Chapter VIII (1)

THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.[497]
A.D. 1028–1051.

§ 1. _Birth, Character, and Accession of William._ A.D. 1028–1035.

[Sidenote: Character and greatness of WILLIAM.]

William, King of the English and Duke of the Normans, bears a name which must for ever stand forth among the foremost of mankind. No man that ever trod this earth was ever endowed with greater natural gifts; to no man was it ever granted to accomplish greater things. If we look only to the scale of a man’s acts, without regard to their moral character, we must hail in the victor of Val-ès-dunes, of Varaville, and of Senlac, the restorer of Normandy, the Conqueror of England, one who may fairly claim his place in the first rank of the world’s [Sidenote: Lasting results of his career.] greatest men. No man ever did his work more effectually at the moment; no man ever left his work behind him as [Sidenote: A good side to his character.] more truly an abiding possession for all time. And, when we consider all the circumstances of his life, when we judge him by the standard of his own age, above all, when we compare him with those who came after him in his own house, we shall perhaps be inclined to dwell on his great qualities, on his many undoubted virtues, rather than to put his no less undoubted crimes in their darkest light. As we cannot refuse to place him among the greatest of men, neither will a candid judgement incline us to place him among the worst of men. If we cannot give him a niche among pure patriots and heroes, he is quite as little entitled to a place among mere tyrants and destroyers. William of Normandy has no claim to a share in the pure glory of Timoleôn, Ælfred, and Washington; he cannot even claim the more mingled fame of Alexander, Charles, and Cnut; but he has even less in common with the mere enemies of their species, with the Nabuchodonosors, the Swends, and the Buonapartes, whom God has from time to time sent as simple scourges of a guilty world. Happily there are few men in history of whom we have [Sidenote: English and Norman portraits of him.] better materials for drawing the portrait. We see him as he appeared to admiring followers of his own race; we see him also as he appeared to men of the conquered nation who had looked on him and had lived in his household.[498] We have to make allowance for flattery on the one side; we have not to make allowance for calumny on the other. The feeling with which the Normans looked on their conquering leader was undoubtedly one of awe rather than of love; and the feeling with which the vanquished English looked on their Conqueror was undoubtedly one of awe rather than of simple hatred. Assuredly William’s English subjects did not love him; but they felt a sort of sullen reverence for the King who was richer and mightier than all the Kings that were before him. In speaking of him, the Chronicler writes as it were with downcast eyes and bated breath, as if he were hardly dealing with a man of like passions with himself, but was rather drawing the portrait [Sidenote: Justice done to him by the English Chronicler.] of a being of another nature. Yet he holds the balance fairly between the dark and the bright qualities of one so far raised above the common lot of man. He does not conceal his crimes and his oppressions; but he sets before us the merits of his government and the good peace that he made in this land; he judicially sums up what was good and what was evil in him; he warns men to follow the good and to avoid the evil, and he sends him out of the world with a charitable prayer for the repose of his soul. And, at the moment when he wrote, it was no marvel if the Chronicler was inclined to dwell on the good rather than on the evil. The Crown of William passed to one who shared largely in his mere intellectual gifts, but who had no fellowship with the greater and nobler elements of his character. To appreciate William the Conqueror we have but to cast our glance onwards to William the Red. We shall then well understand how men writhing under the scorpions of the son might look back with regret to the whips of the father. We can understand how, under his godless rule, men might feel kindly towards the memory of one who never wholly cast away the thoughts of justice and mercy, and who, in his darkest hours, had still somewhat of the fear of God before his eyes.

[Sidenote: Strength of will in William.]

In estimating the character of William, one feature stands out preeminently above all others. Throughout his career, we admire in him the embodiment, in the highest degree that human nature will allow, of the fixed purpose and the unbending will. From time to time there have been men who seem to have come into the world to sway the course of events at their good pleasure, men who have made destiny itself their vassal, and whose decrees it seems in vain for lesser men to seek to withstand. Such was the man who, with the blood of thousands reeking on his hands, could lay down despotic power, could walk unattended to his house, and calmly offer to give an account for any of his actions;[499] and such in might, though assuredly not such in crime, was our first Norman King. Whatever the will of William decreed, he found a means to bring it about. Whatever his hand found to do, he did [Sidenote: His military genius.] it with all his might. As a warrior, as a general, it is needless to sound his praises. His warlike exploits set him among the foremost captains of history, but his warlike exploits are but the smallest part of his fame. Others beside him could have led the charge at Val-ès-dunes; others beside him could have chosen the happy moment for the ambush at Varaville; others beside him could have endured the weariness of the long blockade beneath the donjon of Brionne. Others, it may even be, beside him could have cut their way through palisade and shield-wall and battle-axe to the royal Standard of England. [Sidenote: His statesmanship.] But none in his own age, and few in any age, have shown themselves like him masters of every branch of the consummate craft of the statesman. Calm and clear-sighted, he saw his object before him; he knew when to tarry and when to hasten; he knew when to strike and how to strike, and how to use alike the noblest and the vilest of [Sidenote: His unscrupulousness as to means.] men as his instruments. Utterly unscrupulous, though far from unprincipled, taking no pleasure in wrong or oppression for its own sake, always keeping back his hands from needless bloodshed, he yet never shrank from force or fraud, from wrong or bloodshed or oppression, when they seemed to him the straightest paths to accomplish his purpose. His crimes admit of no denial; but, with one single exception, they never were wanton crimes. And when we come to see the school in which he was brought up, when we see the men whom he had to deal with from his childhood, our wonder really ought to [Sidenote: His personal virtues.] be that his crimes were not infinitely blacker. His personal virtues were throughout life many and great. We hear much of his piety, and we see reason to believe that his piety was something more than the mere conventional [Sidenote: His religious zeal.] piety of lavish gifts to monasteries. Punctual in every exercise of devotion, paying respect and honour of every kind to religion and its ministers, William showed, in two ways most unusual among the princes of that age, that his zeal for holy things was neither hypocrisy, nor fanaticism, nor superstition. Like his illustrious contemporary on the Imperial throne, he appeared as a real ecclesiastical reformer, and he allowed the precepts of his religion to have a distinct influence on his private life. He was one of the few princes of that age whose hands [Sidenote: General excellence of his ecclesiastical appointments.] were perfectly clean from the guilt of simony. His ecclesiastical appointments for the most part do him honour; the patron of Lanfranc and Anselm can never be spoken of without respect. In his personal conduct he practised at least one most unusual virtue; in a profligate age he was a model of conjugal fidelity. He was a good and faithful friend, an affectionate brother—we must perhaps add, too indulgent a father. And strong as was his sense of religion, deep as was his reverence for the Church, open-handed as was his bounty to her ministers, no prince that ever reigned was less disposed to yield to ecclesiastical usurpations. No prince ever knew better how to control the priesthood within his own dominions; none knew better both how to win the voice of Rome to abet his purposes, and how to bid defiance to her demands when they infringed on the rights of his Crown and the laws of his Kingdom. While all Europe rang with the great strife of Pope and Cæsar, England and Normandy remained at peace under the rule of one who knew how, firmly and calmly, to hold his own against Hildebrand himself.

[Sidenote: Effects of his reign in Normandy, France, and England.]

But to know what William was, no way is so clear as to see what William did in both the countries over which he was so strangely called to rule. We are too apt to look on him simply as the Conqueror of England. But so to do is to look at him only in his most splendid, but at the same time his least honourable, aspect. William learned to become the Conqueror of England only by first becoming the Conqueror of Normandy and the Conqueror of France. He found means to conquer Normandy by the help of France and to conquer France by the help of Normandy. He turned a jealous overlord into an effective ally against his rebellious subjects, and he turned those rebellious subjects into faithful supporters against [Sidenote: His early struggles.] that jealous overlord. He came to his Duchy under every disadvantage. At once bastard and minor, with competitors for his coronet arising at every moment, with turbulent barons to hold in check and envious neighbours to guard against, he was, throughout the whole of his early life, beset by troubles, none of which were of his own making, and he came honourably out of all. The [Sidenote: Excellence of his rule in Normandy.] change which William wrought in Normandy was nothing less than a change from anarchy to good order. Instead of a state, torn by internal feuds and open to the attacks of every enemy, his Duchy became, under his youthful rule, a loyal and well-governed land, respected by all its neighbours, and putting most of them to shame by its prosperity. In the face of every obstacle, the mighty genius of the once despised Bastard raised himself and his principality to a place in the eyes of Europe such as Normandy and its prince had never held before. And these great successes were gained with far less of cruelty or harshness than might have been looked for in so [Sidenote: His general forbearance and occasional cruelty.] ruthless an age. He shared indeed in the fierce passions of his race, and in one or two cases his wrath hurried him, or his policy beguiled him, into acts at which humanity shudders. At all stages of his life, if he was debonair to those who would do his will, he was beyond measure stern to all who withstood it.[500] Yet, when we think of all that he went through, of the treachery and ingratitude which he met with on every side, how his most faithful friends were murdered beside him, how he himself had to flee for his life or to lurk in mean disguises, we shall see that it is not without reason that his panegyrist praises his general forbearance and clemency. In short, the reign of William as Duke of the Normans was alike prosperous and honourable in the highest degree. Had he never stretched forth his hand to grasp the diadem which was another’s, his fame would not have filled the world as now it does, but he would have gone down to his grave as one of the best, as well as one of the greatest, rulers of his time.

[Sidenote: His reign in England.]

If we turn from William Duke of the Normans to William King of the English, we may indeed mourn that, in a moral sense, the fine gold has become dim, but our admiration for mere greatness, for the highest craft of the statesman and the soldier, will rise higher than ever. No doubt he was highly favoured by fortune; nothing but an extraordinary combination of events could have made the Conquest of England possible. But then [Sidenote: Difficulties of his undertaking.] it is the true art of statesmanship, the art by which men like William carry the world before them, to know how to grasp every fortunate moment and to take advantage of every auspicious turn of events. Doubtless William could never have conquered England except under peculiarly favourable circumstances; but then none but such a man as William could have conquered England under any circumstances at all. He conquered and retained a land far greater than his paternal Duchy, and a land in [Sidenote: Skill displayed in his claim on the English Crown;] which he had not a single native partisan. Yet he contrived to put himself forward in the eyes of the world as a legal claimant, and not as an unprovoked invader. We must condemn the fraud, but we cannot help admiring the skill, by which he made men believe that he was the true heir of England, shut out from his inheritance by a perjured usurper. Never was a more subtle web of fallacy woven by the craft of man; never did diplomatic ingenuity more triumphantly obtain its end. He contrived to make an utterly unjust aggression bear the aspect, not only of righteous, but almost of holy, warfare. The wholesale spoiler of a Christian people contrived to win for himself something very like the position of a Crusader. And, landed on English ground, with no rights but those of his own sword, with no supporters but his own foreign [Sidenote: in his acquisition of it;] army, he yet contrived to win the English Crown with every circumstance of formal legality. He was elected, crowned, and anointed like his native predecessors, and he swore at the hands of an English Primate to observe the ancient laws of England. By force and by craft, but with the outward pretext of law always put prominently forward, he gradually obtained full possession of the whole land; he deprived the nation one by one of its native [Sidenote: and in his subsequent government.] leaders, and put in their places men of foreign birth and wholly dependent on himself. No prince ever more richly rewarded those to whom he owed his Crown, but no prince ever took more jealous care that they should never be able to bring his Crown into jeopardy. None but a man like him could have held down both conquerors and conquered, and have made his will the only law for Norman and Englishman alike. His consummate policy guarded against the dangers which he saw rife in every other country; he put the finishing stroke to the work of Ecgberht, and made England the most united Kingdom in Western Christendom. Normans and Englishmen conspired against him, and called the fleets and hosts of Denmark to their help. But William held his own alike against revolters at home and against invaders from abroad. Norman and English rebels were alike crushed; sometimes the Dane was bought off, sometimes he shrank from the firm array with which the land was guarded. All opposition was [Sidenote: Severity of his police.] quelled by fire and sword; but when it was quelled, whenever and wherever William’s rule was quietly accepted, his hand was heavy upon all smaller disturbers of the peace of the world. Life, property, female honour, stood indeed but a small chance while the process of Conquest was going on, but, when William’s work was fully accomplished, they were safer under him than they had ever been under England’s native Kings. As the stern avenger of crime, even the conquered learned to bless him, and to crown his good deeds with a tribute of praise hardly inferior to that which waits on the name of his illustrious rival.[501]

[Sidenote: The worst features of his character brought out in England.]

Here then was a career through which none but one of the greatest of mankind could have passed successfully. But it was a career which brought out into full play all those darker features of his character which found but little room for their developement during his earlier reign in his native Duchy. There is no reason to believe that William came into England with any fixed determination to rule otherwise in England than he had already ruled in Normandy. Cnut can hardly fail to have been his model, and William’s earliest days in England were far more promising than the earliest days of Cnut. At no time of his life does William appear as one of those tyrants who actually delight in oppression, to whom the infliction of human suffering is really a source of morbid pleasure. [Sidenote: His false position gradually developed itself, and led him to oppression.] But, if he took no pleasure in the infliction of suffering, it was at least a matter about which he was utterly reckless; he stuck at no injustice which was needed to carry out his purpose. His will was fixed, to win and to keep the Crown of England at all hazards. We may well believe that he would have been well pleased could he have won that Crown without bloodshed. But, rather than not win it, he did not shrink from the guilt of carrying on a desolating war against a people who had never wronged him. We may well believe that, when he swore to govern his new subjects as well as they had been governed by their own Kings, it was his full purpose to keep his oath. That he acted on any settled scheme of uprooting the nationality, the laws, or the language of England is an exploded fable.[502] But he could not govern England as he had governed Normandy; he could not govern England as Cnut had governed England; he could not himself be as Cnut, neither could his Normans be as Cnut’s Danes. He gradually found that there was no way for him to govern England save by oppressions, exactions, and confiscations, by the bondage or the death of the noblest of the land. He made the discovery, and he shrank not from its practical consequences. A reign which had begun with as good hopes as the reign of a foreign conqueror could begin with gradually changed into one of the most tremendous tyrannies on record. Northumberland was hard to be kept in order, and Northumberland was made a desert. [Sidenote: General change for the worse in his character.] This was the dictate of a relentless policy; but when William had once set forth on the downward course of evil, he soon showed that he could do wrong when no policy commanded it, merely to supply means for his [Sidenote: Formation of the New Forest.] personal gratification. To lay waste Hampshire merely to make a hunting-ground was a blacker crime than to lay waste Northumberland to rid himself of a political danger. He could still be merciful when mercy was not dangerous, but he had now learned to shed innocent blood without remorse, if its shedding seemed to add safety to his throne. The repeated revolts of Eadgar were forgiven as often as they occurred; but Waltheof, caressed, [Sidenote: Death of Waltheof.] flattered, promoted, was sent to the scaffold on the first convenient pretext. It is hardly superstitious to point out, alike with ancient and with modern authorities,[503] that the New Forest became a spot fatal to William’s house, and that, after the death of Waltheof, his old prosperity [Sidenote: Crimes and misfortunes of his last years.] forsook him. Nothing indeed occurred to loosen his hold on England; but his last years were spent in bickerings with his unworthy son, and in a petty border warfare, in which the Conqueror had, for the first time, to undergo defeat. At last he found his death-wound in an inglorious quarrel, in the personal commission of cruelties which aroused the indignation of his own age; and the mighty King and Conqueror, forsaken by his servants and children, had to owe his funeral rites to the voluntary charity of a loyal vassal, and within the walls of his own minster he could not find an undisputed grave.

[Sidenote: William’s surnames: the _Great_, the _Conqueror_, the
_Bastard_.]

Such was William the Great, a title which, in the mouths of his contemporaries, he shared with Alexander and with Charles, but which in later times has been displaced by the misunderstood description of Conqueror.[504] But, before he had won any right to either of those lofty titles, William was already known by another surname [Sidenote: Laxity of the Norman Dukes as to marriage and legitimacy.] drawn from the circumstances of his birth. Of all princely lines the ducal house of Normandy was that which paid least regard to the canonical laws of marriage or to the special claims of legitimate birth.[505] The Duchy had been ruled by a whole succession of princes who either were sprung from that irregular kind of union which was known as the Danish marriage,[506] or else were the sons of concubines raised to the rank of wives after the birth of their children. But, among all this brood of spurious or irregular heirs, the greatest of the whole line was the one to whom the reproach, if reproach it was deemed, [Sidenote: Special illegitimacy of William.] of illegitimate birth clave the most abidingly. William the son of Robert was emphatically William the Bastard, and the name clave to him through life, on the Imperial throne of Britain no less than on the ducal chair of Normandy. For, of all the whole line, William was the one whose bastardy was the most undoubted, the least capable of being veiled under ambiguous and euphemistic phrases. The position of Popa and Sprota was a doubtful one;[507] it may, according to Danish ideas, have been perfectly honourable. The children of Richard and Gunnor were, according to the law recognized everywhere but in our own country, legitimated by the subsequent marriage of their parents. But we may doubt whether the notion of the Danish marriage survived as late as the days of Robert, and it is certain that no ecclesiastical sacrament ever gave William a right, according to the law of the Church, to rank as the lawful son of his father. The mother of William is never spoken of in the respectful terms which we find applied to the mother of Richard the Fearless. Throughout the whole of Duke Robert’s life, she remained in the position of an acknowledged mistress, and her illustrious son came forth before the world with no other description than the Bastard.

[Sidenote: Story of William’s birth.]

The irregular birth of one so renowned naturally became the subject of romance and legend. And the spot on which William first saw the light is one which seems to call for the tribute of the legend-maker as its natural due. [Sidenote: Position of Falaise.] The town of Falaise, in the Diocese of Seez, is one of the most famous spots both in the earlier and in the later history of Normandy, and none assuredly surpasses it in the striking character of its natural position. Lying on the edge of the great forest of Gouffer, the spot had its natural attractions for a line of princes renowned, even above others of their time, for their devotion to the sports of the field. The town itself lies in a sort of valley between two eminences. The great Abbey, a foundation of a later date than the times which we are concerned with, has utterly vanished; but two stately parish churches, one of them dating from the days of Norman independence, bear witness to the ecclesiastical splendour of the place. Passing [Sidenote: Historical associations of the Castle.] by them, the traveller gradually ascends to the gate of the Castle, renowned alike in the wars of the twelfth, the fifteenth, and the sixteenth centuries. A tall round tower still bears the name of the great Talbot, the guardian of [Sidenote: 1417–1450.] the castle in the great English war, and who afterwards won a still higher fame as the last champion of the ancient [Sidenote: 1453.] freedom of Aquitaine against the encroachments of the Kings of Paris.[508] But this witness of comparatively recent strife is but an excrescence on the original structure. It is the addition made by an English King to one of the noblest works of his Norman forefathers. The Castle where legend fixes the birth of William of Normandy, and where [Sidenote: 1175.] history fixes the famous homage of William of Scotland, is a vast donjon of the eleventh or twelfth century.[509] One of the grandest of those massive square keeps which I have already spoken of as distinguishing the earliest military architecture of Normandy, crowns the summit of a precipitous rock, fronted by another mass of rock wilder still, on which the cannon of England were planted during [Sidenote: The rocks give its name to the town.] Henry’s siege. To these rocks, these _felsen_, the spot owes its name of Falaise,[510] one of the many spots in Normandy where the good old Teutonic speech still lingers in local nomenclature, though in this case the Teutonic name has also preserved its permanent being in the general vocabulary of the Romance speech. Between these two rugged heights lies a narrow dell, through which runs a small beck, a tributary of the neighbouring river Ante. The dell is crowded with mills and tanneries, but the mills and tanneries of Falaise have their share in the historic interest of the place. The mills play no inconsiderable part in the [Sidenote: The Tanneries of Falaise.] records of the Norman Exchequer,[511] and the tanneries at once suggest the name of the greatest son of Normandy. In every form which the story has taken in history or legend, the mother of the Conqueror appears as the [Sidenote: William the son of a Tanner’s daughter.] daughter of a tanner of Falaise, plying his unsavoury craft on the spot where it has continued to be plied through so many ages. The conquered English indeed strove to claim the Norman Duke as their own, by representing his mother as a descendant of their own royal house.[512] But, even in this version, the traditional trade of her father [Sidenote: English legend of the birth of William.] is not forgotten. The daughter of the hero Eadmund disgraced herself by a marriage or an intrigue with her father’s tanner, to whom in process of time she bore three daughters. The pair were banished from England, and took refuge on the opposite coast. In the course of their wanderings they came to beg alms at the gate of Duke Richard the Good. The Prince discovered the lofty birth of the mother, and took the whole family into his favour. The youngest daughter became the mistress of his son Robert, and of them sprang the mighty William, great-grandson of Eadmund Ironside no less than of Richard the Fearless.

Such a tale is of course valuable only as illustrating the universal tendency of conquered nations to try to alleviate the shame and grief of conquest by striving to believe that their tyrants are at least their countrymen. The story of William’s English origin clearly comes from the same mint as the story in which Egyptian vanity gave out that Kambysês was Egyptian by his maternal origin,[513] as the story which saw in Alexander himself a scion of the royal house of Persia.[514] It seems however to preserve one grain of truth in the midst of so much that is mythical. It represents the connexion between Robert and his mistress as having begun before he ascended the ducal throne. There can be little doubt that this was the case, though the story is generally told as if Robert had been already Duke [Sidenote: Story of Herleva.] of the Normans. But it is more likely that Robert was as yet only Count of the Hiesmois, and, as such, Lord of Falaise, when his eye was first caught by the beauty of Arlette, or rather Herleva, the daughter of Fulbert the Tanner. Some say he first saw her engaged in the dance,[515] others when she was busied in the more homely work of washing linen in the beck which flows by her father’s tannery at the foot of the castle.[516] The prince himself, a mere stripling, saw and loved her. He sought her of her father, who, after some reluctance, gave up his child to his lord, by the advice, according to one account, of a holy hermit his brother.[517] She was led the same evening to the castle; the poetical chroniclers are rich in details of her behaviour.[518] She became the cherished mistress of Robert, and her empire over his heart was, we are told, not disturbed by another connexion, lawful or unlawful.[519] [Sidenote: Advancement of her family.] After the example of former princes, Robert in after times raised the kinsfolk of his mistress to high honours. Half the nobility of Normandy had sprung from the brothers and sisters of Gunnor, so now Fulbert the Tanner, the father of Herleva, was raised to the post of ducal chamberlain,[520] and her brother Walter was placed in some office which, in after times, gave him close access to the person of his princely nephew.[521] After Robert’s death, [Sidenote: Her marriage with Herlwin of Conteville.] Herleva obtained an honourable marriage, and became, by her husband Herlwin of Conteville,[522] the mother of two sons who will fill no small space in our history. But her union with the Duke produced but one son, perhaps but [Sidenote: Legends of omens.] one child.[523] That child however was one whose future greatness was, so we are told, prefigured by omens and prodigies from the moment of his birth, and even from the moment of his conception. On the night of her first visit to the castle, Herleva dreamed that a tree arose from her body which overshadowed all Normandy and all England.[524] At the moment of his birth, the babe seized the straw on the chamber floor with so vigorous a grasp that all who saw the sight knew that he would become a mighty conqueror, who would never let go anything that he had once laid [Sidenote: Birth of William. 1027–1028.] his hand upon.[525] Leaving tales like these apart, it is certain that William, the bastard son of Robert and Herleva, was born at Falaise, perhaps in the year in which the great Cnut made his famous pilgrimage to the threshold of the Apostles.[526]

[Sidenote: Question of the succession: state of the Ducal family.]

Before Robert undertook so perilous an enterprise, it was clearly needful for him to regulate the succession to the Duchy. The reigning prince had neither brother nor legitimate child. The heir, according to modern notions of heirship, was a churchman, Robert, Archbishop of [Sidenote: Robert Archbishop of Rouen. 989–1037.] Rouen. This Prelate we have already seen in rebellion against his namesake the Duke,[527] probably on account of this very claim to the succession. He was one of the children of Richard the Fearless, legitimated and made capable of ecclesiastical honours by the late marriage of his parents. Indeed, according to one account, the marriage of Richard and Gunnor was contracted expressly to take away the canonical objections which were raised against the appointment of a bastard to the metropolitan see.[528] Archbishop Robert was thus an uncle of Duke Robert and a great-uncle of the child William. Besides his Archbishoprick, he held the County of Evreux as a lay fee. Like the more famous Odo of Bayeux, he drew a marked distinction between his ecclesiastical and his temporal character. As Count of Evreux, he had a wife, Herleva by name,[529] and was the father of children of whom we shall hear again in our history. In his latter days, his spiritual character became more prominent; he repented of his misdeeds, gave great alms to the poor, and began the rebuilding of the metropolitan church.[530] There were also two princes whose connexion with the ducal house was by legitimate, though only female, descent. One was [Sidenote: Guy of Burgundy;] Guy of Burgundy, a nephew of Duke Robert, being grandson of Richard the Good through his daughter [Sidenote: Alan of Britanny;] Adeliza.[531] The other was Robert’s cousin, Count Alan of Britanny, the son of Hadwisa daughter of Richard the Fearless.[532] Nearer in blood, but of more doubtful legitimacy, were Robert’s own half-brothers, the sons of Richard [Sidenote: Malger;] the Good by Papia. These were the churchman Malger, who afterwards succeeded Archbishop Robert in the [Sidenote: William of Arques;] see of Rouen,[533] and William, who held the County and [Sidenote: Nicholas.] castle of Arques near Dieppe.[534] There was also the monk Nicholas, the young, and no doubt illegitimate, son of [Sidenote: No candidate free from objection.] Richard the Third.[535] None of these were promising candidates for the ducal crown. Robert, the lineal heir, might be looked on as disqualified by his profession; Alan and Guy were strangers, and could claim only through females; the nearer kinsmen were of spurious or doubtful birth, and some of them were liable also to the same objection as Robert. Had any strong opposition existed, William of Arques would probably have been found the best card to play; but there was no candidate whose claims were absolutely without cavil; there was none round whom national feeling could instinctively centre; there was none who was clearly marked out, either by birth or by merit, as the natural leader of the Norman people. This state of things must be borne in mind, in order to understand the fact, otherwise so extraordinary, that Robert was able to secure the succession to a son who was at once bastard and minor. There were strong objections against young William; but there were objections equally strong against [Sidenote: Unpopularity of William’s succession.] every other possible candidate. Under these circumstances it was possible for William to succeed; but it followed, almost as a matter of course, that the early years of his reign were disturbed by constant rebellions. William’s succession was deeply offensive to many of his subjects, especially to that large portion of the Norman nobility who had any kind of connexion with the ducal house. From the time of the child’s birth, there can be little doubt that his father’s intentions in his favour were at least suspected, and the suspicion may well have given rise to some of the rebellions by which Robert’s reign was disturbed.[536]

[Sidenote: The great Norman houses; their connexion with English
history.]

At this stage of our narrative it becomes necessary to form some clear conception of the personality and the ancestry of some of the great Norman nobles. Most of them belonged to houses whose fame has not been confined to Normandy. We are now dealing with the fathers of the men, in some cases with the men themselves, who fought round William at Senlac, and among whom he divided the honours and the lands of England. These men became the ancestors of the new nobility of England, and, as their forefathers had changed in Gaul from Northmen into Normans, so now, by a happier application of the same law, they gradually changed from Normans into Englishmen. Many a name famous in English history, many a name whose sound is as familiar to us as any word of our own Teutonic speech, many a name which has long ceased to suggest any thought of foreign origin, is but the name of some Norman village, whose lord, or perhaps some lowlier inhabitant, followed his Duke to the Conquest of England and shared in the plunder of the conquered. But the names which are most familiar to us as names of English lords and gentlemen of Norman descent belong, for the most part, to a sort of second crop, which first grew up to importance on English soil. The great Norman houses whose acts—for the most part whose crimes—become of paramount importance at the time with which we are now dealing, were mostly worn out in a few generations, and they have left but few direct representatives on either side of the sea.

[Sidenote: Greatness of the House of Belesme.]

High among these great houses, the third in rank among the original Norman nobility,[537] stood the house of Belesme, whose present head was William, surnamed Talvas.[538] The domains held by his family, partly of the Crown of France, partly of the Duchy of Normandy, might almost put him on a level with princes rather than with ordinary nobles. The possession from which the family took its name lay within the French territory, and was a fief of the French Crown. But, within the Norman Duchy, the Lords of Belesme were masters of the valley bounded by the hills from which the Orne flows in one direction and the Sarthe in another. Close on the French frontier, they held the strong fortress of Alençon, the key of Normandy on that side. They are called Lords of the city of Seez,[539] and, at the time of which we are speaking, a member of their house filled its episcopal throne.[540] Their domains stretched to Vinoz, a few miles south-east of Falaise, and separated from the town by the forest of Gouffer. Ivo, the first founder of this mighty house, had been one of the faithful guardians of the childhood of Richard the Fearless, and had been enriched by him as the reward of his true service in evil days.[541] But with Ivo the virtue of his race seems to have died out, and his descendants appear in Norman and English history as [Sidenote: Their supposed hereditary wickedness.] monsters of cruelty and perfidy, whose deeds aroused the horror even of that not over scrupulous age. Open robbery and treacherous assassination seem to have been their daily occupations. The second of the line, William of Belesme, had rebelled against Duke Robert, and had defended his fortress of Alençon against him.[542] His eldest son Warren murdered a harmless and unsuspecting friend, and was for this crime, so the men of his age said, openly seized and strangled by the fiend. Of his other sons, Fulk, presuming to ravage the ducal territory, was killed in battle, Robert was taken prisoner by the men of Le Mans and beheaded by way of reprisals for a murder committed by his followers. The surviving heir of the possessions and of the wickedness of his race was his one remaining son William Talvas.[543] This man, we are told, [Sidenote: William Talvas; his crimes.] being displeased by the piety and good manners of his first wife Hildeburgis, hired ruffians to murder her on her way to church.[544] At his second wedding-feast he put out the eyes, and cut off the nose and ears, of an unsuspecting guest.[545] This was William the son of Geroy, one of a house whose name we shall often meet again in connexion with the famous Abbeys of Bec and Saint Evroul. A local war ensued, in which William Talvas suffered an inadequate punishment for his crimes in the constant devastation of his lands. At last a more appropriate avenger arose from his own house. The hereditary wickedness of his line passed on to his daughter Mabel and his son Arnulf. Mabel, the wife of Roger of Montgomery, will be a prominent character in our story for many years. Arnulf rebelled against his father, and left him to die wretchedly in exile. An act of wanton rapacity was presently punished by a supernatural avenger; Arnulf, like his uncle Warren, was strangled by a dæmon in his bed.[546] Such was the character of the family whose chief, first in power and in crime among the nobility of Normandy, stood forth, as the story goes, as the mouthpiece of that nobility, to express the feelings with which the descendants of the comrades of Rolf, the descendants of Richard the Fearless, even the descendants of the brothers and sisters of Gunnor, looked on the possible promotion of the Tanner’s grandson to be their lord.

[Sidenote: William Talvas curses young William.]

William Talvas, says the tale, in the days of his prosperity, was one day in the streets of Falaise, a town where the close neighbourhood of his possessions doubtless made him well known. The babe William, the son of the Duke and Herleva, was being nursed in the house of his maternal grandfather. A burgher, meeting the baron, bade him step in and see the son of his lord. William Talvas entered the house and looked on the babe. He then cursed him, saying that, by that child and his descendants, himself and his descendants would be brought to shame.[547] A curse from the mouth of William Talvas might almost be looked on as a blessing, and the form of the prediction was such as to come very near to the nature of a panegyric. It is indeed the highest praise of the babe who then lay in his cradle, that he did something to bring to shame, something to bring under the restraints of law and justice, men like the hoary sinner who instinctively saw in him the destined enemy of his kind. But the words, when uttered, would be meant and understood simply as a protest against the insult which was preparing for the aristocratic pride of the great Norman houses. Possibly indeed the tale, like other tales of the kind, may have been devised after the event; still it would mark none the less truly the feelings with which a man like William Talvas, boasting of a descent from the original conquerors of the land, looked on the unworthy sovereign whom destiny seemed to be providing for them.

[Sidenote: Robert announces his intention of pilgrimage. 1034–5.]

Duke Robert however was bent on his purpose. He gathered an assembly of the great men of his Duchy, among whom the presence of Archbishop Robert, perhaps as being a possible competitor for the succession, is specially mentioned.[548] The Duke set forth his intention of visiting the Holy Sepulchre, and told his hearers, that, aware of the dangers of such a journey, he wished to settle the succession to the Duchy before he set out. The voice of the Assembly bade him stay at home and continue to discharge the duties of government in person, especially at a time when there was no one successor or representative to whom they could be entrusted with any chance of the general good will. It was of course desirable to stave off the question. Robert might yet have legitimate heirs; or, in the failure of that hope, the Norman chiefs might gradually come to an agreement in favour of some other candidate. Let the Duke stay at home and guard his Duchy against the pretensions of the Breton and the Burgundian.[549] But Robert would brook no delay in the accomplishment of his pious purpose; he would go at [Sidenote: He proposes William as his successor.] once to the Holy Land; he would settle the succession before he went. He brought forward the young William, and acknowledged him as his son. He was little, he told them, but he would grow; he was one of their own stock, brought up among them.[550] His overlord the King of the French had engaged to acknowledge and protect him.[551] He called on them to accept, to choose—the never-ceasing mixture of elective and hereditary claims appears here as everywhere—the child as their future Lord, as his successor in the Duchy, should he never return from the distant land to which he was bound.[552] The Normans were in a manner entrapped. There can be no doubt that nothing could be further from the wishes of the majority of the Assembly than to agree to the Duke’s proposal; but there was nothing else to be done. If Robert could not be prevailed on to stay at home, some settlement must be made; and, little as any of them liked the prospect of the rule of the young Bastard, there was no other candidate in whose favour all parties could come to an agreement [Sidenote: William’s succession accepted.] on the spot. Unwillingly then the Norman nobility consented; they accepted the only proposal which was before them; they swore the usual oaths, and did homage to the son of Herleva as their future sovereign.[553] The kinsmen of Gunnor, the descendants of the comrades of Rolf, became the men of the Tanner’s grandson, and he himself was received as the man of King Henry at Paris.[554] As far as forms went, no form was wanting which could make William’s succession indisputably lawful. Duke Robert then set forth on the pilgrimage from which he never returned. Within a few months, his short life and [Sidenote: William succeeds his father in the Duchy. 1035.] reign came to an end at Nikaia.[555] Thus, in the same year which beheld the great Empire of Cnut parted among his sons, did William, the seven years old grandson of the Tanner Fulbert, find himself on the seat of Rolf and Richard the Fearless, charged with the mission to keep down, as his infant hands best might, the turbulent spirits who had been unwillingly beguiled into acknowledging him as their sovereign.

[Sidenote: Necessary evils of a minority.]

Anarchy at once broke forth; all the evils which attend a minority in a rude age were at once poured forth upon the unhappy Duchy. We see the wisdom with which the custom of our own and of most contemporary lands provided that the government of men should be entrusted to those only who had themselves at least reached man’s estate. In England the exceptional minorities of the sons of Eadmund and of Eadgar had been calamitous, but they were nothing to compare to the minority of William of Normandy. In England the custom of regular national assemblies, the habit of submitting all matters to a fair vote, the recognition of the Law as supreme over every man, hindered the state from falling into utter dissolution, even in those perilous times. The personal reign of Æthelred proved far weaker than the administration which Dunstan carried on in his name in his early years. But in Normandy, where constitutional ideas had found so imperfect a developement as compared with England, there was nothing of this kind to fall back upon. Nothing but the personal genius of a determined and vigorous Prince could keep that fierce nobility in any measure of order. With the accession of an infant there at once ceased to be any power to protect or to punish. “Woe [Sidenote: Childhood of William.] to the land whose King is a child” is the apt quotation of an historian of the next age.[556] The developement of the young Duke both in mind and body was undoubtedly precocious; but his early maturity was mainly owing to the stern discipline of that terrible childhood. It was in those years that he learned the arts which made Normandy, France, and England bow before him; but, at the age of seven years, William himself was no more capable than Æthelred of personally wielding the rod of rule. The child had good and faithful guardians, guardians perhaps no less well disposed to fulfil their trust towards him than Dunstan had been towards the children of Eadgar. But there was no one man in Normandy to whom every Norman could look up as every Englishman had looked up to the mighty Primate, and the bowl and the dagger soon deprived the young Prince of the support of his wisest and truest counsellors. The minority of William was truly a time when every man did that which was right in his own eyes. And what seemed right in the eyes of the nobles of Normandy was commonly [Sidenote: Utter anarchy of the time.] rebellion against their sovereign, ruthless oppression of those beneath them, and endless deadly feuds with one another. We have already seen some specimens of their crimes in the doings of the house of Belesme. That house is indeed always spoken of as exceptionally wicked; but a state of things in which such deeds could be done, and could go unpunished, must have come very nearly to a complete break-up of society. The general pictures which we find given us of the time are fearful beyond expression. Through the withdrawal of all controlling power, every landowner became a petty sovereign, and began to exercise all the sovereign rights of slaughter and devastation. [Sidenote: Building of castles.] The land soon bristled with castles. The mound crowned with the square donjon rose as the defence or the terror of every lordship.[557] This castle-building [Sidenote: Building of castles.] is now spoken of in Normandy with a condemnation nearly as strong as that with which it was spoken of in England, when, a few years after this time, the practice was introduced into England by the Norman favourites of Eadward.[558] But there is a characteristic difference in the tone of the two complaints. The English complaint always is that the Frenchmen built castles and oppressed the poor folk,[559] or that they did all possible evil and shame to their English neighbours.[560] The Norman complaint, though not wholly silent as to the oppression of the humbler ranks,[561] yet dwells mainly on the castle-building as a sign of rebellion against the authority of the Prince, and as an occasion of warfare between baron and baron. And it would have been well for the reputation of the Norman nobles of that age if they had confined themselves to open warfare with one another and open rebellion against their sovereign. [Sidenote: Frequency of assassinations.] But they sank below the common morality of their own age; private murder was as familiar to them as open war. The house of Belesme had a bad preeminence in this as in other crimes; but, if they had a preeminence, they were far from having a monopoly. Probably no period of the same length in the history of Christendom contains the record of so many foul deeds of slaughter and mutilation as the early years of the reign of William. And they were constantly practised, not only against avowed and armed enemies, but against unarmed and unsuspecting guests. Some of the tales may be inventions or exaggerations; but the days in which such tales could even be invented must have been full of deeds of horror. Isolated cases of similar crimes may doubtless be found in any age; but this period is remarkable alike for the abundance of crimes, for the rank of the criminals, and for the impunity which they enjoyed. To control these men was the duty laid upon the almost infant years of William, a duty with which nothing short of his own full and matured powers might seem fit to grapple. Yet over all these difficulties the genius of the [Sidenote: Effects of William’s government in Normandy.] great Duke was at last triumphant. His hand brought order out of the chaos, and changed a land wasted by rebellion and intestine warfare into one of the most prosperous regions of Europe, a land flourishing as no Norman ruler had seen it flourish before. When we think of the days in which William spent his youth, of the men against whom his early years were destined to be one continued struggle, we shall be less inclined to lift up our hands in horror at his later crimes than to dwell with admiration on the large share of higher and better qualities which, among all his evil deeds, clave to him to his dying day.

§ 2. _From the Accession of William to the Battle of Val-ès-dunes._
1035–1047.

[Sidenote: Guardians of William.]