William the Great, as men of his own day styled him, William the Conqueror, as by one event he stamped himself on our history, was now Duke of Normandy. The full grandeur of his indomitable will, his large and patient statesmanship, the loftiness of aim which lifts him out of the petty incidents of his age, were as yet only partly disclosed. But there never was a moment from his boyhood when he was not among the greatest of men. His life was one long mastering of difficulty after difficulty. The shame of his birth remained in his name of “the Bastard.” His father, Duke Robert, had seen Arlotta, the daughter of a tanner of the town, washing her linen in the little brook by
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.
Falaise, and, loving her, had made her the mother of his boy. Robert’s departure on a pilgrimage from which he never returned left William a child-ruler among the most turbulent baronage in Christendom, and treason and anarchy surrounded him as he grew to manhood. Disorder broke at last into open revolt. Surprised in his hunting-seat at Valognes by the rising of the Bessin and Cotentin districts, in which the pirate temper and lawlessness lingered longest, William had only time to dash through the fords of Vire with the rebels on his track. A fierce combat of horse on the slopes of Val-ès-dunes, to the southeastward of Caen, left him master of the duchy, and the old Scandinavian Normandy yielded forever to the new civilization which streamed in with French alliances and the French tongue. William was himself a type of the transition. In the young duke’s character the old world mingled strangely with the new, the pirate jostled roughly with the statesman. William was the most terrible, as he was the last outcome of the northern race.
The very spirit of the “sea-wolves” who had so long “lived on the pillage of the world” seemed embodied in his gigantic form, his enormous strength, his savage countenance, his desperate bravery, the fury of his wrath, the ruthlessness of his revenge. “No knight under heaven,” his enemies confessed, “was William’s peer.” Boy as he was, horse and man went down before his lance at Val-ès-dunes. All the fierce gayety of his nature broke out in the chivalrous adventures of his youth, in his rout of fifteen Angevins with but five soldiers at his back, in his defiant ride over the ground which Geoffry Martel claimed from him—a ride with hawk on fist as though war and the chase were one. No man could bend his bow. His mace crashed its way through a ring of English warriors to the foot of the standard. He rose to his greatest heights in moments when other men despaired. His voice rang out like a trumpet to rally his soldiers as they fled before the English charge at Senlac. In his winter march on Chester he strode afoot at the head of his fainting troops, and helped with his own hands to clear a road through the snowdrifts. With the northman’s daring broke out the northman’s pitilessness. When the townsmen of Alençon hung raw hides along their walls in scorn of the baseness of his birth, with cries of “Work for the tanner!” William tore out his prisoners’ eyes, cut off their hands and feet, and flung them into the town.
At the close of his greatest victory he refused Harold’s body a grave. Hundreds of Hampshire men were driven from their homes to make him a hunting-ground, and his harrying of Northumbria left the north of England a desolate waste. There is a grim, ruthless ring about his very jests. In his old age Philip of France mocked at the Conqueror’s unwieldy bulk and at the sickness which confined him to his bed at Rouen. “King William has as long a lying-in,” laughed his enemy, “as a woman behind her curtains!” “When I get up,” swore William, “I will go to mass in Philip’s land, and bring a rich offering for my churching. I will offer a thousand candles for my fee. Flaming brands shall they be, and steel shall glitter over the fire they make.” At harvest-tide town and hamlet flaring into ashes along the French border fulfilled the Conqueror’s vow. There is the same savage temper in the loneliness of his life. He recked little of men’s love or hate. His grim look, his pride, his silence, his wild outbursts of passion, spread terror through his court. “So stark and fierce was he,” says the English chronicler, “that none dared resist his will.” His graciousness to Anselm only brought out into stronger relief the general harshness of his tone. His very wrath was solitary. “To no man spake he, and no man dared speak to him,” when the news reached him of Harold’s accession to the throne. It was only when he passed from the palace to the loneliness of the woods that the king’s temper unbent. “He loved the wild deer as though he had been their father. Whosoever should slay hart or hind man should blind him.” Death itself took its color from the savage solitude of his life. Priests and nobles fled as the last breath left him, and the Conqueror’s body lay naked and lonely on the floor.
It is not to his victory at Senlac, but to the struggle which followed his return from Normandy, that William owes his title of the “Conqueror.” The struggle which ended in the fens of Ely had wholly changed William’s position. He no longer held the land merely as elected king; he added to his elective right the right of conquest. The system of government which he originated was, in fact, the result of the double character of his power. It represented neither the purely feudal system of the Continent nor the system of the older English royalty. More truly, perhaps, it may be said to have represented both. As the successor of Eadward, William retained the judicial and administrative organization of the older English realm. As the conqueror of England he introduced the military organization of feudalism so far as was necessary for the secure possession of his conquests. The ground was already prepared for such an organization; we have seen the beginnings of English feudalism in the warriors, the “companions,” or “thegns,” who were personally attached to the king’s war-band, and received estates from the folk-land in reward for their personal services. In later times this feudal distribution of estates had greatly increased, as the bulk of the nobles followed the king’s example and bound their tenants to themselves by a similar process of subinfeudation. On the other hand, the pure freeholders, the class which formed the basis of the original English society, had been gradually reduced in number, partly through imitation of the class above them, but still more through the incessant wars and invasions which drove them to seek protectors among the thegns at the cost of their independence. Feudalism, in fact, was superseding the older freedom in England even before the reign of William, as it had already superseded it in Germany or France. But the tendency was quickened and intensified by the Conquest; the desperate and universal resistance of his English subjects forced William to hold by the sword what the sword had won, and an army strong enough to crush at any moment a national revolt was necessary for the preservation of his throne. Such an army could only be maintained by a vast confiscation of the soil. The failure of the English risings cleared the way for its establishment; the greater part of the higher nobility fell in battle or fled into exile, while the lower thegnhood either forfeited the whole of their lands or redeemed a portion of them by the surrender of the rest.
The dependence of the Church on the royal power was strictly enforced. Homage was exacted from bishop as from baron. No royal tenant could be excommunicated without the king’s leave. No synod could legislate without his previous assent and subsequent confirmation of its decrees. No papal letters could be received within the realm save by his permission. William firmly repudiated the claims which were now beginning to be put forward by the court of Rome. When Gregory VII called on him to do fealty for his realm, the king sternly refused to admit the claim. “Fealty I have never willed to do, nor do I will to do it now. I have never promised it, nor do I find that my predecessors did it to yours.”
The Conquest was hardly over when the struggle between the baronage and the crown began. The wisdom of William’s policy in the destruction of the great earldoms which had overshadowed the throne was shown in an attempt at their restoration made by Roger, the son of his minister, William Fitz-Osbern, and by the Breton Ralf de Guader, whom the king had rewarded for his services at Senlac with the earldom of Norfolk. The rising was quickly suppressed, Roger thrown into prison, and Ralf driven over sea; but the intrigues of the baronage soon found another leader in William’s half-brother, the Bishop of Bayeux. Under pretense of aspiring by arms to the papacy, Bishop Odo collected money and men; but the treasure was at once seized by the royal officers, and the bishop arrested in the midst of the court. Even at the king’s bidding no officer would venture to seize on a prelate of the Church; it was with his own hands that William was forced to effect his arrest. “I arrest not the bishop, but the Earl of Kent,” laughed the Conqueror, and Odo remained a prisoner till William’s death.