Chapter XII: The Later Reign of William in Normandy.159 (1)

1051–1066.

[Sidenote: Recapitulation of the history of Normandy.]

We left the Duchy of Normandy in the enjoyment of a short season of unusual peace, after the energy of its great Duke had for a moment quelled all enemies at home and [Sidenote: 1051.] abroad. We saw the Duke himself received as a cherished guest at the Court of England, during those gloomy months when England, in the absence of her defenders, seemed to have already become a Norman land. We saw him return to his home, clothed, there can be little doubt, in his own eyes, with the character of the lawful heir of the English Crown. We have now to trace out his history and that of his Duchy from the time of his return from his first English sojourn till he again steps upon the field of English history as an avowed claimant of the Kingdom of England. The intervening time fills a space of fifteen [Sidenote: Character of the period in Norman history.] years, years crowded with stirring and memorable events in the history of Normandy. But they are events which, till quite the end of the period, have no direct connexion with the history of England. It is only in the last stage of the present Chapter that the two streams of our narrative must again converge, at the moment when the two great figures of our drama meet face to face in the memorable and fatal visit of Earl Harold to the Norman court. The earlier years of the period are wholly occupied with the affairs of William and his Duchy, his marriage, his ecclesiastical reforms and foundations, his wars against rebellious kinsmen within his Duchy and with French and Angevin enemies beyond its bounds. But these things all form part of our story. No part of the life of the great Conqueror is foreign to the history of the Conquest of England. Every blow dealt by William against his restless neighbours or against his jealous overlord formed part of his military schooling for the greatest day of his military life. Every exercise of that political craft in which he surpassed all men made his hand more skilful for the weaving of that masterpiece of subtlety by which, even more than by his lance and bow, he knew how to make England his own.

[Sidenote: Divisions of the period.]

The period will fall naturally into four divisions. First [Sidenote: William’s marriage.] comes William’s marriage with Matilda of Flanders, a step which was, in itself, of no small moment in William’s career, and which, as I have already hinted,[160] supplies some [Sidenote: His French wars. 1050–1058.] most characteristic illustrations of William’s temper. Next come the wars of William with the King of the French and his allies, those allies being not only the ceaseless enemy of Normandy, the Count of Anjou, but also enemies of William’s within his own Duchy and within his own [Sidenote: His war for Maine. 1061–1063.] ducal house. Thirdly comes the later stage of the Angevin war, when it became almost wholly resolved into a struggle for the possession of Maine. Lastly, we come to William’s [Sidenote: The Breton War and the oath of Harold.] Breton campaigns, which, in our point of view, necessarily become a mere adjunct to the great question of the visit and the oath of Harold. I have purposely reserved that question for this stage of my history. As the date is uncertain, and as the event is recorded by no contemporary English writer, I could find no fitting place for it in the [Sidenote: The oath a Norman rather than an English question.] course of my purely English narrative. Recorded only by Norman writers, it seems essentially a piece of Norman history, and the question of right or wrong is essentially a Norman question.[161] It has no bearing on the events narrated and discussed in my last Chapter; it has the closest bearing on the events which will be narrated in later Chapters. [Sidenote: Its bearing on the history.] Any personal obligations towards William, which Harold had contracted or which Harold had broken, formed altogether a personal question between William and Harold. It was a question with which the English nation had in strictness nothing to do.[162] They might take it into consideration as a matter of prudence; they had nothing to do with it as a matter of right. If any wrong was done to William, it was done, not by England, but by Harold personally. It might be a crime in Harold to accept the Crown to which he was chosen, but that in no way affected the right of the English people to choose him. The question then, up to this point, is a Norman question; it became an English question only when William claimed the English Crown, and put forth the alleged perjury of Harold as one of the grounds of his claim. I have therefore reserved the consideration of the whole story for the present Chapter. It comes in here as a part of the Norman history, which has no direct bearing on the purely English events which have gone before, but which has the most direct and important bearing on the combined Norman and English events which are to follow.

§ 1. _The Marriage of William and Matilda. 1049–1060._

[Sidenote: Position of William.]

William, at the time of his visit to Eadward, had reached the age of about twenty-four years. The negotiations for [Sidenote: 1049.] his marriage had already begun at least two years before.[163] A marriage into some princely house was an object of no small moment for one in William’s position. The Bastard, the Tanner’s grandson, had now abundantly made good his position within his own Duchy, and he had shown to his neighbours that he was one whose borders could not be insulted with impunity. The victor of Val-ès-dunes, the avenger of Alençon, the man to whom the impregnable steep of Domfront had yielded in sheer dread of his wrath,[164] already held no small place among the princes of Gaul and of Europe. The rulers of the lands nearest to his own had had abundant means of judging of his prowess. His royal overlord at Paris had witnessed what William could do as an ally, and his restless rival at Angers had felt yet more keenly what he could do as an enemy. Alike in warfare and in internal government, he had shown himself in every way the peer of Kings and of long-descended Dukes and Counts. It remained now to be seen whether [Sidenote: A princely marriage desirable for him.] the rulers of other European states were ready to receive him as their social peer, and to allow their blood to mingle with the blood of the son of Herleva. His own panegyrist has indeed no doubt on the point. The Duke of the Normans had only to choose his wife at his will from the houses of whichever of the neighbouring princes he thought good. Nay, distant Kings would have vied with one another in offering their daughters to such a bridegroom.[165] Notwithstanding this rhetoric, we may be allowed to suspect that, when the chief men of Normandy urged on their sovereign the prudence of an early marriage, they thought somewhat of the advantage of fixing the position of William in the eyes of the world as well as of the necessity of securing the Norman succession.[166] This last object [Sidenote: Importance of direct heirs to William.] indeed was a matter of paramount importance. Nothing but the life of the reigning Duke stood between his Duchy and the repetition of such anarchy as his own early years had witnessed. A bastard could, in strict law, have no heirs but heirs of his own body; and, even setting aside William’s bastardy, it was as hard now as it had been at the death of Robert to say who was the lawful presumptive heir to the Norman Duchy. It was before all things necessary that William should, with all speed, raise up sons of his own to [Sidenote: Domestic purity of William’s life.] sit on his ducal chair. And it is to the eternal honour of the young Duke that there was no fear of the rights of William’s lawful sons being interfered with by the claims of any elder but unlawful issue. There was no fear of William’s bride, whoever she might be, having to share her place in his house or in his heart with any unlawful or irregular consort. Alone of all his race, William set an example to all the princes of his time of a domestic life of unsullied purity. He had marked, it may well be, the shame, the sorrow, the anarchy, which had been brought upon himself and his country by the youthful error of his own parents, or rather—it might be fairer to say—by the neglect of his father to redeem that youthful error by a later marriage. He was determined that no such evils should ever arise from any such error on his own part. No mistress, no Danish wife, appeared in William’s days in the palace of Rouen; and this virtue, so unusual in one surrounded by all the temptations of youth and power, seems to have become the subject of foolish and brutal jests among the profligate scoffers of his Court.[167] The private life of William is a bright feature among the varied traits of his strangely mingled character. In this respect the noblest of women would have been no more than an help meet for him. And such an one he found in the wife whom he sought with such characteristic pertinacity, and who, in the end, shared his cares and his glories for more than thirty years.

[Sidenote: His counsellors recommend a marriage with Matilda of
Flanders.]

The counsels of the wise men of Normandy both pressed William to marry, and further suggested the expediency of selecting for his bride the daughter of some neighbouring prince.[168] The weighty matter was long and anxiously discussed, but at last either the counsels of his advisers or his own inclination disposed William in favour of the daughter of the reigning Count of Flanders. It may be that, if the English Court had been adorned with a princess, he would have sought, by a marriage with a daughter of Eadward, to strengthen the hopes which he may have already begun to cherish in the direction of Eadward’s Crown. But no such help was to be looked for in the house of his childless cousin; still, as I have already hinted, it is possible that one of the merits in his eyes of the wife whom he did choose was that she sprang by direct, if only by female descent, from the blood of Ælfred.[169] It is possible that other princesses might have been found who had the same amount of connexion with English royalty,[170] but it would have been hard to find one who united a descent of this kind with the great European position which attached to a daughter of Baldwin. The laureate of William taxes his powers to the uttermost to set forth the greatness of the prince who was thought worthy to become the father-in-law [Sidenote: Descent of the Counts of Flanders.] of his hero. No line was so exalted as that of the Count of Flanders, or as, in contempt of the geography of his own time, he wishes rather to call him, the Satrap of the Morini.[171] The lowly origin of Lyderic the Forester[172] was forgotten among the splendours of a house which, by successive intermarriages, could boast of a descent from the Kings of Wessex, Italy, and Burgundy, and from the Imperial stock of the Great Charles.[173] The Flemish Count was in name a vassal of the Roman Emperor; in truth he was the stay and glory of his counsels. Rarely did he condescend to visit the Imperial Court; when he stooped so far, Counts, Marquesses, Dukes, the mighty Primates of the German Church, even Kings themselves, looked on him [Sidenote: Their power and dignity.] with wonder and admiration.[174] Without accepting all this rhetoric, it is certain that, next to a marriage into the house of an anointed King, no connexion could have been found more exalted than that which William sought to form with the prince whom his contemporaries spoke of as the mighty [Sidenote: Importance of their border position.] Marquess.[175] No description could be more apt. It was to their position as Marquesses in the strict sense of the word, as princes holding a border land between France and Germany,[176] as vassals of both Crowns, but no very humble subjects of either, that the Counts of Flanders owed their special greatness among European princes. Their land, with its sea-board and its rivers, was marked out by nature as the land where commerce and civic greatness were to take a firmer hold than in any other land north of the Alps.[177] And its hardy, sharp-witted, and industrious inhabitants, [Sidenote: Character of the people.] near kinsmen of our own Nether-Dutch stock, were no less renowned in warfare than they were in the peaceful arts of commerce and manufacture. And we must not forget that, in those days, the Flemish dominion, and, with it, the Low-Dutch speech, reached far to the south of the narrow frontier which is all that successive French aggressions have left to the modern Kingdom of Belgium. The Marquess of Flanders was a near neighbour of the Duke of the Normans. Between them lay only the small Counties of Ponthieu and Boulogne, the representatives of the old disputed land of Herlwin of Montreuil.[178] On every political ground, no alliance could be more desirable for the young Duke than one which brought him into close and friendly connexion with this mighty house.

[Sidenote: Baldwin the Fifth. 1036–1067.]

Of the reigning Count, Baldwin the Fifth, Baldwin of Lisle or Yssel,[179] Baldwin the _Debonnaire_, we have often heard in other parts of our history. We first heard of him as a rebel against his own father, and as being brought to reason by the potent influence of Duke Robert.[180] We next heard of his constant reception of English and other exiles, and of his wars with the Empire, in which England bore a part against him.[181] In those wars his Norman panegyrist represents him as invariably successful.[182] We have seen how far this description departs from the truth of history; [Sidenote: Baldwin’s second rebellion and reconciliation. 1054–1056.] but in after times, when the might of Rome and Germany was represented by a woman and a child, it is said that Baldwin gained concessions which he was not likely to gain at the hands of Henry the Third.[183] With his other overlord, the Parisian King, he had formed the closest tie of affinity; his wife was Adela, the daughter of King [Sidenote: His Regency in France. 1061.] Robert and sister of the reigning King Henry.[184] In after times, on the death of Henry, Count Baldwin was called on to act as Regent or Protector over the realm of his wife’s young nephew Philip.[185] His marriage with Adela gave him two sons, Baldwin and Robert, both of whom afterwards reigned over Flanders.[186] Judith, who a few [Sidenote: 1051.] years later became the wife of Tostig the son of Godwine, is often spoken of as his daughter, but she was in truth his sister, the child of his father’s old age,[187] and probably in years the contemporary of his own children. But, if the sister of Baldwin shared the viceregal seat of Northumberland, his daughter was fated to yet higher honour within [Sidenote: His daughter Matilda.] our island. Matilda, the child of Baldwin and Adela, in after days to be crowned at Westminster as Lady of the English, was the princess whom the advice of William’s wisest counsellors selected as the fittest bride for their young Duke.

[Sidenote: William seeks her in marriage.]

One might be curious to know how far this choice was at all prompted in the beginning by personal inclination on William’s part. It is certain that Matilda won and retained William’s deepest affection, that he had to struggle hard to obtain her hand, and that he made her a faithful and loving husband throughout their joint lives. But modern researches have shown that there was a mystery about the marriage which no one would have guessed from the fluent narratives of the Norman writers. They enlarge on Matilda’s beauty, on her accomplishments and her virtues.[188] But, just as the Encomiast of Emma keeps out of sight the fact that his heroine was a widow and a mother at the time of her marriage with Cnut,[189] so the panegyrists of William keep out of sight the fact, revealed to us by a comparison of several documents and incidental statements, that [Sidenote: Matilda’s former marriage and children.] Matilda was the mother of a son and a daughter of whom William was not the father.[190] Some of them further conceal, what others have the honesty to allow, that the marriage of the Duke was objected to on canonical grounds, and that an interval of some years took place between the first proposal of marriage and the actual celebration of the rite. The language of William’s laureate would lead us to believe that Count Baldwin brought his daughter across the Norman frontier almost as soon as William’s ambassadors had reached his court with William’s proposal.[191] A more minute examination reveals the fact that the marriage was first [Sidenote: 1049–1053.] thought of before the murder of Beorn, but that the lovers were not joined together by the Church till the year of the death of Godwine.

[Sidenote: Legend of Brihtric.]

The scandal of a later age told the tale how one Brihtric, a Thegn of Gloucestershire, was sent as an ambassador from the King of the English to the court of Bruges, how the daughter of the Count cast an eye of love on the tall stalwart Englishman, how she offered herself to him in marriage, how he refused her advances, and how in later times Matilda, the Lady of the English, found means of ample revenge for the slight which he had offered to Matilda, the Flemish princess. William, we are told, not considering, it would seem, that such hatred might be deemed to savour of love, easily granted his wife’s prayer for the imprisonment of Brihtric and for the transfer of his lands to herself.[192] The tale is evidently mythical, but it preserves the kernel of truth that William was not the [Sidenote: Gerbod, first husband of Matilda.] first love, or indeed the first husband, of Matilda. She had been already married to Gerbod, a man of distinction in Flanders, whose title was taken from his hereditary office as _Advocate_ of the great Abbey of Saint Bertin at [Sidenote: Her children, Gerbod and Gundrada.] Saint Omer. To him she had borne two children, a son who bore his father’s name, and who, in after times, when his step-father filled the English throne, held and resigned the great Earldom of Chester, the special home of the house of Leofric.[193] The other child of Gerbod and Matilda was a daughter, Gundrada by name, who became the wife of William of Warren, and whose tomb and its inscription have long been among the favourite objects of antiquarian research.[194] That tomb was placed in a minster of her own rearing, which has now vanished from the earth, in that great Priory of Saint Pancras at Lewes, whose walls [Sidenote: 1264.] sheltered the King and the enemies of England in the next great struggle for her freedom. For a long while Gundrada was looked on as a daughter of William himself,[195] but there is no doubt that both she and her brother Gerbod were the children of Matilda by her first husband. The question now arises, which I shall discuss elsewhere,[196] whether the elder Gerbod was dead at the time of William’s first courtship, or whether the delays and difficulties which beset the marriage of William and Matilda were not, partly at least, caused by the necessity of procuring a divorce between the Flemish princess and her first husband. The [Sidenote: Matilda probably a widow.] balance of evidence and of probability seems to me to be decidedly in favour of the belief that Matilda was now a widow. But at any rate it is certain, though no one would have guessed it from any of the writers who record the marriage, that the bride of William was already the mother of two children by another man. The whole story forcibly reminds us of the marriage of Cnut and Emma, except that, while Emma was clearly many years older than Cnut, Matilda, married no doubt to Gerbod when very young, must have been about William’s own age.[197] Another point is plain that, even if the marriage was first thought of as a matter of policy, William’s affections were soon firmly fixed upon the woman whose hand he was seeking. No otherwise can we explain the desperate pertinacity with which he pursued his object in defiance of difficulties to which a merely political suitor would soon have yielded.

[Sidenote: Beginning of William’s courtship. 1048–1049.]

The scheme of the marriage must have been first broached soon after the war of Domfront and Alençon. For in the year following that war the marriage met with the most formidable of all obstacles. It was forbidden by an express command of the common Father of Christendom, speaking at the head of an Assembly which had a real claim to command no small share of the reverence of Western [Sidenote: The Council of Rheims. 1049.] Europe. The good Pope Leo had gathered together at Rheims that famous Council of some of whose acts I have had occasion to speak earlier in my history.[198] For one of those moments which come few and far between in the annals of nations and Churches, the two lights of the Christian firmament shone in friendship side by side; the two swords no longer clashed against each other, but were drawn at the same bidding to chastise the same offenders. At the summons of a Pope and an Emperor each alike worthy of his throne, clerks and laymen had assembled from distant lands, among which England had not been slow to send her representatives.[199] The abbatial minster of Saint Remigius had been hallowed by the Pope himself; and a number of Princes and Prelates were next called to account by the assembled Fathers for various breaches of the law, canonical and moral. There, as we have seen, a Norman Bishop, a member of the mightiest house in Normandy, had to defend himself on a charge of sacrilegious destruction of his own cathedral.[200] There a Prelate of the Ducal Burgundy, Hugh of Langres, was deposed from his episcopal office for various acts of cruelty and adultery.[201] But Pope Leo did not shrink from smiting offenders yet more exalted, and among them he struck the most grievous of personal blows at the Duke of the Normans [Sidenote: Enforcement of the ecclesiastical laws of marriage.] himself. One special object of the Council was the stricter enforcement of the Church’s law of marriage, a point on which the princes and great nobles of Gaul would seem just then to have been specially lax. Among the canons of the Council, two are aimed specially at offences of this kind, and the Pope and the assembled Fathers at once proceeded to launch the censures of the Church against offenders of every degree. A whole train of princes were summoned before the Synod, and some of them were actually excommunicated. Among them [Sidenote: Censures pronounced on various French Princes.] were the two princes who held the border lands between Flanders and Normandy, two princes of one of whom we have already heard but too much in our history, and of both of whom we shall hear again. Eustace of Boulogne, the brother-in-law of King Eadward, and Ingelram, seemingly the son of the reigning Count of Ponthieu, were both smitten with excommunication on charges of incest the evidence for which seems to be no longer forthcoming. Theobald of Chartres, the son of Odo the old enemy of Normandy, was also called to account on a charge of putting away his lawful wife without cause.[202] And it was now that an order went forth which touched the [Sidenote: Baldwin forbidden to give his daughter to William.] two mightier neighbours of all these princes. Count Baldwin of Flanders was forbidden to give his daughter in marriage to William the Norman, and he, William, was forbidden to receive her. Such is the only description vouchsafed to the great Duke. The other princes receive their usual titles of honour, but it would almost seem that any such respectful mention was still looked on as not due of right to the grandson of the Tanner.

At the date then of the Council of Rheims, the marriage had not yet been celebrated, though William’s first proposals must have been already made to Baldwin, and must have been favourably listened to by him. The Papal prohibition seemingly stopped the marriage for four years. [Sidenote: Alleged consanguinity of William and Matilda.] The ground of objection was, according to all the evidence which we have on the subject, the usual ground of nearness of kin. Yet it is by no means easy, either to trace up the pedigree of William and Matilda to a common ancestor, or to see any reasonable ground for the prohibition on any of the usual ecclesiastical theories of affinity. But it certainly seems more reasonable to suppose the existence of some unrecorded hindrance of this kind than to believe that William sought the hand of Matilda, and that her father favoured his suit, at a time when she was actually the [Sidenote: The marriage delayed.] wife of another man.[203] At all events, the marriage was delayed, and the moment when it was actually celebrated [Sidenote: Coincidence of its celebration with the captivity of Pope Leo.] coincides so remarkably with one of the most memorable exploits of William’s countrymen in another part of Europe that it is hard to believe that the one event had not some influence on the other. The Normans were now pressing their conquests in the South of Italy, and Pope Leo did [Sidenote: 1053–1054.] not deem it inconsistent with his duty to endeavour to check their progress even by force of arms.[204] His own prowess, tried in earlier warfare, the lofty stature and heavy swords of his German auxiliaries, availed him not.[205] [Sidenote: Leo’s wars with the Normans of Apulia. His defeat and imprisonment.] The Pontiff became a captive in the hands of enemies who knew as well how to make the most of an advantage as if William himself had been their leader. And in truth there was one in their ranks with a head well nigh as cunning to devise, and an arm well nigh as strong to execute, as the head and the arm of William himself. For the Norman host was commanded by the sons of Tancred [Sidenote: Policy of Robert Wiscard.] of Hauteville, and among them, as yet the least renowned among his brethren, stood the man before whom Cæsars as well as Pontiffs were to quail.[206] There stood the founder of the Apulian Duchy, the remote founder of the Sicilian Kingdom, the man who did less only than William himself to make the Norman name famous and terrible throughout the world. The true spirit of Robert Wiscard appears in the demeanour of conquerors who bowed in the lowliest reverence to their holy captive, and who at the same time knew how to win from him what might pass as a lawful investiture [Sidenote: Origin of the Sicilian Kingdom.] of all their conquests. Such were the beginnings of that Norman Kingdom of the South whose fate forms so striking a contrast to that of their northern conquest. Thus arose that Sicilian realm, whose Crown shone the brightest among the Pleiads which decked the brow of the Wonder of the World,[207] and which, in its lowest depth of degradation, we have seen merged in a realm of happier [Sidenote: 1860.] omen at the mere approach of the wonder-worker of our own day.

[Sidenote: The marriage at last celebrated; Baldwin brings his daughter
to Eu. 1053.]

It was while Leo was thus kept in the power of the Normans of the South that William seems to have thought that the hour was at last come when he might venture to trample under foot the prohibition of the Council of Rheims. It may be that the reverential gaolers of the Pope had contrived to wring from him some concession to the prince whom, if they did not look on as their sovereign, they must at least have honoured as the most renowned of all who bore the Norman name. Or it may be that William and Baldwin deemed that, during such a collapse of the Papal authority, any breach of ecclesiastical discipline might safely be dared, in the hope that an absolution after the fact might be won from some successor less austere than the saintly Leo. At all events the marriage was celebrated while Leo was still in durance. Count Baldwin himself led his daughter through Ponthieu to the Norman frontier. She was there met by the bridegroom who had so long and so patiently waited for her. The marriage ceremony was performed, by what daring priest or Prelate we know not, in the church of the ducal town which stood nearest to the Flemish border. At Eu, under the shadow of the old fortress of Rolf, in the minster which had been lately reared by the bounty of Count William and his half-canonized wife,[208] Duke William received the hand of the bride whose possession had been forbidden to him by the judgement of Pope and Council. From the border castle the new Duchess was led in all fitting state [Sidenote: Matilda’s reception at Rouen.] to her husband’s capital. The metropolitan city received the Lady of Normandy with every expression of joy. Any doubts as to the canonical validity of the marriage were likely to give way before the charm of Matilda’s presence, before the mere novelty of seeing the Court of Rouen, after an interval of perhaps thirty years,[209] once more adorned by the grace and dignity of a reigning Duchess.

[Sidenote: Opposition to the marriage within the Duchy.]

But, in an age and country where the religious spirit was so actively at work as it was in Normandy in the days of William, it was not likely that any breach of canonical law, even on the part of the sovereign, should pass unchallenged. Men were found who feared not, perhaps in the spirit of the Baptist, to rebuke the prince who had dared so direct a breach of the orders of so revered an assembly as the Council of Rheims. And the opposition was led by one from whom, according to all the accounts of his character which have been handed down to us, we should not have looked for any special zeal either for ecclesiastical discipline [Sidenote: Censure pronounced by Archbishop Malger.] or for Christian morality. At the head of the Norman Church now stood William’s uncle Malger, a man who, as I have already said,[210] is described to us only in the darkest colours. Yet almost the only act recorded of him is one which, in the life of a saint, would undoubtedly have been set down as one of the most striking proofs of his sanctity. The Primate of Normandy did not shrink from reproving his prince, and that prince the Great William, for the breach of canonical law which he had committed in marrying his kinswoman. He at least threatened, if he did not actually publish, a sentence of excommunication against the princely [Sidenote: His probable motives.] offender.[211] Was his motive in so doing simply disloyalty? Was he, as one account seems to imply, in league with his brother the Count of Arques, to overthrow William’s throne?[212] Or are we to suppose that Malger was really stirred up by a holy zeal to denounce a breach of ecclesiastical law, however exalted the offenders? Such is the equally distinct statement of another of our authorities, less open than those who are hardest upon Malger to the influences [Sidenote: Nature of the charges against Malger.] of flattery or prejudice.[213] After all, if we come to distinguish the crimes alleged against Malger from the declamation which is used about them, they are not crimes of any enormous dye. They are the follies and vices which could hardly fail to be expected from a young prince thrust into a great ecclesiastical office to which he clearly had no real call. He is allowed not to have been deficient in the learning of the time.[214] But he was fonder of hunting than became an Archbishop, a charge which seems a little hard in an age when an extravagant devotion to brutal sports was not deemed inconsistent with the highest saintliness.[215] He kept too splendid a table,[216] and wasted the wealth, and even the ornaments, of his church in reckless largesses.[217] All this is likely enough, and the existence of his son Michael shows that he was no strict observer of ecclesiastical rule on other points.[218] And we can well believe that Duke William, most of whose own faults were of a kind exactly opposite to those of his uncle, was diligent in rebuking one who certainly departed widely from his ideal of a Prelate.[219] But when these intelligible and probable charges are mixed up with vague stories of robbery and other unnamed crimes,[220] we begin to have our doubts. [Sidenote: His lack of the Pallium.] We are told also that successive Pontiffs had refused him the pallium, as being unworthy of his office,[221] so that Rouen was now in much the same case as Canterbury. He also neglected to attend more than one Council at Rome to which he was summoned.[222] All Rouen and all Normandy, we are told, were utterly weary of their Primate and his doings.[223]

[Sidenote: Malger’s opposition probably honest.]

All this may well have been so; yet the excommunication, or threatened excommunication, of the Duke, more especially when we remember that the fact is left out by those who draw the worst picture of Malger, suggests that there may have been another side to the story. The excommunication does not read like the act of one who was utterly dead to the duties and decencies of his office. It reads more like the act of one who, conscious that he had greatly neglected those duties and decencies, was anxious to make amends for past offences by an act of saintly zeal and boldness. It is the sort of act which may well have been meant as the first step [Sidenote: William’s indignation at him.] in an amended career. And there is strong ground for believing that it was this over zealous discharge of ecclesiastical duty, quite as much as any of his ecclesiastical or moral offences, which finally brought down on Malger the wrath of his nephew and sovereign. It would be altogether of a piece with William’s conduct in greater matters still, if his personal indignation, and the complaints and entreaties of Matilda, were mixed up with a real [Sidenote: Malger deposed at Council of Lisieux. 1055.] feeling of the unfitness of Malger for his office.[224] At all events, two years after William’s marriage, long before that marriage was recognized at Rome, Malger was formally deposed from his see by a joint exercise of the ducal and the pontifical authority. Ermenfrid, Bishop of Sitten, a Prelate who seems to have been specially employed to represent the Roman See beyond the Alps, was [Sidenote: 1062, 1070.] now sent into Normandy, as he was in after years twice sent into England. William gathered a Council at Lisieux, in which all the Bishops of Normandy, under the presidency of the Papal Legate, sat in judgement on their erring metropolitan. Malger was unanimously condemned, and the Duke decreed his deposition from his see.[225] He was banished to the Isles of the Côtentin, so [Sidenote: His banishment and death.] familiar to us as the Channel Islands.[226] His life there is said to have still given scandal;[227] if Malger’s ebullition of zeal against William was really the beginning of his own reformation, nothing was more likely to throw him back in the work of amendment than the consequences which his over diligence had brought upon him. One of the charges against him was that of dealing with a familiar spirit,[228] a charge which has been ingeniously explained by the supposition that the learning of Malger took in mathematics and astronomy, and that, as in the ease of Gerbert and many others, the reputation of practising magic was the penalty of knowledge beyond his age.[229] It was his custom to sail about among the islands, and sometimes to visit the mainland of the Côtentin. One day, on entering the vessel, his supernatural power enabled him to prophesy that one of the company would die that day. He knew not however who was the doomed person, nor by what means he would perish. His prediction was fulfilled in himself: he fell overboard and was drowned. His body was afterwards found among the rocks, and he was buried at Cherbourg.[230]

[Sidenote: Malger succeeded by Maurilius.]

A Prelate of a very different stamp from Malger succeeded him on the metropolitan throne of Rouen. William [Sidenote: His life and character.] had now fully learned that the high places of the Church could not be rightly turned into mere provisions for the younger members of sovereign houses. He determined to give the Norman Church a thoroughly worthy chief pastor, and in his choice he overlooked all prejudices of family and even of nation. This willingness to recognize the claims of merit in strangers from every land has been already spoken of as one of the marked features of the Norman national character.[231] The new Primate, Maurilius, was a man of foreign birth, one who had seen much of various parts of the world, and who seems to have made choice of Normandy as his adopted country. His [Sidenote: His birth near Rheims, and studies at Lüttich.] career in many respects reminds us of that of Lanfranc, with this difference, that the earlier years of Lanfranc were spent in a character wholly lay, while Maurilius had first entered the ecclesiastical calling as a secular priest. He was a Frenchman by birth, born of a noble house in the neighbourhood of Rheims.[232] But his higher education was Teutonic. He first studied at home at Rheims, then at Lüttich, and lastly, as the reward of his proficiency in learning, he was raised to the dignity of [Sidenote: He becomes “Scholasticus” at Halberstadt.] “Scholasticus,” Chancellor or Lecturer, in the cathedral church of Halberstadt, one of the richest secular foundations in the Saxon Church.[233] But the zeal of Maurilius soon aspired to a straiter life than that of a secular canon. He [Sidenote: He becomes a monk at Fécamp. 1001–1031.] left his stall at Halberstadt, he betook himself into Normandy, and there became a monk in the Abbey of Fécamp.[234] That great house, the favourite foundation of Richard the Fearless, and one of the objects of the misapplied bounty of our own Eadward, was now flourishing in all the odour of [Sidenote: Secular Canons at Fécamp. 990.] youthful sanctity.[235] The secular canons, who had been its first inmates, had, under the rule of Richard the Good, the patron and father of monks, made way for regulars of [Sidenote: Benedictine Monks. 1001.] the Benedictine order, under the rule of their first Abbot, the renowned and holy William, a native of Italy, and of illustrious birth. He it was who received the Chancellor of [Sidenote: Maurilius leaves Fécamp, and] Halberstadt as one of his spiritual household,[236] till, like Lanfranc,[237] the neophyte sought for a still more complete [Sidenote: becomes a hermit in Italy.] isolation from the world, and, with the leave of his Abbot, Maurilius left Fécamp for some undescribed part of Italy, where he led a hermit’s life, supporting himself by the work of his own hands.[238] His sanctity at last drew on him [Sidenote: He is made Abbot of Saint Mary’s at Florence by the Marquess Boniface. [1027–1052.]] the attention of the famous Boniface, Marquess of Tuscany, the father of the more famous Countess Matilda. This prince constrained him, much against his will, to undertake the government and the reform of the great monastery of Saint Mary in the city of Florence. He laboured there for some years, and brought his monks into some degree of order and good living. But the elder members of the brotherhood, accustomed to the lax government of former Abbots, proved too much for his powers [Sidenote: He returns to Fécamp.] of reformation.[239] He resigned his dignity and returned to Fécamp, where he lived for some years as a private monk, [Sidenote: Abbot John. 1031–1080.] under the new Abbot John. This Prelate was another Italian, high in favour alike with the Duke of the Normans and with the King of the English, who, like so many others of his order, found it to his advantage to cross the [Sidenote: Maurilius Archbishop of Rouen. 1055–1069.] sea and visit the saintly Eadward face to face.[240] Under his rule the ex-Abbot of Florence lived in peace, till he was called by Duke William to the highest place in the Norman Church. He held more than one Council of his Province.[241] He also finished the rebuilding of the metropolitan Church, which had been begun by his predecessor Robert, and had been possibly interrupted during the unthrifty reign of Malger. The church of Maurilius, which has [Sidenote: He completes and consecrates Rouen Cathedral. 1063.] wholly made way for the works of later architects, was consecrated three years before the invasion of England, in the presence of all the Bishops of his Province, and of Duke William himself.[242] He survived this great ceremony six years, and died in the full odour of sanctity, having seen his sovereign and benefactor for three years on the throne of England.

[Sidenote: The marriage of William and Matilda censured by Lanfranc.]

The deposition of Malger, the succession of Maurilius, and the men to whom the career of the new Primate introduces us, serve well to illustrate that great religious movement which was now going on in Normandy,[243] and which was beyond doubt greatly fostered by the wise appointments which William had now learned to make to the great ecclesiastical offices in his gift. But the unlucky Archbishop was not the only churchman who felt that it was dangerous to administer rebuke to one of William’s temper. A greater than Malger or Maurilius also took upon him the function of Micaiah, and, strangely enough, he found, through a temporary disgrace, a path to a higher place in the favour of his [Sidenote: His present favour with William.] prince. Lanfranc, now Prior of Bec, already high in the Duke’s favour and a sharer in his inmost counsels,[244] perhaps took upon him personally to rebuke his sovereign for his uncanonical marriage; at all events he was known to have spoken his mind freely and openly on the subject.[245] [Sidenote: Papal Interdict on Normandy?] The writer whom we have to follow for the share taken by Lanfranc in the affair adds that all Normandy was laid under an interdict by Papal authority as a punishment for the sin of its prince.[246] The contemporary writers so evidently avoid the whole subject that their silence counts for less than it otherwise would; but it would certainly be strange if so memorable an exercise of Papal authority as the interdiction of divine offices throughout the Duchy found no one to record it except the local chronicler of Bec. But, however this may be, we need not doubt that Lanfranc spoke out on the subject in a way which was far from agreeable to the Duke and probably still less agreeable to the Duchess. The darker side of William’s character now stands forth. He was already stark beyond [Sidenote: William’s incapacity to bear personal insult.] measure to the men who withstood his will.[247] With all his great qualities, he could not endure anything which savoured of personal insult, least of all when that insult touched his wife as well as himself. The stern executor of justice, the reformer of the Norman Church, is forgotten for a while in the man who mutilated his prisoners at Alençon,[248] and who, years after, burned Mantes to punish a silly jest of its sovereign. Lanfranc had also enemies at hand, who did not fail to stir up the mind of the Duke against him.[249] The vengeance taken by William was cruel, one might almost add, cowardly. For the fault or virtue of one member he punished the whole society, and, as commonly happened in such cases, the punishment fell more heavily on the dependants of the society than [Sidenote: He orders the banishment of Lanfranc, and burns the “Park” of the Abbey.] on the society itself.[250] William ordered that Lanfranc should at once be dismissed from the monastery and banished from Normandy. But he also ordered the ravaging and burning of part of the possessions of the Abbey.[251] He was obeyed in both orders. Lanfranc set forth from Bec, to seek his fortune once more, and he set forth in a guise almost as lowly as that in which he first appeared in the presence of Herlwin. But his journey [Sidenote: Reconciliation of Lanfranc and the Duke.] was not a long one. By chance or by design, he met William on the way;[252] the visible change in his fortunes, aided by his own ready wit, procured him an audience of the Duke, and in that audience terms of reconciliation were readily agreed on. Lanfranc was again admitted to William’s full favour, confirmed by the kiss of peace.[253] The damage done to the estates of the House of Bec was more than made good.[254] But Lanfranc was required in return to withdraw his opposition to the Duke’s marriage, [Sidenote: Lanfranc becomes the champion of the marriage.] and even to make himself the champion of his cause. A man of scrupulous honour, according to modern ideas of honour, would not have accepted such an office. But modern ideas of honour differ widely from monastic ideas of conscience. There was nothing in the terms agreed to by Lanfranc at which the most tender and the most formal conscience could be offended.[255] Lanfranc had denounced the marriage as sinful, and he was not called on to withdraw that denunciation. He might still look upon the act as sinful, but he pledged himself to do his best to procure that the sin should be forgiven. The marriage was at most a breach of a canonical restriction, and it was not beyond the power of the Apostolic See to heal such a breach even after the fact. Lanfranc then was to go to Rome, and to use all the power of his learning and eloquence to obtain from the Pontiff a dispensation which would make good the marriage which had been irregularly contracted.[256]

[Sidenote: Negotiations with the Roman Court. 1054?-1059.]

If these transactions between William and Lanfranc took place soon after the celebration of the marriage, the negotiations with the Roman Court must have been prolonged indeed. William’s anxiety to keep his wife would seem to have proved as fertile a source for canonical disputations as the anxiety of Henry the Eighth to get rid of his. It is at least certain that the matter was not finally settled till the Pontificate of Nicolas the Second, the Pontiff who yielded so readily to the threats of the English Earl Tostig,[257] and who found it equally expedient to yield to the milder persuasions of the orator of Pavia. [Sidenote: Succession of Popes. [Victor the Second. 1055–1057. Stephen the Ninth. 1057–1058. Benedict the Tenth. 1058–1059. Nicolas the Second. 1059–1061.]] But Nicolas did not ascend the Papal throne till six years after the marriage ceremony at Eu. It is quite possible that stern and resolute Popes like Victor the Second and Stephen the Ninth refused to grant any concession, and it is probable that the scruples of Lanfranc, perhaps those of William himself, would forbid any application to the usurper Benedict.[258] But, in any case, Nicolas granted the required dispensation. Lanfranc visited Rome, both on the Duke’s errand and on his own. The theological dispute with Berengar of Tours[259] was still [Sidenote: Second Lateran Council. April 13, 1059.] going on, and in the second Lateran Council, held under the presidency of Nicolas, the heretic publicly retracted his errors.[260] Lanfranc was again present as the champion [Sidenote: Lanfranc again opposes Berengar;] of orthodoxy,[261] and his performances in this way may well have inclined Pope and Council to listen favourably to his petitions on other subjects. He pleaded the cause of his [Sidenote: and pleads for William and Matilda.] sovereign firmly and effectually, and he seems to have used language nearly as plain-spoken as Tostig did two years later. William, he argued, was determined not to give up his wife;[262] the Pope would therefore do well to yield, for ecclesiastical censures—the interdict is clearly intended—would fall quite as heavily on the innocent as on the guilty.[263] Another argument is also put into Lanfranc’s mouth, that the pride of Count Baldwin would not endure to have his daughter returned on his hands—he might have added with a second brood of children, and those too of doubtful legitimacy. War would certainly break out between Normandy and Flanders, and it was the duty of the common Father of Christendom to hinder, as far [Sidenote: Nicholas grants the dispensation. Lanfranc returns to Normandy. 1059–1060.] as in him lay, the shedding of Christian blood. To these various arguments the mind of Pope Nicolas yielded. Lanfranc at last returned with the wished-for dispensation which at last ratified by the highest ecclesiastical authority the marriage which had been, in ecclesiastical eyes, rashly and irregularly entered into six years before.[264]

[Sidenote: Condition of the dispensation. Foundation of the two Abbeys
at Caen.]