Chapter V: The Wars of Scotland, Northumberland, and Wales.1 (4)

These words of the British annalist mark a most important stage in the occupation of his country. The campaign of this summer completed the conquest of South Wales, so far as a land could be said to be conquered which was always revolting, and where native chiefs still kept, sometimes by their own strength, sometimes by formal acknowledgement, such parts of the land as the invaders could not or did not care to occupy. But it was now that a land was planted with castles which is still pre-eminently the land of castles; it was now that a land was brought under the power of those who bore rule in England which was itself to become a new England beyond the line of the Briton. Ceredigion, the land of Cardigan, the vale of Teifi with its still abiding beavers,[223] the sites of the castles of Aberystwyth and Cilgerran, of the abbey of Strata Florida and the priory of Saint Dogmael, were added to the dominion of the conquerors. Thence they pressed on to the extreme south-western land, and added Dyfed by a new name to the possessions of the English crown. A tale has been told how the Red King himself made his way to the most western point of all, to the headland of Saint David’s; there, from the treeless rocks, he looked over the sea to the land beyond, which may now and then be seen on a cloudless evening. Then he boasted that, lord as he was of Britain, he would be lord of Ireland too, how he would gather round that headland the fleets of his whole kingdom, and would make of them a bridge by which he might pass over and win the great island for himself. The tale goes on to tell how, when the threatening words were brought to King Murtagh,[224] he asked whether the King of the English had added to his threat the words, “If God will?”[225] The Red King had not used the formula which he hated to hear even from the lips of others,[226] and the Irish prince at once answered that he did not fear the coming of one who meant to come only in his own strength, and not in that of the Most High.[227]

[Sidenote: Estimate of the story.]

[Sidenote: Acquisition of Saint David’s.]

[Sidenote: Bishop Wilfrith.]

[Sidenote: Milford Haven.]

[Sidenote: The Pembrokeshire castles.]

The tale is eminently characteristic of William Rufus; yet it sounds somewhat like an echo of the real visit and the real schemes of the great William translated into the boastful language of his son. The Conqueror did visit Saint David’s;[228] he did plan the conquest of Ireland;[229] but it is not likely that he threw the expression of his designs into such a shape as that which William Rufus would have been likely enough to choose. The younger William may have made his way to Saint David’s; but it is not easy to find a time for his coming, either in this year or in any other. But, whether through his coming or not, Saint David’s itself passed under the obedience of the conquerors. We presently find its bishop, a bishop spoken of as a Briton, but bearing the English name of Wilfrith, acting in their full confidence.[230] But the holy place, deep in its hollow, was left to be guarded by its own holiness. No castle of king or earl or sheriff invaded its precincts; the home of its bishop did not, as at Llandaff, take the form of a castle looking down upon the minster, but that of a peaceful palace resting by its side. The conquerors pressed on, through the land of Cemaes and Emlyn and by the hills of Preseleu, till they reached the south-western land, the land of creeks and peninsulas, where the tides of Ocean rise and fall beneath the walls of far inland towns and fortresses. In those waters the wandering wiking had seen the likeness of his own fiords, and he had left his mark here and there on a _holm_, a _gard_, a _thorp_, a _ford_, some of them bearing names which seem to go back to the gods of Scandinavian heathendom.[231] The Norman won the land, to hand it over in the next reign to the Flemish settlers, who rooted out whatever traces of the Cymry Northmen and Normans had left. Two of the chief towns, Pembroke and Tenby, kept their British names in corrupt forms.[232] Milford and Haverford would seem to have been already named by the Northmen. On every tempting point overlooking the inland waters, sometimes on points overlooking the Ocean itself, castles arose, some of which grew into the very stateliest of their own class. Tenby, Haverfordwest――Manorbeer, birthplace of Giraldus[233]――Caerau, connected with so many famous names of later date[234]――and a crowd of castles of lesser note, witness the means by which the conquerors knew how to hold down the land which they had won.

[Sidenote: Pembroke Castle.]

[Sidenote: Pembrokeshire buildings.]

[Sidenote: The castle begun by Arnulf of Montgomery.]

[Sidenote: Second building of Gerald of Windsor. 1105.]

[Sidenote: His wife Nest.]

At the head of all stands the great fortress which gave its name to a town, a shire, and a long line of earls, and in our own time to a great workshop of the naval strength of the land. _Pen bro_, the head of the sealand, grew into Pembroke, with its vast castle rising on a peninsula above two arms of the inland sea――with its stately hall looking down on the waters――with the deep cave underneath its walls, with the huge mass of the round tower――with the one hill-side covered by the houses and churches of the town, the other crowned by the long line of the priory of Monkton, with its stern square tower and its now roofless choir. The character of military strength and simplicity, which is stamped in a lesser measure on the churches and houses of Glamorgan, comes out in all its fulness in the churches and houses of Pembrokeshire. Of all this the days of which we are speaking saw the beginnings, but only the beginnings. On the tongue of land between the two creeks a fortress was raised by Arnulf of Montgomery, son of Roger and Mabel, a man of whom we have already heard and shall hear again. But his defences were as yet small and feeble as compared with what was to follow; the first castle of Pembroke was a mere earthwork with a palisade.[235] Arnulf placed his work under the care of a valiant knight named Gerald of Windsor, who afterwards was the beginner of a castle of greater strength on the same spot.[236] In after times he married a wife of the noblest British blood, yet another Nest, the daughter of Rhys son of Tewdwr, and grandchild through her mother of that Rhiwallon who had received a kingdom at the hands of Harold.[237] Before her marriage she was the mother of one of the sons of King Henry, though assuredly not of the great Earl of Gloucester.[238] In later days, through another marriage, she became the grandmother of Giraldus Cambrensis.

[Sidenote: Hugh of Chester in Anglesey.]

[Sidenote: Castle of Aberlleiniog.]

[Sidenote: Advance of Earl Roger in Powys.]

[Sidenote: Castle of Rhyd-y-gors.]

The course of events in North Wales during these years is less easy to mark with exact dates. But it is plain that the death of Robert of Rhuddlan had been only a momentary triumph for the Cymry, and that it had not given any real check to the Norman power. Earl Hugh of Chester, strong on the border of the continental Britons, still held a hand no less firm on their island kinsfolk. He even pressed on into Anglesey, and there built a castle, most likely at Aberlleiniog on the eastern coast of the island, a spot of which we shall have to speak again more fully in recording a memorable day later in our story. Earl Roger meanwhile, from his capital at Shrewsbury and his strong outpost at his new British Montgomery,[239] pushed on his dominion into Powys. The King at least approved, if he did not at this stage help in the work; the castle of Rhyd-y-gors was built at the royal order by William son of Baldwin.[240]

[Sidenote: Seeming conquest of Wales.]

[Sidenote: Gower and Caermarthen unsubdued.]

[Sidenote: 1093-1094.]

[Sidenote: Effects of William’s absence.]

[Sidenote: Revolt of the Welsh. 1094.]

The conquest of Wales was thus, to all appearance, nearly complete. The two great earls were going on with their old work in the north, while in the south the tide of conquest was advancing with such speed as it had never advanced before. In the south-east Gwent and Morganwg seemed to be firmly held, while in the south-west the torrent of Norman invasion had rushed by a single burst from the hill of Brecknock to the furthest coast of Dyfed. In the south at least the only independent region left was that which lies between the conquest of Robert Fitz-hamon and the conquest of Arnulf of Montgomery. Gower, with its caves, its sands, its long ridge, where the name of Arthur has made spoil of a monument of unrecorded times――with its Worm’s Head looking out in defiance at the conquered land beyond the bay――the whole range too of coast with its sandy estuaries, from the mouth by Llwchr to the mouth by Laugharne――Kidwelly also, not yet crowned by the gem of South-Welsh castles――Caermarthen and the whole vale of Towy――were still unsubdued. Otherwise the Britons might truly say with their chronicler that on the death of Rhys their kingdom passed away from them. So things slept while Anselm received his archbishopric, while Malcolm pressed on to die at Alnwick, while King William was kept by the winds at Hastings. But when the king was beyond the sea, when he and the great men of England were busy with Norman affairs――when Argentan bowed to Robert and Philip and when the brother of the conqueror of Pembroke was a prisoner[241]――when the great Earl, the father of both of them, had died with the cowl on his head at Shrewsbury――then the Britons deemed that the hour of deliverance was come. The English Chronicler, though he does not at this stage help us to the names of British men or of British places, paints the general picture in his strongest colours; “The Welshmen gathered themselves together, and on the French that were in Wales or the nighest parts and had ere taken away their lands, they upheaved war, and castles they broke and men they offslew, and as their host waxed, they _todealed_ themselves into more. With some of those _deals_ fought Hugh Earl of Shropshire and put them to flight. And none the less the others all this year never left off from none evil that they might do.”[242]

[Sidenote: Cadwgan son of Bleddyn.]

[Sidenote: Divisions of the Welsh.]

[Sidenote: General revolt of Wales.]

[Sidenote: Invasion of England.]

[Sidenote: Deliverance of Anglesey.]

[Sidenote: Aberlleiniog castle broken down.]

In this version the Norman or English champion stands clearly forth. We see that Earl Hugh had sharp work upon his hands from the moment that he stepped into his father’s earldom. The British writers give us a clearer sight of the geographical extent of the movement, and they help us to the name of its chief leader. This was Cadwgan son of Bleddyn, whom we last heard of as harrying Dyfed, and who even now seems at least as anxious to make Dyfed a land subject to Gwynedd as to drive Normans, English, or Flemings, out of either. Thus the Britons were, as ever, in the words of the Chronicler, _todealed_; they were divided into local and dynastic parties. Yet, as he puts it, even this division, if it did not give strength, at least delayed subjection. If Earl Hugh or any other leader of a regular force was able to overthrow one _deal_, another _deal_ was ready all the same to do as much evil as before. But it was in Gwynedd and under Cadwgan that the work began. The Britons could not bear the yoke of the French; they rose, they broke down the castles, and, as men commonly do in such cases, they did by the invaders as the invaders had done by them. It is not very wonderful if, in their hour of victory, they revenged the reavings and slaughters done on them by the French with new reavings and slaughters done on the French themselves.[243] And, as our Chronicler hints, it was not only on the French within Wales, but on those also in the nighest parts that they rose. By this time the whole land had risen; South-Welsh and West-Welsh――that is now no longer the men of the peninsula of Cornwall, but the men of the peninsula of Dyfed――were in arms no less than the men of Gwynedd. Gruffydd and Cadwgan burst into the neighbouring shires, Cheshire, Shropshire, and Herefordshire; they burned towns, carried off plunder, and slew Frenchmen and Englishmen alike.[244] The Saxon, the old enemy, had not become less an enemy, because he had, through his own conquest, become an accomplice in the invasions of his conquerors. Gwynedd was now free; the deliverers crossed into Anglesey; they broke down the castle at Aberlleiniog or elsewhere, and put an end for a while to the foreign dominion in the island.[245]

[Sidenote: Action of Cadwgan in Dyfed.]

[Sidenote: Pembroke holds out.]

The Britons now seemed to have altogether undone the work of the invaders. It was now time for vigorous action on the other side. The French――Hugh of Chester, Hugh of Shrewsbury, or any other――entered Gwynedd with a regular force; but if one _deal_ was put to flight, another, under Cadwgan himself, claims to have overcome the invaders at Yspwys.[246] The path was now open for a march of the Britons to the south. Late in the year a general attack was made on all the castles throughout Ceredigion and Dyfed. Two only held out; Gerald of Windsor successfully defended Pembroke; William the son of Baldwin successfully defended Rhyd-y-gors.[247] But the warfare of Cadwgan was waged in the interest of Gwynedd, not in that of Dyfed. By a harsh, though possibly prudent policy, he enforced a migration somewhat in the style of an Eastern despot. The men and the cattle of Ceredigion and Dyfed――we must take so general a statement with those deductions which the laws of possibility imply――were transported to the safer region, and south-western Wales was made, so far as Cadwgan could make it, a wilderness.[248] Gerald, in his castle among the creeks, was left to lord it over whom he might find, and to feed himself and his followers how he might, in the wasted land. As far as we can see, Gwent, Morganwg, and Brecheiniog, remained in the hands of the conquerors. The rest of the British land, from the isthmus of Gower to the furthest point of Mona, was either free or a wilderness.

[Sidenote: Question of a winter campaign.]

[Sidenote: December 28,1094-January, 1095.]

[Sidenote: Conquest of Kidwelly, Gower, and Caermarthen.]

[Sidenote: 1099.]

[Sidenote: Swansea Castle.]

[Sidenote: The castles of Gower.]

[Sidenote: Alleged West-Saxon settlement of Gower.]

It is almost past belief that William Rufus could have found time for a winter campaign against the Welsh in the few weeks, or rather days, which passed between his return from Normandy at the end of December and his interview with Anselm at Gillingham in the middle of January.[249] But there was plenty of fighting in the course of the year in Wales and elsewhere. The Britons seem to have kept their independence in the newly liberated districts, while the Norman conquerors of Glamorgan made a successful attack on the intermediate lands which had not yet been subdued. “The French laid waste Gower, Kidwelly, and the vale of Towy;” and we are further told that those lands, as well as Dyfed and Ceredigion, remained waste.[250] But if Normans laid waste, they did not simply lay waste, like the Welsh. What they found it expedient to lay waste for a season they meant to put in order some day for their own advantage. This was no doubt the time when William of London established himself at Kidwelly, and made the first beginnings of castle, church, borough, and haven.[251] It was now too that the way was at least opened for the work of colonization which made Gower a Teutonic land. According to an authority to which we turn with a certain doubt, the actual settlement dates from five years later. Castles were built, Abertawy or Swansea guarding its own bay and the approach to the peninsula, Aberllwchr guarding the sandy estuary between the peninsula and the opposite coast to the north, Oystermouth, Penrice, Llanrhidian, on points within the peninsula itself.[252] And in this version the settlement is made, not by Flemings, according to the common tradition, but by West-Saxons brought across the channel from Somerset.[253] It is certain, as has been already said, that there is not the same historical evidence for Flemings in Gower which there is for Flemings in Pembrokeshire. But it is perhaps less important to fix the exact origin of each Teutonic settlement along this coast than to insist on the fact that, as compared with the native Cymry, any two branches of the Nether-Dutch stock, whether Flemish or Saxon, came to very much the same thing.

[Sidenote: Pagan of Turberville joins the Welsh.]

Along with this territorial advance on the part of the invaders, we hear, from the same somewhat doubtful quarter, of a movement among the invaders themselves which turned to the advantage of the natives. It is characteristic of the outwardly legal nature of the Norman Conquest of England that it gave no opportunity for a character not very rare in less regular invasions, the invading chief who finds it to his interest to separate himself from his own fellows and to place himself at the head of those whom he has helped to subdue. In the conquests both of Wales and of Ireland there was room for such a part to be played, and the story sets before us one of the Norman conquerors of Glamorgan as playing it with some effect. The lord of Coyty, Pagan of Turberville, married to a wife of the house of Jestin, took the side of his wife’s countrymen, and, we are told, went so far as to attack Cardiff on their behalf. The result, it is said, was a confirmation of the ancient laws of Wales on the part of the lord of Glamorgan. This, it is added, led many to transfer their dwellings from the disturbed parts of the country to the more settled lands under his rule.[254]

[Sidenote: North Wales keeps its independence.]

[Sidenote: Autumn, 1095.]

[Sidenote: The Welsh take Montgomery.]

[Sidenote: William’s invasion of Wales. Michaelmas, 1095.]

[Sidenote: He reaches Snowdon. November 1.]

[Sidenote: Ill-success of the campaign.]

Meanwhile in the northern parts of Wales the Britons still kept the independence that they had won by the struggle of the last year. They had got the better of the local powers on their own borders, and the King, busied with the peaceful opposition of Anselm and the armed opposition of Robert of Mowbray, had little time to spare from councils and sieges within his kingdom. At last, towards autumn, while the siege of Bamburgh was going on, after he had himself turned away from it, and left the _Evil Neighbour_ to do its work, William heard a piece of news from the British border which at once stirred him to action. One of the great fortresses of the march had fallen. In vain had Earl Roger made his nest on the rock to which he gave the name of his own Norman home.[255] Montgomery, _Tre_ _Baldwin_, was in the hands of the Britons, and all Earl Hugh’s men within it were slain.[256] William was wroth at the tidings, and he at once called out the _fyrd_ of his realm, so much of it as was not needed for the lingering leaguer-work in Northumberland.[257] Soon after Michaelmas he entered Wales at the head of his host. He divided it into parties, and caused them to go thoroughly through the land. At last, by the feast of All-hallows, the whole army met together by Snowdon. If merely marching through a country could subdue it, William Rufus had now done a good deal towards the conquest of Gwynedd. But William Rufus was not Harold; the master of continental chivalry could not bring himself to copy Harold’s homely tactics. While the royal army scoured the dales, the Welsh betook them to the moors and mountains where no man might come at them.[258] Harold had found out the way to come at them; but the Red King knew it not. All that he could do was to go homeward, when he saw that he there in the winter might do no more.[259] The British annalists, with good right, rejoice as they tell how God their people sheltered in the strong places of their land, and how the King and his host went away empty, having taken nothing.[260]

[Sidenote: 1096.]

[Sidenote: The Welsh gain Rhyd-y-gors. 1096.]

[Sidenote: Revolt of Gwent and Brecknock.]

[Sidenote: English feeling towards the war.]

[Sidenote: Vain attempt to recover Gwent.]

The next year saw the bloody Gemót at Salisbury; it saw Europe pour forth its forces for the deliverance of Eastern Christendom; it saw the Red King become master of the Norman duchy. Among such cares, William had no time, perhaps he felt no strong call, for another Welsh campaign, either in winter or summer. But the lords of the marches could not be thus idle; with them the only choice was to invade or to be invaded. The year seems to have begun with another gain on the part of the Britons. William son of Baldwin, who had kept the castle of Rhyd-y-gors safe through all perils up to this time, now died. His spirit did not abide in his garrison; they left the castle empty, a prey to the enemy.[261] The spirit of the Britons, even in the lands which seemed most thoroughly subdued, now rose. Within the bounds of the present Glamorgan the favourable composition of the last year seems to have kept men quiet; but the lands to the east, parts of which had been so long under English rule, were now encouraged to strike another blow for independence. The natives were in arms along the whole line of the Usk; Brecheiniog, Gwent, and Gwenllwg, the land between Usk and Wye and the land between Usk and Rhymny, threw off, as their own writers say, the yoke of the French.[262] The marchers had now to act in earnest. Our own Chronicler says mournfully how “the head men that this land held ofttimes sent the _fyrd_ into Wales, and many men with that sorely harassed, and man there sped not, but man-marring and fee-spilling.”[263] We see that the old duty of every man to fight for the land when called on had come to awaken some of the feelings which attach to a conscription. Men were, we may believe, ready for a campaign in Normandy or Maine, where plunder was to be had, and where there was most likely still some satisfaction felt in fighting against French-speaking enemies, even under French-speaking captains. To drive back Malcolm would come home to every man’s heart as a national duty; to dispose of Malcolm’s crown under the leadership of an English Ætheling might call up long-forgotten feelings of national pride. But who could be tempted by the prospect of a march to Snowdon, even in the fairest weather? What interest had the men of perhaps far-off English shires in rivetting the dominion of a Norman lord on the men of Brecknock or Pembroke? No doubt every Englishman was ready to drive back the Briton from Shropshire and Herefordshire; but it was an irksome and bootless work to go and attack him in his own land, a land from which even conquerors could draw so little gain. Even to win back Gwent, the conquest of Harold, was an enterprise which would lead mainly to man-marring and fee-spilling. Into Gwent however they were marched; but nothing was done; the land was not subdued; the army was even attacked on its retreat, and after great slaughter put to flight.[264] A second greater attempt came to nothing more. The grandsons of Cadwgan, Gruffydd and Ivor, attacked this army too on its return, and cut it also off at Aberllech.[265]

[Sidenote: Effects of the castle-building.]

[Sidenote: Pembroke castle holds out.]

[Sidenote: The Welsh attack Pembroke. 1096.]

[Sidenote: Resistance of Gerald of Windsor.]

[Sidenote: His devices.]

[Sidenote: His dealings with Bishop Wilfrith.]

[Sidenote: Offensive action of Gerald.]

[Sidenote: 1097.]

The British chronicler here makes a comment which fully explains the final issue of these wars. The Normans or English, whichever we are to call the hosts of England under the Red King, had thus for three years met with nothing but defeat. Yet they had in truth won the land. “The folk stayed in their homes, trusting fearlessly, though the castles were yet whole, and the castlemen in them.”[266] The fortresses might be hemmed in for a moment; but, as long as they stood whole with the castlemen in them, the newly won freedom of the open country was liable to be upset at any moment. In Gwent and Brecheiniog at least the natives might for the moment stay fearlessly in their homes; they might at some favourable point surprise and cut to pieces the armies that were sent against them; they might withdraw to moors and mountains when the invading force was too strong for them; but, as long as the castles stood firm, the real grasp of the stranger on the land was not loosened. How long a castle could stand out we see by the example of this very year’s campaign. All the castles of Dyfed and Ceredigion had been destroyed two years before, save Pembroke and Rhyd-y-gors; and Rhyd-y-gors was now in the hands of the Britons. Pembroke, the castle of earth and wood, the outpost cut off from all help, still stood through the whole of these two years, the one representative of Norman dominion in the whole region of which it had become the head. No wonder that the Britons, victorious everywhere else, resolved on one great attack on this still unconquered stronghold of the enemy. A host led by several chieftains of the house of Cadwgan, Uhtred son of Edwin,――one whom we should rather have looked for in Northumberland,――and Howel son of Goronwy, set forth and fought against Pembroke. Gerald of Windsor was hard pressed. One night, fifteen of his knights, despairing of resistance, made their escape from the castle in a boat. Their esquires were more faithful, and Gerald at once gave them the arms of knighthood, and also granted――or professed to grant to them――the fiefs of their recreant lords.[267] We read too how Gerald, to hide his real plight from the enemy, betook himself to some of those simple devices of which we hear in so many times and places. He had four swine in the castle; he cut them in pieces, and threw them over to the besiegers.[268] The next day he wrote or caused letters to be written sealed with his seal, saying that there was no need to trouble Earl Arnulf――he is made to bear the title――for any help for four months to come. These letters he took care should be found near a neighbouring house of Bishop Wilfrith of Saint David’s, as if they had been lost by their bearer.[269] They were read out in the Welsh army. The Britons, we are told, having no mind for a four months’ siege, marched away.[270] They claim to have marched away without loss, with much booty, especially with all the cattle belonging to the castle.[271] But the castle was not taken; it stood there to do its work; and early in the next year Gerald was harrying in his turn as far as the borders of Saint David’s.[272] Friendship for the Bishop perhaps kept him from harrying the holy soil of Dewisland itself.

[Sidenote: Easter, 1097.]

[Sidenote: William’s second Welsh campaign.]

[Sidenote: Seeming conquest.]

[Sidenote: Fresh revolt.]

[Sidenote: Cadwgan.]

[Sidenote: William’s third campaign. June-August, 1097.]

[Sidenote: The King’s ill-success.]

[Sidenote: He determines to build castles. October, 1097.]

This year, the King, as he had done two years before, deemed the affairs of Wales to call for his own presence, and for a greater effort on his part than ever. He had come back from taking possession of the mortgaged land of Normandy; he had held the Easter Assembly at Windsor somewhat after the regular time.[273] At that Assembly Welsh affairs must have formed a subject of discussion, as the King presently set out for Wales with a great host. This was the time when the knights sent by the Archbishop were deemed so unfit for their duty.[274] The King’s coming appears to have led to a seeming, perhaps a pretended, submission. Led by native guides, he passed through the whole country,[275] and he clearly believed that he had brought Wales to a state of peace. So he deemed when he came back to hold the Whitsun Assembly, the assembly in which Anselm for the first time that year craved leave to go to the Pope.[276] But he was called back by a fresh revolt. The Welsh, in the emphatic phrase of our Chronicler, “bowed _from_ the King.”[277] They had once bowed _to_ him; now they bowed _from_ him; they cast away his authority; perhaps they formally _defied_ him in the strict feudal sense; certainly they defied him in the more general sense which that word has now come to bear. And now, for the first time in these wars, the English Chronicler gives us the name of a Welsh leader, a name which from British sources has long been familiar to us. “They chose them many elders of themselves; one of them was Cadwgan hight, that of them the worthiest was; he was brother’s son of Gruffydd the King.”[278] The name of the great prince who had ruled all Wales, who had won the battle by the Severn,[279] who had put Earl Ralph to flight[280] and burned Hereford town and minster,[281] the prince whom it needed all the strength and all the arts of Harold to overthrow, was still famous even among Englishmen. The nephew of Gruffydd had this time too to dread no such tactics as had worn down his uncle on his own soil. King William set forth with a host of horse as well as of foot, vowing to put to death every male of the rebel nation.[282] Again the pomp and pride of Norman chivalry was shivered against the natural defences of the land which was so rashly attacked. The Britons seem, by their own account, to have made the war a religious one; perhaps, like the Irish king, they deemed that higher powers would fight for them against the blasphemer. Strengthened by prayers, fastings, and other pious exercises, the Welsh took to their woods and rocks and mountains, while the Red King’s host marched and rode bootlessly through the valleys and plains.[283] “Mickle he lost in men and in horses, and eke in many other things.”[284] This state of things went on from midsummer to August.[285] Then the King came back to hold two assemblies at unusual times, in the second of which he and Anselm met for the last time.[286] And now it was that he took that wise resolution which I have quoted above.[287] As invasions by mounted knights led to nothing but losing both the knights and their horses, he would build castles on the borders. This Harold, who knew so much better than William Rufus how to carry on a Welsh campaign, had not done. But then the objects of Harold and the objects of William Rufus were not the same.

[Sidenote: Action of Robert of Bellême. 1098-1102.]

We should have been well pleased to know what was the immediate result of the resolve for the building of the border-castles. What were the fortresses which were built, as surely some must have been built, in obedience to it? This is the last entry which connects Rufus personally with Welsh affairs. But we can hardly help connecting this resolve with the building, a little time later, of several fortresses in the lands threatened by the Welsh, specially of one, the greatest of them all. In the next year one part of the British land becomes the scene of a series of events of far-reaching interest and importance, but also of a local interest quite as great in its own way. We shall then see that, if the Red King did not do much in the way of building border-castles himself, much was done by others, of course with his approval, most likely by his order. Our next year’s tale brings Robert of Bellême to the Welsh border, and, where he was lord, castle-building went on with all vigour.

[Sidenote: Affairs of Scotland.]

But before we enter on a branch of our story which touches all parts of the British islands, and many lands beyond the British islands, it may be well to take up the thread of our Scottish narrative at a point where the affairs of Scotland and those of Wales seem again to be brought into some measure of connexion. The year which saw that wise resolution of the Red King with regard to the Welsh castles, a resolution which really meant the final union of Wales with the English realm, saw also the end of those revolutions whose final result was, not the union of Scotland with the English realm――that was not to come about till long after, and by other means――but the extension of English influence within the kingdom of Scotland till it might be looked on as in truth a second English realm.

§ 4. _The Establishment of Eadgar in Scotland._

1097-1098.

[Sidenote: Decree for action in Scotland. August, 1097.]

[Sidenote: Designs of the Ætheling Eadgar.]

It must have been at one of the later assemblies of the year which we have now reached, most likely at the August gathering,[288] that the resolution was taken for vigorous action in Scotland. The King himself had had enough of Welsh warfare; he must have been already looking forward to those French and Cenomannian campaigns which form the main feature of the next year; he was in the middle of his final dispute with Anselm. But William Rufus seems always to have been well pleased to set others in motion, even on enterprises in which he did not share himself. So he gladly hearkened to the proposals of the Ætheling Eadgar for an expedition into Scotland. Its object was to overthrow the usurper Donald, as the chosen of Dunfermline was deemed at Winchester, to restore the line of Malcolm and Margaret, and to bring the Scottish kingdom once more into its due obedience to the over-lord in England.

[Sidenote: Relations between Eadgar and the King.]

[Sidenote: Story of Godwine and Ordgar.]

Our last certain notice of Eadgar sets him before us as enjoying the fullest confidence on the part of the reigning King, as sent by him on the important errand of negotiating with Malcolm and bringing him to William’s court at Gloucester.[289] One hardly knows what to make of the tale which describes him as awakening a certain amount of suspicion in the King’s mind later in the same year;[290] but that, either before or after this time, he was in some such danger appears from another tale in the details of which there may or may not be a legendary element, but which undoubtedly brings before us real persons and a real state of things. To this tale I have already referred elsewhere, as having that kind of interest which belongs to every story in which we see any one of those who are recorded in the Great Survey as mere names stand forth as a living man, playing his part in the world of living men. However obscure the man, however small his deeds, there is always an interest in finding any part of the dry bones of Domesday clothed with flesh and blood. And the interest becomes higher when the man thus called forth out of darkness is a man of native English birth, and the father of one whom England may well be glad to reckon among her worthies.[291]

[Sidenote: Eadgar accused by Ordgar.]

[Sidenote: The ordeal and the battle.]

[Sidenote: Godwine volunteers to fight for Eadgar.]

[Sidenote: Notices of him in Domesday.]

[Sidenote: Duel of Godwine and Ordgar.]

[Sidenote: Victory of Godwine, and acquittal of Eadgar.]

The story runs then that a knight of English birth, Ordgar by name, seeking favour with the King, brought a charge against the English Ætheling. He told William that Eadgar, trusting to his own descent from ancient kings, was seeking to deprive the reigning king of his crown. William hearkened to the accuser, and some grievous doom――would it have been the doom of William of Eu?――was in store for Eadgar, if his guilt――his ambition or patriotism――could be proved. But how was the charge to be proved or disproved? By Old-English law the appeal to the judgement of God in doubtful cases was by the ordeal; and, as between Englishman and Englishman, this rule had not been changed by the laws of the Conqueror.[292] But we can well believe that Englishmen who were admitted to a place in the Red King’s court had largely put on the ideas and feelings of Normans. They would doubtless look down on the ancient practice of their fathers, and they would be more inclined to follow the fashion of their Norman companions in better liking the more chivalrous test of the wager of battle. It seems in the present story to be taken for granted that the trial will be by wager of battle. But who will do battle for Eadgar, when the royal favour is so clearly shown on behalf of Eadgar’s accuser? The Ætheling was sad at heart, forsaken, as it seemed, of all men. But at last one stepped forward who was ready to dare the risk on behalf of a man to whom he was bound by a double tie. As an Englishman he was stirred to come to the help of the descendant of the ancient kings, and he was further bound to Eadgar by the special tie which binds a man to his lord. He was a knight of noble English descent, known as Godwine of Winchester. We know him in Domesday as a tenant of the Ætheling for lands in Hertfordshire, and the Survey further suggests that he may have had a private grudge against the opposite champion. There were lands in Oxfordshire which were held by an Ordgar, and which had been held by a Godwine. The matter is to be decided by the hand-to-hand fight of the two English knights. For they so far cleave to the customs of their fathers that they fight on foot and deal handstrokes with their swords. Ordgar comes forth in splendid armour, surrounded by a crowd of courtiers.[293] Godwine has nothing to trust to but his sword and his good cause. But there was at least no attempt made to hinder a fair fight――so to do would have been altogether foreign to the spirit of the chivalrous king. The herald and the umpire do their duty;[294] the knights take their oath to forbear the use of all weapons but those which were needed in the knightly duel. A long and hard fight follows, the ups and downs of which are described with Homeric minuteness. Ordgar at last, sorely wounded, is pressed to the ground, with the foot of the victorious Godwine upon him.[295] As a last resource, he strives, but in vain, to stab Godwine with a knife which, in breach of his oath, he had treacherously hidden in his boot.[296] Godwine snatches the knife from him; Ordgar confesses the falsehood of his charge, and presently dies of his wounds.[297] Godwine now becomes an object of universal honour, and receives from the King the lands of the slain Ordgar, while Eadgar rises higher than ever in the King’s favour.

[Sidenote: Estimate of the story.]

[Sidenote: Its general truth.]

[Sidenote: Englishmen under Rufus.]

[Sidenote: Robert son of Godwine.]

I see no reason to doubt the main outline of this story, which rests on the evidence of undesigned coincidences. Men of no special renown, about whom there was no temptation to invent fables, are made to act in a way which exactly agrees with what we know from the surest of witnesses to have been their real position. Without pledging ourselves to the details of the combat, which have a slightly legendary sound, we may surely believe that we have here the record of a real wager of battle, like those which happened at no great distance of time in the cases of William of Eu and Arnulf of Hesdin. We may surely believe that Eadgar was wrongfully accused, and that Godwine cleared his lord in the duel. We see then that in the Red King’s day there was nothing to hinder men of Old-English birth, exceptionally lucky men doubtless, from holding an honourable rank and a high place in royal favour. But we learn also, as we might expect to find, that such Englishmen found that it suited their purposes to adopt Norman fashions. Of Godwine we hear no more; but his son, as I have noticed elsewhere, bears, according to a very common rule, the Norman name of Robert.[298] Had we chanced to hear of him without hearing the name of his father, we might not have known that the hero and martyr was a man of our own blood.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The Eadgars march to Scotland. September, 1097.]

[Sidenote: The comet.]

We now follow the Ætheling to a warfare in which Robert the son of Godwine is his companion. Eadgar set out about Michaelmas to place his nephew and namesake on the Scottish throne. He had a bright comet and a shower of falling stars to light him on his way.[299] But Donald was hardly of importance enough for the heavenly powers to foretell his fall; the shining and departure of the comet was rather understood to mark the approaching day when Anselm, the light of England, turned away from our land and left darkness behind him.[300] The force of the Ætheling seems to have been of much the same kind as the force which Duncan had led on the same errand three years before. He went with the King’s approval and support, but certainly without the King’s personal help, perhaps without any part of the royal army.[301] That army, as we have lately seen, was just then coming together for another errand.[302]

[Sidenote: Vision of the younger Eadgar.]

[Sidenote: Exploits of Robert son of Godwine.]

[Sidenote: Defeat and blinding of Donald.]

[Sidenote: Fate of Eadmund;]

[Sidenote: he becomes a monk at Montacute.]

The host then marched northward. On the way, we are told, the younger Eadgar was honoured by a vision of Saint Cuthberht, who bade him take his banner from the abbey at Durham――the abbey now without a bishop――and he should have victory in the battle.[303] The banner was borne before the army; the fight in which it was unfurled was long and hard; but the valour of the men who fought under its folds was not to be withstood. Without binding ourselves to details which may well be legendary, we may believe that Robert son of Godwine was foremost in the fight, and that the victory in which Donald was the second time overthrown was largely owing to his personal prowess.[304] Little mercy was shown to the vanquished; Donald spent the rest of his days blinded and a prisoner;[305] his confederate Eadmund lived to become somewhat of a saint. He put on the garb of Clugny in the priory of Montacute, at the foot of that hill of Saint Michael where the castle of Robert of Mortain now covered the spot which had beheld the finding of England’s Holy Cross.[306] But as that house did not arise till some years later, at the bidding of Count William the son of Robert,[307] we may gather that Eadmund spent the intermediate time in some harsher captivity. When he died, he was buried, at his own request, in chains, as a sign of penitence for his share in his half-brother’s death.[308]

[Sidenote: Eadgar King of Scots.]

[Sidenote: Character of the year 1098.]

[Sidenote: Eadgar’s gifts to Durham and to Robert son of Godwine.]

[Sidenote: Action of Eadgar, Robert, and Randolf Flambard; after 1099.]

The younger Eadgar now reigned over Scotland as the sworn liegeman of King William of England.[309] The elder Eadgar went back to England, to end there a year of heavy time, a year of evil weather, a year in which men could neither till the earth nor gather in its tilth, and when the folk was utterly bowed down by unrighteous gelds.[310] His valiant comrade abode for a while in the dominions of the Scottish King. Eadgar was grateful to all who had helped him in heaven or in earth. The battle had been won by Saint Cuthberht and Robert son of Godwine. Saint Cuthberht, in the person of the monks of his abbey, received the lands of Coldingham, the seat in ancient times of a house of nuns famous in the days of Danish warfare.[311] A little later――for it was when Durham had again a bishop――he received, in the person of his own successor, the greater gift of the town of Berwick.[312] Robert, by the leave of his own sovereign, received a fief in the same land of Lothian, and began the building of a castle. But, while King Eadgar went to do service to his over-lord in England, the bishop――it was already Randolf Flambard――and the barons of the bishopric, whom Robert’s fortress seems in some way to have offended, attacked it and made its lord a prisoner.[313] King Eadgar came back with letters from his over-lord, ordering the release of their common subject. The Bishop and his barons obeyed; but the King of Scots withdrew his gift of Berwick from the bishopric, as a punishment for the wrong done to the man to whom he owed his crown.[314]

[Sidenote: Eadgar and Robert go to the Crusade.]

[Sidenote: 1099.]

[Sidenote: Robert in Palestine.]

[Sidenote: 1103.]

[Sidenote: His exploits and death.]

[Sidenote: Modern parallels and contrasts.]

[Sidenote: Robert of Saint Alban’s.]

Robert the son of Godwine was presently called to a nobler work. His lord the Ætheling went to the Holy War. Eadgar was not one of those who marched first of all with the two Roberts of Normandy and Flanders. He was one of that second party who set forth about the time of the siege of Antioch, and joined the Norman Duke in his ignoble retreat at Laodikeia.[315] Robert the son of Godwine, if he stayed in Britain long enough to have any dealings with Flambard in his character of Bishop of Durham, must have set out later still. He could have had no share in the leaguer of Nikaia or of Antioch; most likely he had no share in the rescue of the Holy City. He could hardly have reached Syria till Jerusalem was again a Christian kingdom under its second king. Godfrey, the mirror of Christian knighthood, was gone. His successor was his less worthy brother Baldwin, he who had told the dream of his calling to Dame Isabel in the hall of Conches.[316] But there was still work to be done; the land which had been won had to be defended. King Baldwin was besieged in Rama by the misbelievers.[317] The King, attended by five knights only, made a sally to cut his way through the besiegers. The valiant Englishman rode in front of him, cutting down the infidels on each side with his sword. As Robert pressed too fiercely on, his sword fell from his hand; he stooped to grasp it again; he was overpowered by numbers, and was carried off a prisoner.[318] He was led to the Egyptian Babylon; he was offered his choice of death or apostasy; he clave to his faith; placed as a mark in the market-place, like the East-Anglian Eadmund, he died beneath the arrows of his merciless captors.[319] Such men could England, even in her darkest day, send forth for the relief and defence of Christendom in the Eastern world. Such men she could send forth even in the days of our fathers, to draw the sword for right in the haven of Pylos or beneath the akropolis of Athens. Now the men who go forth from England to the same quarter of the world seem to share more of the spirit of another Robert who, a century later, went forth from the same shire as the son of Godwine on another errand. In our own story we come across no renegade or traitor save the single name of Hugh of Jaugy.[320] But in the course of the twelfth century we see the forerunners of a class of men whose names stain the annals of our own time. The glory of Robert son of Godwine is balanced by the shame of Robert of Saint Alban’s, English by birth and blood, the apostate Templar who joined the host of Saladin and mocked the last agonies of the defenders of the Holy City.[321] Of the earlier Robert our century has seen the true successors in the honoured names of Gordon and Church and Hastings. Of the later Robert it has seen the successor in the Englishman who sells his soul and his sword to keep down the yoke of the barbarian on the necks of his Christian brethren. It has seen him in the Greek who sells his soul and his glib tongue to argue in the councils of Europe against the deliverance of his own people.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Reign of Eadgar in Scotland. 1097-1107.]

[Sidenote: Alexander. 1107-1124.]

[Sidenote: Friendship of the Scottish kings for England.]

[Sidenote: Turgot and Eadmer.]

[Sidenote: Effects of the reign of David. 1124-1153.]

[Sidenote: His English position;]

[Sidenote: his earldoms.]

[Sidenote: English influence in Scotland.]

[Sidenote: His invasion of England.]

[Sidenote: The Scottish kings of the second series.]

[Sidenote: The English or Norman candidates for the Scottish crown.]