Chapter VIII (4)

Such an auspicious reinforcement might well stir up the spirits of the young Duke and his followers. Every man was eager for battle. A fierce combat of cavalry began. We have heard of the infantry of the communes as appearing at the ducal muster, but we hear nothing of them in the battle. We hear nothing of the Norman archers, who were to win so terrible a renown upon a later field. All is one vast tourney, mounted knights charging one another with shield, sword, and lance. The first great battle of William, like the first great battle of Alexander,[777] was truly a battle of chivalry in every sense of the word, a hand to hand personal fight between mounted nobles on either side. On pressed the Duke, sword in hand, seeking out the perjured Viscounts,[778] and shouting the war-cry of Normandy, “_Dex aie_.”[779] On the same side rose the shout of “_Montjoye-Saint-Denys_,” the national war-cry of the French Kingdom. From the rebel host arose the names of various local saints, patrons of the castles and churches of the revolted leaders, Saint Sever, Saint Amand, and others of less renown.[780] On the rebel left rode the men of the Bessin, on the right those of the Côtentin. The men of the peninsula thus came face to face with the [Sidenote: Personal exertions of King Henry.] royal troops; the King of the French, as in the old days of Lewis and Harold,[781] had to meet in close fight with the fiercest and most unconquerable warriors of the Norman name. And well and bravely did King Henry do his duty on that one day of his life. Even in the Norman picture, it is around the King, rather than around the Duke, that the main storm of battle is made to centre. The knights now met on each side, lance to lance, and, when their lances were shivered, sword to sword. There was no difference of tactics, no contrast between one weapon and another; the fight of Val-ès-dunes was the sheer physical encounter of horse and man, the mere trial of personal strength and personal skill in knightly exercises. The King, as in such a fight any man of common courage must do, exposed himself freely to danger; but, as far as his personal adventures went, the royal share in the battle was somewhat unlucky. Once, if not twice, the King of the French, the overlord of Normandy, was hurled from his horse by the thrust of a Norman lance. A knight of the Côtentin first overthrew him by a sudden charge. The exploit was long remembered in the rhymes of his warlike province,[782] but the hero of it purchased his renown with his life. The King was unhurt, but the report of such an accident might easily spread confusion among his army. Like more renowned warriors before and after, like Eadmund at Sherstone,[783] like William at Senlac, it was needful that he should show himself to his followers, and wipe out the misfortune by fresh exploits. Henry was therefore soon again in the thickest of the fight; but, less fortunate than either Eadmund or William, the like mishap befell him a second time.[784] The King presently encountered one of the three great chiefs of the rebellion; another thrust, dealt by the lance of Hamon, again laid Henry on the ground; but a well timed stroke from a French knight more than avenged this second overthrow; the Lord of Thorigny was carried off dead on his shield like an old Spartan.[785]

The King honoured his valiant adversary, and, by his express order, Hamon was buried with all fitting splendour before the Church of Our Lady at Esquai on the Orne.[786]

The King is thus made decidedly the most prominent figure in the picture, and, somewhat inglorious as were Henry’s personal experiences that day, it is to him and his Frenchmen that the Norman poet does not scruple to attribute the victory.[787] The fight appears throughout as [Sidenote: Exploits and good fortune of William.] a fight between Normans and Frenchmen.[788] But the Duke of the Normans himself was not idle. If his royal ally was personally unlucky, it was on this day that William began that career of personal success, of good fortune in the mere tug of battle, which, till the clouded evening of his life, was as conspicuous as the higher triumphs of his military genius and his political craft. Men loved to tell how the young Duke slew with his own hand the beloved vassal of Randolf, Hardrez, the choicest warrior of Bayeux;[789] how the veteran champion, in the pride of his might, rode defiant in the front rank; how the Duke rode straight at him, not justing with his lance as in a mimic tourney, but smiting hand to hand with the sword. The poet rises to an almost Homeric flight, when he tells us how William smote the rebel below the chin, how he drove the sharp steel between the throat and the chest, how the body fell beneath his stroke and the soul passed away.[790]

[Sidenote: Randolf loses heart and flees.]

The fortune of the day was now distinctly turning against the rebels; but, had all of them displayed equal courage, the issue of the struggle might still have been unfavourable to King and Duke. Neal of Saint Saviour still fought among the foremost of the men of his peninsula, but the heart of his accomplice from Bayeux began to fail him. Randolf had seen his most cherished vassal fall by the hand of his young sovereign; his heart quailed lest the like fate should be his own; he feared lest Neal had fled; he feared that he was betrayed to the enemy; he repented that he had ever put on his helmet; it was sad to be taken captive, it was a still worse doom to be slain. The battle ceased to give him any pleasure;[791] he gave way before every charge; he wandered in front and in rear; at last he lost heart altogether; he dropped his lance and his shield, he stretched forth his neck,[792] and rode [Sidenote: Neal continues the fight to the last.] for his life. The cowards, we are told, followed him; but Neal still continued the fight, giving and taking blows till his strength failed him. The French pressed upon him; their numbers increased, the numbers of the Normans lessened; some of his followers had fled, others lay dead and dying around him. At last the mighty lord of the Côtentin saw that all hope was lost. On the rising ground of Saint Lawrence the last blow seems to have been struck. The spot was afterwards marked by a commemorative chapel, which was destroyed by the Huguenots in the religious wars. On its site it doubtless was that the valiant Neal at last turned and left the field, seemingly the last man of the whole rebel army.

[Sidenote: Rout of the Rebels.]

The rout now became general. The example of Randolf drew after it far more followers than the example of Neal. The rebels rode for their lives in small parties, the troops of the King and the Duke following hard upon them, and smiting them from the rear. From the ridge of Saint Lawrence they rode westward, to reach the friendly land of Bayeux;[793] they rode by the Abbey of Fontenay and the quarries of Allemagne; but the flood of the Orne checked their course; men and horses were swept away by the stream, or were slaughtered by the pursuers in the attempt to cross; the mills of Borbillon, we are told, were stopped by the dead bodies.[794]

[Sidenote: Completeness of the victory.]

The victory was a decisive one, and it was one which proved no less decisive in its lasting results than it had been [Sidenote: The French auxiliaries return.] as a mere success on the field of battle. King Henry, who had done his work well and faithfully, now went back to his own land, and left William to complete the reduction of his revolted subjects. One of them, the original author of the plot, still offered him a long and vigorous resistance. Of the conduct of Guy of Burgundy in the field we hear nothing, except an incidental mention of a wound which he received there.[795] Indeed, since the appearance of his three great Norman adherents, the [Sidenote: Escape of Guy.] Burgundian prince has nearly dropped out of sight.[796] He now reappears, to receive from the Norman writers a vast out-pouring of scorn on account of his flight from the field,[797] though it does not appear to have been in any way more ignominious than the flight of the mass of his Norman allies. At any rate he was not borne away in the indiscriminate rush of his comrades towards the Orne. He escaped, with a large body of companions,[798] in quite the opposite direction, to his own castle of Brionne on the [Sidenote: He defends himself at Brionne.] Risle. There he took up a position of defence, and was speedily followed and besieged by Duke William. The castle of Brionne of those days was not the hill fortress, the shell of a donjon of that or of the next age, which now looks down upon the town and valley beneath. The stronghold of Count Guy had natural defences, but they were defences of another kind. The town itself seems to have been strongly fortified; but the point of defence which was most relied on at Brionne was the fortified hall of stone which stood on an island in the river.[799] William had, before now, by one vigorous assault, brought his own native Falaise to surrender;[800] but, though we are expressly told that the stream was everywhere fordable, the island fortress seems to have been deemed proof against any attacks [Sidenote: Siege of Brionne 1047–1050?] of this kind. A regular siege alone could reduce it, and William was driven to practise all the devices of the military art of his day against his rebellious cousin. He built a castle, this time very possibly of wood, on each side of the river, and thus cut off the besieged from their supplies of provisions.[801] Constant assaults on the beleaguered castle are spoken of, but their aim seems to have been mainly to frighten the besieged rather than to produce any more practical effect;[802] hunger was the sure and slow means on which William relied to bring Guy to reason. The siege was clearly a long one, though it is hardly possible to believe, on the incidental statement of a single authority, that it was spread over a space of three years.[803] [Sidenote: Surrender of Brionne.] At last the endurance of Guy and his companions gave way, and he sent messengers praying for mercy. The Duke required the surrender of the castle; but touched, we are told, by the tie of kindred blood, he bade Guy [Sidenote: William’s clemency to the vanquished.] remain in his court.[804] Nor was the Duke’s hand, on the whole, heavy on the other offenders. No man was put to death, though William’s panegyrist holds that death [Sidenote: Rarity of political executions.] was the fitting punishment for their offences.[805] But in those days, both in Normandy and elsewhere, the legal execution of a state criminal was an event which 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 form.[806] But the formal hanging or beheading of a noble prisoner, so common in later times, was, in the eleventh century, distinctly an unusual sight.[807] And, strange as it may sound, there was a sense in which [Sidenote: William’s ordinary treatment of enemies.] 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. His biographer exultingly points out this feature in his character, and his recorded acts do not belie his praise.[808] Once only did he swerve from this rule, when he sent the noble Waltheof to the scaffold. And, as that act stands out conspicuously from its contrast to his ordinary conduct, so it is the act from which it is impossible not to date the decline of his high fortune. And, at the time of his first great victory, William was of an age which is commonly disposed to be generous, and none of the worse features of his character had hitherto come to the surface. With one exception only, no very hard punishments were inflicted on the conquered [Sidenote: Destruction of the castles.] rebels. The mass of the rebellious Barons paid fines, gave hostages, and had to submit to the destruction of the castles which they had raised without the ducal licence.[809] To this, and to other measures of the same kind, it is owing that such small traces of the Norman castles of the eleventh century now remain. Neal of Saint Saviour had to retire for a time to Britanny, but his exile must have been short, as we find him, seemingly in the very next year, again in office and in the ducal favour. He survived his restoration forty-four years;[810] he lived to repay at Senlac the old wrong done by Englishmen to his father’s province; but, almost alone among the great Norman chiefs, he received [Sidenote: Guy returns to Burgundy.] no share in the spoils of England. As for Guy, he presently left the country of his own free will. His sojourn at William’s court must have been little else than an honourable imprisonment, and it would seem that he now found little respect or sympathy in Normandy.[811] He returned to his native land, the Burgundian Palatinate, and there, we are told, spent the rest of his days in plotting against his brother, the reigning Count William.[812] [Sidenote: Fate of Grimbald.] One criminal only was reserved for a harsher fate. Grimbald was taken to Rouen, and there kept in prison—such as prisons were in those days—and in fetters. He was looked on as the foulest traitor of all; he it was whom the Duke charged with the personal attempt on his life at Valognes.[813] Grimbald confessed the crime, and named as his accomplice a knight named Salle the son of Hugh. The accused denied the charge, and challenged Grimbald to the judicial combat. Before the appointed day of battle came, Grimbald was found dead in his prison. He was buried with his fetters on his legs, his lands were confiscated, and part of them was given to the church of Bayeux. Plessis became a domain of the see, and other portions of the estates of Grimbald became the corpses of various prebends in the cathedral church.[814]

[Sidenote: Establishment of William’s power in Normandy.]

The power of William was now on the whole firmly established. He had still to repel many attacks from hostile neighbours, and we shall have yet to record one more considerable revolt within the Norman territory. But the Norman Barons now knew that they had a master.[815] For some years to come, internal discord, strictly so called, underwent a sort of lull to a degree most remarkable in such an age. Under the firm and equal government of her great Duke, Normandy began to recover from her years of anarchy, and to rise to a higher degree of prosperity than she had ever yet attained to.[816] [Sidenote: Effect of the struggle.] The Duchy became, more completely than it had ever been before, a member of the European and of the Capetian [Sidenote: The supremacy of the French element confirmed.] commonwealth. The Capetian King indeed soon learned again to look with a grudging eye on his northern neighbour; but the general result of the struggle must have been to make Normandy still more French than before. The French and the Scandinavian elements had met face to face, and the French element had had the upper hand. Frenchmen and French Normans had overthrown the stout Saxons of the Bessin and the fierce Danes of the Côtentin. The distinction between the two parts of Normandy is still one which even the passing traveller may remark; but, from the day of Val-ès-dunes, it ceased to manifest itself in the great outward expressions of language and political feeling. The struggle which began during the minority of Richard the Fearless was now finally decided at the close of the minority of William the Bastard. The Count of Rouen had overcome Saxons and Danes within his own dominions, and he was about to weld them into his most trustworthy weapons wherewith to overcome Saxons and Danes beyond the sea. The omen of the fight against Neal and Hamon might well have recurred to the mind of William, when Neal himself and the son of Hamon marched forth at his side from the camp at Hastings, and went on to complete the conquest of England at Exeter and York.

§ 3. _From the Battle of Val-ès-dunes to William’s Visit to England._
1047–1051.

William was thus at peace at home; his next war was indeed one of his own seeking, but it was one from which he could not have shrunk without breaking through every [Sidenote: The Counts of Anjou; their connexion with Norman and English history.] tie alike of gratitude and of feudal duty. This is the first time that I have had directly to mention a power, which had been, for more than a hundred years, steadily growing up to the south of Normandy, and which was to exercise a most important influence on the future history of Normandy and, through Normandy, on that of England. I mean the dynasty of the Counts of Anjou. That [Sidenote: 1154.] house, the house which mounted the throne of England in the person of a great-grandson of William, produced a succession of princes to whose personal qualities it must mainly have been owing that their dominions fill the place which they do fill in French and in European history. [Sidenote: Characteristics of Angevin history.] Anjou holds a peculiar position among the great fiefs of France. It was a singular destiny which gave so marked a character, and so conspicuous a history, to a country which seems in no way marked out for separate existence by any geographical or national distinction. Normandy, Britanny, Flanders, Aquitaine, Ducal Burgundy, all had a being of their own; they were fiefs of the Crown of France, but they were in no sense French provinces. But Anjou was at most an outpost on the Loire, a border district of France and Aquitaine; beyond this position it had nothing specially to distinguish it from any other part of the great [Sidenote: Saxon occupation. 464.] Parisian Duchy.[817] A momentary Saxon occupation in the fifth century[818] cannot be supposed to have left behind it any such abiding traces as were certainly left by the settlement of the same people at Bayeux, perhaps even by their less famous settlement at Seez.[819] It was wholly to the energy and the marked character of its individual rulers that Anjou owes its distinct and prominent place among the principalities of Gaul. The restless spirit of the race showed itself sometimes for good and sometimes for evil, but there was no Count of Anjou who could be called a fool, a coward, or a _fainéant_. The history or legends of the family which was to rise to such greatness laid claim [Sidenote: Ingelgar, first Count. 870?] to no very remote or illustrious pedigree.[820] The first Count of Anjou, who held a part only of the later County,[821] was invested with that dignity either by Charles the Bald or by his son Lewis the Stammerer.[822] He bore the name of Ingelgar, and he seems to be the first member of the family who can be unhesitatingly set down as historical. His grandfather, [Sidenote: Peasant origin of the family.] Torquatius or Tortulfus, was, according to the legend, a peasant, and seems to have sprung from that Breton race of which his descendants became the most persevering enemies. It must have been a later version of the tale which invented for him a Roman name and a Roman descent.[823] [Sidenote: Torquatius and Tertullus.] The son of Torquatius, Tertullus, rose, we are told, to importance at the court of Charles, and founded the [Sidenote: Historical value of these tales.] greatness of his house.[824] Whatever may be the amount of strictly historical truth preserved in these stories, they are, in one point of view, of no small historical value. Like the similar story of the origin of Godwine, they point to a belief, which can hardly have been ill-founded, that, in Gaul in the ninth century and in England in the eleventh, ignoble birth did not disqualify a man from rising to the highest dignities, or from founding a dynasty of Princes or even of Kings.[825] But, when we reach Ingelgar, we seem to stand on more distinctly historical ground. He held Amboise in Touraine as an allodial possession,[826] and he was, as we have seen, invested with the Countship of Anjou on the hither side of the Mayenne. But it is plain that no detailed account of his actions, or of those of his immediate successors, was preserved.[827] [Sidenote: Fulk the Red. 888.] His son Fulk the Red received from Charles the Simple the remaining portion of the County of Anjou, that beyond the Mayenne, and he vigorously defended his enlarged dominions against the attacks of Northmen and Bretons.[828] [Sidenote: Fulk the Good. 938.] This Romulus was appropriately succeeded by a Numa, Fulk the Good, renowned for his piety, his almsdeeds, his just and peaceful government, and for being the traditional author of the proverb that an unlettered King is but [Sidenote: Geoffrey Grisegonelle. 958.] a crowned ass.[829] His son, Geoffrey Grisegonelle,[830] renewed the warlike fame of his house; he fought with his neighbours of Britanny and Aquitaine; and he is said to [Sidenote: 978.] have borne an important share in the wars between King Lothar and the Emperor Otto the Second.[831] After [Sidenote: Fulk Nerra. 987.] him came his son Fulk,[832] surnamed Nerra or the Black, renowned as a warrior and still more renowned as a pilgrim, and who is the first prince of his house whose name has found its way into the general history of France. He overthrew his brother-in-law Conan of Britanny in one or [Sidenote: 992.] more pitched battles, which French, as well as Breton and [Sidenote: His war with Odo of Chartres.] Angevin, writers thought worthy of record. He was also engaged in a war with his neighbour Odo the Second, Count of Blois and Chartres, the grandson of the famous Theobald, a war which passed on as an inheritance to the next generation, and which proved the origin of the first entanglements between Normandy and Anjou.[833] It sounds like an incursion from another hemisphere, when we read how Aldebert, Count of Perigueux, Perigueux with its cupolas and its Roman tower, far away in the heart of Aquitaine, appeared as an ally of the Angevin [Sidenote: Fulk gains and loses Tours. 990.] Count. He took Tours and gave it to Fulk, but the citizens were ill disposed to their new master, and Odo [Sidenote: Battle of Pontlevois. 1016.] recovered it after a short time. Later in his reign, Fulk defeated Odo in a great battle at Pontlevois in the territory [Sidenote: 1031.] of Touraine, and afterwards gained or recovered Saumur. We have already met with him in the character of a mediator between contending candidates for the Crown of France,[834] and he appears also in the less honourable light of an assassin, who removed a courtier of King Robert who stood in the way of the plans of his own termagant niece Queen Constance.[835] We hear also heavy complaints of him as a violator of ecclesiastical rule, by setting up the usurped authority of the See of Rome against the rights [Sidenote: His pilgrimages. 1028, 1035.] of the independent metropolitans of Gaul.[836] But he is perhaps best known for his two pilgrimages to the Holy Sepulchre, for the ready ingenuity which he displayed on his first journey, and for the extreme of penitential humiliation by which he edified all men on the second.[837] Less happy in his private than in his public career, he was troubled in his last years by a rebellion of his son;[838] he was charged, truly or falsely, with the murder of one wife, and with driving another from him by ill-treatment.[839] A reign of unusual length made him, during a few years, a contemporary of the Great William, and at last he left his dominions to a son under whom Normans and Angevins met for the first time in open warfare.

[Sidenote: Geoffrey Martel. 1040.]

This son, Geoffrey by name, rejoiced in the surname of Martel, which he bestowed upon himself to express the heavy blows which, like the victor of Tours, he dealt around upon all his enemies.[840] He began his career in his father’s lifetime. A dispute for the possession of the County of Saintonge led to a war between him and William the Sixth or the Fat, Duke of Aquitaine and [Sidenote: He imprisons William of Aquitaine. April 22, 1033.] Count of Poitou.[841] Geoffrey was successful; he took the Aquitanian prince prisoner, and kept him in close bondage, till his wife Eustacia ransomed him at a heavy price. According to one version, the ransom consisted only of gold and silver, the spoil or contribution of the monasteries of his Duchy. Others however assert that it was nothing short of the cession of Bourdeaux and other cities, and an engagement to pay tribute for the rest of his dominions. Three days after this hard bought deliverance, William died. Immediately afterwards, or, according to some accounts, in the course of the year before, Geoffrey married Agnes, the step-mother of his victim, the widow of William’s father, William the Fifth or the Great. The marriage was, on some ground or other, branded as incestuous, and it was this imprisonment of William and [Sidenote: Geoffrey rebels against his father. 1033.] this marriage with Agnes which, we are told, gave rise in some way to Geoffrey’s rebellion against his father and to the discord between Fulk and his second wife Hildegardis the mother of Geoffrey.

The imprisonment of William of Aquitaine evidently made a deep impression upon men’s minds at the time; but it was the standing war with the house of Chartres which brought Anjou into direct collision with Normandy, and thereby, at a somewhat later time, into connexion [Sidenote: Last days of Odo of Chartres.] with England. The last energies of Odo were mainly directed to objects remote from Anjou, and even from Chartres and Blois. He was one of the party which opposed the succession of King Henry, and in so doing he must have crossed the policy of Henry’s great champion [Sidenote: His war with King Henry. 1034.] Duke Robert. In a war which followed with the King Odo was unsuccessful,[842] but his mind was now set upon greater things. Already Count of Champagne, he aimed [Sidenote: His attempt on the Kingdom of Burgundy. 1033.] at restoring the great frontier state between the Eastern and the Western Franks, at reigning as King of Burgundy, of Lotharingia, perhaps of Italy. After meeting [Sidenote: His defeat and death at Bar. 1037.] for a while with some measure of success, he was at last defeated and slain by Duke Gozelo, the father of Godfrey of whom we have already heard,[843] in a battle near Bar in the Upper Lotharingia.[844] His great schemes died with him. His sons were only Counts and not Kings, and their father’s dominions were divided between them. The [Sidenote: His sons Stephen and Theobald.] sons of both of them obtained settlements in England, and a grandson of one figures largely in English history. Stephen reigned in Champagne; his son Odo married a sister of the Conqueror, and was one of the objects of his brother-in-law’s bounty in England.[845] Theobald inherited Blois and Chartres. His son Stephen married [Sidenote: Their wars with King Henry and with Geoffrey.] William’s daughter Adela, and thereby became father of a King of the English. But at present we have to deal with Count Theobald as a vassal of France at variance with his overlord, as a neighbour of Anjou inheriting the hereditary enmity of his forefathers. Touraine, part of which was already possessed by Geoffrey,[846] and, above all, the metropolitan city of Tours, were ever the great objects of Angevin ambition. It was a stroke of policy on the part of Henry, when he formally deprived the rebel Theobald of [Sidenote: Geoffrey receives Tours as a grant from Henry, and imprisons Theobald. 1044.] that famous city, and bestowed it by a royal grant on the Count of Anjou.[847] Geoffrey was not slow to press a claim at once fresh and most plausible. He advanced on the city to assert his rights by force. Saint Martin, we are specially told, favoured the enterprise.[848] The brothers resisted in vain. Stephen was put to flight; Theobald was taken prisoner, and was compelled, like William of Aquitaine, to obtain his freedom by the surrender of the city.[849]

Both French and Angevin writers agree in describing Geoffrey as taking possession of Tours with the full consent of King Henry. Yet, in the first glimpse of Angevin affairs given us by our Norman authorities, the relations between the King of the French and the Count of Anjou are set forth in an exactly opposite light. Geoffrey is [Sidenote: William helps King Henry against Geoffrey. 1048.] engaged in a rebellious war against Henry, and the Duke of the Normans appears simply to discharge his feudal duty to his lord, and to return the obligation incurred by the King’s prompt and effectual help at Val-ès-dunes.[850] These two accounts are in no way inconsistent; in the space of four years the relations between the King and so dangerous a vassal as Geoffrey may very well have changed. Henry may well have found that it was not sound policy to foster the growth of one whose blows might easily be extended from Counts to Kings. The campaign which followed is dwelt on at great length by our Norman authorities and is cut significantly short by the Angevins. [Sidenote: Personal exploits of William.] In its course, we are told, William gained the highest reputation. The troops of Normandy surpassed in number the united contingents of the King and of all his other vassals.[851] The Duke’s courage and conduct were preeminent, and they won him the first place in the King’s counsels.[852] But on one point Henry had to remonstrate with his valiant ally. He was forced, says the panegyrist, to warn both William himself and the chief Norman leaders against the needless exposure of so precious a life.[853] William at no time of his life ever shrank from danger, and we may be sure that, at this time of his life especially, he thoroughly enjoyed the practice of war in all its forms. But William’s impulses were already under the control of his reason. He knew, no doubt, as well as any man, that to plunge himself into needless dangers, and to run the risk of hairbreadth scapes, was no part of the real duty of a prince or a general. But he also knew that it was mainly by exploits of this kind that he must dazzle the minds of his own generation, and so obtain that influence over men which was needful for the great schemes of his life.[854] In any other point of view, one would say that it was unworthy of William’s policy to win the reputation of a knight-errant at the expense of making for himself a lasting and dangerous enemy in the Count of Anjou.

[Sidenote: Position of Maine under Geoffrey.]

The undisputed dominions of the two princes nowhere touched each other. But between them lay a country closely connected both with Normandy and with Anjou, and over which both William and Geoffrey asserted rights. This was the County of Maine, a district which was always said to have formed part of the later acquisitions of Rolf,[855] but of which the Norman Dukes had never taken practical possession. The history of the Cenomannian city and province will be more fittingly sketched at another stage of William’s [Sidenote: Count Herbert. 1015.] career; it is enough to say here that Geoffrey was now practical sovereign of Maine, in the character of protector, [Sidenote: Hugh. 1036.] guardian, or conqueror of the young Count Hugh, the son of the famous Herbert, surnamed _Wake-the-dog_.[856] William and Geoffrey thus became immediate neighbours, and Geoffrey, with the craft of his house, knew how to strike a blow [Sidenote: The fortresses of Domfront and Alençon.] where William was weakest. Two chief fortresses guarded the frontier between Maine and Normandy. Each commanded its own valley, its own approach into the heart of the Norman territory; each watched over a stream flowing from Norman into Cenomannian ground. These were Domfront towards the western, and Alençon towards the eastern, portion of the frontier. Domfront commanded the region watered by the Mayenne and its tributaries, while Alençon was the key of the valley of the Sarthe, the keeper of the path which led straight to the minster of Seez and to the donjon of Falaise. Of these two strongholds, Alençon stood on Norman, Domfront on Cenomannian soil.[857] But Norman writers maintained that Domfront, no less than Alençon, was of right a Norman possession, both fortresses alike having been reared by the licence of Richard the [Sidenote: Disloyalty of Alençon.] Good.[858] But even Alençon, whatever may have been its origin, was at this time far from being a sound member of the Norman body-politic. As a lordship of William Talvas, it shared in the ambiguous character, half Norman, half French, which attached to all the border possessions of the house of Belesme. And, as events presently showed, its inhabitants shared most fully in the spirit in which the Lord of Alençon had cursed the Bastard in his cradle.[859] We are told also that the citizens both of Alençon and of Domfront disliked the rule of William, on account of the strict justice which he administered and the checks which he put on their marauding practices.[860] This complaint sounds rather as if it came from turbulent barons than from burghers; yet it is quite possible that the burghers of a frontier town, especially on a frontier which was very doubtful and ill defined, may have indulged in those breaches of the peace which it was William’s greatest praise, both in Normandy and in England, to chastise without mercy. [Sidenote: Alençon garrisoned by Geoffrey.] At any rate, the people of Alençon were thoroughly disloyal to Normandy, and they willingly received the Angevin Count and his garrison.[861] William returned the blow of [Sidenote: William marches ta Domfront;] Geoffrey’s hammer in kind. Leaving Alençon for a while to itself, he crossed the frontier, Angevin or Cenomannian as we may choose to call it, and laid siege to Domfront. [Sidenote: his exploits on the way.] On his march he found that treason was not wholly extinguished, even among his own troops. He had gone on a foraging or plundering party with fifty horse;[862] a traitor, a Norman noble, sent word of his whereabout to the defenders of the town, who sent forth, we are told, three hundred horse and seven hundred foot to attack the Duke unexpectedly. It sounds like romance when we read that William at once charged and overthrew the horseman nearest to him, that the rest were seized with a sudden panic and took to flight, that the Duke and his little band chased them to the gates of Domfront, and that William carried off one prisoner with his own hands.[863] Such stories are no doubt greatly exaggerated; the details may often be pure invention; but, as contemporary exaggerations and inventions, they show the kind of merit which Normans then looked for in their rulers, and they show the kind of exploit of which William himself was thought capable. [Sidenote: Traitors in the Norman camp.] And the perfectly casual mention of the traitor in the Norman camp is instructive in another way. We have here no doubt merely an example of what often happened, and the way in which treason is spoken of as an everyday matter sets vividly before us the difficulties with which William, even now after the victory of Val-ès-dunes, had still to contend at every step.[864]

[Sidenote: Siege of Domfront.]

William now laid siege to Domfront. The town was strong both by its fortifications and by its natural position. The spirit of the citizens was high, and they were further strengthened by the presence of a chosen body of Angevin troops sent by Count Geoffrey. An assault was hopeless where two steep and narrow paths were the only ways by which the fortress could be approached even on foot.[865] William surrounded it with four towers,[866] and the Norman army sat down before it. The Duke was foremost in every attack, in every ambush, in every night march to cut off the approach of those who sought to bring either messages or provisions to the besieged town.[867] Yet we are told that he found himself so safe in the enemy’s country that he often enjoyed the sports of hunting and hawking, for which the neighbouring woods afforded special opportunities.[868] [Sidenote: 1048–1049.] The siege had continued for some time in this way, and it was now seemingly winter,[869] when news was brought that Count Geoffrey was advancing with a large [Sidenote: Geoffrey comes to relieve Domfront.] force to the relief of the town. A tale of knight-errantry follows, the main substance of which, coming as it does from a contemporary writer, we have no ground for disbelieving, even though some details may have been heightened to enhance the glory of William. The story is worthy of attention as showing that, amid all the apparent rudeness of the times, some germs of the later follies of chivalry had already begun to show themselves. As the Angevin army [Sidenote: Messages between William and Geoffrey. Early example of knight-errantry.] approached, William sent a message to Geoffrey by the hands of two of his chosen friends, two youths who had grown up along with him, and who were destined to share with him in all his greatest dangers and greatest successes. Both were men who lived to be famous in English history, Roger of Montgomery, the son-in-law of the terrible Talvas,[870] and William, the son of that Osbern who had lost his life through his faithfulness to his master.[871] These two trusty companions were sent to see Count Geoffrey, and to get from him an explanation of his purpose. Geoffrey told them that, at daybreak the next morning, he would come and beat up William’s quarters before Domfront. There should be no mistake about his person; he would be known by such a dress, such a shield,[872] such a coloured horse. The Norman messengers answered that he need not trouble himself to come so far as the Norman quarters; he whom he sought would come and visit him nearer home. Duke William would be ready for battle, with such a horse, such a dress, such manner of weapons.[873] The Normans appeared the next morning, eager for fight, [Sidenote: Geoffrey decamps.] and their Duke the most eager among them.[874] But no enemy was there to await them; before the Normans came in sight, the Count of Anjou and his host had decamped. Geoffrey doubtless, like some later generals, retired only for strategical reasons; but the Norman writers can see no nobler motive for his conduct than his being seized with a sudden panic.[875] Here, and throughout the war, the lions stand in need of a painter, or rather their painters suddenly refuse to do their duty. We have no Angevin account of the siege of Domfront to set against our evidently highly coloured Norman picture.

[Sidenote: William marches suddenly to Alençon, and besieges the town.]

The whole country now lay open for William to harry; but he knew better than to waste time and energy on mere useless ravages.[876] He determined rather to strike another sudden blow. Leaving a force before Domfront, he marched all night, through the enemy’s country, along the course of the Mayenne, passing by Mehendin, Pointel, and Saint-Samson.[877] He thus suddenly appeared before Alençon with the morning light.[878] A bridge over the Sarthe, strongly fortified with a ditch and a palisade, divided the Norman from the Cenomannian territory.[879] This bridge now served as a barrier against a Duke of the Normans attacking his own town from the Cenomannian [Sidenote: Insults offered to William at Alençon.] side. The defenders of the bridge, whether Angevins or disaffected Normans, received the Duke with the grossest personal insult. They spread out skins and leather jerkins, and beat them, shouting, “Hides, hides for the Tanner.”[880] The Duke of the Normans had acted a merciful and generous part towards the rebels of Val-ès-dunes and Brionne; but the grandson of Fulbert of Falaise could not endure the jeers thus thrown on his descent by the spindle side. Anything like a personal insult is commonly far more unpardonable in princely eyes than a real injury. The one act of cruelty which [Sidenote: 1296.] stains the reign of our great Edward is the slaughter of the inhabitants of Berwick in revenge for a jesting and not very intelligible ballad sung against him from the walls.[881] So now William swore, according to his fashion, by the Splendour of God,[882] that the men who thus mocked him should be dealt with like a tree whose branches are cut off by the pollarding-knife.[883] He kept his word. A vigorous assault was made upon the bridge. Houses were unroofed, and the timbers were thrown into the fosse.[884] Fire was set to the mass; the wood was dry, the flame spread, the palisades and gates were burned down, and [Sidenote: He takes the town, and mutilates his prisoners.] William was master of the bridge, and with it of the town of Alençon. The castle still held out. The Conqueror, faithful to his fearful oath, now gave the first of that long list of instances of indifference to human suffering which have won for him a worse name than many parts of his character really deserve. Thirty-two of the offenders were brought before him; their hands and feet were cut off,[885] and the dismembered limbs were thrown over the walls of the castle, as a speaking menace to its defenders.[886] The threat did its work; the garrison surrendered, bargaining only for safety for life and limb.[887] Alençon, tower and town, was thus taken so speedily that William’s panegyrist says that he might renew the boast of Cæsar, “I came; I saw; I conquered.”[888] Leaving [Sidenote: Domfront surrenders.] a garrison in Alençon, the Duke hastened back to Domfront, the fame of his conquest and of his cruelty going before him. The man before whom Alençon had fallen, before whom the Hammer of Anjou had fled without striking a blow, had become an enemy too fearful for the men of Domfront to face.[889] They surrendered on terms somewhat more favourable than those which had been granted to the defenders of the castle of Alençon; they were allowed to retain their arms as well as their lives and limbs.[890] William entered Domfront, and displayed the banner of Normandy over the donjon.[891] The town henceforth became a standing menace on the side of Normandy against Maine, and it formed, together with Alençon, the main defence of the southern frontier of the Duchy. If William undertook the war to discharge his feudal duty towards King Henry, he certainly did not lose the opportunity for permanently strengthening his own dominions. In fact, in our Norman accounts, the King of the French has long ago slipped away from the scene, and the Count of Chartres has vanished along with him. William and Geoffrey remain the only figures [Sidenote: William fortifies Ambières.] in the foreground. The Duke, having secured his frontier, marched, seemingly without resistance, into the undoubted territory of Maine; he there fortified a castle at Ambières, and returned in triumph to Rouen.[892]

The men of Alençon had jeered at the grandson of the Tanner; but the sovereign who so sternly chastised their jests was determined to show that the baseness of his mother’s origin in no way hindered him from promoting his kinsmen on the mother’s side. If one grandson of Fulbert wore the ducal crown of Normandy, another already wore the mitre of Bayeux; and another great promotion, almost equivalent to adoption into the ducal [Sidenote: William the Warling;] house, was now to be bestowed upon a third. The county of Mortain—Moritolium in the Diocese of Avranches[893]—was now held by William, surnamed Warling, son of Malger, a son of Richard the Fearless and Gunnor.[894] [Sidenote: his connexion with the ducal family.] He was therefore a first cousin of William’s father, a descendant of the ducal stock as legitimate as any other branch of it. We have not heard his name in the accounts of any of the former disturbances; but it is clear that he might, like so many others, have felt himself aggrieved by the accession of the Bastard. Among [Sidenote: Robert the Bigod.] the knights in Count William’s service was one, so the story runs, who bore a name hitherto unknown to history, though not unknown to legend and fanciful etymology, but a name which was to become more glorious on English ground than the names of Fitz-Osbern and Montgomery. The sons of Robert the Bigod[895] were to rule where Harold now held his Earldom, and his remote descendant was to win a place in English history worthy of Harold himself, as the man who wrested the freedom of England from the greatest of England’s later Kings.[896] The patriarch of that great house was now a knight so poor that he craved leave of his lord to leave his service, and to seek his fortune among his countrymen who were carving out for themselves lordships and principalities in Apulia. The Count bade him stay where he was; within eighty days he, Robert the Bigod, would be able, there in Normandy, to lay his hands on whatever good things [Sidenote: He charges William with treason.] it pleased him. In such a speech treason plainly lurked; and Robert, whether out of duty to his sovereign or in the hope of winning favour with a more powerful master, determined that the matter should come to the ears of the Duke. The Bigod was a kinsman of Richard of Avranches, the son of Thurstan the rebel of Falaise,[897] and Richard was now high in favour at the court of William. By his means Robert obtained an introduction to the Duke,[898] and told him of the treasonable words of the Count of Mortain. William accordingly sent for his cousin, and charged him with plotting against the state. He had, the Duke told him, determined again to disturb the peace of the country, and again to bring about the reign of licence. But, while he, Duke William, lived, the peace which Normandy so much needed should, by God’s help, never be disturbed again.[899] Count [Sidenote: William the Warling goes to Apulia.] William must at once leave the country, and not return to it during the lifetime of his namesake the Duke. The proud Lord of Mortain was thus driven to do what his poor knight had thought of doing. He went to the wars in Apulia in humble guise enough, attended by a [Sidenote: Robert, Count of Mortain.] single esquire. The Duke at once bestowed the vacant County of Mortain on his half-brother Robert, the son of Herlwin and Herleva. Of him we shall hear again in the tale of the Conquest of England. Thus, says our informant, did William pluck down the proud kindred of his father and lift up the lowly kindred of his mother.[900]

[Sidenote: Estimate of William’s conduct.]

This affair of William of Mortain is one of which we may well wish for further explanation. We are hardly in a position to judge of the truth or falsehood of the charge brought by Robert the Bigod against his lord.[901] We have no statement from the other side; we have no defence from the Count of Mortain; all that we are told is that, when arraigned before the Duke, he neither confessed nor denied the charge.[902] We need not doubt that William was honestly anxious to preserve his Duchy from internal disturbances. But in this case his justice, if justice it was, fell so sharply and speedily as to have very much the look of interested oppression. It was impossible to avoid the suspicion that William the Warling was sacrificed to the Duke’s wish to make a provision for his half-brother. We are not surprised to find that the charge of having despoiled and banished his cousin on frivolous pretences was brought up against William by his enemies in later times, and was not forgotten by historians in the next generation.[903]

The energy of William had thus, for the time, [Sidenote: Prosperous condition of Normandy. 1049–1054.] thoroughly quelled all his foes, and his Duchy seems for some years to have enjoyed as large a share of peace and prosperity as any state could enjoy in those troubled times. The young Duke was at last firmly settled in the ducal seat, and he now began to think of strengthening himself by a marriage into the family of some neighbouring prince. And he seems to have already made up his mind in favour of the woman who retained [Sidenote: William seeks Matilda of Flanders in marriage.] his love during the remainder of their joint lives, Matilda,[904] the daughter of Baldwin, Count of Flanders. He must have been in treaty for her hand very soon after the Angevin war, as the marriage was forbidden by a decree [Sidenote: 1049.] of the Council of Rheims.[905] But the marriage itself did [Sidenote: 1053.] not take place till several years later, and the negotiation opened so many questions, and was connected with so many later events, that I reserve the whole subject of [Sidenote: William’s objects, Duchy, Wife, and Kingdom, all pursued in the like spirit.] William’s marriage for a later chapter. William had to struggle through as many difficulties to obtain undisputed possession of his wife as he had to obtain undisputed possession of either his Duchy or his Kingdom. And he struggled after all three with the same deliberate energy, ever waiting his time, taking advantage of every opportunity, never baffled by any momentary repulse. His struggle for Normandy was now, for the time, over; he had fairly conquered his own Duchy, and he had now only to defend it. His struggle for Matilda had already begun; a struggle almost as hard as the other, though one which was to be fought, not with bow and spear, but with the weapons of legal and canonical disputation. Whether he had already begun to lift up his eyes to the succession of his childless cousin, whether he had already formed the hope that the grandson of the despised Tanner might fill, not only the ducal chair of Normandy, but the Imperial throne of Britain, is a question to which we can give no certain answer. But there can be little doubt that, soon after this time, the idea was forcibly brought before his mind. And, with characteristic pertinacity, when he had once dreamed of the prize, he never slackened in its pursuit till he could at last call it his own.

[Sidenote: Condition of England. 1051–1052.]