[14] The anonymous continuer of Wace's Brut gives a curious account of William's deliberation, at an earlier date, with his barons, as to the future state and fortunes of his sons. He is described as proving the qualities and tempers of his sons, by asking each what bird he would choose to be, if doomed to assume that form:
Si Dex, ki est tuit puissant,
De vus eust fait oisel volant,
De tuz icels ki pount voler
Laquelle voldriez resembler?
Robert selects the esperver, and William the eagle, but Henry, 'k'en clergie esteit fundé'—'mult sagement ad parlé,' and chose the estornele. The whole story forms a curious and interesting apologue. The 'grantz clers de phylosophie, e los mestres de grant clergie, e les sages homes de son poer,' are described as assembled on this occasion, 'a un parlement;' and the king opens the session with a royal speech, perhaps the earliest of the sort on record:
Seignors! dist il, ki estes ici,
De vostre venue mult vus merci.
De voz sens et vostre saver
Ore endreit en ai mester;
Pur ceo vus pri e requer
K'entre vus voillez traiter, &c.
The story forms a distinct fabliau in the MSS. Cotton. Cleop. A. xii.
[15] Orderic puts the same observation into William's mouth. History fully proves its justice.
[16] This confession may appear to be an odd commentary on the tenor of Wace's preceding history of the events leading to the conquest. It was perhaps in some quarters unpalatable here, for Duchesne's MS. reads directly the opposite:
'Engleterre ai cunquise a dreit.'
Orderic gives the confession, but less explicitly, thus: 'Neminem Anglici regni constituo hæredem.... Fasces igitur hujus regni, quod cum tot peccatis obtinui, nulli audeo tradere nisi Deo solo.' See the note on this passage in Lyttleton's Hen. II. vol. i. 397. Possibly William's admission would not, in his day, be understood as being at variance with any of the details given by Wace and other Norman historians. Harold, as we have seen, is treated as assuming with his brother Gurth the perfect moral and legal validity of his title as against William, and yet as shrinking from a personal contest with one to whom he had de facto, though by stratagem, become bound in allegiance. And William might, in a similar train of reasoning, maintain all the facts asserted by the Normans, bearing on the moral justice of the case as between him and Harold, and his personal right to punish treason in his man, and yet admit that Harold, having obtained by the gift of Edward, and by election and consecration, a strictly legal title, his eviction was tortuous, and could give his conqueror no right except that of force—none that he could lawfully transmit. Benoit states his title by conquest, not in the mitigated sense in which that word has been used by some of our legal antiquaries, but in its harshest application:
Deu regne est mais la seignori
As eirs estraiz de Normendie:
CUNQUISE l'unt cum chevalier
Au FER TRENCHANT e al acier.