William the Conqueror

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oes on both sides of the sea, to withstand foes in his own household, to undergo his first defeat, to receive his first wound in personal conflict. Nothing shook his firm hold either on duchy or kingdom; but in his l

, like the French invasions of Normandy, like the campaigns that won England. One event only of the earlier time is repeated almost as exactly as an event can be repeated. William had won Maine onc

st foreign rule. The other was a rebellion of William's own earls in their own interests, in which English feeling went with the King. Both were short sharp struggles which stand out boldly in the tale. More important in the general story, though less striking in detail, are the relations of William to the other powers in and near the isle of Britain. With the crown of the West-Saxon kings, he had taken up their claims to supremacy over the whole island, and probably beyond it. And even without such clai

e distinctly that he released many subjects who were in British bondage, and that he went on a religious pilgrimage to Saint David's. This last journey is in some accounts connected with schemes for the conquest of Ireland. And in one most remarkable passage of the English Chronicle, the writer for once speculates as to what might have happened but did not. Had William lived two years longer, he would have won Ireland by his wisdom without weapons. And if William had won Ireland either by wisdom or by weapons, he would assuredly have known better how to deal with it than most of those who have come after him. If any man could have joined together the lands which God has put asunder, surely it was he. This mysteriou

began in June 1070, and a Scottish harrying of Northern England, the second of five which are laid to the charge of Malcolm, took place in the same year, and most likely about the same time. The English movement is connected alike with the course of the Danish fleet and with the appointment of Turold to the abbey of Peterborough. William had bribed the Danish commanders to forsake their English allies, and he allowed them to ravage the coast. A later bribe took them back to Denmark; but

Morkere at last plucked up heart to leave William's court and join the patriotic movement. Edwin was pursued; he was betrayed by traitors; he was overtaken and slain, to William's deep grief, we are told. His brother reached the isle, and helped in its defence. William now felt that the revolt called for his own presence and his full energies. The isle was stoutly attacked and stoutly defended, till, according to one version, the monks betrayed the stronghold to the King. According to another, Morkere was induced to surrender by promises of mercy which William failed to fulfil. In any case, before the year 1071 was ended, the isle of Ely was in William's hands. Hereward alone with a few companions made their way out by sea. William was less merciful than usual; still no man was put to death. Some were mutilated, some imprisoned;

n Scotland so poor that it had not an English bondman. Presently some of Malcolm's English guests joined the defenders of Ely; those of highest birth stayed in Scotland, and Malcolm, after much striving, persuaded Margaret the sister of Edgar to become his wife. Her praises are written in Scottish history, and the marriage had no small share in the process which made the Scottish kings and the lands which formed their real kingdom practically English. The sons and grandsons of Marg

errand Englishmen followed him gladly. Eadric, the defender of Herefordshire, had made his peace with the King, and he now held a place of high honour in his army. But if William met with any armed resistance on his Scottish expedition, it did not amount to a pitched battle. He passed through Lothian into Scotland; he crossed Forth and drew near to Tay, and there, by the round tower of Aber

vacant by the revolt, the death, the imprisonment, of Edwin and Morkere. But these William had no intention of filling. He would not have in his realm anything so dangerous as an earl of the Mercian's or the Northumbrians in the old sense, whether English or Norman. But the defence of the northern frontier needed an earl to rule Northumberland in the later sense, the land north of the Tyne. And after the fate of Robert of Comines, William could not as yet put a Norman earl in so perilous a post. But the Englishman whom he chose was open to the same charges as the deposed Gospatric. For he was Waltheof the son of Siward, the hero of the storm of York in 1069. Already Earl of Northampton and Huntingdon, he was at this time high in the King's personal favour, perhaps already the husband of the King's niece. One side of William's policy comes out here. Union was sometimes helped by division. There were men whom William loved to make great, but whom he had no mind to make dangerous. He gave them vast estates, but estates for the most part scattered over different parts of the kingdom. It was only in the border earldoms and in Cornwall that he allowed anything at all near to the lordship of a whole shire to be put in the hands of a single man. One Norman and one Englishman held two earldoms together; but they were earldoms far apart. Roger of Montgomery held the earldoms of Shrewsbury and Sussex, and Waltheof to his midland earldom of Northampton and Huntingdon now added the rule of distant Northumberland. The men who had fought most stoutly against William were the men whom he most willingly received to favour. Eadric

dow Richildis, the guardian of his young son Arnulf, and his brother Robert the Frisian. Robert had won fame in the East; he had received the sovereignty of Friesland-a name which takes in Holland and Zealand-and he was now invited to deliver Flanders from the oppressions of Richildis. Meanwhile, Matilda was acting as regent of Normandy, with Earl William of Hereford as her counsellor. Richildis sought help of her son's two overlords, King Henry of Germany and Kin

nglish and Norman authorities are silent, and the notices in the contemporary German writers are strangely unlike one another. But they show at least that the prince who ruled on both sides of the sea was largely in men's thoughts. The Saxon enemy of Henry describes him in his despair as seeking help in Denmark, France, Aquitaine, and also of the King of the English, promising him the like help, if he should ever need it. William and Henry had both to guard against Saxon enmity, but the throne at Winchester stood firmer than the throne at Goslar. But the historian of the continental Saxons puts into William's mouth an answer utterly unsuited to his pos

to be followed perhaps by an imperial crowning at Rome. But that such schemes were looked on as a practical danger against w

stock of their ancient counts. This was Hugh the son of Azo Marquess of Liguria and of Gersendis the sister of the last Count Herbert. The Normans were driven out of Le Mans; Azo came to take possession in the name of his son, but he and the citizens did not long agree. He went back, leaving his wife and son under the guardianship of Geoffrey of Mayenne. Presently the men of Le Mans threw off princely rule altogether and proclaimed the earliest commune in Northern Gaul. Here then, as at Exeter, William had to strive against an armed commonwealth, and, as at Exeter, we specially wish to know what were to be the relations between the capital and the county at large. The mass of the

the tale of English victory. Few men of that day would see that the cause of Maine was in truth the cause of England. If York and Exeter could not act in concert with one another, still less could either act in concert with Le Mans. Englishmen serving in Maine would fancy that they were avenging their own wrongs by laying waste the lands of any man who spoke the French tongue. On William's part, the employment of Englishmen, the employment of Hereward, was another stroke of policy. It was more fully following out the system which led Englishmen against Exeter, which led Eadric and his comrades into Scotland. For in every English soldier whom William carried into Maine he won a loyal English subject. To men who had foug

abetted, we are told, by the chief Norman nobles. Success against confederated Anjou and Britanny might be doubtful, with Maine and England wavering in their allegiance, and France, Scotland, and Flanders, possible enemies in the distance. The rights of the Count of Anjou over Maine were formally acknowledged, and

y are spoken of as a time of special oppression. This fact is not unconnected with the King's frequent absences from England. Whatever we say of William's own position, he was a check on smaller oppressors. Things were always worse when the eye of the great master was no longer watching. William's

r of a convenient settlement on the march of France, Normandy, and Flanders. Edgar sets forth from Scotland, but is driven back by a storm; Malcolm and Margaret then change their minds, and bid him make his peace with King William. William gladly accepts his submission; an embassy is sent to br

hat the elder Ralph was not of English descent. He survived the coming of William, and his son fought on Senlac among the countrymen of his mother. This treason implies an unrecorded banishment in the days of Edward or Harold. Already earl in 1069, he had in that year acted vigorously for William against the Danes. But he now conspired against him along with Roger, the younger son of William Fitz-Osbern, who had succeeded his father in the earldom of Hereford, while his Norman estates had passed to his elder brother William. What grounds of complaint either Ralph or Roger had against William we know not; but that the loyalty of the Earl of Hereford was doubtful throughout the year 1074 appears from several letters of rebuke and counsel sent to him by the Regent Lanfranc. At last the wielder of both swords took to his spiritual arms, and pronounced the Earl excommunicate, till he should submit to the King's mercy and make restitution to the King and to all men whom he had wronged. Roger remained stiff-necked under the Primate's censure, and presently committed an act of direct disobedience. The next year, 1075, he gave his sister Emma in marriage to Earl Ralph. This marriage the King had forbidden, on some unrecorded ground of state policy. Most likely

went to Lanfranc, at once regent and ghostly father, and confessed to him whatever he had to confess. The Primate assigned his penitent some ecclesiastical penances; the Regent bade the Earl go into Normandy and tell the who

England was soon put down, both in East and West. The rebel earls met with no support save from those who were under their immediate influence. The country acted zealously for the King. Lanfranc could report that Earl Ralph and his army were fleeing, and that the King's men, French and English, were chasing them. In another letter he could add, with some strength of language, that the kingdom was cleansed from the filth o

English feeling; had the undertaking been less hopeless, nothing could have been gained by exchanging the rule of William for that of Ralph or Roger. It might have been different if the Danes had played their part better. The rebellion broke out while William was in Norman

heof and Roger. The imprisonment of Roger, a rebel taken in arms, was a matter of course. As for Waltheof, whatever he had promised at the bride-ale, he had done no disloyal act; he had had no share in the rebellion, and he had told the King all that

d imprisonment for life. Waltheof made his defence; his sentence was deferred; he was kept at Winchester in a straiter imprisonment than before. At the Pentecostal Gemót of

, and Edgar. But why should he be picked out for death, when the far more guilty Roger was allowed to live? Why should he be chosen as the one victim of a prince who never before or after, in Normandy or in England, doomed any man to die on a political charge? These are questions hard to answer. It is not enough to say that Waltheof was an Englishman, that it was William's policy gradually to get rid of Englishmen in high places, and that the time was now come to get rid of the last. For such a policy forfeiture, or at most imprisonment, would have been enough. While other Englishmen lost lands, honours, at most liberty, Waltheof alone lost his life by a judicial sentence. It is likely enough that many Normans hunger

g of Northumberland, the very invasion of England, with all the bloodshed that they caused, might be deemed blacker crimes than the unjust death of a single man. But as human nature stands, the less crime needs a worse man to do it. Crime, as ever, led to further crime and was itself the punishment of crime. In the eyes of William's contemporaries the death of Waltheof, the blackest act of William's life, was also its turning-point. From the day of the martyrdom on Saint Giles' hill the magic of William's name and William's arms passed away. Unfailing luck no longer waited on him; after Waltheof's de

land thickly inhabited; for most of the Forest land never can have been such. But it is certain from Domesday and the Chronicle that William did afforest a considerable tract of land in Hampshire; he set it apart for the purposes of hunting; he fenced it in by special and cruel laws-stopping indeed short of death-for the protection of his pleasures, and in this process some men lost their lands, and were driven from their homes. Some destruction of houses is here implied; some destruction of churches is not unlikely. The popular belief, which hardly differs from the account of writers one degree later than Domesday and the Chronicle, simply exaggerates the extent of destruction. There was no such wide-spread laying waste as is often supposed, because no such wide-spread laying waste was needed. But whatever was needed for William's purpose was done; and Domesday gives us the record. And the act surely makes, like the death of Waltheof, a downward stage in William's character. The harrying of Northumberland was in itself a far greater crime, and involved far more of hum

he saw, the death of his second son Richard, a youth of great promise, whose prolonged life might have saved England from the rule of William Rufus. He died in the Forest, about

the dowry of his daughter Matilda; that of Huntingdon passed to his descendants the Kings of Scots. But Northumberland, close on the Scottish border, still needed an earl; but there is something strange in the choice of Bishop Walcher of Durham. It is possible that this appointment was a concession to English feeling stirred to wrath at the death of Waltheof. The days of English earls were over, and a Norman would have been looked on as Waltheof's murderer. The Lotharingian bishop was a stranger; but he was not a Norman, and he was no oppressor of Englishmen. But he was strangely unfit for the place. Not a fighting bishop like Ode and Geoffrey, he was chiefly devoted to spiritual affairs, specially to the revival of the monastic life, which had died out in Northern England since the Danish invasions. But his weak trust in unworthy favourites, English and foreign, led him to a fearful and memorable end. The Bishop was on terms of close friendship with Ligulf, an Englishman of the highest birth and uncle by marriage to Earl Waltheof. He had kept

w ringleaders. But William was in Normandy in the midst of domestic and political cares. He sent his brother Ode to restore order, and his vengeance was frightful. The land was harried; innocent men were mutilated and put to death; others saved their lives by bribes. Earl after earl was set over a land so hard to rule. A certain Alberi

lful captain, he was no general; ready of speech and free of hand, he was lavish rather than bountiful. He did not lack generous and noble feelings; but of a steady course, even in evil, he was incapable. As a ruler, he was no oppressor in his own person; but sloth, carelessness, love of pleasure, incapacity to say No, failure to do justice, caused more wretchedness than the oppression of those tyrants who hinder the oppressions of others. William would not set such an one over any part of his dominions before his time, and it was his policy to keep his children dependent on him. While he enriched his brothers, he did not give the smallest scrap of the spoils of England to his sons. But Robert deemed that he had a right to something greater than private estates. The nobles of Normandy had done homage to him as William's successor; he had done homage to Fulk for Maine, as if he were

s horse smitten by an arrow, the Conqueror fell to the ground, and was saved only by an Englishman, Tokig, son of Wiggod 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 pronounced

pedition 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 wr

o. The forms of outrage on which the Truce was meant to put a cheek, and which the strong hand of William had put down

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

ngle 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 W

mestic 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