Part 6 (2/2)

While he enriched his brothers, he did not give the smallest sc.r.a.p of the spoils of England to his sons. But Robert deemed that he had a right to something greater than private estates. The n.o.bles of Normandy had done homage to him as William's successor; he had done homage to Fulk for Maine, as if he were himself its count. He was now stirred up by evil companions to demand that, if his father would not give him part of his kingdom-the spirit of Edwin and Morkere had crossed the sea-he would at least give him Normandy and Maine. William refused with many pithy sayings. It was not his manner to take off his clothes till he went to bed. Robert now, with a band of discontented young n.o.bles, plunged into border warfare against his father. He then wandered over a large part of Europe, begging and receiving money and squandering all that he got. His mother too sent him money, which led to the first quarrel between William and Matilda after so many years of faithful union. William rebuked his wife for helping his enemy in breach of his orders: she pleaded the mother's love for her first-born. The mother was forgiven, but her messenger, sentenced to loss of eyes, found shelter in a monastery.

At last in 1079 Philip gave Robert a settled dwelling-place in the border-fortress of Gerberoi. The strife between father and son became dangerous. William besieged the castle, to undergo before its walls his second defeat, to receive his first wound, and that at the hands of his own son. Pierced in the hand by the lance of Robert, his horse smitten by an arrow, the Conqueror fell to the ground, and was saved only by an Englishman, Tokig, son of WigG.o.d of Wallingford, who gave his life for his king. It seems an early softening of the tale which says that Robert dismounted and craved his father's pardon; it seems a later hardening which says that William p.r.o.nounced a curse on his son. William Rufus too, known as yet only as the dutiful son of his father, was wounded in his defence. The blow was not only grievous to William's feelings as a father; it was a serious military defeat. The two wounded Williams and the rest of the besiegers escaped how they might, and the siege of Gerberoi was raised.

We next find the wise men of Normandy debating how to make peace between father and son. In the course of the year 1080 a peace was patched up, and a more honourable sphere was found for Robert's energies in an expedition into Scotland. In the autumn of the year of Gerberoi Malcolm had made another wasting inroad into Northumberland. With the King absent and Northumberland in confusion through the death of Walcher, this wrong went unavenged till the autumn of 1080. Robert gained no special glory in Scotland; a second quarrel with his father followed, and Robert remained a banished man during the last seven years of William's reign.

In this same year 1080 a synod of the Norman Church was held, the Truce of G.o.d again renewed which we heard of years ago. The forms of outrage on which the Truce was meant to put a cheek, and which the strong hand of William had put down more thoroughly than the Truce would do, had clearly begun again during the confusions caused by the rebellion of Robert.

The two next years, 10811082, William was in England. His home sorrows were now pressing heavily on him. His eldest son was a rebel and an exile; about this time his second son died in the New Forest; according to one version, his daughter, the betrothed of Edwin, who had never forgotten her English lover, was now promised to the Spanish King Alfonso, and died-in answer to her own prayers-before the marriage was celebrated. And now the partner of William's life was taken from him four years after his one difference with her. On November 3, 1083, Matilda died after a long sickness, to her husband's lasting grief. She was buried in her own church at Caen, and churches in England received gifts from William on behalf of her soul.

The mourner had soon again to play the warrior. Nearly the whole of William's few remaining years were spent in a struggle which in earlier times he would surely have ended in a day. Maine, city and county, did not call for a third conquest; but a single baron of Maine defied William's power, and a single castle of Maine held out against him for three years. Hubert, Viscount of Beaumont and Fresnay, revolted on some slight quarrel. The siege of his castle of Sainte-Susanne went on from the death of Matilda till the last year but one of William's reign. The tale is full of picturesque detail; but William had little personal share in it. The best captains of Normandy tried their strength in vain against this one donjon on its rock. William at last made peace with the subject who was too strong for him. Hubert came to England and received the King's pardon. Practically the pardon was the other way.

Thus for the last eleven years of his life William ceased to be the Conqueror. Engaged only in small enterprises, he was unsuccessful in all. One last success was indeed in store for him; but that was to be purchased with his own life. As he turned away in defeat from this castle and that, as he felt the full bitterness of domestic sorrow, he may have thought, as others thought for him, that the curse of Waltheof, the curse of the New Forest, was ever tracking his steps. If so, his crimes were done in England, and their vengeance came in Normandy. In England there was no further room for his mission as Conqueror; he had no longer foes to overcome. He had an act of justice to do, and he did it.

He had his kingdom to guard, and he guarded it. He had to take the great step which should make his kingdom one for ever; and he had, perhaps without fully knowing what he did, to bid the picture of his reign be painted for all time as no reign before or after has been painted.

CHAPTER XI.

THE LAST YEARS OF WILLIAM.

10811087.

OF two events of these last years of the Conqueror's reign, events of very different degrees of importance, we have already spoken. The Welsh expedition of William was the only recorded fighting on British ground, and that lay without the bounds of the kingdom of England. William now made Normandy his chief dwelling-place, but he was constantly called over to England. The Welsh campaign proves his presence in England in 1081; he was again in England in 1082, but he went back to Normandy between the two visits. The visit of 1082 was a memorable one; there is no more characteristic act of the Conqueror than the deed which marks it. The cruelty and insolence of his brother Ode, whom he had trusted so much more than he deserved, had pa.s.sed all bounds. In avenging the death of Walcher he had done deeds such as William never did himself or allowed any other man to do. And now, beguiled by a soothsayer who said that one of his name should be the next Pope, he dreamed of succeeding to the throne of Gregory the Seventh. He made all kinds of preparations to secure his succession, and he was at last about to set forth for Italy at the head of something like an army. His schemes were by no means to the liking of his brother. William came suddenly over from Normandy, and met Ode in the Isle of Wight. There the King got together as many as he could of the great men of the realm. Before them he arraigned Ode for all his crimes. He had left him as the lieutenant of his kingdom, and he had shown himself the common oppressor of every cla.s.s of men in the realm. Last of all, he had beguiled the warriors who were needed for the defence of England against the Danes and Irish to follow him on his wild schemes in Italy. How was he to deal with such a brother, William asked of his wise men.

He had to answer himself; no other man dared to speak. William then gave his judgement. The common enemy of the whole realm should not be spared because he was the King's brother. He should be seized and put in ward.

As none dared to seize him, the King seized him with his own hands. And now, for the first time in England, we hear words which were often heard again. The bishop stained with blood and sacrilege appealed to the privileges of his order. He was a clerk, a bishop; no man might judge him but the Pope. William, taught, so men said, by Lanfranc, had his answer ready. ”I do not seize a clerk or a bishop; I seize my earl whom I set over my kingdom.” So the Earl of Kent was carried off to a prison in Normandy, and Pope Gregory himself pleaded in vain for the release of the Bishop of Bayeux.

The mind of William was just now mainly given to the affairs of his island kingdom. In the winter of 1083 he hastened from the death-bed of his wife to the siege of Sainte-Susanne, and thence to the Midwinter Gemot in England. The chief object of the a.s.sembly was the specially distasteful one of laying on of a tax. In the course of the next year, six s.h.i.+llings was levied on every hide of land to meet a pressing need.

The powers of the North were again threatening; the danger, if it was danger, was greater than when Waltheof smote the Normans in the gate at York. Swegen and his successor Harold were dead. c.n.u.t the Saint reigned in Denmark, the son-in-law of Robert of Flanders. This alliance with William's enemy joined with his remembrance of his own two failures to stir up the Danish king to a yearning for some exploit in England.

English exiles were still found to urge him to the enterprise. William's conquest had scattered banished or discontented Englishmen over all Europe. Many had made their way to the Eastern Rome; they had joined the Warangian guard, the surest support of the Imperial throne, and at Dyrrhachion, as on Senlac, the axe of England had met the lance of Normandy in battle. Others had fled to the North; they prayed c.n.u.t to avenge the death of his kinsman Harold and to deliver England from the yoke of men-so an English writer living in Denmark spoke of them-of Roman speech. Thus the Greek at one end of Europe, the Norman at the other, still kept on the name of Rome. The fleet of Denmark was joined by the fleet of Flanders; a smaller contingent was promised by the devout and peaceful Olaf of Norway, who himself felt no call to take a share in the work of war.

Against this danger William strengthened himself by the help of the tax that he had just levied. He could hardly have dreamed of defending England against Danish invaders by English weapons only. But he thought as little of trusting the work to his own Normans. With the money of England he hired a host of mercenaries, horse and foot, from France and Britanny, even from Maine where Hubert was still defying him at Sainte-Susanne. He gathered this force on the mainland, and came back at its head, a force such as England had never before seen; men wondered how the land might feed them all. The King's men, French and English, had to feed them, each man according to the amount of his land. And now William did what Harold had refused to do; he laid waste the whole coast that lay open to attack from Denmark and Flanders. But no Danes, no Flemings, came. Disputes arose between c.n.u.t and his brother Olaf, and the great enterprise came to nothing. William kept part of his mercenaries in England, and part he sent to their homes. c.n.u.t was murdered in a church by his own subjects, and was canonized as _Sanctus Canutus_ by a Pope who could not speak the Scandinavian name.

Meanwhile, at the Midwinter Gemot of 10851086, held in due form at Gloucester, William did one of his greatest acts. ”The King had mickle thought and sooth deep speech with his Witan about his land, how it were set and with whilk men.” In that ”deep speech,” so called in our own tongue, lurks a name well known and dear to every Englishman. The result of that famous parliament is set forth at length by the Chronicler. The King sent his men into each s.h.i.+re, men who did indeed set down in their writ how the land was set and of what men. In that writ we have a record in the Roman tongue no less precious than the Chronicles in our own. For that writ became the Book of Winchester, the book to which our fathers gave the name of Domesday, the book of judgement that spared no man.

The Great Survey was made in the course of the first seven months of the year 1086. Commissioners were sent into every s.h.i.+re, who inquired by the oaths of the men of the hundreds by whom the land had been held in King Edward's days and what it was worth then, by whom it was held at the time of the survey and what it was worth then; and lastly, whether its worth could be raised. Nothing was to be left out. ”So sooth narrowly did he let spear it out, that there was not a hide or a yard of land, nor further-it is shame to tell, and it thought him no shame to do-an ox nor a cow nor a swine was left that was not set in his writ.” This kind of searching inquiry, never liked at any time, would be specially grievous then. The taking of the survey led to disturbances in many places, in which not a few lives were lost. While the work was going on, William went to and fro till he knew thoroughly how this land was set and of what men. He had now a list of all men, French and English, who held land in his kingdom. And it was not enough to have their names in a writ; he would see them face to face. On the making of the survey followed that great a.s.sembly, that great work of legislation, which was the crown of William's life as a ruler and lawgiver of England. The usual a.s.semblies of the year had been held at Winchester and Westminster. An extraordinary a.s.sembly was held in the plain of Salisbury on the first day of August. The work of that a.s.sembly has been already spoken of. It was now that all the owners of land in the kingdom became the men of the King; it was now that England became one, with no fear of being again parted asunder.

The close connexion between the Great Survey and the law and the oath of Salisbury is plain. It was a great matter for the King to get in the gold certainly and, we may add, fairly. William would deal with no man otherwise than according to law as he understood the law. But he sought for more than this. He would not only know what this land could be made to pay; he would know the state of his kingdom in every detail; he would know its military strength; he would know whether his own will, in the long process of taking from this man and giving to that, had been really carried out. Domesday is before all things a record of the great confiscation, a record of that gradual change by which, in less than twenty years, the greater part of the land of England had been transferred from native to foreign owners. And nothing shows like Domesday in what a formally legal fas.h.i.+on that transfer was carried out.

What were the principles on which it was carried out, we have already seen. All private property in land came only from the grant of King William. It had all pa.s.sed into his hands by lawful forfeiture; he might keep it himself; he might give it back to its old owner or grant it to a new one. So it was at the general redemption of lands; so it was whenever fresh conquests or fresh revolts threw fresh lands into the King's hands. The principle is so thoroughly taken for granted, that we are a little startled to find it incidentally set forth in so many words in a case of no special importance. A priest named Robert held a single yardland in alms of the King; he became a monk in the monastery of Stow-in-Lindesey, and his yardland became the property of the house. One hardly sees why this case should have been picked out for a solemn declaration of the general law. Yet, as ”the day on which the English redeemed their lands” is spoken of only casually in the case of a particular estate, so the principle that no man could hold lands except by the King's grant (”Non licet terram alicui habere nisi regis concessu”) is brought in only to ill.u.s.trate the wrongful dealing of Robert and the monks of Stow in the case of a very small holding indeed.

All this is a vast system of legal fictions; for William's whole position, the whole scheme of his government, rested on a system of legal fictions. Domesday is full of them; one might almost say that there is nothing else there. A very attentive study of Domesday might bring out the fact that William was a foreign conqueror, and that the book itself was a record of the process by which he took the lands of the natives who had fought against him to reward the strangers who had fought for him.

But nothing of this kind appears on the surface of the record. The great facts of the Conquest are put out of sight. William is taken for granted, not only as the lawful king, but as the immediate successor of Edward. The ”time of King Edward” and the ”time of King William” are the two times that the law knows of. The compilers of the record are put to some curious s.h.i.+fts to describe the time between ”the day when King Edward was alive and dead” and the day ”when King William came into England.” That coming might have been as peaceful as the coming of James the First or George the First. The two great battles are more than once referred to, but only casually in the mention of particular persons. A very sharp critic might guess that one of them had something to do with King William's coming into England; but that is all. Harold appears only as Earl; it is only in two or three places that we hear of a ”time of Harold,” and even of Harold ”seizing the kingdom” and ”reigning.” These two or three places stand out in such contrast to the general language of the record that we are led to think that the scribe must have copied some earlier record or taken down the words of some witness, and must have forgotten to translate them into more loyal formulae. So in recording who held the land in King Edward's day and who in King William's, there is nothing to show that in so many cases the holder under Edward had been turned out to make room for the holder under William. The former holder is marked by the perfectly colourless word ”ancestor” (”antecessor”), a word as yet meaning, not ”forefather,” but ”predecessor” of any kind. In Domesday the word is most commonly an euphemism for ”dispossessed Englishman.” It is a still more distinct euphemism where the Norman holder is in more than one place called the ”heir” of the dispossessed Englishmen.

The formulae of Domesday are the most speaking witness to the spirit of outward legality which ruled every act of William. In this way they are wonderfully instructive; but from the formulae alone no one could ever make the real facts of William's coming and reign. It is the incidental notices which make us more at home in the local and personal life of this reign than of any reign before or for a long time after. The Commissioners had to report whether the King's will had been everywhere carried out, whether every man, great and small, French and English, had what the King meant him to have, neither more nor less. And they had often to report a state of things different from what the King had meant to be. Many men had not all that King William had meant them to have, and many others had much more. Normans had taken both from Englishmen and from other Normans. Englishmen had taken from Englishmen; some had taken from ecclesiastical bodies; some had taken from King William himself; nay King William himself holds lands which he ought to give up to another man. This last entry at least shows that William was fully ready to do right, according to his notions of right. So also the King's two brothers are set down among the chief offenders. Of these unlawful holdings of land, marked in the technical language of the Survey as _invasiones_ and _occupationes_, many were doubtless real cases of violent seizure, without excuse even according to William's reading of the law. But this does not always follow, even when the language of the Survey would seem to imply it. Words implying violence, _per vim_ and the like, are used in the legal language of all ages, where no force has been used, merely to mark a possession as illegal. We are startled at finding the Apostle Paul set down as one of the offenders; but the words ”sanctus Paulus invasit” mean no more than that the canons of Saint Paul's church in London held lands to which the Commissioners held that they had no good t.i.tle. It is these cases where one man held land which another claimed that gave opportunity for those personal details, stories, notices of tenures and customs, which make Domesday the most precious store of knowledge of the time.

One fruitful and instructive source of dispute comes from the way in which the lands in this or that district were commonly granted out. The in-comer, commonly a foreigner, received all the lands which such and such a man, commonly a dispossessed Englishman, held in that s.h.i.+re or district. The grantee stepped exactly into the place of the _antecessor_; he inherited all his rights and all his burthens. He inherited therewith any disputes as to the extent of the lands of the _antecessor_ or as to the nature of his tenure. And new disputes arose in the process of transfer. One common source of dispute was when the former owner, besides lands which were strictly his own, held lands on lease, subject to a reversionary interest on the part of the Crown or the Church. The lease or sale-_emere_ is the usual word-of Church lands for three lives to return to the Church at the end of the third life was very common. If the _antecessor_ was himself the third life, the grantee, his _heir_, had no claim to the land; and in any case he could take in only with all its existing liabilities. But the grantee often took possession of the whole of the land held by the _antecessor_, as if it were all alike his own. A crowd of complaints followed from all manner of injured persons and bodies, great and small, French and English, lay and clerical. The Commissioners seem to have fairly heard all, and to have fairly reported all for the King to judge of. It is their care to do right to all men which has given us such strange glimpses of the inner life of an age which had none like it before or after.

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