Chapter XII: The Later Reign of William in Normandy.159 (6)

It would be an interesting question to determine how far the Celtic language has gone back, and how far the Romance language has advanced, along the frontier which now became the seat of war. The country through which William and Harold passed is now wholly French in speech, and in outward appearance it offers hardly any strictly Breton peculiarities.[711] Into what is still the true Britanny further to the west the line of their campaign [Sidenote: March of William and Harold.] did not reach. Their march led them only through those border-lands of Normandy and Britanny, where the trees, the hedges, the rich pastures, the orchards loaded with their autumnal wealth,[712] might have made the English Earl still deem himself within the fairest regions [Sidenote: Avranches.] of his own Wessex. Their course must have passed by Avranches, the city so lately enlightened by the learning, and made illustrious by the fame, of Lanfranc. From the height where the now vanished minster once crowned the city, the eye of Harold would rest for the first time on that other and far more wondrous minster which crowns the island rock in the distance, the minster which Æthelred in his wrath and pride had feared to injure,[713] the guardian [Sidenote: Saint Michael’s Mount.] Mount of the Archangel, Saint Michael in Peril of the Sea. That princely Abbey is marked as one of the halting-places of the host, and the rude art of the times still preserves the pictured representation of the Duke and his host passing below the sea-girt sanctuary.[714] Beneath its walls the army crossed over that vast expanse of sand, where the frontier stream of the Norman and the Breton, [Sidenote: Passage of the Coesnon;] the deep and rushing Coesnon, then no doubt unfettered by dykes and fences, pours its flood into the bay at the foot of the consecrated Mount. In that dangerous passage the [Sidenote: Harold saves the drowning soldiers.] careless traveller might easily be engulfed. Even soldiers of the Norman army were sinking in the sands or were being carried away by the stream, when the strong arm of the English Earl was stretched forth to save them. This feat of Harold’s bodily prowess, the ease with which his single strength raised up the sinking men, made an impression on the minds of his companions which still lives in the truest record of the one campaign in which Harold and William fought side by side.[715] The stream was crossed, and the Norman Duke and his English guest were now landed on Breton ground, where Harold was ready, perhaps eager, to display the same prowess which he had already shown in his own island in warfare against a kindred enemy. [Sidenote: They reach Dol; description of the city.] A short march from the frontier stream brought them to the first important post of eastern Britanny, the city which they came to rescue. The ancient ill luck of Dol has pursued it in all ages, and warfare later than the days of Harold has swept away nearly every trace of the city on which he could have gazed. Its cathedral church, small as compared with the gigantic piles of Amiens and Ely, yields to none in true stateliness and vigour of design, and it draws only greater solemnity from its rugged material, the granite of the neighbouring rock. But that church, even now unfinished, is a work of the thirteenth century, and it owes its origin to a calamity which fell upon the city in the wars of John Lackland. And now Dol has wholly sunk from its old ecclesiastical rank; the church which once aspired to metropolitan honours has lost even its diocesan Bishop; the cathedral has sunk to a parish church; the parish church, the only building which can date from the days of William and Harold, is put to profane uses. The city itself hardly ranks above a village, though, in the varied and curious architecture of its long street, its houses ranging from the twelfth century onwards, we see abundant traces of the greatness which has passed away. Still Dol has features wrought by the hand of nature, and by the hand of man in earlier days, which remain now as they were when Harold and William rode forth to the war [Sidenote: Primæval remains in the neighbourhood.] against Conan. At no great distance to the south of the city stands one of the hugest of those huge stones, which were as mysterious in the days of Harold as they are in our own. There it still abides, reared, it may well be, by the hands of men by whose side the Briton himself might stand abashed as a modern intruder. On that rude pillar the zeal of later days has reared the triumphant cross, to crown the vast work of heathen times, the monument, it may well be, of heathen worship. And to the north of the city lies the great natural feature of the district, the Mount [Sidenote: Mount Dol.] of Dol. The elevation of the city itself is small; its walls indeed crown what passes for a height in that vast plain, a height great enough to give the minster yet further stateliness in the view from the lower ground. But Dol is no hill-fortress, like Le Mans, Angers, and Domfront. The spot where one would have almost looked to find the city is the mount itself, which still rises, a huge stern mass of granite, well nigh as wild and untilled as in the days of its first inhabitants. But the presence of man and the dominion of the Christian faith are witnessed by the village, with its rude and ancient church, nestling at the base, by the small chapel and the vast statue of Our Lady which crown the height itself. From that height the eye ranges far and wide over that noble bay, over the shores of Britanny and of the Constantine peninsula, over islands dotted here and there, the proud Mount of the Archangel rising in the foreground as if alike to guard and to sanctify the landscape. From that height the trembling watchers of Dol had gazed in fear, when in earlier days the sails of the heathen pirates were seen in the far horizon. They had gazed, perhaps in hope, when the fleet of Æthelred drew near to ravage the Norman shore. They had gazed again in fear, when Duke Robert, when his hopes of English conquest were dashed to the ground, turned his wrath on neighbours who were at least guiltless of the death of Ælfred or of the banishment of Eadward.[716] And now from that height, not indeed the men of Dol, but the spies of the besieging host of Conan, doubtless looked forth as the Duke of the Normans and his renowned English guest [Sidenote: Union of Normans and English against the Celts on both sides of the Channel.] drew nigh. The men of Britanny might well quake with greater fear than ever as the two mightiest warriors of their age marched against them side by side. The presence of William and Harold in the same host might seem to show that the old strifes of Angle and Saxon and Dane and Frank and Roman were lulled to rest, that the powers of North and South were joined together in one great effort to crush the persecuted Briton in each of his two last homes on either side of his own sea.

[Sidenote: Flight of Conan.]

The besieging host, we are told, did not dare to meet in the field the enemy whose presence their prince had so unwisely challenged. At the approach of William the Breton Count fled, laying himself open to the jeers and mockeries of his rebellious subject within the besieged city.[717] Nothing could check his flight, which seems not to have stopped till he found himself safe in his own [Sidenote: Rhiwallon complains of the damage done by the Normans.] capital at Rennes.[718] Dol was saved; but its commander found his deliverers almost as destructive as his enemies. The Norman host, encamped round the city, was fast eating up the fruits of the ground. Rhiwallon represented to his Norman ally that it mattered little to him and to his neighbours whether it was by Norman or by Breton destroyers that their goods were lost to them.[719] The flight of Conan, however glorious to William, had as yet done no good to the men of Dol.[720] In the narrative of the expedition, a [Sidenote: William’s return.] narrative by no means easy to follow, we are told that these considerations of prudence or humanity were enough to induce William to withdraw his troops at the end of a month’s campaign.[721] This retreat however has a strange sound, when we go on to hear that an Angevin host was said to have suddenly appeared in support of Conan.[722]

[Sidenote: Probability that Harold accompanied William in more than one
expedition.]

On the whole it seems most probable that Harold accompanied William in more than one expedition against Britanny.[723] It was most likely in another raid, though in one, we may be sure, which followed pretty soon after the earlier one, that William and his English guest made their way somewhat further into the Breton territory, though still without reaching the districts most strongly marked with Breton characteristics. In a campaign of which we have no further account, Conan was driven to take shelter in what was doubtless one of the most important [Sidenote: Siege of Dinan.] strongholds of his dominions. His last stand was made at Dinan, the fortress by the Rance, than which no town in all Gaul better preserves the character, expressed perhaps in its Celtic name, of the old Gaulish [Sidenote: Description of the town.] hill-fort. No remains of castle or minster are there which can have witnessed the approach of the Norman Conqueror and the English hero. The chief church, a building which seems more like the work of Aquitanian than of Breton hands, dates only from the next age, and the noble mass of the castle, the almost perfect circuit of the town-walls, are the work of still later times. The heroic associations of Dinan gather round the name of Bertrand Du Guesclin rather than round those of Conan, William, or Harold. Yet, save the heights crowned by the donjons of Domfront and Falaise, few of the spots which figure in our history more thoroughly preserve the general aspect which they must have borne in the eleventh century. The peninsular height looking down on the Rance, the hills, the rocks, the woods, remain doubtless unchanged. The neighbouring group of buildings at Lehon, the monastery in the vale, the castle on the height, though their existing buildings all belong to later times, speak to us of the tastes alike of the monks and of the warriors of William’s day. They tell of times when the armed chief reared his eagle’s nest on the height, and when the peaceful brotherhood below sought for a spot where wood and water would never fail them.[724] And the town itself, still almost wholly contained within its ancient walls, crowns the main hill exactly as it must have done in the days of William. Unmarked as it is by the soaring spires of Angers, by the spreading apse of Le Mans, or by the twin towers of Exeter and Geneva, no town better sets before us that distinctive feature of early times, the city set on an hill which cannot be hid. The ancient bridge remains, now guarded only by a mere village suburb; it is only the modern viaduct, a work worthy of old Roman days, which speaks at all forcibly of the changes which have passed over the world since William and Harold encamped beneath the height. They crossed the stream, they compassed the town, and doubtless made their attack on the western side, where the fall is gentler, where the later fortifications are stronger, and where the comparatively modern castle no doubt occupies the site of the donjon of Conan.

[Sidenote: William attacks the town—employment of fire.]

We have no details of the siege. It must be in a great degree a fancy picture which represents the Norman horsemen as charging with lifted lances against the defenders of the fortress.[725] But the same representation implies a vigorous defence on the part of the besieged, and it shows that the post was at last won by the familiar Norman means, the application of fire.[726] This seems, as at Mayenne, to have broken the spirits of the defenders, and, [Sidenote: Conan surrenders the town.] in our one representation of the siege, Conan is shown, according to the custom of the time, surrendering the keys of his fortress by offering them on the point of a spear to his conqueror. It is in the like fashion that the conqueror receives his submission.[727] This is all that we hear of the expedition in which Harold took a part. Whatever may have been its real nature and results, it at least did not lead to any permanent Norman occupation of the country which had been the seat of war. Dol and Dinan both remained Breton. And, at a later period of William’s life, when he could command the whole force of England and not only an occasional English volunteer, we shall [Sidenote: 1076.] find him again in arms before Dol, but this time as the besieger of the doomed city, not as its deliverer.[728]

According to one account, according to that account on which I look with less of distrust than on the others,[729] [Sidenote: Knighthood of Harold.] Harold’s knighthood and Harold’s oath did not go before, but followed, the Breton campaign, and the knighthood seems to be set forth as taking place within or under the walls of Dinan, immediately after the capture of the town. Such a ceremony, possibly amounting to a tie of sworn brotherhood[730] between the two companions-in-arms, may very well have followed the capture of a town won by the joint prowess of the Norman Duke and the English [Sidenote: Question of Harold’s oath.] Earl. But the more famous oath, the oath on which so much of the history turns, wherever and whenever it was [Sidenote: Contradiction as to time and place. Probably at Bayeux after the Breton War.] taken, was, at any rate, taken on Norman ground. One version, as we have seen, places it before the Breton expedition; the account which I am inclined to follow places it immediately after. From Dinan William returned to Bayeux, and at Bayeux it was that Harold took the fatal engagement upon his soul.[731] Other accounts place it at Bonneville; others at Rouen, either in the palace, or under [Sidenote: Contradiction as to the nature of the Oath.] an oak near the city. The nature of the oath, is as little certain as its time or place. As I have already said,[732] nearly every account represents it as containing an engagement to marry one of William’s daughters; some accounts seem to make that engagement and its breach the whole ground of quarrel between the two Princes. Others add that Harold further engaged to give his [Sidenote: Statements as to its terms.] sister in marriage to an unnamed Norman noble. Most accounts add also far more important political stipulations. Harold is to become the man of William; he is to receive him, on Eadward’s death, as his successor on the throne of England; meanwhile he is to be the guardian of William’s interests in England, and to act in some sort as his lieutenant. He is at once to give up the castle of Dover, with its well, to the Duke, and to receive a Norman garrison in it; he is to build other castles at other points of English ground, where the Duke may think good, and there also he is to receive and maintain Norman garrisons. The highest place in William’s favour, when he shall have attained the English Crown, honours, grants, even to the half of the Kingdom, are of course promised to Harold as the reward of faithfully carrying out all these promises.

[Sidenote: Form of the oath, said to be on the relics of the saints.]

To all this, or to some part of all this, we are told that Harold swore. He swore, it is said, after some form of more than usual solemnity, something beyond the ordinary oath of homage. He swore upon the relics of the [Sidenote: Trick played by William about the relics.] saints.[733] And one famous version of the tale represents this more solemn form of oath as something into which Harold was unwittingly entrapped by a base trick on the part of William. It is not an English apologist of Harold, but a Norman admirer of William,[734] who tells us how the Duke filled a chest with all the holiest relics of the saints of Normandy; how Harold swore on the chest, not knowing on what he swore; how William then drew away the covering with which the holy things had been hidden, and bade Harold see how fearful was the oath which he had taken, and how awful was the vengeance which would light on him who failed to keep it. His hand trembled and his flesh quivered[735] when he laid his hand on the chest, while still unknowing of all that was in it; how much more frightened was he when he knew by how awful a sanction he had unwittingly bound his soul.[736] This may be history or it may be legend; at any rate it is the honour of the Norman rather than that of the Englishman which is staked on its truth or falsehood.

[Sidenote: Harold returns to England, perhaps leaving Wulfnoth as a
hostage.]

The oath then, whatever was its nature, being sworn, Harold left, or was allowed to leave, the Norman Court. He returned to England in full outward friendship with the Norman Duke, as his sworn man, his future son-in-law. With Hakon, and with his sister, if she had accompanied him, he sailed back to England. Wulfnoth, it would seem, was left with the Duke as a hostage for his brother’s fidelity.[737]

[Sidenote: Impossibility of fixing the details, but some groundwork of
truth in the story.]

I have told this famous tale in that one of the many shapes which it has taken which seems least widely removed from the probabilities of the case. It is at least not impossible, which is more than can be said of some of the other shapes. But I would not be understood as pledging myself to the accuracy of a single detail. The charge of perjury against Harold is a charge in which there is no statement for the defence, while the witnesses [Sidenote: Negative evidence of the English writers.] for the prosecution contradict one another. To my own mind, as I have before said,[738] the strongest argument against Harold is that there is no statement for the defence. Had there been a single distinct English contradiction of the story, direct or implied, I should have cast away the whole tale as pure invention. But, while we have such contradictions on almost every other point, on this point we have none. It was clearly a weak point in Harold’s case; it was a subject on which his friends shrank from entering. This to my mind proves a great deal; but we must beware of dealing with it as if it proved more than it really does. It proves that there was something wrong, something about which Harold’s friends could not speak freely. It proves that there was some groundwork for the Norman story; it proves that Harold took some engagement the breach of which could easily be represented as perjury. But it proves no more. The different forms of the Norman story remain as contradictory to one another, as lacking in all corroborative evidence, as they were before. Harold swore. [Sidenote: No certainty as to the time,] But when? All kinds of dates are given; our only means of choosing one date rather than another is by choosing the most vacant year in the English annals. We know that it must have been before Harold’s marriage with Ealdgyth; but the date of that marriage is itself matter of conjecture.[739] Again, we could fix the date, if we had any independent accounts of the campaigns of Dol and Dinan. But no Breton writer mentions those campaigns at all; no Norman writer mentions them except in connexion with the visit and oath of Harold. I have myself placed the event at the point of time which on the whole seemed least unlikely; but I confess to have had all along a lurking feeling that the whole story may have arisen out of something which happened in that earlier French journey of Harold’s, of which we have no details.[740] Harold then, I admit, swore, but when he swore must remain matter of conjecture.

[Sidenote: the place,]

And, if we are thus left to conjecture as to the time when Harold swore, we are equally left to conjecture as to the place. The scene of such an event might have been expected to be well known. We are told that the oath was taken in the presence of a full assembly of the Norman nobles;[741] but even contemporary authorities do not agree as to the spot where this great council was gathered together. We have to choose at our pleasure between Bonneville, Bayeux, and Rouen. These glaring contradictions do not indeed affect the belief that there is some groundwork of fact for the story, but they are quite enough to hinder us from putting implicit faith in a single uncorroborated detail.

[Sidenote: or the nature, of the oath.]

Still more important than the questions when and where Harold swore, is the question what he swore. Even here the witness of his accusers does not agree together. The engagement to marry William’s daughter, so prominent in most of the accounts, is passed by in one which ought to be the most trustworthy of any. There is an utter uncertainty as to which of William’s many daughters it was that Harold engaged to marry. According to one version, this part at least of the oath, if not kept, was at least not broken; one statement, and that put into Harold’s own mouth,[742] affirms, with whatever truth, that the daughter of William to whom he had plighted himself died before his accession to the Crown. Even the most important engagement of all, the promise to secure William’s succession, or at least to do all that one man could do to secure it, appears in different shapes in the different [Sidenote: Impossibility of some of its alleged terms.] accounts. In most of them it is accompanied by lesser engagements which carry their own confutation with them. Harold is made to promise to do various things on William’s behalf forthwith. The engagements to receive a Norman garrison in Dover Castle, to build other castles elsewhere, and to receive and maintain Norman garrisons in them—these were engagements the fulfilment of which was not to wait till the death of Eadward. They were engagements to be fulfilled at once, as pledges of Harold’s faith, and as means of paving the way for William’s succession when the day should come. But it is certain that these lesser engagements never were fulfilled; it is nowhere stated that any complaint was made during Eadward’s life as to their non-fulfilment. We hear nothing of any complaint, of any message, on the part of William, until after Harold’s election and coronation. They were in truth stipulations the fulfilment of which was simply impossible, and a prince so clear-sighted as William must have seen that it was impossible. Harold might indeed do all that was in one man’s power to secure the election of William whenever the throne should become vacant; but it would have been beyond the power of any man, even of an Earl of the West-Saxons, to surrender English fortresses to William while Eadward still lived. When Eadward was dead, the Witan might of course, if they would, choose William as his successor. But, while William was not yet King, it would have been simple treason in an English Earl to surrender to him a fortress which the King and people of England had entrusted to his keeping. It is highly probable that William himself knew the English Constitution much better than the historians who write as his advocates and flatterers. But it called for no special knowledge of the English Constitution, it was little more than a matter of common sense, to see that no subject, however exalted, either could, or ought to, hand over English fortresses to a foreign prince, even though that foreign prince was the destined successor to the English Crown.

[Sidenote: The oath, if the terms were as is alleged, must have been
taken under compulsion.]

Harold then, as I hold, swore, but what he swore is as uncertain as it is when and where he swore it. We are left as completely to conjecture as to the matter of his oath as we are left as to its time and its place. We know only that it was something which gave William a great advantage, something which enabled him, without much difficulty, to represent his rival as guilty of a signal perjury. But we can say no more. If Harold really promised to accept William as King after the death of Eadward, and to use every means in his power to bring about his acceptance by the rest of the nation, such an oath could have been taken only under compulsion. If Harold took such an oath, it could only have been because he felt that his position in the Norman Court, however honourable in appearance, was practically the position of a prisoner. For such an oath was one which he certainly had no intention of keeping. And, however reckless Harold may have been with regard to oaths,[743] this was an oath which neither Harold nor any other man in his senses would have willingly taken, unless he had meant to keep it. To take such an oath, and then to break it, was to give the enemy the greatest possible advantage. We may therefore feel sure that, if Harold did swear to all which the Norman accounts represent him as swearing to, he must have sworn simply because he felt himself in bonds, because he saw no other way of escaping from Normandy and returning to England.[744]

[Sidenote: William’s apparent motives—to entrap Harold into breach of
his oath.]

On the other hand, if William required such an oath, he could have required it only because he knew that it would not be kept. It is quite impossible to believe that, at the time when Harold’s visit is commonly placed, William did not know perfectly well that Harold had designs on the English Crown, even if Harold were not in some sort already recognized as Eadward’s destined successor. William could not be so blind as to think that an extorted oath on the part of Harold would really hinder the English people from electing Harold King, or would even hinder Harold from accepting the election of the English people. A formal oath to receive William as King could have been required with no other object than that of gaining, on some future day, the advantage of representing Harold as a perjured man. Harold, in short, was called on to take an oath, simply in the hope that he might break it. Great as William’s character was in many ways, I fear that this sort of trick to entrap a rival would have seemed to him simply a praiseworthy stratagem. We may be sure that William’s religious feelings, to speak of no other motive, would have kept him back from a wilfully false oath in his own person. But the formal religion of those times would perhaps not have kept him back from throwing an occasion of sin in the way of another, provided his own hands were kept formally clean from all share in it. A more enlightened morality will pronounce that, if William really did thus purposely entrap Harold into the crime of perjury, the guilt of William was far blacker than the guilt of Harold.

[Sidenote: Probable real nature of the oath.]

But perhaps it is not necessary to suppose that Harold really did swear to William’s succession in the full and formal way which the Norman writers assert. It is remarkable how prominent a place is filled in nearly every account by Harold’s promise to marry William’s daughter. And it is further remarkable that this promise is the only part of the story which seems to have reached some writers [Sidenote: An engagement to marry William’s daughter,] in other lands.[745] I am inclined to suspect that we have here before us the germ of the whole matter. Harold may have promised, promised, as we are told his manner was, too hastily, to marry one of William’s daughters. He may easily have been thus far cajoled by the blandishments of Matilda, and even, as some accounts suggest, by the expressed preference of the princess herself. When once out of the snare, he may have forgotten or laughed at his promise to so youthful a bride, and love, or policy, or both, may have attracted him to the widow of Gruffydd. We must remember how very lightly matrimonial engagements of this sort were both entered into and cancelled. The whole history of the middle ages is full of stories of princesses whose marriage engagements were lightly made and lightly broken, sometimes through the inconstancy of suitors, sometimes through that of fathers. The diplomacy of days a little later than those of Harold and William shows us many a treaty of marriage which became a dead letter almost as soon as it was signed. In the morality of those times, Harold’s breach of his promise to marry Adeliza or Agatha, or whatever the maiden’s name was, would certainly not be set down as a very deadly sin. But, deadly or not deadly, it was manifestly a sin out of which William could reap no small advantage, one which could easily be employed to discredit the cause of his adversary. [Sidenote: combined with an act of formal homage.] The case would be still stronger if we could suppose, what is really not unlikely, that either Harold’s knighthood or his engagement to marry William’s daughter was accompanied by some formal act of homage done by Harold to William.[746] We must remember that Harold owed William a real and deep debt of gratitude for his deliverance from Guy’s dungeon. He consented to serve in William’s army in a quarrel which concerned neither himself nor his country; and, though older than William, he did not scruple to enter into what was in some sort a filial relation [Sidenote: Probability of such homage on Harold’s part.] towards him. It would really not be wonderful if, under this combination of circumstances, Harold consented to become William’s man. We must again bear in mind how lightly engagements of this kind were entered into, [Sidenote: Complications of the feudal relation.] and how perplexing and clashing were the endless complications of feudalism. Men did homage on all kinds of grounds, on the receipt of almost any kind of benefit, and they were often bound by the tie of homage to several lords at the same time. William himself was the man of King Henry; but he seems also to have looked on himself as the man of King Eadward;[747] it is within the compass of possibility that he did homage to Eadward as his chosen successor at the time of his visit to England. Herbert of Maine might have been claimed as the man of the King of the French, of the Duke of the Normans, and of the Count of Anjou, all at once. Roger of Mortemer was undoubtedly the man of Duke William; but he was also the man of so small a lord as Ralph of Montdidier; and we have seen the difficulties into which he was brought through this divided allegiance.[748] King Malcolm was the man of Eadward and the sworn brother of Tostig; yet neither of these obligations kept him back from ravaging Northumberland.[749] In short the instances are endless. Most public men of the eleventh century must have been like the English statesman of the seventeenth, who had taken a great many oaths, [Sidenote: Effect of homage done by Harold to William.] and was afraid that he had not kept them all.[750] In such a state of things it would be nothing amazing if Harold became the man of his benefactor, his future father-in-law, his military commander in the Breton war. Such an act of homage would undoubtedly not bind him, either in its terms or in its spirit, to receive William as Eadward’s [Sidenote: The advantage given by it to William.] successor on the throne of England. But it would give William a great advantage nevertheless. Nothing would be more easy than for William to construe the oath of homage in one way and for Harold to construe it in another. When the man assumed a crown to which the lord laid claim, such conduct might easily be represented as a breach of the man’s duty to his lord. The man had promised to do his lord faithful service, and he had failed to do that faithful service in the matter which, of all others, was nearest the lord’s heart. Here was quite material enough for the craft of William to take advantage of, and to turn to the discredit of his rival. The relations of lord and vassal in those days were in a state somewhat like that in which other relations of life have been at other [Sidenote: Fluctuating public opinion as to the obligations of homage.] times. There must have been few princes or nobles in western Europe who had not, at some time or other, been guilty of some breach of the strict duty of a man to his lord. The fault thus lightly committed was often as lightly pardoned. Yet, as special acts of fidelity called for special admiration, so it was not hard, whenever it was convenient, to insist on and to aggravate the offence of the faithless vassal.[751] The offence was one which could, almost at pleasure, be either passed by as altogether trivial or held up to execration as a sin of the most heinous dye. The latter course, I need not say, was that which would be followed with unrelenting eagerness, when the breach of duty to be held up for scorn and vengeance was one committed by Harold and against William.

[Sidenote: Case of an oath on relics.]

And, in the ideas of those days, it would be held as further strengthening the case of William, as further aggravating the crime of Harold, if the oath taken and broken was not merely the common oath of a man to his lord, but an oath of unusual sanctity, an oath taken upon the relics of the saints. We must look at the matter with [Sidenote: General case with regard to oaths.] the feelings of those times. In any enlightened view of morality, one promise is as binding as another; the word of an honest man is as sacred as a thousand oaths. But the fact that oaths are required among all nations and under all religions shows that this is a morality so high that the mass of mankind do not practically act upon it. Every oath is in truth a curse, a religious threat, a calling down of the vengeance of an unseen power on the man who shall break it. A man, under different forms of religion, swears by such a god or by such a saint. If he breaks his oath, he offers a personal insult to the god or the saint by [Sidenote: Personal enmity of the saints incurred by a false oath on their relics.] whom he swears. The power whom he thus offends becomes his personal enemy, and may be expected to mark him out as an object for personal vengeance. If therefore the story of the relics be true, William’s object was to work on Harold’s mind by dint of the extreme of superstitious dread, by pointing to all the saints of Normandy as about to become his personal enemies in case he should break his oath. The strange thing to our minds is that it does not seem to have struck any one that the real sinner against [Sidenote: True moral aspect of the case. William more guilty than Harold.] the saints was not Harold but William. If the saints in glory are conceived as being still capable of personal human passions, one would have expected that they would look on no insult as so great, so direct, so unpardonable, as that of profaning their holy relics to a purpose of deliberate fraud. Harold is made to swear; then, after he has sworn, he is told that he has sworn on these awful and wonder-working relics, whose vengeance, in case of breach of faith, will track him like that of the Erinnyes. Strange to say, the author of so base a deception is looked on as a pious worshipper, deserving the highest favour of every holy person of whom a bone or a fragment of clothing lay within the chest. It is the unwitting victim of fraud whom the saints mark out for what, in the intercourse of mortals upon earth, would be looked on as a somewhat unjust vengeance. The reader must judge for himself as to the probability of the tale. The strongest argument in its favour is that Harold’s alleged perjury seems to have aroused greater general indignation than could have been aroused by a mere breach of the common oath of homage. At any rate, the question whether such a tale be true or false is certainly one which comes much more nearly home to the apologist of William than to the apologist of Harold.

[Sidenote: Harold’s sin lay not in breaking the oath, but in taking it.]

As to the bearing of the transaction on Harold’s character, the morality of the question is easily summed up. Whatever was the engagement which Harold broke, whether it was a promise to betray England to the stranger or simply to contract a marriage of absurd disparity in point of years, his sin lay wholly in taking the oath, not in breaking it. He yielded to threats or to blandishments, to a vague sense of danger, to a vague impulse of gratitude or to a momentary inclination, when in strict morality he ought to have stood firm against every temptation and every threat. Through one or other of these motives he allowed himself to be cajoled into making a promise which he had no serious intention of fulfilling. He incurred whatever amount of guilt is incurred by thus trifling with what ought to be solemn engagements. No one, I suppose, will argue that he would at all have mended matters, had he fulfilled his promise by any act of treason towards his country. This of course goes on the supposition that his promise really involved any such acts of treason. But it is just as likely that Harold really broke no promise of greater moment than that of marrying, at some unfixed time, a child whose father was younger than himself.

[Sidenote: Utter obscurity of the whole matter.]

I found the question involved in darkness, and I must leave it in the darkness in which I found it. I have offered some conjectures, but it is simply as conjectures that I have offered them. The tale is so beset with contradictions that it is impossible to attain to anything like certainty on [Sidenote: The oath in no case affected the English people.] any single point of detail. One thing at least is certain. However deeply Harold may have sinned against William, England sinned not at all. No promise or oath of Harold could bind the people of England, or could give William any right over them which he did not possess before. If Harold sinned, his guilt was on his own head. The people of England were guiltless, and William’s invasion of England was none the less an unprovoked attack on a people who had never wronged him. And, if we accept the most famous and most striking part of the story, it is clear that the guilt of the deceiver was far heavier than the guilt of the deceived. The question is therefore a Norman rather than an English question, and as a Norman question I have dealt with it in one of the Norman chapters of my history.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

I may seem, in the course of this long chapter, to have wandered far away from Harold and from England. But the whole career of the Conqueror is an essential part of my subject. Every step in that career is a step towards the great enterprise of his life. Every event which illustrates his character belongs alike to the history of both the lands over which he ruled. We have now seen him completely establish himself within his own Duchy; we have seen him successful alike against domestic and against foreign enemies; we have seen him extend his dominions by a continental conquest which seemed almost designed as a forestalling of his coming conquest beyond the sea. We again entered on the direct stream of English history, when we reached that obscure and mysterious event, which, in some way or another, placed the hero of England in his power. Our long episode is therefore over. We return to the point where we left the affairs of England. Harold, in Norman eyes the faithless vassal of William, is chosen and consecrated to the Crown which William claimed as his own. We have now to see what steps William took, when the news reached him of what he deemed, or professed to deem, so great a wrong. A few bootless attempts at negotiation alone separate us from actual wars and rumours of wars. A few more pages, and we shall have fairly entered on the central scene of the great tragedy. We shall soon have to look on the last warfare of Teutonic England under the King of her own choice. We shall soon have to behold the twofold invasion, the twofold struggle, the last and greatest victory of Harold, his first and his last defeat.