William the Conqueror. Edward A. Freeman
Читать онлайн книгу.
a house renowned for power and wickedness, and which, as holding great possessions alike of Normandy and of France, ranked rather with princes than with ordinary nobles. The story went that William Talvas, lord of Bellême, one of the fiercest of his race, had cursed William in his cradle, as one by whom he and his should be brought to shame. Such a tale set forth the noblest side of William’s character, as the man who did something to put down such enemies of mankind as he who cursed him. The possessions of William Talvas passed through his daughter Mabel to Roger of Montgomery, a man who plays a great part in William’s history; but it is the disloyalty of the burghers, not of their lord, of which we hear just now. They willingly admitted an Angevin garrison. William in return laid siege to Domfront on the Varenne, a strong castle which was then an outpost of Maine against Normandy. A long skirmishing warfare, in which William won for himself a name by deeds of personal prowess, went on during the autumn and winter (1048–49). One tale specially illustrates more than one point in the feelings of the time. The two princes, William and Geoffrey, give a mutual challenge; each gives the other notice of the garb and shield that he will wear that he may not be mistaken. The spirit of knight-errantry was coming in, and we see that William himself in his younger days was touched by it. But we see also that coat-armour was as yet unknown. Geoffrey and his host, so the Normans say, shrink from the challenge and decamp in the night, leaving the way open for a sudden march upon Alençon. The disloyal burghers received the duke with mockery of his birth. They hung out skins, and shouted, “Hides for the Tanner.” Personal insult is always hard for princes to bear, and the wrath of William was stirred up to a pitch which made him for once depart from his usual moderation towards conquered enemies. He swore that the men who had jeered at him should be dealt with like a tree whose branches are cut off with the pollarding-knife. The town was taken by assault, and William kept his oath. The castle held out; the hands and feet of thirty-two pollarded burghers of Alençon were thrown over its walls, and the threat implied drove the garrison to surrender on promise of safety for life and limb. The defenders of Domfront, struck with fear, surrendered also, and kept their arms as well as their lives and limbs. William had thus won back his own rebellious town, and had enlarged his borders by his first conquest. He went farther south, and fortified another castle at Ambrières; but Ambrières was only a temporary conquest. Domfront has ever since been counted as part of Normandy. But, as ecclesiastical divisions commonly preserve the secular divisions of an earlier time, Domfront remained down to the great French Revolution in the spiritual jurisdiction of the bishops of Le Mans.
William had now shown himself in Maine as conqueror, and he was before long to show himself in England, though not yet as conqueror. If our chronology is to be trusted, he had still in this interval to complete his conquest of his own duchy by securing the surrender of Brionne; and two other events, both characteristic, one of them memorable, fill up the same time. William now banished a kinsman of his own name, who held the great county of Mortain, Moretoliam or Moretonium, in the diocese of Avranches, which must be carefully distinguished from Mortagne-en-Perche, Mauritania or Moretonia in the diocese of Seez. This act, of somewhat doubtful justice, is noteworthy on two grounds. First, the accuser of the banished count was one who was then a poor serving-knight of his own, but who became the forefather of a house which plays a great part in English history, Robert surnamed the Bigod. Secondly, the vacant county was granted by William to his own half-brother Robert. He had already in 1048 bestowed the bishopric of Bayeux on his other half-brother Odo, who cannot at that time have been more than twelve years old. He must therefore have held the see for a good while without consecration, and at no time of his fifty years’ holding of it did he show any very episcopal merits. This was the last case in William’s reign of an old abuse by which the chief church preferments in Normandy had been turned into means of providing for members, often unworthy members, of the ducal family; and it is the only one for which William can have been personally responsible. Both his brothers were thus placed very early in life among the chief men of Normandy, as they were in later years to be placed among the chief men of England. But William’s affection for his brothers, amiable as it may have been personally, was assuredly not among the brighter parts of his character as a sovereign.
The other chief event of this time also concerns the domestic side of William’s life. The long story of his marriage now begins. The date is fixed by one of the decrees of the council of Rheims held in 1049 by Pope Leo the Ninth, in which Baldwin Count of Flanders is forbidden to give his daughter to William the Norman. This implies that the marriage was already thought of, and further that it was looked on as uncanonical. The bride whom William sought, Matilda daughter of Baldwin the Fifth, was connected with him by some tie of kindred or affinity which made a marriage between them unlawful by the rules of the Church. But no genealogist has yet been able to find out exactly what the canonical hindrance was. It is hard to trace the descent of William and Matilda up to any common forefather. But the light which the story throws on William’s character is the same in any case. Whether he was seeking a wife or a kingdom, he would have his will, but he could wait for it. In William’s doubtful position, a marriage with the daughter of the Count of Flanders would be useful to him in many ways; and Matilda won her husband’s abiding love and trust. Strange tales are told of William’s wooing. Tales are told also of Matilda’s earlier love for the Englishman Brihtric, who is said to have found favour in her eyes when he came as envoy from England to her father’s court. All that is certain is that the marriage had been thought of and had been forbidden before the next important event in William’s life that we have to record.
Was William’s Flemish marriage in any way connected with his hopes of succession to the English crown? Had there been any available bride for him in England, it might have been for his interest to seek for her there. But it should be noticed, though no ancient writer points out the fact, that Matilda was actually descended from Alfred in the female line; so that William’s children, though not William himself, had some few drops of English blood in their veins. William or his advisers, in weighing every chance which might help his interests in the direction of England, may have reckoned this piece of rather ancient genealogy among the advantages of a Flemish alliance. But it is far more certain that, between the forbidding of the marriage and the marriage itself, a direct hope of succession to the English crown had been opened to the Norman duke.
CHAPTER III.
WILLIAM’S FIRST VISIT TO ENGLAND.
A.D. 1051–1052.
While William was strengthening himself in Normandy, Norman influence in England had risen to its full height. The king was surrounded by foreign favourites. The only foreign earl was his nephew Ralph of Mentes, the son of his sister Godgifu. But three chief bishoprics were held by Normans, Robert of Canterbury, William of London, and Ulf of Dorchester. William bears a good character, and won the esteem of Englishmen; but the unlearned Ulf is emphatically said to have done “nought bishoplike.” Smaller preferments in Church and State, estates in all parts of the kingdom, were lavishly granted to strangers. They built castles, and otherwise gave offence to English feeling. Archbishop Robert, above all, was ever plotting against Godwine, Earl of the West-Saxons, the head of the national party. At last, in the autumn of 1051, the national indignation burst forth. The immediate occasion was a visit paid to the King by Count Eustace of Boulogne, who had just married the widowed Countess Godgifu. The violent dealings of his followers towards the burghers of Dover led to resistance on their part, and to a long series of marches and negotiations, which ended in the banishment of Godwine and his son, and the parting of his daughter Edith, the King’s wife, from her husband. From October 1051 to September 1052, the Normans had their own way in England. And during that time King Edward received a visitor of greater fame than his brother-in-law from Boulogne in the person of his cousin from Rouen.
Of his visit we only read that “William Earl came from beyond sea with mickle company of Frenchmen, and the king him received, and as many of his comrades as to him seemed good, and let him go again.” Another account adds that William received great gifts from the King. But William himself in several documents speaks of Edward as his lord; he must therefore at some time have done to Edward an act of homage, and there is no time but this at which