The Normans; told chiefly in relation to their conquest of England

by Sarah Orne Jewett

We hear nothing of the Norman archers yet in the chronicler's story of the fight. They were famous enough afterward, but this battle was between mounted knights, a true battle of chivalry. The place was near the river Orne, and the long slopes of the low hills stretched far and wide, covered with soft turf, like the English downs across the Channel, lying pleasantly toward the sun. Master Wace writes the story of the day in the "Roman de Rou," [Pg205] and sketches the battle-field with vivid touches of his pen. Mr. Freeman says, in a note beneath his own description, that he went over the ground with Mr. Green, his fellow-historian, for company, and Master Wace's book in hand for guide. In the "Roman de Rou" there is a hint that not only the peasantry, but the poorer gentlemen as well, were secretly on William's side, that the prejudice and distrust toward the feudal lords was very great, and that there was more confidence in a sovereign than in the irksome tyranny of less powerful lords.

The barons of Saxon Bayeux and Danish Coutances were matched against the loyal burghers of Falaise, Romanized Rouen, and the men of the bishop's cities of Liseux and Evreux. King Henry stopped at the little village of Valmeray to hear mass, as he came up from the south with his followers, and presently the duke joined them in the great plain beyond. The rebels are there too; the horses will not stand in place together, they have caught the spirit of the encounter, and the bright bosses of the shields; the lances, tied with gay ribbons, glitter and shine, as the long line of knights bends and lifts and wavers like some fluttering gay decoration,—some many-colored huge silken splendor all along the green grass. The birds fly over swiftly, and return as quickly, puzzled by the strange appearance of their country-side. Their nests in the grass are trampled under foot—the world is alive with men in armor, who laugh loudly and swear roundly, and are there for something strange, to kill each other if they can, rather than live, for the sake of [Pg206] Normandy. Far away the green fields stretch into the haze, the cottages look like toys, and the sheep and cattle feed without fear in the pastures. Church towers rise gray and straight-walled into the blue sky. It is a great day for Normandy, and her best knights and gentlemen finger their sword-hilts, or buckle their saddle-girths, and wait impatiently for the battle to begin on that day of Val-ès-dunes.

Among the Côtentin lords was Ralph of Tesson, lord of the forest of Cinquelais and the castle of Harcourt-Thury. Behind him rode a hundred and twenty knights, well armed and gallant, who would follow him to the death. He had sworn on the holy relics of the saints at Bayeux to smite William wherever he met him, yet he had no ground for complaint against him. His heart fell when he saw his rightful lord face to face. A tanner's grandson, indeed, and a man whose father and mother had done him wrong; all that was true, yet this young Duke William was good to look upon, and as brave a gentleman as any son of Rolf's, or the fearless Richard's. Ralph Tesson (the Badger they called him), a man both shrewd and powerful, stood apart, and would not rank himself and his men with either faction, and his knights crowded round him, to remind him that he had done homage once to William, and would fight against his natural lord. The Côtentin lords were dismayed and angry, they promised him great rewards, but nothing touched him, and he stood silent, a little way from the armies. The young duke and the king noticed him, and the six-score-and-six brave knights in his troop, all with their [Pg207] lances raised and trimmed with their ladies' silk tokens. William said that they would come to his aid; neither Tesson nor his men had any grudge against him.

Suddenly Tesson put spurs to his horse, and came dashing across the open field, and all the lords and gentlemen held their breath as they watched him. "Thury! Thury!" he shouted as he came, and "Thury! Thury!" the cry echoed back again from the distance. He rode straight to the duke; there was a murmur from the Côtentin men; he struck the duke gently with his glove. It was but a playful mockery of his vow to the saints at Bayeux; he had struck William, but he and his knights were William's men again; the young duke said, "Thanks to thee!" and the fight began, all the hotter for the anger of the deserted barons and their desire for revenge. The day had begun with a bad omen for their success. "Dexaide!" the old Norman war-cry, rang out, and those who had followed the lilies of France cried "Montjoie Saint Denis!" as they fought.

Nowadays, a soldier is a soldier, and men who choose other professions can keep to them, unless in their country's extremity of danger, but in that day every man must go to the wars, if there were need of him, and be surgeon or lawyer, and soldier too; yes, even the priests and bishops put on their swords and went out to fight. It would be interesting to know more names on the roll-call that day at Val-ès-dunes, but we can almost hear the shouts to the patron saints, and the clash of the armor. King [Pg208] Henry fought like a brave man, and the storm of the battle raged fiercest round him. The knights broke their lances, and fought sword to sword. There was no play of army tactics and manœuvring, but a hand-to-hand fight, with the sheer strength of horse and man. Once King Henry was overthrown by the thrust of a Côtentin lance, and sprang up quickly to show himself to his men. Again he was in the thickest of the encounter, and was met by one of the three great rebel chiefs and thrown upon the ground, but this Lord of Thorigny was struck, in his turn, by a loyal French knight, and presently his lamenting followers carried him away dead on his shield like any Spartan of old. And the king honored his valor and commanded that he should be buried with splendid ceremonies in a church not far from the battlefield. Long afterward the Norman men and women loved to sing and to tell stories about the young Duke William's bravery and noble deeds of arms in that first great fight that made him duke from one end of Normandy to the other. He slew with his own hand the noblest and most daring warrior of Bayeux. Master Wace, the chronicler, tells us how William drove the sharp steel straight through his hardy foe, and how the body fell beneath his stroke and its soul departed. Wace was a Bayeux man himself, and though he was a loyal songster and true to his great duke, he cannot help a sigh of pride and sorrow over Hardrez' fate.

Neal of St. Saviour fought steadily and cheered his men eagerly as the hour went on, but Randolf of Bayeux felt his courage begin to fail him. Hamon [Pg209] was dead. Their great ally, Hardrez, had been the flower of his own knights, and he was lying dead of a cruel sword-thrust there in plain sight. He lost sight of Neal, perhaps, for he was suddenly afraid of betrayal, and grieved that he had ever put his helmet on. There is a touching bit of description in the "Roman de Rou" just now. The battle pleased him no more, is told in the quaint short lines. He thought how sad it was to be a captive, and sadder still to be slain. He gave way feebly at every charge; he wandered to and fro aimlessly, a thing to be stumbled over, we fancy him, now in the front of the fight, now in the rear; at last he dropped his lance and shield. "He stretched forth his neck and rode for his life," says Master Wace, quite ashamed of his countryman. But we can see the poor knight's head drooping low, and his good, tired horse—the better man of the two—mustering all his broken strength to carry his master beyond the reach of danger. All the cowards rode after him pell-mell, but brave Saint Saviour fought to the last and held the field until his right arm failed and he could not strike again. The French pressed him hard, the Norman men looked few and spent, and the mighty lord of the Côtentin knew that all hope was lost. There on the rising ground of Saint Lawrence the last blow was struck.

Away went the rebels in groups of three or four—away for dear life every one of them, riding this way and that, trying to get out of reach of their enemies and into some sort of shelter. The duke chased them like a hound on the track of hares on, on [Pg210] toward Bayeux, past the great Abbey of Fontenay and the Allemagne quarries, until they reached the river Orne with its deep current. Men and horses floundered in the water there, and many hot wounds tinged it with a crimson stain. They were drowned, poor knights, and poor, brave horses too. They went struggling and drifting down stream; the banks were strewn with the dead; and the mill-wheels of Borbillon, a little farther down, were stopped in their slow turning by the strange wreck and floating worthless fragments of those lords and gentlemen who had lost the battle of the Val-ès-dunes.

And William was the conqueror of Normandy. Guy of Burgundy was a traitor to his friends, and won a heritage of shame for his flight from the field. We hear nothing of him while the fight went on, only that he ran away. It appears that he must have been one of the first to start for a place of safety, because they blame him so much; there is nothing said about all the rebels running away together a little later. That was the fortune of war and inevitable; not personal cowardice, they might tell us. Guy of Burgundy was the man who had led the three Côtentin lords out by fair promises and taunts about their bastard duke, and he should have been brave and full of prowess, since he undertook to be the rival of so brave a man. He did not go toward the banks of the fateful river, but in quite another direction to his own castle of Brionne, and a troop of his vassals escaped with him and defended themselves there for a long time, until William fairly starved them out like rats in a hole. They held [Pg211] their own bravely, too, and no man was put to death when they surrendered, while Guy was even allowed to come back to court. Master Wace stoutly maintains that they should have been hung, and says long afterward that some of those high in favor at court were the traitors of the great rebellion.

Strange to say, nobody was put to death. Mr. Freeman says of this something that gives us such a clear look at William's character that I must copy it entire. "In those days, both in Normandy and elsewhere, the legal execution of a state criminal was an event that seldom happened. Men's lives were recklessly wasted in the endless warfare of the times, and there were men, as we have seen, who did not shrink from private murder, even in its basest forms. But the formal hanging or beheading of a noble prisoner, so common in later times, was, in the eleventh century, a most unusual sight. And, strange as it may sound, there was a sense in which William the Conqueror was not a man of blood. He would sacrifice any number of lives to his boundless ambition; he did not scruple to condemn his enemies to cruel personal mutilations; he would keep men for years as a mere measure of security, in the horrible prison-houses of those days; but the extinction of human life in cold blood was something from which he shrank."

At the time of the first great victory, the historian goes on to say, William was of an age when men are commonly disposed to be generous, and the worst points of his character had not begun to show themselves. Later in life, when he had broken the [Pg212] rule, or perhaps we must call it only his prejudice and superstition, we find that the star of his glory is already going down, pale and spent, into the mists of shame and disappointment.