It was found, as far as Earl Robert was concerned, in a wanton breach of common right and of the law of nations, which it was assumed that the King would treat as an act of defiance against his authority. Four Norwegian trading ships had peacefully anchored in some Northumbrian haven. Earl Robert plunders the Norwegian ships. Earl Robert, his nephew Morel, and their followers, wantonly plundered the ships, and took away their whole cargoes. And the tale is told as if the act of plunder was meant directly as an act of rebellion against the King, whose peace was certainly broken in the most outrageous way.[89] The merchants complain to the King. The merchants, despoiled of all that they had, made their way to the King and laid before him their complaint against the Earl of the Northumbrians.[90] Had such an act been done by any of William’s own following, the injured men would most likely have met with no redress. But plunder done by anybody else on his own account was an outrage on the royal authority—​one might perhaps say an encroachment on the royal monopoly of oppression—​with which the Red King was not minded to put up. William straightway sent the strictest and sternest orders to Earl Robert to restore at once all that had been taken from the Norwegian merchants. Robert refuses redress. The Earl scornfully took no notice. The King then asked the amount of the merchants’ losses, and made it good to them from his own hoard. He is summoned to the King’s court. He then summoned the Earl to his court; but he refused to come.[91]

Such is the story which reached the cloister of Saint Evroul, a story altogether likely in itself, and which well fits in with and explains the entries in our own Chronicle. These bring us into the thick of the regular assemblies of this year of assemblies. The gathering at Rockingham dealt wholly with the affairs of Anselm; Gemót of Winchester. March 25, 1095. to the regular Easter assembly at Winchester which so soon followed it, Earl Robert, though specially summoned, refused to come. The King was very wroth against him, and sent word that, if he did not wish to be altogether put out of the King’s peace, he must come to the court to be held at Pentecost.[92] Signs in the heavens seem to have foretold that something was coming. The falling stars. April 4. It was now, on the night of the feast of Easter and again ten days later, that a crowd of stars was seen to fall from heaven, not one or two, but so thickly that no man could tell them.[93] If the stars fought against Malcolm on the day of Saint Brice, it was only in their courses, and no chronicler has recorded the fact. But it looks as if this special Easter shower, of which we have elsewhere heard other meanings,[94] was by some at least held to portend the fall of the great earl of the North. Messages between the King and Robert. The time between Easter and Pentecost, the time so busily occupied in another range of subjects by the coming of Cardinal Walter and the acknowledgement of Pope Urban,[95] was no less busily occupied by an exchange of messages between the King and his undutiful subject. Robert, like Godwine two-and-forty years before, demanded hostages and a safe-conduct, before he would risk himself before the Assembly.[96] This the King refused; Robert, arraigned on a definite charge of open robbery, had no such claim to hostages as Godwine, as King Malcolm, or even as his own neighbour Bishop William. Whitsun Gemót. Windsor, May 13, 1095. The Whitsun-feast was held; the King was at Windsor—​not at Westminster—​and all his Witan with him. Anselm was there, to be received into the King’s favour, and to engage to observe the customs of the realm.[97] But the Earl of the Northumbrians was not there.[98] The two accounts fit in perfectly without contradiction or difficulty. One gives us the cause of the special summons of Earl Robert to the Gemót; the other gives us its exact date and form.

The King’s march. Rufus, thus defied, at once took to arms. It would seem that he did not wholly rely on his mercenaries, but called out the national force of the kingdom.[99] He was again the King of the English, marching at the head of his people. He was marching against the rebel fortresses of the North, as he had once marched against Tunbridge, Pevensey, and Rochester. His motives. But these great preparations were not made simply to avenge the wrongs of the Norwegian merchants. Their wrongs were the outward occasion, and that was all. The refusal of Earl Robert to come to the King’s court was the counterpart of the more general refusal of the Norman nobles to come to the Easter Assembly seven years earlier.[100] The King knew, or had good reason to suspect, that there was again a wide-spread conspiracy afloat to deprive him of his crown and life. Of this conspiracy the open disobedience of Earl Robert was simply the first outward sign; the affair of the Norwegian merchants had merely brought matters to a head. Rufus may even have made use of their wrongs as a pretext for proving Robert’s doubtful loyalty. Robert was as yet the only open rebel. When the King drew the sword, he met with no resistance anywhere save where the Earl of the Northumbrians was in possession. Robert’s accomplices remained accomplices and conspirators; they did not dare to risk the chances of open rebellion. The Earl may have thought that the strength which had twice overcome a King of Scots might defy a King of the English also.[101] Robert resists. At all events, Robert of Mowbray withstood the King in arms, and a stirring and varied campaign followed.

It appears however from an incidental notice that Earl Robert and his fellows by no means trusted only to movements within the realm. Help expected from Normandy. It is certainly strange that a conspiracy in which William of Eu could be even suspected of taking a part should have found any support in Normandy; yet in those times men changed sides so easily that it is not impossible that he might have been again intriguing with Duke Robert himself. It is still more likely that some intrigue was going on, not with the Norman Duke but with the enemies of Rufus in Normandy as well as in England. It is certain that an invasion of south-eastern England was at this time daily dreaded;[102] and it is perhaps more likely that William of Eu, Stephen of Aumale, and the rest, were planning an expedition at their own risk than that Duke Robert was designing anything with the regular forces of Normandy. The invasion was plainly looked on as a serious danger; but there is no reason to think that it ever took place. The King thought it needful to take special means for guarding the coast. The King marches to Nottingham. He had gone on his northern march as far as Nottingham, accompanied not only, as we might expect, by many of his nobles, but what we might less have looked for, by both the archbishops and by the Cardinal Bishop of Albano.[103] Anselm’s command in Kent. One might almost think that some special news was brought to the King at this point; for it was now that Anselm, in this his short season of renewed favour with the King, was sent back to guard his city and diocese. He received the trust from the King’s own mouth; he went back to Canterbury, whither a writ from the King followed him bidding him stay in care of the city, ready at any moment, when news should be brought from the threatened havens, at once to gather together horse and foot for the defence of the land.[104] Anselm went back to his metropolis, and there stayed, as we have seen, ready to discharge these unusual duties, which, as the expected invasion never came, did not in the end involve any military action on his part.

Meanwhile the King went on, taking with him the Archbishop of York, who at Nottingham was already in his own province and diocese. The King draws near to Northumberland. When the march had gone on somewhat further, when the King and his host were drawing near to the borders of the Northumbrian earldom, that is, we may suppose, when they were near the banks of the Tyne, an incident happened which showed that the enemies of Rufus had other schemes besides those of open warfare either at home or abroad.[105] Gilbert of Clare or of Tunbridge, of whom we have already heard as a rebel in earlier days,[106] and who seems now to be looked on as a traitor in the King’s camp, calls the King aside, and, to his amazement, falls at his feet and craves his pardon for his offences. Confession of Gilbert of Clare. Let the King promise him forgiveness, and he will do something which shall deliver him from a great danger.[107] Rufus wonders and hesitates, but, after a little debate in his own mind, he promises the pardon that is asked for. Gilbert then warns the King not to enter a certain wood—​have we again the tale of the hunting-party as the scene of assassination?[108] He was himself one of a body who had plotted the King’s death, and a party of them were now in the wood ready to slay him. He told the King their number and names;[109] but the story reads as if no immediate action was taken against them. The conspirators are baulked of their prey, and the King’s host marches on to attack the fortresses of the rebel Earl.[110]

Defence of Robert’s fortresses. Robert of Mowbray had made good preparations for defence. The main body of his followers, among them the men highest in rank and most trusted in valour, guarded the great frontier fortress of his earldom, The New Castle. the New Castle which Duke Robert had reared to guard the way to the further north by the old line of the Ælian Bridge.[111] Placed opposite the scene of Walcher’s slaughter at Gateshead,[112] it rose above the Tyne with far more of the usual position of a fortress than would be dreamed by one who merely passes so strangely near to it on the modern railway, or who lights almost by chance on gateway and castle imbedded in the streets of the modern town. The gateway, even the keep as it now stands, are both of later date than the time of our story. But the days of Monkchester were passed; the New Castle was already a place of arms, a strong post standing right in the way of the King’s advance against the rebellious land. Lower down the tidal stream, beyond the relics—​they were then still something more than relics—​of the great Roman rampart which left its name at Wallknol, at Wallcar, and at Wallsend[113]—​fast by the mouth of the estuary whose shores and whose waters are now so thickly set with the works of modern industry—​the Tynemouth. Earl’s castle of Tynemouth at once sheltered the rising monastery of Saint Oswine and guarded the approach to the river and to all to which the river led. Tynemouth was held by the Earl’s brother; Bamburgh. Robert himself, far to the north, kept the great stronghold of all, the old seat of Northumbrian power, which frowns over land and sea from the basaltic rock of Bamburgh. The King’s first attack was lucky; we have no details; but we read that the New Castle was taken, and that all the men that were in it were kept in ward. Taking of the New Castle. The choicest men of Earl Robert’s following were thus in the King’s hands; the inland centre of his power was lost; but he and his brother still held out in their fastnesses by the Ocean.

Tynemouth and Bamburgh both stood long sieges. The strong site of the monastic stronghold enabled it to bear up for two months, while the fortress of Ida remained, as far as any strictly military operation was concerned, untaken during the whole war. Siege of Tynemouth. Tynemouth, which had so lately seen the burial of Malcolm, had now to endure the assaults of the royal force in the cause of Malcolm’s chief enemy. The holy place of Saint Oswine was strong alike by nature and art. Description of the site. At the mouth of the great Northumbrian river, on that bank of it which lay within Robert’s earldom, two headlands, divided by a small bay, stand forth boldly to meet the waves of the German Ocean. In later times the fortified precinct took in both points. Both came within the wall and ditch which cut off the peninsulas from the mainland. The castle of Tynemouth, strictly so called, covered the southern height immediately above the river. The northern promontory was crowned by the church and the monastic buildings, themselves sheltered by a vast gatehouse, which itself grew into a castle. Such, there is reason to believe, was the arrangement in the days of Malcolm and William. The castle of Robert of Mowbray rose sheer above the estuary, on its left bank. To the north, on the other headland, protected by a smaller fortress, stood the church and monastery which were growing up at his bidding, a tribute paid by the conquerors to the ancient worthies of the land. The monastic peninsula. The peninsula crowned by the monastic stronghold stretches forth into the waters, like a miniature of that which is at once the oldest and the newest Syracuse, since the art of man joined the island of Ortygia to the mainland of Sicily. While the neck is strengthened by works of defence, the rocky headland rises boldly from the waves on two sides. To the south the ground rises more gently above the bay between the two peninsulas, the bay to which the monastery above it gave the name of the Prior’s haven. The town which grew up in after times sprang up directly to the west of the approach to the northern headland; it now spreads itself on all sides save only on the two headlands themselves. Taking of Tynemouth. July? 1095. The first attack must have been made from the older site of the town; the small fortress, that most likely which guarded the neck of the monastic headland, was taken. The main castle to the south fell at the end of two months, and the Earl’s brother and the knights who defended it shared the fate of the defenders of the New Castle.

And now came the hardest struggle of all, the struggle for the old home of Ida and Bebbe. The castle of Bamburgh. Bebbanburh, Bamburgh—​the royal city of Bernicia, which its founder had fenced first with a hedge and then with a wall or earthwork—​the city small but strong, with its steep height approached only by steps[114]—​though its main purpose was military and not religious, contained within its walls a sanctuary and a relic as worshipful as aught that was sheltered by Tynemouth or Jarrow or Durham itself. The relic of Saint Oswald. The ancient church of Bamburgh was honoured by the presence of the wonder-working hand of the martyred Bretwalda Oswald. That relic had in earlier days helped, along with the prayers of Aidan, to save Bamburgh from the fires of Penda; we are not told whether it was by the favour of the martyr that the elder Waltheof sheltered himself within the impregnable walls, while his valiant son marched forth to victory. The city, the small city which took in the space only of a few fields, had doubtless by this time given way to the Norman fortress, strengthened by all the arts which the Norman had brought with him. The castle precincts, in their widest extent, clearly cover the whole of the ancient site; at the south-western end they are still approached by steps which doubtless represent those which in the days of the old Northumbrian chronicler were the only means of mounting the height. At Bamburgh, as elsewhere, we are met by the never-failing difficulty which besets the student of the castles of that age. Can any of the work at Bamburgh which bears the impress of Norman art be safely assigned to the eleventh century? The keep. Or must we give up all to the twelfth, and believe that no part of the great centre of the building, the keep “huge and square,” was already in being when Robert of Mowbray defied the Red King from his rock? On such a point it is dangerous to be over-positive. The surrounding walls are of all dates down to the basest modern imitations; the chapel which guarded the relic of Saint Oswald, standing apart in the great court with its eastern apse overlooking the sea, was clearly, when perfect, no mean work of the next age. But whatever was the character or the material of the defences of Robert’s day, they were doubtless as strong as any skill within the Northumbrian earldom could make them. There, from the castle raised on the land side on the bulwarks of the rock out of which its walls and bastions grow, rising on the sea side over deep and shifting hills of sand, the eye might take in the long indented coast, the sea dotted with islands of which many play a part in the sacred story of northern England,[115]—​Farn and its fellows hard by, hallowed by the abode and death of Saint Cuthberht—​Holy Island itself further to the north-west, the landscape bounded in the far distance by the border hills of the two British kingdoms, beyond which Malcolm no longer stood ready to ravage the pastures of Northumberland. Robert defends Bamburgh against the King. Within that ancient fortress, rich with so many earlier associations, the proud and gloomy Earl now kept his ground, adding a new and stirring page to the long history of Bamburgh. His brother and his best knights were the King’s prisoners; but, strong on his rocky height, the Earl of the Northumbrians, heedless of the lesson of seven years earlier, dared to bid defiance to the King of the English and to the whole strength of his kingdom.

Strength of the position. And in truth the event proved that the rebellious daring of Robert of Mowbray had better grounds than the daring of those who had held Rochester and Pevensey, Tynemouth and the New Castle, against their sovereign. The well of the purest water, hollowed out on the highest point of the rock, and then, or at some later day, taken in within the massive walls of the huge keep, made Robert safe from all such dangers as threatened the Ætheling Henry when he held out on the rock of Saint Michael.[116] Direct attacks fail. All the power and skill of the Red King was brought to bear upon the ancient stronghold; but all was in vain; the castle of Bebbe was not to be taken by any open attack. William therefore took to slower means of warfare. Making of the Malvoisin. He made one of those towers which were so often made in such cases, to act as a check on the besieged castle, to form in fact an imperfect kind of blockade. This tower must have stood on the land side, to cut off all hope of help from any friendly quarter. It therefore could not have stood very far from the site of the present village; and in the fields nearly south of the castle some faint traces of earthworks seem not unlikely to mark the site of the tower to which the King gave the significant name of Malvoisin. Its effects. The new work is described as exercising all the energies of the royal army, and as striking such fear into the hearts of the besieged that many of Robert’s party now forsook him and entered the King’s service. Alleged despair of Robert. We are even told that the fierce Earl looked out from the height of Bamburgh in all fear and sadness, crying out to his accomplices by name to be mindful of the traitorous oaths which they had sworn to him. The King and his friends were merry as they heard, and none of those who were appealed to, tormented as they were with fear and shame, went back to share the Earl’s waning fortunes. Be this as it may, as far as open force went, Bamburgh and its lord remained unsubdued. The castle still not taken. To bring either of them under his power, the King and his followers were fain to have recourse to false promises and cruel threats.

The Evil Neighbour of Bamburgh was built; it was well stocked with guards, arms, and victuals. But Bamburgh itself was not taken any the more. William did not in this case, as he did in some of his continental enterprises, throw up the whole undertaking, because he did not succeed in the first or second attack. So to have done would have been pretty much the same as throwing up his crown; it would have been to unteach the great lesson of his reign, and to declare that the Earl of the Northumbrians was stronger than the King of the English. He might turn away in wilfulness from this or that Norman or Cenomannian fortress which he had attacked in wilfulness; but he knew the art of reigning better than to leave Bamburgh in the possession of a rebel earl. The King goes away. The work was to go on; but he was so far tired of it that he left it to be done by others. When the Malvoisin was well strengthened, the King turned away, and appeared no more before Bamburgh during the rest of the campaign.

Michaelmas, 1095. When Rufus left Bamburgh, he went southward; he then went to the war in Wales, and left the garrison of the Malvoisin to keep watch over their besieged neighbour. It may be left to casuists in chivalry to judge whether the knightly king approved of the means which were now taken in order to entrap the besieged earl. Robert entrapped by a false message. The garrison of the New Castle, doubtless not without the knowledge of the garrison of the Malvoisin, sent a false message to Robert, saying that, if he came thither privily, he would be received into the castle. The Earl, naturally well pleased at such a prospect of winning back his lost stronghold, set forth by night for the New Castle at the head of thirty knights. The men from the Malvoisin watched and followed him, and sent to the men of the New Castle to say that he was on the way. Knowing nothing of what was going on, Earl Robert drew near to the New Castle on a Sunday, expecting, it would seem, to be received there with welcome. His hopes were vain; he was taken, and the more part of his followers also were taken, killed, or wounded. He flees to Tynemouth. The version which goes most into detail says that, when he saw that he was betrayed by the garrison of the New Castle, he fled, with a part at least of his following, to his own monastery at Tynemouth. It is not easy to see how this could be, unless he was able either to win back the small fortress on the neck of the monastic peninsula, or else to climb up from the seaside at some less steep or less strongly defended point of the height. But the tale is so told that there must be at least some kernel of truth in it. He is besieged in the monastery, We read that the Earl stood something like a siege in his own monastery. He was able, with his small party, to defend himself in it for six days, and to kill and wound many of his assailants. At last, on the sixth day, he himself received a severe wound in the leg; the whole of his followers were taken, some of them also as wounded men. The Earl, himself among the latter, contrived to drag himself to the church of his own rearing, where still lay the body of the Scottish King whom some looked on as his victim. If claims of sanctuary were thought of, they were not allowed, and one who had turned the consecrated precinct into a castle had perhaps little claim to plead such privileges, even within his own foundation. taken, and imprisoned. Earl Robert was dragged away from his own church, and was kept in prison to await the King’s pleasure.

Bamburgh defended by Matilda of Laigle. A tale of twenty years back now repeats itself in our story. A strong castle is again defended by a valiant bride. As Norwich, after the revolt and flight of Ralph of Wader, was defended by Emma of Breteuil, so Bamburgh, after the revolt and capture of Robert of Mowbray, was defended by Matilda of Laigle. Married just as the revolt broke out, she had had, we are told, but little taste of joyful or peaceful wedlock; but she was at least zealous in the cause of her husband. She had Morel to her counsellor and captain, and the two held out in the ancient stronghold against all attacks. November, 1095. It was now winter, and King William had come back from Snowdon, not covered with much glory. He felt no mind to renew the siege of Bamburgh in his own person; but he bade that the captive Earl should be taken thither, and led before the walls, with the threat to his wife and nephew that, if the castle was not at once given up, the eyes of its lord should be then and there seared out in their sight. She yields to save her husband’s eyes. To this threat Matilda and Morel yielded, and the gates of the unconquered fortress were thrown open to the King’s forces. The valiant Countess thus saved her husband’s eyes; but his eyes were all that she could save. Robert was sent back to prison at Windsor, to live in bonds, at least for a season, and in no case to return to the rights and duties of an earl or a husband. Later history of Robert; two versions. But there are two widely different stories as to his later fate. The local history of Saint Alban’s told how one who, however guilty towards others, was at least a benefactor to that house, was allowed to spend his remaining days as a monk within its walls. At Saint Evroul a widely different tale was believed. It was there recorded by the contemporary writer that Robert survived his capture thirty years, but that the whole of that time was passed in hopeless imprisonment. If so, he must have been looked on as dangerous by the calm prudence of Henry no less than by the wrath or the revenge of Rufus. The story indeed runs that his imprisonment was deemed so irrevocable that it was held to amount to a civil death. The once proud Earl of Northumberland was counted to have passed away from among men as much as if the grave had closed over him alongside of Malcolm in his own Tynemouth. Later history of Matilda; her second marriage and divorce. By a special permission from Pope Paschal, Matilda was allowed to marry again, as though she had been his widow and not his wife. Nigel of Albini became her second husband; but, after the death of her brother Gilbert of Laigle, he thought he could better himself by marriage in another quarter. His marriage with Matilda was declared void, not on the ground that Robert was alive, but because of some kindred, real or alleged, between Robert and Nigel. The papal dispensation must have been badly drawn, if it did not provide for the lesser irregularity as well as for the greater. Of Matilda we hear no more; Nigel took him another wife of the house of Gournay. Gerard had by that time died on his way to the crusade;[117] his widow Eadgyth had married again, and their son Hugh was lord of Gournay. Their daughter, who inherited the name of Gundrada from her mother’s mother, took the place of the forsaken Matilda, who was thus left in a strange plight, as the widow, so to speak, of two living husbands.

Morel turns King’s evidence. Meanwhile her partner in the defence of Bamburgh, Morel, the nephew and steward of the fallen Earl, made his peace with the King by naming all who had any share in the late conspiracy. Not a few men of high rank, clerical and lay, were accused by him.[118] The time of the Midwinter Gemót drew nigh, at which the offenders would regularly be brought for trial. The King’s prisons were full,[119] and he determined that the gaol delivery should be a striking and a solemn one. Christmas Gemót of 1095–1096. The Assembly of that Christmas-tide was to be a Mickle Gemót indeed, a Gemót like those which had gathered in King Eadward’s day beneath the walls of London and in King William’s day upon the plain of Salisbury. A summons of special urgency went forth, bidding all men who held any land of the King, if they wished to be deemed worthy of the King’s peace, to come to his court at the appointed time.[120] The call was answered. The appointed place of meeting was Windsor, and there the Assembly came together. But the business to be done needed a longer time than the usual twelve days of Christmas, and the gathering was greater than the royal castle and its courts could hold. Adjourned from Windsor to Salisbury. January 13, 1096. The work began at Windsor; but an adjournment was needed, and on the octave of the Epiphany in the opening year we find the King and his Witan at Salisbury.[121] The wide fields which had seen the great review and the great homage in the days of the elder William could alone hold the crowd which came together to share in the great court of doom which was now holden by the younger.

Constitutional importance of the meeting. The Gemót of this winter, and specially the strict general summons sent forth by the King, are of high constitutional importance. They show how, even under such a king as Rufus, the old constitutional forms went on. They show how great is the error of those who dream that the Norman kingship in England was as thorough a despotism in form as it undoubtedly was in substance. Continuance of the old forms. In the eleventh century, as in the sixteenth, the whole future of English history turned on the fact that constitutional forms still went on, that assemblies were still brought together, even if they came together for little more than to register the edicts of the King.[122] So now Rufus himself, when about to make a great display of kingly power, specially summons no small part of the nation to take a share in his acts. Import of the summons. On the one hand, the need of the summons shows that, unless at some specially exciting moment, men did not flock eagerly to such gatherings.[123] On the other hand, the fact of the summons shows that kings then knew, that Rufus himself knew, that the gathering of such an assembly was both a sign and a source, not of weakness but of strength, on the part of the kingly power.[124] But in the form of the summons we may see that the assembly, though still large, is gradually narrowing. Tenants-in-chief only summoned. The summons goes, not to all freemen, not to all land-owners, but only to the King’s tenants-in-chief. Their great number. These, it must be remembered, were a very large body, including land-owners on every scale, from the greatest to the smallest. And it must be further remembered that in this body a vast majority of the influential members were strangers by birth, but that a great numerical proportion, most likely a numerical majority, were natives. The King’s thegn, who had kept a scrap of his old estate, was as much a member of the court as Earl Hugh of Shrewsbury or Earl Walter of Buckingham, though he was not so likely to be listened to in any debate that might arise as Earl Hugh or Earl Walter was. Still the special summons to the King’s tenants-in-chief marks a change; it marks the growth of the new ideas. The immediate reason was doubtless to be found in the main object for which the Assembly came together. The main work of the earlier Gemót of Salisbury was that all men in the realm, of whatever lord they held, should become the men of the King. Comparison with the Conqueror’s Gemót at Salisbury. William the Great therefore summoned the men of other lords, who had not up to that moment been his own men, who owed obedience to him as head of the kingdom, but who was not bound to him by any more personal tie. He summoned them in order that they might bind themselves to him by that personal tie, that they might become his men as well as his subjects. But the main work of the present Gemót was to sit in judgement on a crowd of offenders, of various ranks and orders, but all of whom were likely to be tenants-in-chief of the King. According to the notions which were coming in, the right court for their trial was the court of their peers, their fellow tenants-in-chief. The King, who could summon whom he would, who sometimes summoned few and sometimes many, this time, for this special purpose, summoned the whole body of his tenants-in-chief, great and small, and summoned no others. Effects of the practice of summons. But, as every summons tends practically to the exclusion of those who are not summoned, this summons of a particular class marks a stage in the process by which the Assembly shrank up from the crowd which decreed the restoration of Godwine to a House of Lords of the reign of Henry the Eighth.[125] Still the actual gathering, even of the summoned members only, must have been very great. Action of the Assembly. When it came together, the Assembly must have followed the same law as all other assemblies of that age. Practically it decreed as the King willed; only a few of the great men were likely to say anything to guide the King’s will; the mass of the assembly were not likely to do more than to make the King’s acts their own by crying Yea, Yea. We must however remember that they had not the slightest temptation to cry Nay, Nay. No general sympathy with the accused. The mass of the inhabitants of the land, Norman and English alike, were not likely to have the faintest sympathy with any one who really had a share in the late treason. The only question was whether any were accused who had no share in it. In the case of those who were charged only with conspiracy and not with open revolt, this might easily be. Otherwise the Red King, in the vengeance which he now took, did no more than justice, as justice was deemed in his day. But his justice was far sharper than the justice of the old kings, far sharper than the justice of his father. And the tone in which the story is told implies that men at the time felt that it was so.

Sickness of the Bishop of Durham. One of the great men of the realm, who, whether guilty or not, seems to have been at least suspected, died, while the Assembly was in session, before any formal charge had been brought against him. Before the Bishop of Durham came to Windsor, it was known in his own diocese that he had not long to live. Portents foretelling his death. One of his knights, Boso by name, had, while lying under a dangerous sickness, been favoured with trances and visions, which told him much that was comforting about the monks of Durham, and much that was fearful about other folk. He saw the old inhabitants of the land, he saw the new French settlers, above all, he saw the priests’ wives—​these seem to be looked on as three classes of offenders, gradually increasing in blackness—​suffering each a grievous doom.[126] His visions about the Bishop himself might perhaps point to an intermediate destiny; at all events they were understood as implying his speedy death.[127] His work at Durham. 1083. 1093. His work perhaps was done. Thirteen years before he had filled the church of Durham with monks;[128] three years before he had begun the great work of its rebuilding; and, by pressing it on with almost incredible speed, he had carried it on so far as to set an example of unsurpassed grandeur in its own style, an example which his own monks could not follow, but which Randolf Flambard could.[129] He is summoned to take his trial. William of Saint-Calais came to the Gemót, and was summoned by the King to appear to take his trial.[130] He pleaded sickness as his excuse for not appearing. Rufus declared, with his usual oath, that the excuse was a feigned one.[131] He sickens and dies. December 25, 1095-January 1, 1096. It was however thoroughly real. Bishop William was sick, and sick unto death. He was smitten on the day of the Nativity, and died on the day of the Circumcision.[132] His death-bed. He was comforted in his sickness by the presence and exhortations of several of his brother bishops who had come together for the business of the Assembly. There was Anselm whom he had withstood at Rockingham; there was his own metropolitan Thomas; there was Walkelin of Winchester; there was John of Bath, born, like himself and Anselm, beyond the bounds either of England or of Normandy. Debate as to his burying-place. These prelates debated concerning the place of his burial. They argued that he who had done such great things for Saint Cuthberht’s abbey should be buried in the place of highest honour within its walls. He himself declined any such place. He would be no party to any breach of Saint Cuthberht’s own rule, which forbade that any man should be buried within his minster.[133] The bishops therefore ruled that he should be buried in the chapter-house, so that his monks, when they came together, should have the tomb of their founder ever before their eyes.[134] So it was; He is buried in the chapter-house. he was borne to Durham, and there laid in the place which the bishops had chosen for him, among the tears and wailings of the brotherhood which he had founded, any one of whom, we are told, would gladly have died for him.[135]

This touching picture of the death which ended the varied life of William of Saint-Calais comes as an episode in the middle of the stern doings of the Gemót of Windsor and Salisbury. The Red King did not bear the sword in vain. Sentences of the Gemót. Yet, if his justice was sharp towards those whom it did smite, it was certainly somewhat capricious, or at least guided by expediency, with regard to those whom it smote and those whom it failed to smite. Some of the offenders were men of the highest rank, some even, it is implied, of the rank of Earl. But these powerful rebels, ashamed and weakened by the fall of their brother of Northumberland, were now deemed fitting objects of mercy. By the advice of the Wise Men, they were spared a public trial;[136] but some of them were made to pay a heavy price for being left safe in life, limb, and estate. Hugh of Shrewsbury buys his pardon. One is mentioned by name. Earl Hugh of Shrewsbury, who was at least suspected of a share in the plot, was dealt with privately by the King as his father had been at Arundel.[137] He bought his restoration to favour at the high price of three thousand pounds.[138] Roger of Lacy. Roger of Lacy lost his lands and was banished, as he would have been in the days of King Eadward, and his possessions were given to his loyal brother Hugh. But heavier penalties, unknown in King Eadward’s days, were in store for others of the conspirators, including one of the loftiest descent. January 13, 1097. At the adjourned meeting at Salisbury, Geoffrey of Baynard, bearing a name famous in London city, appealed no less a man than William of Eu of treason against the King, of conspiring to slay him, and to give his crown to Stephen of Champagne.[139] Combat of Geoffrey of Baynard and William of Eu. The charge was denied, and, as both parties were Frenchmen, the trial was, by the law of the Conqueror, referred to the wager of battle. The judicial combat which followed is memorable in the history of the time, and forms one of the landmarks in our early jurisprudence.

Defeat of William of Eu. On the plain of Salisbury the combatants met, and William of Eu was overthrown.[140] By the laws of the combat his defeat was full evidence of his guilt. But what was to be his punishment? Save the case of the beheading of Waltheof, there was no precedent in the ordinary jurisprudence either of England or of Normandy for any sentence harsher than banishment, forfeiture, and imprisonment.[141] The older English precedents went for banishment and forfeiture. The precedents of Normandy and of Norman rule in England went for imprisonment, such an imprisonment, it might be, as that of Robert of Mowbray. For the course actually taken there was no precedent in either land, unless it were the dealings of Harold the son of Cnut with the Ætheling Ælfred.[142] Sentence of mutilation on William of Eu. The punishment decreed was that of bodily mutilation. Urged by Hugh of Chester. It is said that this course was proposed by Earl Hugh of Chester, and that on a singular ground. William of Eu was the husband of the Earl’s sister—​her name is not mentioned. He had neglected his wife, while he had three children by a mistress.[143] If this was to be ground for the loss of eyes or limbs, the brothers of the Countess Ermentrude would have had a right to demand that the portly person of Earl Hugh should be cut down to a shapeless trunk.[144] Feeling with regard to mutilation. Mutilation, it should be remembered, was a familiar punishment, a punishment which in that generation aroused no horror when the persons so dealt with were held to be real criminals.[145] But, with that common inconsistency which reverses the sound rule of smiting the leaders and sparing the commons, mutilation, death, or any heavy punishment, seems always to have aroused horror, or at least amazement, when it was inflicted on any criminal of lofty rank. Such things had been done in the isle of Britain and out of it, but hardly by the solemn sentence of the King of the English at the head of his Witan. But now William of Eu was blinded, and underwent a fouler mutilation as well.[146] His sentence was seemingly carried out at Salisbury, perhaps in sight of the assembly. Are we to infer that any show of indignation was called forth by the bloody sight, when we read directly afterwards that some of the lord of Eu’s fellow-sufferers were taken to London, and were blinded or otherwise mutilated there?[147]

Story of Arnulf of Hesdin. If we may trust a tale to be found in one of those secondary writers who often preserve scraps of truth, another accused man appealed to the wager of battle with better luck than William of Eu. This was Arnulf of Hesdin, a man whose name is familiar enough to us in Domesday, though it does not call up any distinct personal idea like the King’s unlucky kinsman.[148] He is set before us as a man of great bodily stature, brave and active, and in the enjoyment of large possessions, out of which he and his wife Emmeline had made gifts to the abbey of Gloucester.[149] He was charged, unjustly and enviously we are told, with the same crime as the rest.[150] His innocence proved by battle. He defended himself by his champion, who proved his lord’s innocence by overthrowing a man of the King’s who was matched against him.[151] But Arnulf was so stirred up with wrath and grief at the unjust charge, that, notwithstanding the King’s entreaties to stay, he threw up all the lands that he held of him, and left England for ever.[152] He goes to the Crusade, Before the end of the year, the Crusade offered him worthy occupation elsewhere. He marched with the Christian host as far as Antioch; he there fell sick, and declined all medical help; none should heal him save Him for whose sake he had gone on pilgrimage. and dies. Arnulf, professing the opposite doctrine to Asa of Judah, fared no better than that king. Antioch was the last stage reached by the armed pilgrim of Hesdin.[153]

Confiscation of lands. Arnulf, according to this story, became landless, as far as England was concerned, by his own act. Others underwent the same loss by sentence, it seems, of the Assembly. Count Odo of Champagne and many others lost their lands.[154] In one case only does death seem to have been inflicted. William of Alderi is condemned to death. William of Alderi, cousin and steward of William of Eu, was, as the Chronicle tells us, “hanged on rood.”[155] This somewhat startling formula doubtless means nothing but ordinary hanging; but it seemingly marks hanging of any kind as something which was not ordinary. As to the guilt or innocence of William of Alderi we have contradictory accounts. One weighty authority declares him to have been a sharer in the plot.[156] Others class him among many brave and guiltless men who were ruined by the charges brought by Morel and by Geoffrey of Baynard.[157] Guilty or innocent, he was, we are told, a man of high birth, goodly presence, and lofty spirit.[158] He was moreover the King’s gossip, bound to him by the same tie which bound Morel to Malcolm. We thus incidentally learn that there were those whom William Rufus had held at the font, and for whose Christian faith and Christian life he had pledged himself. But the spiritual kindred went for nothing with the Red King. The King refuses to spare him. Many of the great men are said to have earnestly begged for the life of William of Alderi, and to have striven to move the King’s greed by a mighty bribe. The Conqueror had refused Harold’s weight in gold as the price of his Christian burial; his son refused three times the weight of William of Alderi, both in gold and in silver, as the price of his life.[159] Why Rufus was so bent on his death does not appear; but nothing could move him. It marks the way in which the King’s will practically ordered everything, even in so great an assembly of the realm as that which had now come together, that William of Alderi was condemned and hanged without any attempt to rescue him, though many believed him to be guiltless, and though powerful men were eager to save him. His pious end. When hope was gone, he made an ending at once as pious and, according to the ideas of other ages, more manly than the ending of Waltheof. He confessed his sins to Bishop Osmund, and was, seemingly at his own asking, scourged in the new-built minster and the other churches of the city on the waterless hill.[160] Then he gave away his clothes to the poor, and went naked or slightly clad to the place of hanging, staining his limbs with blood by often kneeling on the rough stones.[161] The Bishop and a crowd of people followed him to the place. He then made the most solemn protestations of his innocence. The Bishop sprinkled him with holy water, said the commendatory prayer, and then withdrew.[162] It was not for Osmund of Salisbury, whatever it might have been for Odo of Bayeux or Geoffrey of Coutances, to look on what was next to come. The work of death was then done, and all who beheld wondered that not a groan escaped the victim as death drew near, and not a sigh in the act of dying.[163]

Last days of William of Eu. There was thus a marked difference in the fate of the kinsmen and chief officers of the two leaders, if leaders they both were, in the conspiracy. The steward and cousin of William of Eu was done to death, while his master underwent a fate which to modern ideas seems worse than death. We are not told how long William of Eu lived on in blindness and misery; but his punishment did not involve forfeiture, at all events not corruption of blood; for a few years later we find his son Henry in possession of his county.[164] End of Morel. The steward and nephew of Robert of Mowbray seems to have gained but little by the act which, if it were formally allowed to be loyalty to the King, was likely to be far more commonly looked on as treason to his immediate lord. When he saw that his kinsman and master was condemned to life-long bonds, he left England, and died in banishment, poor and hated of all men.[165]

§ 3. The Conquest and Revolt of Wales.
1093–1097.

Relations with Wales. These years, so rich in events in Scotland and on the English lands nearest to the Scottish border, were at least equally rich in events on the other border of the English kingdom, towards the lands which were still held by the remnant of our British predecessors. Wars with the Welsh may be looked for, as a matter of course, in every reign during this period; but in the reign of William Rufus such wars form a special feature, and the position which they hold is a little singular. Nature of the Welsh wars of Rufus. It is plain from the records of the time, it is still plainer from the results, that this reign was a time of great and lasting advance at the cost of the Britons. It was the time when large parts of Wales were more or less fully brought under the authority of the English crown. Territorial advance and military ill-success. It is still more distinctly the time when Norman adventurers, subjects of the English crown, carved out for themselves, as its vassals, possessions and lordships within the British land. Yet the first impression which we draw from the writers who record the British warfare of this reign is that it was a time of ill success on the English side, especially in those campaigns in which the King himself took a part. The Chronicler records an expedition, and he sends up a wail at its ill luck. Nothing came of it; horses and men not a few were lost; the Welsh escaped to their moors and mountains where no man might come at them. One chief is put to flight in a battle, but the others go on doing mischief all the same.[166] The same story comes almost every year; one would think that the warfare of the Red King with the Welsh was a warfare than which none was ever more bootless. And a historian who aspires to more of critical and philosophical insight sums up the whole British warfare of the reign as a distinct case of failure.[167] Yet it is clear from the result that it was not so. And one passage in the Chronicle seems to give us the key to the whole matter. “When the King saw that he could there further nothing of his will, he came back into this land, and took rede that he might let make castles on the borders.”[168] Effect of the building of castles. An expedition which seemed mere failure, in which many men and horses were lost, while the Welsh escaped to moors and mountains with hardly any loss at all, was really successful in the long run, if it led to the building of a border castle. The Britons fled unhurt to their mountains; but while they lurked in the fastnesses where none might come at them, the most valuable part of their land was taken from them bit by bit. When they came down again from the mountains, they found a castle built, they found so much land as the castle could protect changed into a settlement of strangers. The lands might be harried; the castle might at some favourable moment be broken down; but it was sure to spring up again and again to do its work. The lasting possession of the fertile land had passed away to the invaders; the moors and mountains alone were left to the sons of the soil.

Welsh campaigns of Harold and of William Rufus. The mention of these Welsh wars naturally carries us back to the thought of the great Welsh campaign of a generation earlier. We see how true, from one point of view, was the saying of the next century that none since Harold had known how to deal with the Welsh as Harold had known.[169] As a matter of military success, the failures of William Rufus stand out in marked contrast to the victories of Harold. The Red King had no pillars to set up to mark where he had overcome the Briton in open fight.[170] A single word helps us to at least one part of the cause. Use of horses. Harold, in his victorious campaign, must have undergone some loss of men, but he underwent no loss of horses. He found that the English tactics were not suited for British warfare, and he made his housecarls turn themselves into light-armed Welshmen.[171] But the Norman tactics were still less suited for British warfare than the English. There were places in the moors and mountains which the mailed housecarl might reach, if with difficulty, but which the mounted knight could not reach at all. But William Rufus does not seem to have suited his tactics to the country as Harold had done; the mention of horses suggests that he repeated the old mistake of Ralph the Timid in a worse shape.[172] Immediate defeat and lasting success. As a matter of fighting then, Rufus failed where Harold had succeeded; but as a matter of enduring conquest, the failures of Rufus did more than the successes of Harold. Harold indeed had no general schemes of Welsh conquest. Different objects of Harold and Rufus. He overthrew the Welsh; but, except in the districts which were definitely ceded to England,[173] he made no attempt to occupy Wales. He gave back the land whose people he had overcome to princes of their own blood, bound to him simply by their oath of homage.[174] But wherever Rufus or his lords planted a castle, there was at once a piece of Welsh soil occupied, and a centre made ready for occupying more. The object of Harold in short was simply the defence of England; the object of William Rufus was the conquest of Wales.

Comparison of the conquest of Wales with the English and Norman Conquests. The conquest which now began, that which we may call either the English or the Norman Conquest of Wales, differed widely both from the English Conquest of Britain and from the Norman Conquest of England. It wrought far less change than the landing at Ebbsfleet; it wrought far more change than the landing at Pevensey. The Briton of those lands which in the Red King’s day were still British was gradually conquered; he was gradually brought under English rule and English law; but he was neither exterminated nor enslaved nor wholly assimilated. He still abides in his ancient land, still speaking his ancient tongue. The English or Norman Conquest of Wales was not a national migration, like the English Conquest of Britain. Nor was it a conquest wrought under the guise of an elaborate legal fiction, like the Norman Conquest of England. William Rufus did not ask the people of Wales to receive him as their own lawful king; he did not give himself out to all mankind as the true heir of Gruffydd the son of Llywelyn, defrauded of his rights by perjured usurpers. Europe had passed the stage at which a conquest of the earlier kind was possible; and there was in this case no excuse or opportunity for a conquest of the later kind. William Rufus was not a man to seek, like his father, to justify his acts by legal fictions; nor had he the same room for devising them as his father had. He had doubtless, with the crown of the Old-English kings, inherited their claims to Imperial supremacy over the whole island; he called himself “Monarch of Britain” no less than the kings who had gone before him.[175] But that monarchy gave him no claim to bring the lands of his subordinate princes under his immediate rule. If an invasion of Wales needed any justification in the eyes of William Rufus and his barons, that justification would take the shape of reprisals. We may be sure that there was no moment when the men on the border, either on the English or the Welsh side, could not have brought some complaint against the other side which might have been deemed to justify reprisals by a more scrupulous prince than the Red King. But for men like the Norman adventurers of his day it was enough that a land adjoining to the land which they had made their own lay open to be conquered. Geographical conditions of the conquest. Therein lay another great difference between this conquest and either of the other two conquests with which we have compared it, in the fact that the land to be won lay adjoining to the land which was already won. The Angles and Saxons wholly forsook their old homes beyond the sea, and, if the Normans in England did not in the same way wholly forsake theirs, the sea at least rolled between the old home and the new. But the Norman whose lot was cast on the Welsh frontier of England had nothing to do but to press on from the point where he already was. He had simply to add on the next field to his own field, subject to such resistance as the actual occupiers of the next field might be able to make. From this geographical cause, while the Norman Conquest of England was in no sense an extension of Normandy, the English or Norman Conquest of Wales was in every sense an extension of England. Extension of England by conquest and settlement. The Normans in England did not bring Normandy with them; they had from the very beginning to put on more or less fully the character of Englishmen, and to live according to English law. But the Norman who from England went on into Wales had no thought of putting on the character of a Welshman or of living according to Welsh law. Wherever he settled, he most truly carried England with him, such as England had been made through his own coming. But then for a long time he settled only here and there in the British land. Where he did settle, the speech, the laws, the national life, of the Briton passed away in such sort as the speech, the laws, the national life, of the Englishman never at any moment passed away from England. But alongside of these conquered districts there long remained independent districts, where the natives under their native princes still bade defiance to the invaders. England had already an uniform aspect; it was the old England with certain changes; its laws were the laws of King Eadward with the amendments of King William. Wales, for a long while after the time with which we are now dealing, was as far from uniformity as any land east of the Hadriatic. Various elements in Wales. Here was the castle of the Norman lord, with his following, Norman, English, Flemish, anything but British. Here was the newly-founded town, with its free burghers, again Norman, English, Flemish, anything but British. Here again was a whole district from which the Briton had passed away as thoroughly as he had passed away from Kent or Norfolk, but which the Norman had not taken into his own hands. The Flemings. He had found that it suited his purpose to leave it in the hands of the hardy and industrious Fleming, the last wave of Low-Dutch occupation in the isle of Britain. And alongside of all, there was the still independent Briton, still keeping his moors and mountains, still ready to pour down from them upon the richer lands which had been his fathers’, but which had passed into the stranger’s grasp. Those days have long passed away; for three centuries and more Briton and Englishmen have been willing members of a common state, willing subjects of a common sovereign. But the memory of those days has not passed away; it abides in the most living of all witnesses. Endurance of the Welsh language. England has for ages spoken a single tongue, her own ancient speech, modified by the coming of the conquerors of eight hundred years ago. But in Wales the speech of her conquerors, the speech of England, is still only making its way, slowly and fitfully, against the abiding resistance of that stubborn British tongue which has survived three conquests.[176]

Local nomenclature of Wales. The results of this state of things, where so many contending elements so long stood side by side, are still to be seen on the face of the British land. The local nomenclature of Wales tells a wholly different tale from that of England. Contrast with that of England. In England the nomenclature is everywhere essentially Teutonic; we might say that it is everywhere essentially English; for the names given by the Danes form one class along with those given by the Angles and Saxons, as opposed either to Celtic survivals or to Romance intruders. Both these two last classes are in England mere exceptions to the general law of Teutonic nomenclature. Teutonic and French names. But in Wales, while the great majority of the names are Celtic, the Teutonic names are somewhat more than exceptions. In some districts, as I have already said, they are the all but invariable rule. French names, too, though not very common, are, I think, less rare than in England. Places bearing two names. Nothing is more common than for a place to bear different names, according as English or Welsh is spoken. And these names sometimes translate one another, and sometimes do not. All this is natural in a land where distinct and hostile races so long dwelled side by side, each one a thorn in the side of the others. It marks a kind of conquest different alike from the conquest where the conquered vanish from the soil and from the conquest where they swallow up their conquerors.