Cameos from English History, from Rollo to Edward II Part 9

At Whitsuntide, 1094, he was taken ill, and lingered under a slow fever till the new year, when he died in peace and joy on the 19th of January.

His greatest friend, Robert, the Bishop of Hereford, a learned man, understanding all the science of the time, a judge, and a courtly Lorrainer, yet who loved to spend whole days with the unlettered Saxon, came to lay him in his grave. He received, as a gift from the convent, the lambskin cloak that Wulstan used to wear, in spite of the laughter of the gay prelates arrayed in costly furs, keeping his ground by saying, that "the furs of cunning animals did not befit a plain man."

He went home to Hereford, and soon after died, having, it is said, been warned in a vision by St. Wulstan that he must soon prepare to follow him.

CAMEO X. THE CONQUEROR. (1066-1087.)

In speaking of William, the Norman Conqueror, we are speaking of a really great man; and great men are always hard to understand or deal with in history, for, as their minds are above common understandings, their contemporary historians generally enter into their views less than any one else, and it is only the result that proves their wisdom and far-sight. Moreover, their temptations and their sins are on a larger scale than those of other men, and some of the actions that they perform make a disproportionate impression by the cry that they occasion--the evil is remembered, not the good that their main policy effected.

William was a high-minded man, of mighty and wide purposes, one of the very few who understood what it was to be a king. He had the Norman qualities in their fullest perfection. He was devoutly religious, and in his private character was irreproachable, being the first Norman Duke unstained by licence, the first whose sons were all born of his princess wife. He was devout in his habits, full of alms-deeds; and strong and resolute as was his will, he kept it so upright and so truly desirous of the Divine glory and the Church's welfare, that he had no serious misunderstanding with the clergy, and lived on the most friendly terms with his great Archbishop, Lanfranc.

He was one of those mighty men who, in personal intercourse, have a force of nature that not merely renders opposition impossible, but absolutely masters the will and intention, so that there is not even the secret contradiction of mind. We have seen this in his dealings with both his own Normans and the Saxons who came in contact with him. His presence was so irresistible that men yielded to it unconsciously, but when absent from him they became themselves again, and in the reaction they committed treason against the pledges they seemed to have voluntarily given to him.

He was stern, fiercely stern. His standard and ideal were very high, such as, perhaps, only the saintly could attain to. The men who never quarrelled with him were Lanfranc, Edgar Atheling, and William Fitzosborn. The first was saintly and strong; the second, honest, upright, and simple; the third was endeared by boyish memories, and to these, perhaps, may be added Edward the Confessor and good Bishop Wulstan.

Many others William tried to love and trust--his uncle Odo, his own son, Earls Edwin and Morkar, Waltheof, the sons of Fitzosborn; but they all failed, grieved, and disappointed him. None was strong, n.o.ble, or disinterested enough not at one time or other to be a traitor; and, perhaps, his really honest, open enemy, Hereward le Wake, was the person whom he most valued and honored after the above mentioned.

And though his affection was hearty, his wrath when he was disappointed was tremendous. And his disappointments were many, partly because his standard was in every respect far above that of the men around him, and partly because his presence so far lifted them to his level, that, when they fell to their own, he was totally unprepared for the treachery and deceit such a fall involved.

Then down he came on them with implacable vengeance, he was so very "stark," as the old chronicle has it. Battle, devastation, plunder, lifelong imprisonment, confiscation, requited him who had drawn on himself the terrible wrath of William of Normandy. There were few soft places in that mighty heart; it could love, but it could not pity, and it could not forgive. He was of the true nature to be a Scourge of G.o.d.

Hardened and embittered by the selfish treasons that had beset his early boyhood, and which had forced him into manhood before his time, he came to England as one called thither by the late king's designation, and, therefore, the lawful heir. The Norman law, a confusion of the old Frank and Roman codes, and of the Norwegian pirate customs, he seems to have been glad to leave behind. His native Normans must be ruled by it, but he was an English king by inheritance, and English laws he would observe; Englishmen should have their national share in the royal favor, and in their native land.

But the design proved impracticable. The English had been split into fierce parties long before he came, and the West Saxon, the Mercian Angle, and Northumbrian Dane hated one another still, and all hated the Norman alike; and his Norman, French, and Breton importations lost no love among themselves, and viewed the English natives as conquered beings, whose spoil was unjustly withheld from them by the Duke King.

Rebellion began: by ones, twos, and threes, the n.o.bles revolted, and were stamped out by William's iron heel, suffering his fierce, unrelenting justice--that highest justice that according to the Latin proverb becomes, in man's mind at least, the highest injustice. So England lay, trampled, bleeding, indignant, and raising a loud cry of misery; but, in real truth, the sufferers were in the first place the actual rebels, Saxon and Norman alike; next, those districts which had risen against his authority, and were barbarously devastated with fire and sword; and lastly, the places which, by the death or forfeiture of native lords, or by the enforced marriage of heiresses, fell into the hands of rapacious Norman adventurers, who treated their serfs with the brutal violence common in France.

Otherwise, things were left much as they were. The towns had little or no cause of complaint, and the lesser Saxon gentry, with the Franklins and the Earls, were unmolested, unless they happened to have vicious neighbors. The Curfew bell, about which so great a clamor was raised, was a universal regulation in Europe; it was a call to prayers, an intimation that it was bedtime, and a means of guarding against fire, when streets were often nothing but wooden booths thatched. The intense hatred that its introduction caused was only the true English dislike to anything like domiciliary interference.

The King has left us an undoubted testimony to the condition of the country, and the number of Saxons still holding tenures. Nineteen years after his Conquest, he held a council at Gloucester, the result of which was a great "numbering of the people"--a general census. To every city or town, commissioners were sent forth, who collected together the s.h.i.+re reeve or Sheriff--the Viscount, as the Normans called him--the thegus, the parish priests, the reeves, and franklins, who were examined upon oath of the numbers, names, and holdings of the men of their place, both as they were in King Edward's days, and at that time. The lands had to be de scribed, whether plough lands or pasture, wood or waste; the mills and fisheries wore recorded, and each farmer's stock of oxen, cows, sheep, or swine. The English grumbled at the inquiry, called it tyranny, and expected worse to come of it, but there was no real cause for complaint. The primary object of the survey was the land-tax, the Danegeld, as it was called, because it was first raised to provide defences against the Danes, and every portion of arable land was a.s.sessed at a fair rate, according to ancient custom, but not that which lay waste. The entire record, including all England save London and the four northern counties, was preserved at Winchester, and called the Winchester Roll, or Domesday Book. It is one of the most interesting records in existence, showing, as it does, the exceeding antiquity of our existing divisions of towns.h.i.+ps, parishes and estates, and even of the families inhabiting them, of whom a fair proportion, chiefly of the lesser gentry, can point to evidence that they live on soil that was tilled by their fathers before the days of the Norman. It is far more satisfactory than the Battle Roll, which was much tampered with by the monks to gratify the ancestral vanity of gentlemen who were so persuaded that their ancestors ought to be found there, that they caused them to be inserted if they were missing. Of Domesday Book, however, there is no doubt, as the original copy is still extant in its fair old handwriting, showing the wonderful work that the French-speaking scribes made with English names of people and places. Queen Edith, the Confessor's widow, who was a large landholder, appears as Eddeve, Adeve, Adiva--by anything but her true old English name of Eadgyth. But it was much that the subdued English folk appeared there at all.

The most real grievance that the English had to complain of was the Forest Laws. The Dukes of Normandy had had many a quarrel in their Neustrian home with their subjects, on the vexed question of the chase, their greatest pa.s.sion; and when William came into England as a victor, he was determined to rule all his own way in the waste and woodland. All the forests he took into his own hands, and the saying was that "the king loved the high deer as if he was their father;" any trespa.s.s was severely punched, and if he slaughter of any kind of game was a more serious thing than murder itself.

Chief of all, however, in people's minds, was his appropriation of the tract of Jettenwald, or the Giant's Wood, Ytene, in South Hants. A tempting hunting-ground extended nearly all the way from his royal city of Winchester, broad, bare chalk down, pa.s.sing into heathy common, and forest waste, covered with holly and yew, and with n.o.ble oak and beech in its dells, fit covert for the mighty boar, the high deer, and an infinity of game beside.

With William's paternal feelings toward the deer, he thought the cotters and squatters, the churls and the serfs, on the borders of the wood, or in little clearings in the midst, mischievous interlopers, and at one swoop he expelled them all, and kept the Giant's Wood solely for himself and his deer, by the still remaining name of the New Forest.

Chroniclers talk of twenty-two mother churches and fifty-two parishes laid waste, but there is no doubt that this was a monstrous exaggeration, and that the population could not have been so dense. At any rate, whatever their numbers, the inhabitants were expelled, the animals were left unmolested for seven years, and then the Norman king enjoyed his sports there among his fierce n.o.bility, little recking that all the English, and many of the Normans, longed that a curse should there light upon his head, or on that of his proud sons.

CAMEO XI. THE CONQUEROR'S CHILDREN. (1050-1087.)

The wife of William of Normandy was, as has been said, Matilda, daughter of Baldwin, Count of Flanders. The wife of such a man as William has not much opportunity of showing her natural character, and we do not know much of hers. It appears, however, that she was strong-willed and vindictive, and, very little disposed to accept him. She had set her affections upon one Brihtric Meau, called Snow, from his fair complexion, a young English lord who had visited her father's court on a mission from Edward the Confessor, but who does not appear to have equally admired the lady. For seven years Matilda is said to have held out against William, until one twilight evening, when she was going home from church, in the streets of Bruges he rode up to her, beat her severely, and threw her into the gutter!

Wonderful to relate, the high-spirited demoiselle was subdued by this rough courts.h.i.+p, and gave her hand to her determined cousin without further resistance; nor do we hear that he ever beat her again. Indeed, if he did, he was not likely to let their good va.s.sals be aware of it; and, in very truth, they seem to have been considered as models of peace and happiness. But it is much to be suspected that her nature remained proud and vindictive; for no sooner had her husband become master of England, than she caused the unfortunate Brihtric, who had disdained her love, to be stripped of all his manors in Gloucesters.h.i.+re, including Fairford, Tewkesbury, and the rich meadows around, and threw him into Winchester Castle, where he died; while Domesday Book witnesses to her revenge, by showing that the lands once his belonged to Queen Matilda.

The indication of character in a woman who had so little opportunity of independent action, is worth noting, as it serves to mark the spirit in which her children would be reared, and to explain why the sons so entirely fell short of all that was greatest and n.o.blest in their father. The devotion, honor, and generosity, that made the iron of his composition bright as well as hard, was utterly wanting in them, or merely appeared in pa.s.sing inconsistencies, and it is but too likely that they derived no gentler training from their mother. There were ten children, four sons and six daughters, but the names of these latter, are very difficult to distinguish, as Adela, Atheliza, Adelheid, or Alix, was a sort of feminine of Atheling, a Princess-Royal t.i.tle, and was applied to most of the eldest daughters of the French and German-princes, or, when the senior was dead, or married, to the surviving eldest.

Cecily, Matilda's eldest daughter, was, even before her birth, decreed to be no Adela for whom contending potentates might struggle. She was to be the atonement for the parents' hasty, unlicensed marriage, in addition to their two beautiful abbeys at Caen. When the Abbaye aux Dames was consecrated, the little girl was led by her father to the foot of the altar, and there presented as his offering. She was educated with great care by a very learned though somewhat dissipated priest, took the veil, and, becoming abbess, ruled her nuns for many years, well contented and much respected.

The next sister was the Atheliza of the family, but her name was either Elfgiva or Agatha. She enjoys the distinction of being the only female portrait in her mother's tapestry--except a poor woman escaping from a sacked town. She stands under a gateway, while Harold is riding forth with her father, in witness, perhaps, of her having been betrothed to Harold; or perhaps Matilda felt a mother's yearning to commemorate the first of her flock who had been laid in the grave, for Elfgiva died a short time after the contract, which Harold would hardly have fulfilled, since he had at least one wife already at home.

Her sister, Matilda, promoted to be Adeliza, was betrothed to another Saxon, the graceful and beautiful Edwin, whom she loved with great ardor, through all his weak conduct toward her father. After his untimely end, she was promised to Alfonso I. of Castile, but she could not endure to give her heart to another; she wept and prayed continually, but in vain as far as her father was concerned. She was sent off on her journey, but died on the way; and then it was that the poor girl's knees were found to be hardened by her constant kneeling to implore the pity that a.s.suredly was granted to her.

Constance married Alain Fergeant, a brother of the Duke of Brittany, and an adventurer in the Norman invasion. He was presented with the Earldom of Richmond, in Yorks.h.i.+re; and as his son became afterward Duke of Brittany, this appanage frequently gave t.i.tle to younger brothers in the old Armorican Duchy. That son was not born of Constance; she fell into a languis.h.i.+ng state of health, and died, four years after her marriage.

Report said that her husband's va.s.sals found her so harsh and rigorous, that they poisoned her; and considering what her brothers were, it is not unlikely.

Of the Adela who married that accomplished prince, Stephen, Count de Blois, there will be more to say; and as to Gundred, the wife of Earl Warenne, it is a doubtful question whether she was a daughter of William and Matilda. Her tomb was lately found in Isfield Church, Suss.e.x; but though it has an inscription praising her virtues, it says nothing of her royal birth.

The sons of William left far more distinct and undesirable traces of themselves than their sisters. Robert was probably the eldest of the whole family, and he was his mother's favorite, like most eldest sons.

He did not inherit the stately height of the Norman princes, and, from his short, st.u.r.dy form, early acquired the nickname of Courtheuse, by which he was distinguished among the swarms of other Roberts. Much pains was bestowed on his instruction, and that of his brothers, Richard and William, by the excellent Lanfranc, and they all had great abilities; but there were influences at work among the fierce Norman lads that rendered the holy training of the good abbot wholly ineffectual. Their father, conscious of his own defective right to the ducal rank, lost no opportunity of binding his va.s.sals to swear fealty not only to himself, but his eldest son; and from Robert's infancy he had learnt to hold out his hand, and hear the barons declare themselves his men. When the Duke set out on his conquest of England, he caused the oath to be renewed to Robert, and he at the same time showed his love for William, then the youngest, by having him, with his long red hair floating, carved, blowing a horn, at the figure-head of the Mora.

Soon after the Conquest, when Matilda had lately been crowned Queen of England, the fourth son, Henry, was born. He had much more personal beauty and height than the other brothers, and there was always an idea floating that the son born when his father was king had a right over his elder brethren, and thus Henry was always an object of jealousy to his brothers. Pa.s.sionately fond of the few books he could obtain, he was called Beauclerc, or the fine scholar; and whilst as little restrained by real principle as his brothers, he was able to preserve a decorum and self-command that kept him in better reputation.

The second brother, Richard, however, had no opportunity of showing his character. He died in the New Forest, either from a blow on the head from a branch of a tree, or from a fever caught in the marshes, and is buried in Winchester Cathedral. Perhaps the doom came on him in innocent youth, "because there was some good thing in him."

In 1075, when Robert must have been a man some years over twenty, Henry a boy of nine, and William probably twelve or fourteen, they all three accompanied their father into Normandy, and were there in the fortress of Aquila, or Aigle, so called because there had been an eagle's nest in the oak-tree close to the site of the castle. Robert was in a discontented mood. The numerous occasions on which he had received the homage of the Normans made him fancy he ought to have the rule in the duchy; his mother's favoritism had fostered his ill-feeling, and he was becoming very jealous of red-haired William, who from his quickness, daring, and readiness had become his father's favorite; and though under restraint in the Conqueror's presence, was no doubt outrageously boisterous, insolent, and presuming in his absence; and Henry, the fine scholar, his companion and following his lead, secretly despised both his elders.

Robert's lodging was suddenly invaded by the two wild lads and their attendants. Finding themselves no better welcomed or amused than rude boys are wont to be by young men, they betook themselves to an upper room, the floor of which was formed by ill-laid, gaping planks, which were the ceiling of that below. Here they began to play at dice; they soon grew even more intolerably uproarious, and in the coa.r.s.e of their quarrelsome, boisterous tricks, overthrew a vessel of dirty water, which began to drip through the interstices of the planks on their brother and his friends below--an accident sure to be welcomed by a hoa.r.s.e laugh by the rough boys, but appearing to the victims beneath a deliberate insult. "Are you a man not to avenge this shameful insolence?" cried Robert's friends, Alberic and Ivo de Grantmesnil. In a fury of pa.s.sion, Robert rushed after the lads with his sword drawn, and King William was roused from his sleep to hear that Lord Robert was murdering his brothers.

The pa.s.sion and violence of the elder son had the natural effect of making the father take the part of the younger ones, and Robert was so much incensed, that he rode off with his friends, and, collecting partisans as he went, attacked Rouen.

He was of course repulsed, and many of his followers were made prisoners. He held out in the border counties for a little while, but all his supporters were gained from him by his father, and he at length came back to court, and appeared reconciled. There, however, he had nothing to do, and all the licentious and disaffected congregated round him; he idled away half his time, and revelled the rest, and his pretensions magnified themselves all the time in his fancy, till at last he was stimulated to demand of his father the cession of Normandy, as a right confirmed to him by the French king.

William replied by a lecture on disobedience, citing as examples of warning all the Absaloms of history; but Robert fiercely answered, that he had not come to listen to a sermon; he was sick of hearing all this from his teachers, and he would have his answer touching his claim to Normandy.

The answer he got was, "It is not my custom to lay aside my clothes till I go to bed."

It sent him off in a rage, with all his crew of dissolute followers. He went first to his uncle in Flanders, then to Germany and Italy, always penniless from his lavish habits, though his mother often sent him supplies of money by a trusty messenger, called Samson le Breton.

However, the King found him out, and reproached Matilda angrily; but she made answer, "If Robert, my son, were buried seven feet under ground, and I could bring him to life again by my heart's blood, how gladly would I give it!" The implacable William commanded Samson to be blinded, but he escaped to the monastery of St. Everard, and there became a monk.

Returning, Robert presented himself to King Philippe of France, who was glad to annoy his overgrown va.s.sal by patronizing the rebellious son, and accordingly placed Robert in the Castle of Gerberoi, where he might best be a thorn in his father's side. There William besieged him, bringing the two younger sons with him, though Henry was but twelve years old. For three weeks there was sharp fighting; and, finally, a battle, in which the younger William was wounded, and the elder, cased in his full armor of chain mail, encountered unknowingly with Robert, in the like disguising hawberk. The Conqueror's horse was killed; his esquire, an Englishman, in bringing him another, was slain; and he himself received a blow which caused such agony that he could not repress a shriek of pain. Robert knew his voice, and, struck with remorse, immediately lifted him up, offered him his own horse, and a.s.sured him of his ignorance of his person; but William, smarting and indignant, vouchsafed no answer, and while the son returned to his castle, the father went back to his camp, which he broke up the next day, and returned to Rouen.

Robert seems to have been a favorite with the lawless Normans, who writhed under the mighty hand of his father, and on their interference, backed by that of the French king and the Pope, brought about a reconciliation in name. The succession of Normandy was again secured to Robert, but therewith he was laid under a curse by his angry father, whose face he never saw again.

Other troubles thickened on William. Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, the bold, rough, jovial half-brother, whom he had trusted and loved, was reported to be full of mischievous plots. He seems to have been told by diviners that the next Pope was to be named Odo, and, to secure the fulfilment of the augury, he was sending bribes to Rome, and at the same time collecting a great body of troops with whom to fight his way thither.

He was in the Isle of Wight, preparing to carry his forces to Normandy, when William pounced, on him, and ordered him back again. It is not clear whether he wished to prevent the scandal to the Church, or whether he suspected this army of Odo's of being intended to support Robert against himself; but, at any rate, he made bitter complaint before the council of the way he had been treated by son, brother, and peer, and sentenced Odo to imprisonment. No one would touch the Bishop, and William was obliged to seize him himself, answering, to Odo's appeal to his inviolable orders, "I judge not the Bishop, but my Earl and Treasurer."

Another grief befell him in 1083, in the death of Matilda, who, it was currently believed, pined away with grief at his fury against her beloved first-born--anger that his affection for her could not mitigate, though he loved her so tenderly that his great heart almost broke at her death, and he never was the same man during the four years that he survived her.

His health began to break; he had grown large and unwieldy, but his spirit was as fiery as ever, and wherever there was war, there was he.

At last, in 1087, there was an insurrection at Mantes, supported by King Philippe. William complained, but received no redress. Rude, scornful jests were reported to him, and the savage part of his nature was aroused.

Always, hitherto, he had shown great forbearance in abstaining from direct warfare on his suzerain, much as Philippe had often provoked him, but his patience was exhausted, and he armed himself for a deadly vengeance.