Chapter XII: The Later Reign of William in Normandy.159 (2)

So great a favour however was not to be granted, except on condition that the sinners should atone for their fault by worthy works of penance. The Duke and the Duchess were each to rear and endow a monastery for religious persons of their respective sexes.[265] Another account adds that four foundations of still more direct usefulness, hospitals namely for the sick, blind, and aged, were also to be established in four of the chief towns of Normandy, at Rouen, Bayeux, Caen, and Cherbourg.[266] The discharge of the former part of the Papal command caused the creation of two of the noblest architectural monuments of the Duchy. The two stately Abbeys of Caen arose as at once the monument and the atonement of the irregular marriage of William and Matilda. Each [Sidenote: Character of the buildings.] of those noble piles retains to this day large portions of the original work of its founder, and each exhibits a character of its own, a sort of personality received from [Sidenote: Matilda’s church of the Holy Trinity.] its founder’s hand. The church of Matilda, the Abbey of the Holy Trinity, the first to be begun, the last to be brought to perfection, bears witness, we may say, to the feminine impatience of the Duchess, to her anxiety not to delay the work of atonement for her fault. Her church [Sidenote: Its consecration. June 18, 1066.] was so far completed as to be ready for consecration in the year of the great crisis of her husband’s life, and its solemn hallowing forms an incident which will again claim our attention even in the midst of William’s preparations for the invasion of our island.[267] But the church then hallowed seems to have been a mere fragment, simply so much as was necessary for the devotions of the sisterhood; the greater portion of the present fabric belongs to a somewhat later age. But enough remains of Matilda’s own work to show that the building was carried on in the full spirit of her original design. No contrast between two buildings so nearly alike in plan and style can be more striking than the contrast between the minster of William and the [Sidenote: William’s church of Saint Stephen, begun 1064?] minster of Matilda. William was no more inclined to hurry in this undertaking than in any other undertaking of his life. His wife hastened to consecrate a fragment; but William knew how to bide his time as much in a work [Sidenote: consecrated 1077.] of architecture as in a work of war or politics. Eleven years later,[268] William and Lanfranc, now promoted to be the Cæsar and the Pontiff of another world,[269] were present at the consecration of the great Abbey of Saint Stephen, perfect from east to west, save only that the addition of [Sidenote: 1086.] the western towers was a later work, and was probably [Sidenote: Character of the Conqueror impressed on his building.] celebrated with a second feast of dedication. And that mighty pile, perhaps the noblest and most perfect work of its own date, shows us the spirit of the Conqueror impressed on every stone. The choir has given way to a later creation; but the nave of William and Lanfranc is still there,[270] precisely such a nave as we should expect to arise at the bidding of William the Great. Erected at the moment when the Romanesque of Normandy had cast aside the earlier leaven of Bernay and Jumièges, and had not yet begun to develope into the more florid style of Bayeux and Saint Gabriel, the church of William, vast in scale, bold and simple in its design, disdaining ornament, but never sinking into rudeness, is indeed a church worthy of its founder. The minster of Matilda, far richer, even in its earliest parts, smaller in size, more delicate in workmanship, has nothing of that simplicity and grandeur of proportion which marks the work of her husband. The one is the expression in stone of the imperial will of the conquering Duke; the other breathes the true spirit of his loving and faithful Duchess.

[Sidenote: Beginning of the foundation of Saint Stephen’s. 1064?]

But, though the completion of William’s minster was delayed till a much later date, yet, according to the custom of the founders of monasteries,[271] the society itself, furnished no doubt with a temporary church and other temporary buildings, was established as soon as possible after the receipt of the Papal rescript. The monks of Saint Stephen already dwelt in their suburb beyond the walls of Caen, and the care of their founder had already given them the most famous man in his dominions for their ruler. In the same year in which the sister church was dedicated, in the same year in which England was invaded, the house was fit for at least the temporary accommodation of its new ruler. [Sidenote: Lanfranc first Abbot. June 15, 1066.] Lanfranc, the Prior of Bec, was called to the office of Abbot of the rising house. It was fitting that the man who had wrought the reconciliation between the Duke and the Holy See should receive the dignity which came into being as the fruit and seal of that reconciliation. Lanfranc long resisted;[272] he had no wish to encumber himself with the cares and responsibilities of a post which was designed to hold a high place among the Norman Prelacy. His learned retirement at Bec was far more to his taste. But the will of Duke William was not to be withstood, either by those to whom he would give or by those from whom he would take away. Lanfranc became the first Abbot of the great [Sidenote: ANSELM, born 1033; Monk of Bec 1060; Prior 1066? Abbot of Bec 1078; Archbishop of Canterbury 1093–1109.] house of Saint Stephen. In the office which he vacated at Bec he was succeeded by one no less renowned than himself. A few years before the foundation of Saint Stephen’s, another wanderer from the South had found his way to the holy shelter of Bec, and had become one of the spiritual household of Abbot Herlwin. Anselm of Aosta, the profoundest of metaphysicians and divines, the father of all Christian theology since his time, had heard of the fame of Lanfranc, and he had left his home and his heritage to sit at his feet as his scholar. He soon, by the counsel of Lanfranc himself and of Archbishop Maurilius, became not only his scholar, but his brother in the monastic profession. He now succeeded him in his office of Prior;[273] he lived to succeed their common father Herlwin in the abbatial chair of Bec, and at last to succeed Lanfranc himself on the [Sidenote: Excellence of William’s ecclesiastical appointments.] throne of Augustine. We have now reached quite another æra in the history of the Norman Church from that when Robert and Malger and Odo were thrust into the highest ranks of the priesthood. Lanfranc, Anselm, Maurilius, the worthiest men of every land—such were now the chief pastors to whom William, in this at least a true nursing father, entrusted the care of the spiritual welfare of his people.

[Sidenote: Happiness of William’s marriage.]

William had thus, after so many troubles and difficulties, won, or rather wrested, the highest ecclesiastical sanction for the marriage which he had so dearly at heart. That marriage proved happy and fruitful. The abiding affection of William and Matilda endured no shock till, in their later days, a subject of difference between them was stirred up by the misconduct of their eldest son.[274] That son was the first-born of a house as numerous, as flourishing, and well [Sidenote: His sons.] nigh as ill-fated as the House of Godwine himself. Four sons were born to William and Matilda. Two of them seem to have been born before the Papal confirmation of their parents’ marriage,[275] but we do not read that any objection [Sidenote: Robert, b. 1056? d. 1135.] to their legitimacy was raised on that ground. Of these two, Robert, the eldest, twice failed of the Crown of England, and ruled Normandy to his shame and sorrow. Still the bold Crusader, the generous brother, the chosen friend of the last male of the House of Cerdic, the only one of his own house who had not the opportunity, perhaps had not the will, to be a tyrant over England, may perhaps claim some small sympathy at English hands. The second brother, [Sidenote: Richard, b. 1058? d. after 1066. William, b. 1060? d. 1100. Henry, b. 1068, d. 1135.] Richard, was cut off in his youth by that mysterious doom which made the woods of Hampshire fatal to William’s house. The third, William the Red, a man of natural powers perhaps hardly inferior to those of his father, lived to leave behind him a name more detested than any other name in the dark catalogue of royal oppressors. The fourth was the mighty Henry, the Lion of Justice, an Englishman so far as birth on English soil could make him one, the one son of their Conqueror whom Englishmen recognized as a true Ætheling, the child of a crowned King and a crowned Lady. In him we see once more, if not the personal virtues, yet at least the vigorous government, the far-seeing policy, which became a son of William the Great. Deeply as he was stained with crimes and vices, it is not without a certain reverence that we look back to the King in whom the green tree began at last to return to its place, to him of whom our own Chronicler could say that “a good man was he and mickle awe was there of him,” and who won for himself a praise like that of Godwine, of Harold, and of William, the praise that “no man durst hurt other in his days.”[276]

[Sidenote: William’s daughters.]

Such were the sons of the Conqueror. The names and number of his daughters are given with such strange variation that I must examine the different statements more [Sidenote: Adela, wife of Stephen of Blois.] minutely elsewhere.[277] But among them we see clearly the noble Adela, through whom the once hostile land of Chartres and Blois became a land friendly to Normandy, a land [Sidenote: Cecily, Abbess of Caen.] which gave a King to England. Clearly too we see Cecily, a virgin consecrated to God from her childhood, dedicated at the altar which her mother had reared, and where she was herself so long to bear rule over her holy sisterhood. More [Sidenote: Other daughters, Adeliza, &c.] dimly pass before our eyes the forms of daughters wedded or betrothed to a Duke in neighbouring Britanny and to a King in distant Spain. And one there was to whom a higher honour than all was for a moment offered, the betrothed for a day of the one man who could bear himself as the born peer of her mighty father, the bride whose sad betrothal directly led to all the woes which the warfare of those two master spirits was to bring upon the land for which they strove.

§ 2. _William’s Wars with France. 1053–1060._

The many points which are suggested by William’s marriage have led us some years away from our strict [Sidenote: Character of the period.] chronological order. But the years which were occupied by these discussions and delays were important and busy years in many ways. William, still young, was now in the full maturity of mind and body, and the renown of his exploits was spreading far beyond the bounds of his own Duchy. But he had still to struggle for its possession [Sidenote: Rebellions within Normandy supported by Anjou and France.] against foes both within and without its borders. Faithless vassals and jealous kinsmen were still constantly rising up against him, nor did they ever fail to find neighbouring potentates ready to abet them against their sovereign. The restless enmity of the Angevin never slept, and now King Henry himself relapsed into that same position of constantly recurring hostility which had marked the earlier days of William’s reign. Henry had acted as a good and faithful overlord at Val-ès-dunes; but William had paid the debt in full by no less good and faithful service against the King’s enemies. It was indeed in the King’s cause that he had drawn upon himself the abiding enmity of the Count of Anjou. But now we see France and Anjou leagued together against Normandy. Every Norman rebel is aided in his revolt and sheltered in his exile. Once at least, King and Count pass the Norman frontier together, but only to feel both the strength of the Norman arm and the subtlety of the Norman brain. Henry in short plays the part which he played in the days before Val-ès-dunes, and [Sidenote: France and Normandy naturally hostile.] he now has the power of Anjou to help him. The relapse on the King’s part is not wonderful; the real wonder is that he ever left his course of obvious, though crooked, policy, in order to act for once as a generous and honourable neighbour and suzerain. It was only natural that every advance which was made by the lord of Rouen, whether in the way of external greatness or of internal prosperity, should be felt by the lord of Paris as [Sidenote: Greatness of Normandy even in later times.] a blow dealt against himself and his kingdom. We may perhaps better understand the greatness of Normandy in the days of its independence, if we look at some of the signs of the greatness which it retained after two centuries and a half of subjection, after having long served as the chief battle-ground between England and France. In the days of Lewis the Eleventh, Normandy, far from being a third part in extent, was in wealth and importance a third part of the kingdom into which it had been merged, and it furnished a third part of the revenue of the Parisian Crown. The great object of every enemy of the Parisian Kingdom was to wrest Normandy from its grasp. No blow could be so great as to give even a qualified independence to the great province which cut off the city which was the cradle and kernel of the Kingdom from [Sidenote: Its importance in the English and Burgundian Wars.] all communication with the English seas. There was no object on which the enemies of France, English and Burgundian, were more strongly bent, than on the separation of Normandy from the French Crown. There was no sacrifice which a French King would not make rather than surrender the noblest province of his Kingdom. The last [Sidenote: 1421.] dying injunction of the great English conqueror of France was, at all risks, at all sacrifices, to keep Normandy in full [Sidenote: 1465.] possession.[278] One main object of the great Burgundian rival of France was to give Normandy a Duke of her own,[279] even though that Duke was himself a member of [Sidenote: Spirit of Norman independence still remaining in the fifteenth century.] the royal house of France. And, whatever we say of the wish of the Englishman, the wish of the Burgundian was certainly met by a strong vein of local feeling in Normandy itself. Even in those times, Norman patriotism still held that Normandy was too great for simple incorporation with France, and that so great a Duchy ought not to be without its Duke.[280] On the other hand, there was no sacrifice from which French policy so instinctively shrank. Lewis the Eleventh, who at least knew his own interests, was willing to surrender anything rather than make that one great sacrifice. He would give up Champagne, even Aquitaine, far greater in extent than Normandy, anything rather than the [Sidenote: Independent Normandy threatening to France.] precious dominion itself.[281] And, if the extended France of the fifteenth century could so little afford to see Normandy separated from its body, even though it was to form an appanage of one of its own princes, how far more threatening must a practically independent, and often hostile, Normandy have been to the infant France of the eleventh century, when Champagne and Anjou were the fiefs of princes well nigh as powerful as their overlord, when Aquitaine was, in all save a nominal homage, a foreign land? Independent Normandy, flourishing under its illustrious Duke, was as sharp an eye-sore to Paris as ever Aigina was to Peiraieus.[282] As he who held Dêmêtrias, Chalkis, and Akrokorinthos was said to hold the fetters of Greece,[283] so he who held Eu, Cherbourg, Honfleur, and Rouen, might truly be said to hold the fetters of royal France.

[Sidenote: Norman rebels constantly supported by France and Anjou.]

The King of the French then, throughout this period, is the arch-disturber, powerfully helped on occasion by his now loyal vassal the Count of Anjou. We shall see both of them advance, step by step, from giving shelter and comfort to Norman rebels to giving them active help in their warfare, and from giving them active help in their warfare to formal invasions of the Norman land at the head of their own armies.

[Sidenote: Revolt of William Busac. 1048–1053?]

The first revolt against William after the war of Domfront and Alençon is wrapped up in great obscurity. One ancient writer alone records it; among modern writers, some pass it by unnoticed, while others recount it with a singular amount of confusion.[284] But there seems reason to believe that, at the beginning of this period, at some time after the affair of William of Mortain,[285] the Duke was disturbed by a revolt of another kinsman of his [Sidenote: The Counts of Eu.] own name at the other end of his Duchy. Duke Richard the Good had granted to his half-brother William the castle and county of Eu, the old border-fortress of Rolf.[286] [Sidenote: Castle of Eu.] That famous spot, known in modern times as the last home of lawful royalty in France, was marked by a castle, every trace of which has given way to a palace of the sixteenth century, but which was long the chief guard of Normandy towards the frontier of Ponthieu. It was no hill-fort, like Domfront or, in another way, like Falaise. [Sidenote: The earlier Norman sites on the coast.] It was a fortress of the older Norman type, a stronghold of the days when the Normans had not yet cast off the feelings of the old Wikings, when to command the sea was their main object, and when princes placed their dwelling-places on points close to the sea or to some navigable river. Placed on comparatively low ground, with hills overlooking town and castle on every side, the fortress of Eu no doubt had its value in the days of Hasting and Rolf. It immediately commands the flats, in those days no doubt not fully reclaimed from the sea, which lie skirted by the hills which end in the cliffs of Tréport. Count William and his wife Lescelina were among the most lavish benefactors of the Church [Sidenote: Church of Eu founded for secular Canons, 1002; changed to regulars, 1177.] among the princes and nobles of Normandy. The church of Eu was built and endowed by Count William as a foundation of secular canons, which, like so many other foundations of the same kind, like Waltham in the very same year, was afterwards changed into an establishment of regulars.[287] Small, if any, are the traces which remain of the church where the Great William received his bride;[288] it is to the monastic occupants of Eu that we owe that stately and soaring pile which needs only fitting towers to rank among the noblest [Sidenote: Other ecclesiastical foundations of the family.] minsters of Normandy. Lescelina, the Count’s wife, who herself in her widowhood took the monastic habit, lives in Norman ecclesiastical history as the foundress of the Abbey of Saint Peter on the Dive,[289] whose noble tower forms the most striking object on the way from the birthplace of the Great William to the place of his [Sidenote: Sons of William and Lescelina; Robert Count of Eu;] burial. Two of their sons, the eldest and the youngest, walked in the steps of their parents. Robert succeeded his father in the County of Eu; he lived a loyal and honoured subject of Duke William, one of his chosen counsellors and valiant soldiers, whose name will often occur in this history alike among the defenders of Normandy and the invaders of England. He too was bountiful to ecclesiastical foundations, and at his bidding the Abbey of Tréport[290] arose on the rocks which bound the view from the now forsaken walks which surround his [Sidenote: Hugh, Bishop of Lisieux. 1050–1077.] dwelling-place. His younger brother, Hugh, mounted the episcopal throne of Lisieux. In that office he is described as showing himself a model of ecclesiastical [Sidenote: His virtues.] perfection of every kind.[291] Among his other good deeds, his panegyrist records that, when the synod was held in his own church for the trial of his kinsman and metropolitan Malger, he preferred the cause of God to the ties of blood, and was foremost to give his voice against the son of his uncle.[292] There is no need to doubt the purity of Hugh’s motives; yet an historian who judged Norman Bishops by a rule as uncharitable as that by which his panegyrist judges English Earls might doubt whether it was necessarily a disinterested act when the Bishop of Lisieux pleaded for the condemnation of the Archbishop of Rouen. The eldest and the third son of William and Lescelina were thus memorable and honoured [Sidenote: William Busac.] in their several walks. Their second son, William, called Busac, has left behind him a less worthy name. He is [Sidenote: His rebellion.] known in Norman history only for his rebellion, a rebellion of which the exact cause and the exact date are alike uncertain. But it is plain that he asserted a right to the Duchy.[293] This claim must have been made on much more frivolous grounds than those which had been put forth by some other pretenders; for, to say nothing of his having an elder brother living, the birth of his father was as distinctly illegitimate as the birth of the reigning Duke. William Busac seems to have been at this time, by what means does not appear, in possession of his brother’s fortress of Eu, which he made the centre of his revolt. [Sidenote: Duke William takes Eu.] But he had provoked a foe stronger than himself. Duke William gathered a force, and besieged and took the fortress of his great ancestor.[294] He acted with the same politic lenity which, at this time of his life, he always showed, except when his passions were specially aroused [Sidenote: William Busac banished. He takes refuge in France, and receives the County of Soissons. 1058.] in the way that they had been at Alençon. He merely required his rebellious kinsman to go into banishment. The castle of Eu was restored to its lawful owner Count Robert. As for William Busac, he distinctly gained by his exile. A younger son in Normandy, he became the founder of a great house in a foreign land. He took shelter in France, where King Henry received him with all honour, and after a while promoted him to a splendid marriage and a great fief. He bestowed on the exile the hand of Adelaide, heiress of Reginald Count of Soissons, sprung from a younger branch of that house of Vermandois which traced its descent from the direct and legitimate male line of Charles the Great.[295] But the direct line of the banished rebel did not flourish. Two sons succeeded Count William in the possession of Soissons, and the heritage then passed away into the hands of descendants in the female line.[296]

[Sidenote: Revolt of William Count of Arques. 1053.]

The next revolt against which the Duke had to struggle was of a much more formidable kind. Of no man could it be more truly said than of William that his foes were they of his own household. The rebel was again a kinsman, and the scene of the rebellion was again laid in those lands beyond Seine which had remained loyal during the revolt which ended at Val-ès-dunes.[297] William, in short, was destined to fight for his crown with every branch of his family, and with the men of every part of his dominions. The kinsman who now revolted was an uncle, another William, a son of Richard the Good by Papia, a brother therefore of Archbishop Malger. The legitimacy of his own birth was perhaps not absolutely beyond doubt,[298] yet we are told that he, like Guy of Burgundy and others,[299] as the son of a lawful wife,[300] despised the Bastard of Herleva, [Sidenote: Wide-spread movement] and asserted his own better right to the Duchy. In this movement against Duke William many conspirators, both [Sidenote: against the Duke;] in and out of Normandy, had a share. And at their head stood one, the highest of all in rank, and now again the [Sidenote: share taken by King Henry;] foremost in hatred against the prince by whose side he once had fought, Henry, King of the French. It is also [Sidenote: perhaps by Archbishop Malger.] quite possible that the Primate of Normandy himself had a share in his brother’s intrigues. Acts of distinct treason may thus have been among the causes which led to his deposition, as well as either neglect of ecclesiastical rule in his own person or an intemperate zeal for its observance in [Sidenote: The Duke suspects William of Arques.] the persons of others.[301] At all events, the Primate’s brother was now strongly, most likely deservedly, suspected by the [Sidenote: His earlier conduct;] Duke. We are told that he had been engaged in secret plots ever since William’s childhood;[302] but it is certain that [Sidenote: his desertion at Domfront. 1048–1049.] his name has not openly appeared in any of the conspiracies and revolts which we have thus far had to record. We are told also that, at the siege of Domfront, he acted something like the part of a deserter, leaving his post without any [Sidenote: Duke William occupies the castle of Arques.] leave from his sovereign and general.[303] On these and on other grounds it was that Duke William, as a matter of precaution, without as yet interfering with any other of the rights and possessions of his uncle, took possession of and garrisoned his castle of Arques.[304]

[Sidenote: Description of Arques: its earlier and later history.]

Arques, the small capital of the district of Talou,[305] plays a part in warfare both earlier and later than the days with which we are concerned. Its name is now best known through the victory which was won in its neighbourhood by Henry of Navarre over the forces of the League. [Sidenote: 1589.] But Arques had become famous in far earlier times. In the troubled minority of Richard the Fearless, when King [Sidenote: 944.] Lewis of Laôn and Count Arnulf of Flanders invaded the Duchy, the Flemish Count, in marching along the Norman coast, had been checked by the resistance of the Norman garrison which defended Arques.[306] The position then contended for was probably the town of Arques, now sunk to a village, but which was in those days a place of some importance. As an important position according to earlier Norman ideas,[307] it became an occasional dwelling-place of the Dukes, and it was in its neighbourhood that Duke Richard first made the acquaintance of the famous Gunnor.[308] Arques had also given its name to a line of Viscounts, themselves descended from another daughter of the lucky forester, and whose names will be found enrolled [Sidenote: Duke William grants the County to his Uncle.] among the conquerors of England.[309] But the County of Arques or Talou had been granted, seemingly by William himself in the early part of his reign,[310] to his uncle the son of Papia. Count William now proceeded, after the [Sidenote: Count William builds the Castle of Arques.] manner of that time, to secure himself by the erection of a fortress on a new site, a fortress which is undoubtedly one of the earliest and most important in the history of Norman military architecture. The castle of Arques, the work of William’s rebellious uncle and namesake,[311] is one of the few examples still remaining of the castles which were raised by the turbulent Norman barons in [Sidenote: The later Norman castles on heights.] the stormy days of William’s minority.[312] In the stage of the military art which now opens, the lower ground is forsaken, and the square donjon is almost always found placed on a height. Such a position at once added to the strength of the castle in case of attack, and enabled it to command the surrounding country like an eagle’s nest perched on a rock. Still, in days before the introduction of artillery, it was no objection to a site, otherwise convenient, that it was commanded by ground higher still. It was not till the days of the English wars that William’s own Falaise had been commanded by the rock on the opposite side of his maternal beck.[313] An insular or peninsular site was specially preferred; and this is very [Sidenote: Position of Arques.] conspicuously seen in the site of the Castle of Arques. At a distance of about three miles from the haven whose name of Dieppe is but a slight corruption of the old Teutonic _deeps_, near the point of junction of the river of the same name with the Eaulne and with the northern Varenne, a narrow tongue of land immediately commands the low, and in old times marshy, flats which lie between the high ground and the sea. The range of hills which ends in the cliffs of Dieppe rises close to the left; to the right, at a greater distance, lie the heights covered by the Forest of Arques. These heights are separated from the peninsular hill by the town of Arques, with its rich and picturesque church of the latest mediæval work, and by the battle-ground which made Arques famous in later days. In fact both Williams, the founder and the Conqueror alike, seem to be eclipsed even in local memory by the fame of the more modern hero.[314] It was on the end of this tongue of land that Count William fixed his castle, the outer wall fencing in the greater part of the peninsula, while the donjon itself [Sidenote: Strength of the castle.] was placed on the neck of the isthmus. At Arques no artificial mound was needed; the sides of the hill are naturally of no slight steepness; but, even on such a site as this, a Norman castle-builder was not satisfied with trusting to natural defences only. Between the wall and the slope of the hill Count William dug a fosse of enormous depth, such a fosse as may be seen in our own land at Old Sarum. An enemy who scaled the sides of the hill thus found himself, not under the castle wall, but on a narrow ledge of ground, a mere pathway in short, with a deep and wide ditch between himself and the fortress. This gigantic work still remains; so does the donjon itself, but, stripped as it is of all its smooth stone and of every fragment of architectural detail, it appears to the ordinary eye little more than a shapeless mass. The inner gate and part of the outer wall are perhaps also of the original work; but the castle received large additions and alterations in very late times, some of which did not even spare the donjon itself.[315] Still the site remains untouched, and the huge stern mass of the donjon is still there, at least more fortunate in its decay than Falaise in its “restoration.” There is no spot in Normandy on which the true Norman spirit is more thoroughly impressed.

Such a fortress as this Duke William could not afford to [Sidenote: Duke William puts a garrison in the castle.] leave in the hands of a suspected enemy. He therefore, as I have just said, placed a garrison in the castle of Arques, seemingly thinking that, in so doing, he had done enough to provide for the safety of that quarter of the Duchy. At all events he did not think that his personal presence was [Sidenote: Duke William at Valognes.] needed; for we find him once more in the distant Côtentin, once more, as before the day of Val-ès-dunes, to be summoned from his quarters at Valognes[316] by the news of a rebellion in the land. This time it was not his personal safety that was threatened, but everything was in jeopardy for which William could deem it worth while to reign or to [Sidenote: The Duke’s garrison at Arques betrays the castle to Count William.] live. The garrison which he had placed on the steep of Arques had proved faithless. Count William had appeared before the gate of the fortress which he had himself raised; threats, gifts, promises, solicitations of every kind, had won over the minds of its unsteady defenders.[317] The Lord of [Sidenote: Count William openly revolts.] Arques once more stood as master within his own castle, and now, in reliance on the support of their common overlord, he openly defied his nephew and immediate sovereign.[318]

The anarchy which had overspread all Normandy in the days of Duke William’s childhood, now broke forth again, [Sidenote: Ravages of the rebels.] no less terrible in kind if greatly narrowed in extent. But it was at least spread over as wide a range as could be commanded from the Castle of Arques. The hill-fortress became a mere nest of robbers, by whom every sort of damage was ceaselessly inflicted on the country around. As ever happened in these wretched conflicts, the blow fell heaviest on those who were least able to bear it. The goods of the churches, the crops and cattle of the peasant, the wares of the travelling merchant, became the prey of Count William and his soldiers. This kind of excess it was ever the great Duke’s boast, as it was his highest glory, to put down with all the weight of his hand. We may well believe his panegyrist when he tells us that it was in answer to the cry of his suffering people, no less than to avenge the insult done to his own authority,[319] that William set forth in all haste [Sidenote: Duke William’s march from Valognes.] from Valognes. He set forth on a march only less speedy than the headlong ride which had once borne him across the estuary of the Vire and by the minster and the mount of the faithful Hubert.[320] No longer alone, he again made his way across the ford which he had passed on that memorable night, but now he had no need to slink in by-paths or to fear to present himself before the gates of any city in his dominions. He pressed on by now loyal Bayeux, safe under the episcopal care of his brother, or rather of those who ruled under the name of the youthful Prelate.[321] He passed by Caen, where the anathema had been spoken against evil-doors such as those whom he was hastening to chastise.[322] There he made a feint of going on towards his capital; but he turned his steps to Pontaudemer, he crossed the Seine at Caudebec, one of the spots where the ancient speech of the Northman still lives in the local name;[323] he hastened on by Baons-le-Comte, till he found himself, at the head of [Sidenote: He reaches Arques with a small company,] six followers only, at the foot of the hill of Arques.[324] All the rest of the company at whose head he had set forth from Valognes had broken down on the way beneath the [Sidenote: and meets a reinforcement from Rouen.] haste and weariness of that terrible ride. But a reinforcement was already waiting for him. Some of the Duke’s chiefest and most trusty vassals had deemed that, in such a moment of peril, there was no need to wait for formal orders to do the duty of every loyal subject. They had set forth from Rouen at the head of a troop numbering three hundred knights, meaning to keep the revolters in check and to hinder the carrying of any kind of provisions into the rebellious fortress.[325] But they found the forces gathered in the castle to be so numerous, and they found the loyalty of some of their own men to be so doubtful, that, on the second day of their adventure, they made up their minds to turn home again before the dawn of the next day. Hard by the castle [Sidenote: William exhorted to delay.] they found the Duke with his small company. They told him the state of affairs; the disaffection was greater than he thought; nearly the whole neighbourhood—that is, we may suppose, the noble portion of its inhabitants—was hostile; it was dangerous to go on further with so small a force. But the victor of Val-ès-dunes and Domfront had learned something like confidence in his star. “The rebels,” said the Duke, “if once they see me face to face, will [Sidenote: He hastens on; his successful skirmish before the gates.] never dare to withstand me.”[326] At once, we are told, he spurred on his horse at full speed. His rebel uncle and his followers, a greater company than his own, were to be seen on the steep, returning, it would seem, from a plundering excursion. They were therefore no doubt disordered and encumbered with booty. The Duke determined on an instant attack. He followed them up to the only accessible point of the hill, by the path leading straight to the gate of the castle. A skirmish followed before the gateway, on the ground now covered by the later defences of the castle. The defenders of the fortress gave way before the impetuous charge of the Duke, and it was only, we are told, through their suddenly shutting the gates that the quarrel failed to be decided on the very day in which William had come in sight of the rebel stronghold.

The castle of Arques might possibly have been taken by such a sudden blow as the Duke had done his best to deal; but he knew well that to attempt to carry his uncle’s fortress by storm while its defenders were on their guard was an undertaking which surpassed even his prowess. Horse and foot could only have pressed up the sides of the peninsula, probably to fall headlong into the deep chasm which yawned between them and the outer walls of the castle.[327] Duke William was too wary a warrior to waste his strength on such attempts as this; moreover, at this time of his life at least, he had no mind for wanton slaughter, and he wished for the honour of recovering the castle and subduing the rebellion without the shedding of Norman blood.[328] A blockade was therefore [Sidenote: William blockades the castle.] the only course open to him; Arques was to be another Brionne.[329] The Duke had now been joined by a large following, counting among them some of the best knights of Normandy.[330] He could therefore afford to divide his forces. One party was left to continue the blockade of the castle. [Sidenote: Walter Giffard commands the blockading party.] Its command was entrusted to Walter Giffard, a loyal knight of the neighbourhood. He was a kinsman of William of Arques, that is, not of the rebel Count, but of the faithful Viscount, and a more distant kinsman of the Duke himself, both owning a common ancestor in the forester of Equiqueville, the father of Gunnor and her sisters.[331] The chief who now commanded below the steep of Arques lived to refuse to bear the banner of Normandy below the steep of Senlac. He lived to make up for a forced inaction against rebels in his own land, by dealing blows with all the remaining strength of his aged arm against men who were fighting for their homes against an unprovoked invasion. He lived to have his name written in the great record of the Conquest, and to found, like so many others among the baronage of Normandy, a short-lived Earldom in the land which he helped to conquer. The force under Walter now remained to guard the works which the Duke raised for the blockade of the castle. A ditch and palisade at the foot of the hill protected a wooden tower,[332] which was raised, as usual, in order to cut off the besieged from all communication with the neighbourhood. With the other party William himself departed, to keep in check some of the more powerful allies by whom it was likely that supplies or reinforcements would be furnished to the besieged.[333]

[Sidenote: King Henry abets the rebels.]

At the head of these was King Henry. It would seem that a scruple of feudal honour made William shrink from meeting his lord face to face in battle, even though his lord was in the act of committing a breach of every feudal tie towards a vassal who had fully discharged every feudal [Sidenote: William’s feudal scruple against meeting the King in arms.] duty. One reason, we are told, for the Duke’s entrusting the blockade to others was that the King was known to be marching to the relief of the castle. Rather than do aught against his oath of homage, William would run all the risk involved in carrying his own arms elsewhere, while he left others to head the resistance against the most dangerous of his foes.[334] And so it happened. The King came and went unhurt in person, but he was far from [Sidenote: Ambush of the Normans at Saint Aubin.] being successful in his enterprise. The besiegers laid an ambush in the way of the French army, near the dwelling of one of the few men in the County of Talou who remained loyal. The scene of this stratagem was the castle of Saint Aubin, a point on the Dieppe at a short [Sidenote: Loyalty of Richard of Hugleville.] distance above Arques. There dwelt a valiant knight of princely descent, Richard of Hugleville, a son of Papia, a daughter of Richard the Good. She had married beyond the limits of Normandy. Her husband was Gulbert, Advocate of Saint Valery in Ponthieu, a name soon to become so famous in Norman history. The Ponthevin dignity continued in the elder branch of the family; but Richard, the second son of Gulbert and Papia, had received an establishment in the land of Talou, and he now stood firmly by his cousin the Duke, while nearly the whole of the surrounding country was hostile.[335] With him no doubt stood his son, the younger [Sidenote: His son Gulbert.] Gulbert, a man whose name we shall again greet with honour, one whom Englishmen at least may look on as the noblest among the chivalry of Normandy.[336] With Richard too stood his son-in-law Geoffrey, the husband of his daughter Ada, and Geoffrey’s brother Hugh, the sons of Thurcytel who held the lordship of Neufmarché by the famous forest of Lions. Of these, Hugh had already fallen in an earlier [Sidenote: Richard’s son-in-law Geoffrey and his son Bernard of Newmarch.] skirmish with the rebels of Arques.[337] Geoffrey lived to be father of one who made himself a name in a remote corner of our own island. Bernard of Newmarch, the son of Ada the daughter of Richard of Hugleville, became as terrible an enemy to the central land of the Cymry, as the son of Hamon Dentatus showed himself to the Cymry of the southern coasts.[338] His fame still [Sidenote: His priory and castle at Brecknock.] lives, far away from the forest of Lions and the hill of Arques, where the minster and the castle of Brecknock look forth on the vale of the Welsh Axe, and on the mountain rampart which, when Arques was beleaguered and defended, still guarded the realm of Gruffydd the son of Rhydderch.[339]

[Sidenote: The French halt at Saint Aubin.]

The King of the French and his comrades must have been strangely ignorant of the state of the country, when they chose a spot for their halting-place so near to the home of such tried and loyal warriors as these. They had brought with them a good stock of provisions of corn and of wine, for the relief of the besieged of Arques. At Saint Aubin they began to make ready a train of sumpter-horses with a military convoy, to carry these good things to their suffering friends, just as if they had been in a country where no danger was to be looked for.[340] But, no doubt by the help of the loyal lord of Saint Aubin,[341] the besiegers of Arques, in their wooden castle,[342] soon learned the careless [Sidenote: Success of the Norman ambush.] approach of the French. A plan was speedily devised; an ambush was laid; a smaller party was sent forth to practise that stratagem of pretended flight which Norman craft was to display thirteen years later on a greater scale.[343] The Normans turned; the French pursued; presently the liers-in-wait were upon them, and the noblest and bravest of the invading host were slaughtered or taken prisoners before [Sidenote: Capture of Hugh Bardulf.] the eyes of their King.[344] One Norman traitor at least was taken. “Hugh Bardulf himself, that great man,”[345] was among the captives. The exact nature and measure of Hugh’s greatness does not appear; but his capture is spoken of as one of the most important events of the fight. I know of no record of his earlier exploits or of his later fate; but the name of Bardulf occurs repeatedly in the later records both of the Norman and of the English Exchequer, and one at least of his descendants seems to have been as [Sidenote: Death of Count Ingelram of Ponthieu.] little amenable to lawful authority as his ancestor.[346] By the side of the captive Bardulf died a sovereign prince, a neighbour of Normandy, bound by ties of the closest affinity [Sidenote: The Counts of Ponthieu.] alike to William the Duke and to William the rebel. The house of the Counts of Ponthieu is one whose name will meet us more than once again in the course of the present volume. Sprung of the blood of Herlwin of Montreuil, a name so familiar to us in Norman history a hundred years before,[347] they held, as he had done, the border land between Normandy and Flanders. But they had held it by various [Sidenote: Hugh the First, Advocate of Saint Riquier.] tenures and under various titles. Hugh, the great-grandfather of the present ruler, a prince, if we may so call him, high in the favour of his namesake the Parisian King, had borne no title but that of Advocate of Saint Riquier.[348] He was, as the chronicles of the Abbey take care to tell us, enriched at the expense of the great monastery of which he was bound to be the defender.[349] The house of Saint Riquier was the work of the bounty of the great Charles; it was the house where a saintly Abbot and an Emperor’s daughter so strangely became the parents of that famous Nithard, who figures alike as Count and as Abbot, and who is yet more renowned as a lay historian in whose steps neither Æthelweard [Sidenote: Ingelram the First, Count of Ponthieu or Abbeville.] nor Fulk knew how to walk.[350] The son of Hugh, Ingelram or Enguerrand[351] the First, was the first to bear the title of Count of Ponthieu, a title sometimes exchanged for that of Count of Abbeville.[352] The grange stolen away from the house of Saint Riquier grew into the capital of a principality, and the town was in after days adorned with that unfinished minster, which, as it is looked at from the west or from the east, may be called the noblest or the meanest in France. This elder Ingelram has already appeared in our history as a foe of Count Gilbert of Brionne, his antagonist on the field where Herlwin, not yet of Bec, taught the contending chiefs how a Christian soldier had learned to [Sidenote: Hugh the Second. 1046–1052.] return good for evil.[353] From him the County passed to a second Hugh, and from him, only a year before, it had [Sidenote: Ingelram the Second. 1052–1053.] passed to a second Ingelram. This prince now, whether led by border enmity, by loyalty to his suzerain, or by preference to one domestic tie over another, had joined the call of King [Sidenote: His affinity with both Williams.] Henry to an invasion of the Norman Duchy. The Count of Ponthieu went forth to help the husband of his sister against the brother of his wife. Count Hugh had given his daughter in marriage to William of Arques,[354] but his son was also the husband of a full sister of Duke William.[355] As such, he was himself the son-in-law of the Tanner’s daughter, and he had therefore no right to join the Lord of Arques in his sneers at the Bastard of Falaise. He now felt the strength of the Norman steel, even in the absence of the Prince against whom he came. He fell in the ambush [Sidenote: Guy, 1053–1100.] of Saint Aubin;[356] his County passed to his brother Guy, soon again to appear in our story;[357] but his daughters, [Sidenote: Daughters of Ingelram.] the nieces of Duke William, were treated as members of the ducal family, and one of them, Judith the wife of Waltheof, lived to leave behind her an evil renown in the history of our own land.[358]

[Sidenote: King Henry retires.]