William Talvas, says the tale, in the days of his prosperity, was one day in the streets of Falaise, a town where the close neighbourhood of his possessions doubtless made him well known. The babe William, the son of the Duke and Herleva, was being nursed in the house of his maternal grandfather. A burgher, meeting the baron, bade him step in and see the son of his lord. William Talvas entered the house and looked on the babe. He then cursed him, saying that, by that child and his descendants, himself and his descendants would be brought to shame.[547] A curse from the mouth of William Talvas might almost be looked on as a blessing, and the form of the prediction was such as to come very near to the nature of a panegyric. It is indeed the highest praise of the babe who then lay in his cradle, that he did something to bring to shame, something to bring under the restraints of law and justice, men like the hoary sinner who instinctively saw in him the destined enemy of his kind. But the words, when uttered, would be meant and understood simply as a protest against the insult which was preparing for the aristocratic pride of the great Norman houses. Possibly indeed the tale, like other tales of the kind, may have been devised after the event; still it would mark none the less truly the feelings with which a man like William Talvas, boasting of a descent from the original conquerors of the land, looked on the unworthy sovereign whom destiny seemed to be providing for them.
Duke Robert however was bent on his purpose. He gathered an assembly of the great men of his Duchy, among whom the presence of Archbishop Robert, perhaps as being a possible competitor for the succession, is specially mentioned.[548] The Duke set forth his intention of visiting the Holy Sepulchre, and told his hearers, that, aware of the dangers of such a journey, he wished to settle the succession to the Duchy before he set out. The voice of the Assembly bade him stay at home and continue to discharge the duties of government in person, especially at a time when there was no one successor or representative to whom they could be entrusted with any chance of the general good will. It was of course desirable to stave off the question. Robert might yet have legitimate heirs; or, in the failure of that hope, the Norman chiefs might gradually come to an agreement in favour of some other candidate. Let the Duke stay at home and guard his Duchy against the pretensions of the Breton and the Burgundian.[549] But Robert would brook no delay in the accomplishment of his pious purpose; he would go at |He proposes William as his successor.| once to the Holy Land; he would settle the succession before he went. He brought forward the young William, and acknowledged him as his son. He was little, he told them, but he would grow; he was one of their own stock, brought up among them.[550] His overlord the King of the French had engaged to acknowledge and protect him.[551] He called on them to accept, to choose—the never-ceasing mixture of elective and hereditary claims appears here as everywhere—the child as their future Lord, as his successor in the Duchy, should he never return from the distant land to which he was bound.[552] The Normans were in a manner entrapped. There can be no doubt that nothing could be further from the wishes of the majority of the Assembly than to agree to the Duke’s proposal; but there was nothing else to be done. If Robert could not be prevailed on to stay at home, some settlement must be made; and, little as any of them liked the prospect of the rule of the young Bastard, there was no other candidate in whose favour all parties could come to an agreement |William’s succession accepted.| on the spot. Unwillingly then the Norman nobility consented; they accepted the only proposal which was before them; they swore the usual oaths, and did homage to the son of Herleva as their future sovereign.[553] The kinsmen of Gunnor, the descendants of the comrades of Rolf, became the men of the Tanner’s grandson, and he himself was received as the man of King Henry at Paris.[554] As far as forms went, no form was wanting which could make William’s succession indisputably lawful. Duke Robert then set forth on the pilgrimage from which he never returned. Within a few months, his short life and |William succeeds his father in the Duchy. 1035.| reign came to an end at Nikaia.[555] Thus, in the same year which beheld the great Empire of Cnut parted among his sons, did William, the seven years old grandson of the Tanner Fulbert, find himself on the seat of Rolf and Richard the Fearless, charged with the mission to keep down, as his infant hands best might, the turbulent spirits who had been unwillingly beguiled into acknowledging him as their sovereign.
Anarchy at once broke forth; all the evils which attend a minority in a rude age were at once poured forth upon the unhappy Duchy. We see the wisdom with which the custom of our own and of most contemporary lands provided that the government of men should be entrusted to those only who had themselves at least reached man’s estate. In England the exceptional minorities of the sons of Eadmund and of Eadgar had been calamitous, but they were nothing to compare to the minority of William of Normandy. In England the custom of regular national assemblies, the habit of submitting all matters to a fair vote, the recognition of the Law as supreme over every man, hindered the state from falling into utter dissolution, even in those perilous times. The personal reign of Æthelred proved far weaker than the administration which Dunstan carried on in his name in his early years. But in Normandy, where constitutional ideas had found so imperfect a developement as compared with England, there was nothing of this kind to fall back upon. Nothing but the personal genius of a determined and vigorous Prince could keep that fierce nobility in any measure of order. With the accession of an infant there at once ceased to be any power to protect or to punish. “Woe |Childhood of William.| to the land whose King is a child” is the apt quotation of an historian of the next age.[556] The developement of the young Duke both in mind and body was undoubtedly precocious; but his early maturity was mainly owing to the stern discipline of that terrible childhood. It was in those years that he learned the arts which made Normandy, France, and England bow before him; but, at the age of seven years, William himself was no more capable than Æthelred of personally wielding the rod of rule. The child had good and faithful guardians, guardians perhaps no less well disposed to fulfil their trust towards him than Dunstan had been towards the children of Eadgar. But there was no one man in Normandy to whom every Norman could look up as every Englishman had looked up to the mighty Primate, and the bowl and the dagger soon deprived the young Prince of the support of his wisest and truest counsellors. The minority of William was truly a time when every man did that which was right in his own eyes. And what seemed right in the eyes of the nobles of Normandy was commonly |Utter anarchy of the time.| rebellion against their sovereign, ruthless oppression of those beneath them, and endless deadly feuds with one another. We have already seen some specimens of their crimes in the doings of the house of Belesme. That house is indeed always spoken of as exceptionally wicked; but a state of things in which such deeds could be done, and could go unpunished, must have come very nearly to a complete break-up of society. The general pictures which we find given us of the time are fearful beyond expression. Through the withdrawal of all controlling power, every landowner became a petty sovereign, and began to exercise all the sovereign rights of slaughter and devastation. |Building of castles.| The land soon bristled with castles. The mound crowned with the square donjon rose as the defence or the terror of every lordship.[557] This castle-building |Building of castles.| is now spoken of in Normandy with a condemnation nearly as strong as that with which it was spoken of in England, when, a few years after this time, the practice was introduced into England by the Norman favourites of Eadward.[558] But there is a characteristic difference in the tone of the two complaints. The English complaint always is that the Frenchmen built castles and oppressed the poor folk,[559] or that they did all possible evil and shame to their English neighbours.[560] The Norman complaint, though not wholly silent as to the oppression of the humbler ranks,[561] yet dwells mainly on the castle-building as a sign of rebellion against the authority of the Prince, and as an occasion of warfare between baron and baron. And it would have been well for the reputation of the Norman nobles of that age if they had confined themselves to open warfare with one another and open rebellion against their sovereign. |Frequency of assassinations.| But they sank below the common morality of their own age; private murder was as familiar to them as open war. The house of Belesme had a bad preeminence in this as in other crimes; but, if they had a preeminence, they were far from having a monopoly. Probably no period of the same length in the history of Christendom contains the record of so many foul deeds of slaughter and mutilation as the early years of the reign of William. And they were constantly practised, not only against avowed and armed enemies, but against unarmed and unsuspecting guests. Some of the tales may be inventions or exaggerations; but the days in which such tales could even be invented must have been full of deeds of horror. Isolated cases of similar crimes may doubtless be found in any age; but this period is remarkable alike for the abundance of crimes, for the rank of the criminals, and for the impunity which they enjoyed. To control these men was the duty laid upon the almost infant years of William, a duty with which nothing short of his own full and matured powers might seem fit to grapple. Yet over all these difficulties the genius of the |Effects of William’s government in Normandy.| great Duke was at last triumphant. His hand brought order out of the chaos, and changed a land wasted by rebellion and intestine warfare into one of the most prosperous regions of Europe, a land flourishing as no Norman ruler had seen it flourish before. When we think of the days in which William spent his youth, of the men against whom his early years were destined to be one continued struggle, we shall be less inclined to lift up our hands in horror at his later crimes than to dwell with admiration on the large share of higher and better qualities which, among all his evil deeds, clave to him to his dying day.
We have seen among what kind of men the young Duke of the Normans had to pass the first years of his life and sovereignty. But his father, in leaving his one lamb among so many wolves, had at least provided him with trustworthy |Alan of Britanny.| guardians. Alan of Britanny, a possible competitor for the Duchy, a neighbouring prince with whom Duke Robert had so lately been at war,[562] was disarmed when his overlord committed his son to his faith as kinsman and vassal, and even invested him with some measure of authority in Normandy itself.[563] The immediate care of the young Duke’s person was given to one Thurcytel or Thorold, names which point to a genuine Scandinavian descent in their bearer, and which would make us look to the Bessin as the probable place of his birth.[564] Other |Osbern.| guardians of high rank were the Seneschal Osbern, and Count Gilbert, both of them connected in the usual way with the ducal family. Osbern was the son of Herfast, a brother of the Duchess Gunnor; he was also married to a daughter of Rudolf of Ivry, the son of Asperleng and Sprota, the savage suppressor of the great |Gilbert.| peasant revolt.[565] Gilbert’s connexion was still closer. He was illustrious alike in his forefathers and in his descendants. He sprang of the ducal blood of Normandy, and of his blood sprang the great houses of Clare and Pembroke in England. His father Godfrey was one of those natural children of Richard the Fearless who did not share the promotion of the offspring of Gunnor.[566] He was lord of the border fortress of Eu, renowned in Norman history as early as the days of Rolf;[567] he was lord too of the pleasant valley of the Risle, separated only by one wooded hill from the more memorable valley which is hallowed by the names of Herlwin, Lanfranc, and Anselm. |Alan poisoned. 1039–1040.| All these worthy men paid the penalty of their fidelity. Count Alan died of poison, while he was besieging the castle of Montgomery, the stronghold of a house which we shall often have again to mention. He died at Vinmoutier, and was buried in the abbey of Fécamp. Breton slander afterwards threw the guilt of this crime upon the Duke himself,[568] the person who had least to gain by it. Norman slander threw it on Alan’s own subjects;[569] but one can hardly doubt that, if the poisoned bowl was administered at all, it was administered by some one or |Murder of Gilbert.| other of the rebellious Norman nobles.[570] Count Gilbert was murdered by assassins employed by Ralph of Wacey, son of Archbishop Robert.[571] The sons of the murdered man fled to Flanders, and took refuge with the common protector of banished men, Count Baldwin. The lands of Gilbert were divided among various claimants; the County of Eu seems to have passed into the hands of his uncle William;[572] but his famous castle of Brionne fell to the lot of Guy of Burgundy, of whom, and of whose possession of the fortress, we shall hear much as we go on.[573]
Another still more criminal attempt directly introduces us for the first time to another of the great Norman houses, and one whose name has been more abiding than any other. I have just before mentioned Count Alan’s siege of the castle of Montgomery. The name of that castle, a hill fortress in the diocese of Lisieux, enjoys a peculiar privilege above all others in Norman geography. Other spots in Normandy have given their names to Norman houses, and those Norman houses have transferred those names to English castles and English towns and villages. But there is only one shire in Great Britain which has had the name of a Norman house impressed |Roger of Montgomery and his five sons.| upon it for ever. Roger, the present Lord of Montgomery, was, at the time of Duke Robert’s death, in banishment at Paris.[574] His five sons remained in Normandy, and were among the foremost disturbers of the peace of the country.[575] But one of the five, Hugh, had a son, named, like his |The younger Roger.| grandfather, Roger, who bore a better character and was destined to a higher fate. He had, through his mother, a connexion of the usual kind with the ducal house. Weva, a sister of Gunnor, was the wife of Thorulf of Pont-Audemer, the son of Torf,[576] and her daughter Joscelina was the wife of Hugh of Montgomery, and the mother of the younger Roger.[577] On this Roger, William Talvas, in his old age, |His wife Mabel, daughter of William Talvas.| bestowed the hand of his daughter Mabel, who transferred the name, the honours, and the hereditary wickedness of the house of Belesme to her sons of the house of Montgomery.[578] Mabel, small in stature, talkative, and cruel, guilty of fearful crimes and destined to a fearful doom,[579] fills a place in history fully equal to that filled by her husband. Of him we shall hear again as literally the foremost among the conquerors of England; we shall see him enriched with English estates and honours, bearing the lofty titles of Earl of Arundel and Shrewsbury, and, once at least, adorned with the loftier title which had been borne by Æthelred and |1087.| Leofric. Once, and that while engaged in rebellion against his prince, he flits before us for a moment as Roger Earl of the Mercians.[580] A munificent friend of monks both in England and in Normandy, he has left behind him a different reputation from that of either his father, his wife, or his sons. In one of those sons we shall see the name of his maternal ancestors revive, and, with their name, a double portion of their wickedness.
But we have as yet to deal with the house of Montgomery |Attempt of William of Montgomery on Duke William at Vaudreuil.| only in its least honourable aspect. William, son of the elder, and uncle of the younger, Roger, stands charged with an attempt, aimed no longer at guardians or tutors, but at the person of the young Duke himself. William was staying with his guardian Osbern at Vaudreuil, a castle on an island in the Eure, said to have been the place of captivity of the famous Fredegunda in Merowingian times.[581] Thorold, it would seem, had been already murdered, but his assassins are spoken of only in general terms.[582] But Osbern still watched over his young lord day |Murder of Osbern; escape of the Duke.| and night. While at Vaudreuil he was butchered by William of Montgomery in the very bedchamber of the Duke, and the young prince owed his own safety on this, and on many other occasions, to the zealous care of his maternal uncle Walter. Many a time did this faithful kinsman carry him from palace and castle to find a lurking-place from those who sought his life in the cottages of the poor.[583] The blood of Osbern was soon avenged; a faithful servant of the murdered Seneschal presently did to William of Montgomery as William of Montgomery had done to Osbern.[584] In the state of things in Normandy at that moment crime could be punished only by crime. The remembrance of the faithful Osbern lived also in the memory of the Prince whose childhood he had so well |Friendship of the Duke with William Fitz-Osbern.| guarded. His son William grew up from his youth as the familiar friend and counsellor of his namesake the Duke. This is that famous William Fitz-Osbern who lived to be, next to the Duke himself, the prime agent in the Conquest of England, who won, far more than the Duke himself, the hatred of the conquered people, and who at last perished in a mad enterprise after a crown and a wife in Flanders.
The next enemy was Roger of Toesny, whom we have already heard of as a premature Crusader, the savage foe |Rebellion and death of Roger of Toesny.| of the Infidels of Spain.[585] Disappointed in his dream of a Kingdom in the Iberian peninsula, he returned to his native land to find it under the sway of the son of the Tanner’s daughter. The proud soul of the descendant of Malahulc scorned submission to such a lord; “A bastard is not fit to rule over me and the other Normans.”[586] He refused all allegiance, and began to ravage the lands of his neighbours. The one who suffered most was Humfrey de Vetulis, a son of Thorulf of Pont-Audemer, and of Weva the sister of Gunnor. He sent his son Roger of Beaumont against the aggressor. A battle followed, in which Roger of Toesny and his two sons were killed, and Robert of Grantmesnil received a mortal wound.[587] This fight was fought rather in defence of private property than in the assertion of any public principle. But the country gained by the destruction of so inveterate an enemy of peace as Roger of Toesny. And here, as at every step of this stage of our narrative, we become acquainted with men whose names are to figure in the later portion of |Houses of Grantmesnil and Beaumont.| our history. Robert of Grantmesnil was the father of Hugh of Grantmesnil, who had no small share in the conquest of England and the division of its spoil. Roger of Beaumont became the patriarch of the first house of the Earls of Leicester. One of his descendants played an honourable part in the great struggle between King and Primate in the latter half of the twelfth century;[588] and his honours passed by female succession to that great deliverer who made the title of Earl of Leicester the most glorious in the whole peerage of England.[589]
By this time William was getting beyond the years of childhood, and he was beginning to display those extraordinary powers of mind and body with which nature had endowed him. He could now in some measure exercise a will of his own. He still needed a guardian, but, according to the principles of Roman Law, he had a right to a voice in determining who that guardian should be. He summoned the chief men of his Duchy, and, by their advice, he chose as his own tutor and as Captain-General of the armies of Normandy,[590] Ralph the son of Archbishop Robert. The choice seems a strange one, as Ralph was no other than the murderer of William’s former guardian Count Gilbert.[591] But it may have been thought politic for the young Duke to strengthen his hands by an alliance with a former enemy, and to make, as in the case of Count Alan of Britanny, a practical appeal to the honour of a possible rival. The appointment of Ralph seems in fact to have had that effect. A time of comparative internal quiet now followed. But there still were traitors in the land. Many, we are told, of the Norman nobles, even of those who professed the firmest fidelity to the Duke, and were loaded by him with the highest honours, still continued to plot against him in secret.[592] For a while they no longer revolted openly on their own account; but there was a potentate hard by whose ear was ever open to their suggestions, and who was ever ready to help them in any plots against their sovereign and their country.
From this point a new chapter opens in the relations between Normandy and France. We have seen that, ever since the Commendation made by Richard the Fearless to Hugh the Great,[593] the relations between the Norman Princes and the Dukes and Kings of Paris had been invariably |945.| |987.| friendly.[594] It was to Norman help that the Parisian dynasty in a great measure owed its rise to royalty;[595] it |1031.| was to Norman help that the reigning King of the French owed his restoration to his throne.[596] Henry of Paris, made King by the help of Robert, had received Robert’s son as his vassal,[597] and had promised to afford him the protection due from a righteous overlord to a faithful vassal. But we |Return to ill-feeling from the accession of William.| now, from the accession of William, begin to see signs of something like a return on the French side to the old state of feeling in the days when the Normans were still looked on as heathen intruders, and their Duke was held to be Duke only of the Pirates.[598] We find the French applying contemptuous epithets to the Norman people,[599] and we find the King of the French ready to seize every opportunity for enriching himself at the expense of the Norman Duke.
It is not easy at first sight to explain this return to a state of things which seemed to have passed away for more than a generation. Still we must not forget that any prince reigning at Paris could hardly fail to look with a grudging eye on the practically independent power which cut him off from the mouth of his own river. The great feudatory at Rouen seemed, in a way in which no other feudatory seemed, to shut up his overlord in a kind of prison. The wealth and greatness and prosperity of Normandy might seem, both historically and geographically, to be something actually taken away from the possessions of France. This feeling would apply to Normandy in a way in which it did not apply to the other great fiefs of Flanders and Aquitaine. And the feeling would on every ground be stronger in the mind of a King reigning at Paris than in that of a King reigning at Laôn. To a French King at Paris the Normans were the nearest and the most powerful of all neighbours, those whose presence must have made itself far more constantly felt than that of any other power in Gaul. Hitherto this inherent feeling of jealousy had been kept in check by the close hereditary connexion between the two states. The league established between Richard and Hugh had hitherto been kept unbroken by their descendants. But the main original object of that league, mutual support against the Carolingian King at Laôn, had ceased to exist when the Parisian Duke assumed the royal dignity. Since that time, the league could have rested on little more than an hereditary sentiment between the Norman and French princes, which probably was never very deeply shared by their subjects on either side. And now that sentiment was giving way to the earlier and more instinctive feeling which pointed out the Rouen Duchy as the natural enemy of the Parisian Kingdom. It had once been convenient to forget, it was now equally convenient to remember, that the original grant to Rolf had been made at the immediate expense, not of the King of Laôn but of the Duke of Paris.[600] Under these changed circumstances, the old feeling, dormant for a time, seems to have again awakened in all its strength. And now that Normandy held out temptations to every aggressor, now that Norman nobles did not scruple to invite aid from any quarter against a prince |Ingratitude of King Henry.| whose years were the best witness of his innocence, every feeling of justice and generosity seems to have vanished from the mind of King Henry. The King who owed his Crown to the unbought fidelity of Duke Robert did not scruple to despoil the helpless boy whom his benefactor had |Dispute about Tillières.| entrusted to his protection. The border fortress of Tillières formed the first pretext. That famous creation of Richard the Good had been raised as a bulwark, not against the King, but against the troublesome Count of Chartres.[601] But Odo had found it convenient to surrender the disputed territory of Dreux to the Crown;[602] the Arve therefore now became the boundary between Normandy and the royal domain. Tillières was accordingly declared to be a standing menace to Paris, whose retention was inconsistent with any friendly relations between King and Duke.[603] The loyal party in Normandy thought it better to yield than to expose their young Duke to fresh jeopardy.[604] But the actual commander of the fortress was of another mind. |Gilbert Crispin besieged in Tillières.| Tillières had been entrusted by Duke Robert to Gilbert Crispin, the ancestor of a race by whom, after its restoration to Normandy, the border fortress was held for several generations.[605] He scorned to agree to a surrender which he looked on as dangerous and disgraceful;[606] he shut himself up in the castle with a strong force, and there endured a siege at the hands of the King. Besides his own subjects, Henry had a large body of Normans in the besieging host.[607] It is not clear whether these were Normans of the disaffected party, or whether the Duke’s own adherents, when they had once pledged themselves to surrender the castle, deemed it expedient to display this excess of zeal against a comrade who had carried his loyalty to the extreme of |Tillières surrendered and burned.| disobedience. It is certain that it was only in deference to orders given in the Duke’s name, and which seem to imply the Duke’s personal presence,[608] that the gallant Gilbert at last surrendered his trust. The fortress of which Normandy had been so proud was handed over to the French King, and was at once given to the flames, to the sorrow of every true Norman heart.[609] The King pledged himself, as one of the conditions of the surrender, not to restore the fortress for four years.[610] But, if the Norman writers may be trusted, he grossly belied his faith. His somewhat unreasonable demand had been granted, and no further provocation seems to have been given on the Norman side. But, now that the protecting fortress |Henry invades Normandy and restores Tillières.| was dismantled, Henry ventured on an actual invasion. He retired for a while; but he soon returned and crossed the border. He passed through the County of Hiesmes, the old appanage of Duke Robert; from the valley of the Dive he passed into the valley of the Orne, and burned the Duke’s own town of Argentan. He then returned laden with booty, and, on his way back, in defiance of his engagements, he restored and garrisoned the dismantled fortress of Tillières.[611] The border fortress, so long the cherished defence of Normandy, now became the sharpest thorn in her side.
It is impossible to doubt that this devastation of the County of Hiesmes was made by special agreement with the man who was most bound to defend it. The commander of the district was Thurstan surnamed Goz, the son of Ansfrid the Dane.[612] In this description, so long after the first occupation of the country, we must recognize a son of a follower of Harold Blaatand,[613] not a son of an original companion of Rolf. And a son of a follower of Harold Blaatand must have been by this time a man advanced in life. But neither his age and office, nor his Scandinavian |Treason of Thurstan Goz.| descent and name, hindered Thurstan from playing into the hands of the French invaders. Seeing that the Duke had been thus compelled to yield to the King, Thurstan |He garrisons Falaise Castle against the Duke.| looked upon the moment as one propitious for revolt. He took some of the King’s soldiers into his pay, and with their help he garrisoned the castle of Falaise against the Duke.[614] Young William’s indignation was naturally great. To select that particular spot as a centre of rebellion was not only a flagrant act of disloyalty, but the grossest of personal insults. Acting under the guidance of his guardian Ralph of Wacey, he summoned all loyal Normans to his standard, and advanced to the siege of his |The castle besieged and taken by the Duke and Ralph of Wacey.| birthplace. The castle was attacked by storm, a fact which shows that the town was loyal, proud as it well might be of numbering among its sons not only a sovereign, but a sovereign who was beginning to be renowned even in his boyhood. It was only on the side of the town that the castle could be assaulted in this way. William himself could hardly have swarmed up the steep cliffs which looked down upon the dwelling of his grandfather, nor could he, like the English invader four centuries later, command the fortress by artillery planted on the opposite heights. By dint of sheer personal strength and courage, the gallant Normans assaulted the massive walls of the Norman fortress, in the heart of the Norman land, which French hirelings, in the pay of a Norman traitor, were defending against the prince to whom that fortress owes a renown which can never pass away. Their attacks made a breach, perhaps not in the donjon itself, but at any rate in its external defences; night alone, we are told, put an end to the combat, and saved Thurstan and his party from all the horrors of a storm. But the rebel chief now saw that his hopes were vain; he sought a parley with the Duke, and was allowed to go away unhurt on condition of perpetual banishment from Normandy. |Thurstan’s descendants, the Earls of Chester.| Thurstan’s son, Richard, Viscount of Avranches, proved a loyal servant to William, and in the end procured the pardon of his father.[615] The son of the loyal Richard, the grandson of the rebel Thurstan, finds a place in English history by the name of Hugh the Wolf, the first of the mighty but short-lived line of the Counts Palatine of Chester.[616]
The young Duke’s great qualities were now fast displaying themselves. At the earliest age which the rules of chivalry allowed, he received the ensigns of knighthood from King Henry, and his subjects now began, not without reason, to look forward to a season of peace and order under his rule.[617] We hardly need the exaggerated talk of his extravagant panegyrist to feel sure that William, at an unusually early age, taught men to see in him the born ruler. We hear, not only of his grace and skill in every warlike exercise, not only of his wisdom in the choice of his counsellors, but of his personally practising every virtue that becomes a man and a prince. William, we are told, was fervent in his devotions, righteous in his judgements, and he dealt out a justice as strict as that of Godwine or Harold upon all disturbers of the public peace.[618] All this we can well believe. Of all these virtues he retained many traces to the last. A long career of ambition, craft, and despotic rule, never utterly seared his conscience, never brought him down to the level of those tyrants who neither fear God nor regard man. And in the fresh and generous days of youth, we can well believe that one so highly gifted, and who as yet had so little temptation to abuse his gifts, must have shone forth before all men as the very model of every princely virtue. In one important point however, the public acts of William, or of those who acted in his name, hardly bear out the language of his |Ecclesiastical appointments abused by the Norman Dukes.| panegyrists. His first ecclesiastical appointments were quite unworthy of the prince who was, somewhat later in life, to learn to appreciate and to reward the virtues of Lanfranc and Anselm. The two greatest preferments of the Norman Church fell vacant during this period, and the way in which they were filled illustrates a not uncommon practice of the Norman princes which had few or no parallels in England. There have been few instances in England in any age of great spiritual preferments being perverted into means of maintenance for cadets or bastards of the royal house. In Normandy, at least since the days of Richard the Fearless, the practice had been shamefully common, and in the early days of William the scandal still continued.
It must be remembered that the Prelates of Normandy, |Position of the Norman Prelates.| like the Prelates of the other great fiefs of the French Crown, were, in every sense, the subjects of the Princes within whose immediate dominions they found themselves. Here was one great point of difference between the condition of France and the condition of Germany. In Germany all the great churchmen, in every part of the country, held immediately of the Emperor. Every Bishop was therefore reckoned as a Prince. The episcopal city also commonly became a Free City of the Empire, and, as such, a commonwealth enjoying practical independence. |Their subjection to the Ducal authority.| No such oases of ecclesiastical or municipal privilege interrupted the continuous dominion of a Norman or Aquitanian Duke. The Metropolitan of Rouen or of Bourdeaux might be either the loyal subject or the refractory vassal of his immediate Prince; but in no case was he a coordinate sovereign, owning no superior except in the common overlord. It is only among the Bishops within the Crown lands, those who, in the extemporized jurisprudence of a later age, sat as Peers of France, alongside of the great Dukes and Counts, that the slightest signs of any such hierarchical independence can be discerned. At an earlier age we have indeed seen the metropolitan see of Rheims holding a position which faintly approached that of Mainz or Köln;[619] but even Rheims had now considerably fallen from its ancient greatness, and no such claims to princely authority were at any time put forward by the proudest Prelate of Rouen or Bayeux. It was as Count of Evreux, rather than as Primate of Normandy, that Archbishop Robert had been able to make himself so troublesome to |Death of Archbishop Robert. 1037.| his nephew and sovereign. That turbulent Prelate, after an episcopate of forty-eight years, had amended his ways, and had at last vacated both County and Archbishoprick by death.[620] In his temporal capacity he was succeeded by a son and a grandson, after whom the County of Evreux passed by an heiress to the house of Montfort, giving the Count-Primate the honour of being, through female descendants, a forefather of the great Simon.[621] The vacancy of the Archbishoprick placed the greatest spiritual preferment in the Duchy at the disposal of the young Duke. The choice of the new Primate was as little directed by considerations of ecclesiastical merit as that of his predecessor, and it proved in every way unfortunate. At the |Malger, Archbishop of Rouen. 1037–1055.| head of the Norman Church William’s counsellors placed his uncle Malger, one of the sons of Richard the Good by Papia.[622] We shall presently find him displaying no very priestly qualities, and the only act of his life which could be attributed to Christian or ecclesiastical zeal was one which wounded the Duke himself in the tenderest point. |Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. 1048–1098.| So too, when, some years later, the great see of Bayeux fell vacant, William bestowed it on his half-brother Odo, the son of Herleva by her husband Herlwin of Conteville.[623] Odo, like Hugh of Rheims in earlier times,[624] must have been a mere boy at the time of his appointment;[625] but he held the see of Bayeux for fifty years,[626] and, during most part of that time, his name was famous and terrible on both sides of the Channel. The character which he left |His character in England,| behind him was a singularly contradictory one.[627] In England he was remembered only as the foremost among the conquerors and oppressors of the land, the man who gained for himself a larger share of English hatred than William |1086|. himself, the man whose career of wrong was at last cut short by his royal brother, who, stern and unscrupulous as he was, at least took no pleasure in deeds of wanton oppression. Of Odo’s boundless ambition and love of enterprise there is no doubt. The one quality led him to aspire to the Papal throne;[628] the other led him first to forsake his diocese to rule as an Earl in England, and then to forsake it again to follow his nephew Duke Robert to the first Crusade. That he was no strict observer of ecclesiastical rules in his own person is shown by the fact that he left behind him a son, on whom however he at least bestowed the ecclesiastical name of John.[629] Still Norman |and in Normandy.| ecclesiastical history sets Odo before us in a somewhat fairer light than that in which we see him in English secular history. He at least possessed the episcopal virtue of munificence, and, whatever were the defects of his own conduct, he seems to have been an encourager of learning and good conversation in others. He was bountiful to all, specially to those of his own spiritual household. He |His works at Bayeux. Cathedral consecrated, 1077.| rebuilt his own church at Bayeux, where parts of his work still remain. The lower part of the lofty towers of the western front, the dim and solemn crypt beneath the choir, of that stately and varied cathedral, are relics of the church reared by its most famous Bishop. These precious fragments, severe but far from rude in style, form a striking contrast to the gorgeous arcades which in the next century supplanted Odo’s nave, and to the soaring choir and apse raised by a still later age. Besides renewing the fabric, he increased the number of the clergy of his church, and founded or enriched a monastery in the outskirts of the city, in honour of Saint Vigor, a canonized predecessor in the see of Bayeux.[630] The name of Odo is one which will be constantly recurring in this history, from the day when his Bishop’s staff and warrior’s mace were so successfully wielded against the defenders of England, till the day when he went forth to wield the same weapons against the misbelievers of the East, and found on his road a tomb, far from the heavy pillars and massive arches of his own Bayeux, among the light and gorgeous enrichments with which the art of the conquered Saracen knew how to adorn the palaces and churches of the Norman lords of Palermo.[631]
But, though the appointments of Malger and Odo might bode but little good for the cause of ecclesiastical reformation, it is certain that a great movement was at this time |Ecclesiastical movement in Normandy; foundation of monasteries.| going on in the interior of the Norman Church. The middle of the eleventh century was, in Normandy, the most fruitful æra of the foundation of monasteries. The movement in that direction, which had begun under Richard the Fearless, had continued under Richard the Good, and it seems to have reached its height under Robert and William. A Norman noble of that age thought that his estate lacked its chief ornament, if he failed to plant a colony of monks in some corner of his possessions.[632] No doubt the fashion of founding monasteries became, in this case, as in other cases earlier and later, little more than a mere fashion. Many a man must have founded a religious house, not from any special devotion or any special liberality, but simply because it was the regular thing for a man in his position to do.[633] And, as an age of founding monasteries must also be an age in which men are unusually eager to enter the monastic profession, we may infer that many men took that profession on them out of mere imitation or prevalent impulse, without any real |Character of the monastic reformations in various ages.| personal call to the monastic life. Still, though movements of this sort may end in becoming a mere fashion, they never are a mere fashion at their beginning. The Norman Benedictine movement in the eleventh century, the English Cistercian movement in the twelfth century, the still greater movement of the Friars in the thirteenth century—we may add the revulsion in favour of the Seculars in the fourteenth century, and the great Jesuit movement in the sixteenth—all alike point to times when all classes of men were dissatisfied with the existing state of the Church, and were filled with a general desire for its reformation. The evil in every case was that the monastic reformations were never more than temporary. Some new foundations were created, perhaps even some old ones were reformed; the newly kindled fire burned with great fervour for a generation or two; a crop of saints arose, with their due supply of legends and miracles. But presently love again waxed cold; the new foundations fell away like the elder ones, and the next age saw its new order arise, to run the same course of primitive poverty and primitive holiness, degenerating into wealth, indolence, and corruption. Still there is a peculiar charm in contemplating the early years, the infant struggles, the simple and fervent devotion, of one of these religious brotherhoods |Two monasteries claiming special notice, Bec and Saint Evroul.| in the days of its first purity. And, among the countless monasteries which arose in Normandy at this time, there are two which claim some special notice at the hands of an historian whose chief aim is to connect the history of Normandy with that of England. The famous Abbey |Three Archbishops of Canterbury from Bec;| of Bec became the most renowned school of the learning of the time, and, among the other famous men whom it sent forth, it gave three Primates to the throne of Augustine. Thence came Lanfranc, the right hand man of the |Lanfranc, 1070–1089.| Conqueror—the scholar whose learning drew hearers from all Christendom, and before whose logic the heretic stood abashed—the courtier who could win the favour of Kings without stooping to any base compliance with their will—the ruler whose crozier completed the conquest which the ducal sword only began, and who knew how to win the love of the conquered, even while rivetting their fetters. |Anselm, 1093–1109.| Thence too came also the man of simple faith and holiness, the man who, a stranger in a strange land, could feel his heart beat for the poor and the oppressed, the man who braved the wrath of the most terrible of Kings in the cause at once of ecclesiastical discipline and of moral righteousness. Such are the truest claims of Anselm to the reverence of later ages, but it must not be forgotten that, if Bec sent forth in Lanfranc the great reformer of ecclesiastical discipline, it sent forth also in his successor the father of the whole dogmatic theology of later times. |Theobald, 1139–1161.| The third Metropolitan who found his way from Bec to Canterbury cannot compete with the fame of either of his great predecessors; yet Theobald lives in history as the first to discern the native powers of one whose renown presently came to outshine the renown of Lanfranc and Anselm. The early patron of Thomas the burgher’s son of London may fairly claim some reflected share of the glory which surrounds the name of Thomas the Chancellor of England, the Primate and the Martyr of Canterbury. |Ouche or Saint Evroul.| By the side of the house which sent forth men like these the name of the other Norman monastery of which I speak may seem comparatively obscure. Yet the Abbey of Ouche or Saint Evroul has its own claim on our respect. It was the spot which beheld the composition of the record from which we draw our main knowledge of the times following |The home of Orderic Vital.| those with which we have immediately to deal; it was the home of the man in whom, perhaps more than in any other, the characters of Norman and Englishman were inseparably mingled. There the historian wrote, who, though the son of a French father, the denizen of a Norman monastery, still clave to England as his country and gloried in his English birth[634]—the historian who could at once admire the greatness of the Conqueror and sympathize with the wrongs of his victims, who, amid all the conventional reviling which Norman loyalty prescribed, could still see and acknowledge with genuine admiration the virtues and the greatness even of the perjured Harold.[635] To have merely produced a chronicler may seem faint praise beside the fame of producing men whose career has had a lasting influence on the human mind; yet, even beside the long bead-roll of the worthies of Bec, some thought may well be extended to the house where Orderic recorded the minutest details of the lives alike of the saints and of the warriors of his time.