Chapter II: The Early Days of William Rufus.4 (5)

The rebellion and its suppression, the affairs of the Bishop of Durham, and the striking episode by the Orm’s Head, fill up the first stirring year of the Red King. But the year of the rebellion is also marked by one or two ecclesiastical events, which throw some light on the state of things in the early days of Rufus, while he still had Lanfranc to his guide. The great ecclesiastical crimes of the Red King in his after days were the bestowal of bishoprics and abbeys for money, and the practice of keeping them vacant for his own profit. Of these two abuses, the former seems to have been the earlier in date. The keeping prelacies vacant was one of the devices of Randolf Flambard, and it could hardly have been brought into play during the very first year of Rufus. The influence of Lanfranc too would be powerful to hinder so public an act as the keeping vacant of a bishopric or abbey; it would be less powerful to hinder a private transaction on the King’s part which might be done without the Primate’s knowledge. Add to this, that, while the filling a church or keeping it vacant was a matter of fact about which there could be no doubt, the question whether the King had or had not received a bribe was a matter of surmise and suspicion, even when the surmise and suspicion happened to be just. It is then not wonderful that we find Rufus charged with corrupt dealings of this last kind at a very early stage of his reign. We have seen that Thurstan, the fierce Abbot of Glastonbury, was, by one of the first acts of Rufus, restored to the office which he had so unworthily filled, and from which the Conqueror had so worthily put him aside. And we have seen that it was at least the general belief that his restoration was brought about by a lavish gift to the King’s hoard.[371] But three prelacies, two bishoprics and a great abbey, which either were vacant at the moment of the Conqueror’s death or which fell vacant very soon after, were filled without any unreasonable delay. Stigand, Bishop of Chichester, died about the time of the Conqeror’s death, whether before or after, and his see was filled by his successor before the end of the year.[372] Geoffrey’s own tenure was short; he died in the year of the rebellion, and, as his see did then remain vacant three years, we may set that down as the beginning of the evil practice.[373] About the same time died Scotland Abbot of Saint Augustine’s, and the English Ælfsige, who still kept the abbey of Bath. Not long after died Ælfsige’s diocesan, the Lotharingian Gisa, who had striven so hard to bring in the Lotharingian discipline among his canons of Wells.[374] The bishopric of the Sumorsætan was thus among the first sees which fell to the disposal of William the Red, and his disposal of it led to one of the most marked changes in its history. The bishopric was given to John, called _de Villula_, a physician of Tours, one of the men of eminence whom the discerning patronage of William the Great had brought from lands alike beyond his island realm and beyond his continental duchy. John was a trusty counsellor of the Red King, employed by him in many affairs, and withal a zealous encourager of learning.[375] But he had little regard to the traditions and feelings of Englishmen, least of all to those of the canons of Wells. Like Hermann, Remigius, and other bishops of his time, he carried out the policy of transferring episcopal sees to the chief towns of their dioceses. But the way in which he carried out his scheme, if not exactly like the violent inroad of Robert of Limesey on the church of Coventry,[376] was at least like the first designs of Hermann on the church of Malmesbury, which had been thwarted by the interposition of Earl Harold.[377] The change was made in a perfectly orderly manner, but by the secular power only. The abbey of Bath was now vacant by the death of its abbot Ælfsige. Bishop John procured that the vacant post should be granted to himself and his successors for the increase of the bishopric of Somerset. This was done by a royal grant made at Winchester soon after the suppression of the rebellion, and confirmed somewhat later in a meeting of the Witan at Dover.[378] John then transferred his _bishopsettle_ from its older seat at Wells to the church which had now become his. He next procured a grant of the temporal lordship of the “old borough,” which was perhaps of less value after its late burning by Robert of Mowbray.[379] Thus, in the language of the time, Andrew had to yield to Simon, the younger brother to the elder.[380] That is, the church of Saint Peter at Bath, with its Benedictine monks, displaced the church of Saint Andrew at Wells, with its secular canons freshly instructed in the rule of Chrodegang, as the head church of the bishopric of Somerset. The line of the independent abbots of Bath came to an end; their office was merged in the bishopric, by the new style of Bishop of Bath. Thus the old Roman city in a corner of the land of the Sumorsætan, which has never claimed the temporal headship of that land, became for a while the seat of its chief pastor.

[Sidenote: The change made wholly by the civil authority.]

[Sidenote: Power of bishops.]

[Sidenote: Dislike to the change on the part of the canons of Wells]

[Sidenote: and the monks of Bath.]

[Sidenote: Buildings of John of Tours. 1088-1122.]

[Sidenote: The church of Bath called abbey.]

That so great an ecclesiastical change should be wrought by the authority of the King and his Witan――perhaps in the first instance by the King’s authority only――shows clearly how strong an ecclesiastical supremacy the new king had inherited from his father and his father’s English predecessors. By the authority of the Great Council of the realm, but without any licence from Pope or synod, an ancient ecclesiastical office was abolished, the constitution of one church was altered, and another was degraded from its rank as an episcopal see. The change was made, so says the Red King’s charter, for the good of the Red King’s soul, and for the profit of his kingdom and people. It is more certain that it was eminently distasteful to both the ecclesiastical bodies which were immediately concerned. The treatment which they met with illustrates the absolute power which the bishops of the eleventh century exercised over their monks and canons, but which so largely passed away from them in the course of the twelfth. To the canons of Wells Bishop John was as stern a master or conqueror as Bishop Robert was to the monks of Coventry. They were deprived of their revenues, deprived of the common buildings which had been built for them by Gisa, and left to live how they might in the little town which had sprung up at the bishop’s gate.[381] To the English monks of Offa’s house at Bath the new bishop was hardly gentler; he deemed them dolts and barbarians, and cut short their revenues and allowances. It was not till he was surrounded by a more enlightened company of monks of his own choosing that he began to restore something for the relief of their poor estate.[382] But in his architectural works he was magnificent. His long reign of thirty-four years allowed him, not only to begin, but seemingly to finish, the great church of Saint Peter of Bath, of which a few traces only remain, and the nave only of which is represented by the present building.[383] And though, since the days of Ælfsige, there has never been an Abbot of Bath distinct from the Bishop, yet _abbey_, and not _minster_ or _cathedral_, is the name by which the church of Bath is always known to this day.[384]

[Sidenote: Disturbances on the appointment of Guy at Saint Augustine’s.]

[Sidenote: Flight of Guy.]

[Sidenote: Punishment of the rebellious monks.]

[Sidenote: Punishment of the citizens.]

The disturbances at Saint Augustine’s which followed the death of Abbot Scotland, and the chief features of which have been described elsewhere, must have taken place earlier in the year. For the appointment or intrusion of Guy took place while Odo was still acting as Earl of Kent.[385] But the great outbreak, in which the citizens of Canterbury took part with the monks against the Abbot, did not happen till after the death of Lanfranc. Then monks and citizens alike made an armed attack on Guy, and hard fighting, accompanied by many wounds and some deaths, was waged between them and the Abbot’s military following.[386] The Abbot himself escaped only by fleeing to the rival house of Christ Church. Then came two Bishops, Walkelin of Winchester and Gundulf of Rochester, accompanied by some lay nobles, with the King’s orders to punish the offenders. The monks were scourged; but, by the intercession of the Prior and monks of Christ Church, the discipline was inflicted privately with no lay eyes to behold.[387] They were then scattered through different monasteries, and twenty-four monks of Christ Church, with their sub-prior Anthony as Prior, were sent to colonize the empty cloister of Saint Augustine’s.[388] The doom of the citizens was harder; those who were found guilty of a share in the attack on the Abbot lost their eyes.[389] The justice of the Red King, stern as it was, thus drew the distinction for which Thomas of London strove in after days. The lives and limbs of monastic offenders were sacred.

§ 3. _The Character of William Rufus._

[Sidenote: Death of Lanfranc. May 24, 1089.]

[Sidenote: Its effects.]

[Sidenote: Position of Lanfranc in England and Normandy.]

[Sidenote: His burial at Christ Church.]

The one great event recorded in the year after the rebellion was the death of Archbishop Lanfranc, an event at once important in itself, and still more important in the effect which it had on the character of William Rufus, and in its consequent effect on the general march of events. The removal of a man who had played so great a part in all affairs since the earliest days of the Conquest, who had been for so many years, both before and after the Conquest, the right hand man of the Conqueror, was in itself no small change. For good or for evil, the Lombard Primate had left his mark for ever on the Church and realm of England. One of the abetters of the Conquest, the chief instrument of the Conqueror, he had found the way to the good will of the conquered people, with whom and with whose land either his feelings or his policy led him freely to identify himself.[390] It must never be forgotten that, if Lanfranc was a stranger in England, he was no less a stranger in Normandy. As such, he was doubtless better able to act as a kind of mediator between the Norman King and the English people; he could do somewhat, if not to lighten the yoke, at least to make it less galling. In the last events of his life we have seen him act as one of the leaders in a cause which was at once that of the English people and of the Norman King. We have seen too some specimens of his worldly wisdom, of his skill in fence and debate. An ecclesiastical statesman rather than either a saint or strictly a churchman, it seems rather a narrow view of him when the national Chronicler sends him out of the world with the hope that he was gone to the heavenly kingdom, but with the special character of the venerable father and patron of monks.[391] His primacy of nearly nineteen years ended in the May of the year following the rebellion.[392] He was buried in the metropolitan church of his own rebuilding, and, when his shorter choir gave way to the grander conceptions of the days of his successor, the sweet savour that came from his tomb made all men sure that the pious hope of the Chronicler had been fulfilled.[393]

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[Sidenote: Change for the worse in the King’s character.]

[Sidenote: Lanfranc’s rebukes of William.]

Lanfranc was borne to his grave amid general sorrow.[394] But the sorrow might have been yet deeper, if men had known the effect which his death would have on the character of the King and his reign. Up to this time the worst features of the character of William Rufus had not shown themselves in their fulness. As long as his father lived, as long as Lanfranc lived, he had in some measure kept them in check. We need not suppose any sudden or violent change. It is the manifest exaggeration of a writer who had his own reasons for drawing as favourable a picture as he could of the Red King, when we are told that, as long as Lanfranc lived, he showed himself, under that wholesome influence, the perfect model of a ruler.[395] There can be no doubt that, while Lanfranc yet lived, William Rufus began to cast aside his fetters, and to look on his monitor with some degree of ill will. The Primate had already had to rebuke him for breach of the solemn promises of his coronation, and it was then that he received the characteristic and memorable answer that no man could keep all his promises. But there is no reason to doubt that the death of Lanfranc set Rufus free from the last traces of moral restraint.[396] His dutiful submission to his father had been the best feature in his character; and it is clear that some measure of the same feeling extended itself to the guardian to whose care his father, both in life and in death, had entrusted him. But now he was no longer under tutors and governors; there was no longer any man to whom he could in any sense look up. He was left to his own devices, or to the counsels of men whose counsels were not likely to improve him. It was not a wholesome exchange when the authority of Lanfranc and William the Great was exchanged for the cunning service of Randolf Flambard and the military companionship of Robert of Bellême.

[Sidenote: Picture of William Rufus.]

[Sidenote: Birth of William Rufus, c. 1060.]

[Sidenote: His outward appearance.]

[Sidenote: His surname of _Rufus_.]

[Sidenote: Rufus in youth.]

[Sidenote: His filial duty.]

[Sidenote: His natural gifts.]

[Sidenote: His conduct during the rebellion.]

[Sidenote: Case of the Bishop of Durham.]

As soon then as Lanfranc was dead, William Rufus burst all bounds, and the man stood forth as he was, or as his unhappy circumstances had made him. We may now look at him, physically and morally, as he is drawn in very elaborate pictures by contemporary hands. William, the third son of the Conqueror, was born before his father came into England; but I do not know that there is any evidence to fix the exact year of his birth. He is spoken of as young[397] at the time of his accession, and from the date of the marriage of the Conqueror and Matilda, it would seem likely that their third son would then be about twenty-seven years of age. He would therefore be hardly thirty at the time of the death of Lanfranc. The description of his personal appearance is not specially inviting. In his bodily form he seems, like his brother Robert,[398] a kind of caricature of his father, as Rufus, though certainly not Robert, was also in some of his moral and mental qualities. He was a man of no great stature, of a thick square frame, with a projecting stomach. His bodily strength was great; his eye was restless; his speech was stammering, especially when he was stirred to anger. He lacked the power of speech which had belonged to his father and had even descended to his elder brother; his pent-up wrath or merriment, or whatever the momentary passion might be, broke out in short sharp sentences, often showing some readiness of wit, but no continued flow of speech. He had the yellow hair of his race, and the ruddiness of his countenance gave him the surname which has stuck to him so closely. The second William is yet more emphatically the Red King than his father is either the Bastard or the Conqueror. Unlike most other names of the kind, his surname is not only used by contemporary writers, but it is used by them almost as a proper name.[399] Up to the time of his accession, he had played no part in public affairs; in truth he had no opportunity of playing any. The policy of the Conqueror had kept his sons dependent on himself, without governments or estates.[400] We have a picture of Rufus in his youthful days, as the young soldier foremost in every strife, who deemed himself disgraced, if any other took to his arms before himself, if he was not the first to challenge an enemy or to overthrow any enemy that challenged his side.[401] Above all things, he had shown himself a dutiful son, cleaving steadfastly to his father, both in peace and war. His filial zeal had been increased after the rebellion of his brother, when the hope of the succession had begun to be opened to himself.[402] By his father’s side, in defence of his father, he had himself received a wound at Gerberoi.[403] Such was his character beyond the sea; but the one fact known of him in England before his father’s death is that he had, like most men of his time who had the chance, possessed himself in some illegal way of a small amount of ecclesiastical land.[404] It is quite possible that both his father and Lanfranc may have been deceived as to his real character. In the stormy times which followed his accession, he had shown the qualities of an able captain and something more. He had shown great readiness of spirit, great power of adapting himself to circumstances, great skill in keeping friends and in winning over enemies. No man could doubt that the new King of the English had in him the power, if he chose to use it, of becoming a great and a good ruler. And assuredly he could not be charged with anything like either cruelty or breach of faith at any stage of the warfare by which his crown was made fast to him. If he anywhere showed the cloven foot, it was in the matter of the Bishop of Durham. Even there we can have no doubt that he spared a traitor; but he may have been hasty in the earliest stage of the quarrel; he certainly, in its latter stages, showed signs of that small personal spite, that disposition to take mean personal advantages of an enemy, which was so common in the kings of those days. Still, whatever Lanfranc may have found to rebuke, whatever may have been the beginnings of evil while the Primate yet lived, no public act of the new king is as yet recorded which would lead us to pass any severe sentence upon him, if he is judged according to the measure of his own times.

[Sidenote: General charges against Rufus.]

[Sidenote: Little personal cruelty;]

[Sidenote: comparison with his father and brother.]

[Sidenote: His profligacy and irreligion.]

[Sidenote: Redeeming features in his character.]

It is indeed remarkable that the pictures of evil-doing which mark the reign of Rufus from the Chronicle onwards are, except when they take the form of personal anecdote, mainly of a general kind. Those pictures, those anecdotes, leave no room to doubt that the reign of Rufus was a reign of fearful oppression; but his oppression seems to have consisted more in the unrestrained licence which he allowed to his followers than in any special deeds of personal cruelty done by his own hands or by his immediate orders. Rufus certainly did not share his father’s life-long shrinking from taking human life anywhere but in battle; but his brother Henry, the model ruler of his time, the king who made peace for man and deer, is really chargeable with uglier deeds in his own person than any that can be distinctly proved against the Red King. We are driven back to our old distinction. The excesses of the followers of Rufus, the reign of unright and unlaw which they brought with them, did or threatened harm to every man in his dominions; the occasional cruelties of Henry hurt only a few people, while the general strictness of his rule profited every one. What makes William Rufus stand out personally in so specially hateful a light is not so much deeds of personal cruelty, as indulgence in the foulest forms of vice, combined with a form of irreligion which startled not only saints but ordinary sinners. And the point is that, hateful as these features in his character were, they did not hinder the presence of other features which were not hateful in the view of his own age, of some indeed which are not hateful in the view of any age.

[Sidenote: His marked personality.]

[Sidenote: Comparison with his father.]

[Sidenote: His alleged firmness of purpose.]

[Sidenote: His caprice.]

[Sidenote: His unfinished campaigns.]

The marked personality of William Rufus, the way in which that personality stamped itself on the memory of his age, is shown by the elaborate pictures which we have of his character, and by the crowd of personal anecdotes by which those pictures are illustrated. Allowing for the sure tendency of such a character to get worse, we may take our survey of the Red King as he seemed in men’s eyes when the restraints of his earlier life were taken away. As long as his father lived, he had little power to do evil; as long as Lanfranc lived, he was kept within some kind of bounds by respect for the man to whom he owed so much. When Lanfranc was gone, he either was corrupted by prosperity, or else, like Tiberius,[405] his natural character was now for the first time able to show itself in the absence of restraint. His character then stood out boldly, and men might compare him with his father. William the Red may pass for William the Great with all his nobler qualities, intellectual and moral, left out.[406] He could be, when he chose, either a great captain or a great ruler; but it was only by fits and starts that he chose to be either. His memory was strong; he at least never forgot an injury; he had also a kind of firmness of purpose; that is, he was earnest in whatever he undertook for good or for evil, and could not easily be turned from his will.[407] But he lacked that true steadiness of purpose, that power of waiting for the right time, that unfailing adaptation of means to ends, which lends somewhat of moral dignity even to the worst deeds of his father. The elder William, we may be sure, loved power and loved success; he loved them as the objects and the rewards of a well-studied and abiding policy. The younger William rather loved the excitement of winning them, and the ostentatious display of them when they were won. Hard as it was for others to turn him from his purpose, no man was more easily turned from it by his own caprice. No man began so many things and finished so few of them. His military undertakings are always ably planned and set on foot with great vigour. But his campaigns come to an end without any visible cause. After elaborate preparations and energetic beginnings, the Red King turns away to something else, often without either any marked success to satisfy him or any marked defeat to discourage him. If he could not carry his point at the first rush, he seems to have lacked steadiness to go on. We have seen what he could do when fighting for his crown at the head of a loyal nation. He does not show in so favourable a light, even as a captain, much less as a man, when he was fighting to gratify a restless ambition at the head of hirelings gathered from every land.

[Sidenote: His “magnanimity.”]

[Sidenote: His boundless pride.]

[Sidenote: His private demeanour.]

[Sidenote: Trick of his chamberlain.]

The two qualities for which he is chiefly praised by the writer who strives to make the best of him are his magnanimity and his liberality. The former word must not be taken in its modern English use. It is reckoned as a virtue; it therefore does not exactly answer to the older English use of the word “high-minded;” but it perhaps comes nearer to it than to anything that would be spoken of as magnanimity now. It was at all events a virtue which easily degenerated into a vice; the magnanimity of William Rufus changed, it is allowed, by degrees into needless harshness.[408] The leading feature of the Red King’s character was a boundless pride and self-confidence, tempered by occasional fits of that kind of generosity which is really the offspring of pride. We see little in him either of real justice or of real mercy; but he held himself too high to hurt those whom he deemed it beneath him to hurt. His overweening notion of his own greatness, personal and official, his belief in the dignity of kings and specially in the dignity of King William of England, led him, perhaps not to a belief in his star like Buonaparte, certainly not to a belief in any favouring power, like Sulla,[409] but to a kind of conviction that neither human strength nor the powers of nature could or ought to withstand his will. This high opinion of himself he asserted after his own fashion. The stern and dignified aspect of his father degenerated in him into the mere affectation of a lofty bearing, a fierce and threatening look.[410] This was for the outside world; in the lighter moments of more familiar intercourse, the grim pleasantry into which the stately courtesy of his father sometimes relaxed degenerated in him into a habit of reckless jesting, which took the specially shameless form of mocking excuses for his own evil deeds.[411] Indeed his boasted loftiness of spirit sometimes laid him open to be mocked and cheated by those around him. One of the endless stories about him, stories which, true or false, mark the character of the man, told how, when his chamberlain brought him a pair of new boots, he asked the price. Hearing that they cost three shillings only――a good price, one would have thought, in the coinage of those times――he bade his officer take them away as unworthy of a king and bring him a pair worth a mark of silver. The cunning chamberlain brought a worse pair, which he professed to have bought at the higher price, and which Rufus accordingly pronounced to be worthy of a King’s majesty.[412] Such a tale could not have been believed or invented except of a man in whose nature true dignity, true greatness of soul, found no place, but who was puffed up with a feeling of his own importance, which, if it could sometimes be shaped into the likeness of something nobler, could also sometimes sink into vanity of the silliest and most childish kind.

[Sidenote: His “liberality.”]

[Sidenote: His wastefulness.]

[Sidenote: His reward to the loyal troops after the rebellion.]

[Sidenote: His extortions.]

[Sidenote: His generally strict government.]

[Sidenote: His lavishness to his mercenaries.]

[Sidenote: Chiefly foreigners.]

[Sidenote: Their wrongdoings.]

[Sidenote: Statute of Henry against them. 1108.]

But the quality for which the Red King was most famous in his own day, a quality which was, we are told, blazed abroad through all lands, East and West, was what his own age called his boundless liberality. The wealth of England was a standing subject of wonder in other lands, and in the days of Rufus men wondered no less at the lavish way in which it was scattered abroad by the open hand of her King.[413] But the liberality of Rufus had no claim to that name in its higher sense.[414] It was not that kind of liberality which spends ungrudgingly for good purposes out of stores which have been honestly come by; it was a liberality which gave for purposes of wrong out of stores which were brought together by wrong. It was a liberality which consisted in the most reckless personal waste in matters of daily life, and which in public affairs took the form of lavish bribes paid to seduce the subjects of other princes from their allegiance, of lavish payments to troops of mercenary soldiers, hired for the oppression of his own dominions and the disquieting of the dominions of others. It was said of him that the merchant could draw from him any price for his wares, and that the soldier could draw from him any pay for his services.[415] The sources which supplied William with his wealth were of a piece with the objects to which his wealth was applied; under him the two ideas of liberality and oppression can never be separated. What was called liberality by the foreign mercenary was called extortion by the plundered Englishman. The hoard at Winchester, full as the Conqueror had left it, could not stay full for ever; it is implied that it was greatly drawn upon by gifts to those who saved William’s crown and kingdom at Pevensey and Rochester.[416] This was of a truth the best spent money of the Red King’s reign; for it rewarded true and honest service, and service done by the hands of Englishmen. But to fill the hoard again, to keep it filled amid the constant drain, to keep up with the lavishness of one to whom prodigality had become part of his nature,[417] needed every kind of unrighteous extortion. The land was bowed down by what, in the living speech of our forefathers, was called _ungeld_; money, that is, wrung from the people by unrede, unright, and unlaw.[418] Like his father, Rufus was, as a rule, strict in preserving the peace of the land; his hand was heavy on the murderer and the robber. The law of his father which forbade the punishment of death[419] was either formally repealed or allowed to fall into disuse. The robber was now sent to the gallows; but, when he had got thither, he might still save his neck by a timely payment to the King’s coffers.[420] And the sternness of the law which smote offenders who had no such prevailing plea was relaxed also in favour of all who were in the immediate service of the King.[421] The chief objects of William’s boasted liberality were his mercenary soldiers, picked men from all lands. A strong hand and a ready wit, by whomsoever shown and howsoever proved, were a passport to the Red King’s service and to his personal favour.[422] And those who thus won his personal favour were more likely to be altogether strangers than natives of the land, whether of the conquering or of the conquered race. We may suspect that the settled inhabitants of England, whether English or Norman, knew the King’s mercenaries mainly as a body of aliens who had licence to do any kind of wrong among them without fear of punishment. The native Englishman and his Norman neighbour had alike to complain of the chartered brigands who went through the land, wasting the substance of those who tilled it, and snatching the food out of the very mouths of the wretched.[423] A more detailed picture sets before us how, when the King drew near to any place, men fled from their houses into the woods, or anywhere else where they could hide themselves. For the King’s followers, when they were quartered in any house, carried off, sold, or burned, whatever was in it. They took the householder’s store of drink to wash the feet of their horses, and everywhere offered the cruellest of insults to men’s wives and daughters.[424] And for all this no redress was to be had; the law of the land and the discipline of the camp had alike become a dead letter in the case of offenders of this class. The oppressions of the King’s immediate company were often complained of in better times and under better kings; but they seem to have reached a greater height under William Rufus than at any time before or after. We hear of no such doings under the settled rule of the Conqueror; under Henry they were checked by a statute of fearful severity.[425] As usual, the picture of the time cannot be so well drawn in any words as those in which the native Chronicler draws it in our own tongue. King William “was very strong and stern over his land and his men and his neighbours, and very much to be feared, and, through evil men’s rede that to him ever welcome were, and through his own greediness, he harassed his land with his army and with _ungeld_. For in his days ilk right fell away, and ilk unright for God and for world uprose.”[426]

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[Sidenote: Stricter forest laws.]

[Sidenote: Story of the fifty Englishmen.]

[Sidenote: Why mentioned as Englishmen.]

[Sidenote: Their acquittal by ordeal.]

[Sidenote: The King’s blasphemous comment.]

Thus were the promises with which William Rufus had bought the help of the English people in his day of danger utterly trampled under foot. He had promised them good laws and freedom from unrighteous taxes; he had promised them that they should have again, as in the days of Cnut,[427] the right of every man to slay the beasts of the field for his lawful needs. Instead of all this, the reign of the younger William became, above all other reigns, a reign of _unlaw_ and of _ungeld_. The savage pleasures of the father, for the sake of which he had laid waste the homes and fields of Hampshire, were sought after by the son with a yet keener zest, and were fenced in by a yet sterner code. In the days of William the Red the man who slew a hart had, what he had not in the days of William the Great, to pay for his crime with his life.[428] The working of this stern law is shown in one of the many stories of William Rufus, a story of which we should like to hear the end a little more clearly.[429] Fifty men were charged with having taken, killed, and eaten the King’s deer. We are so generally left to guess at the nationality of the lesser actors in our story that our attention is specially called to the marked way in which we are told that they were men of Old-English birth, once of high rank in the land, and who had contrived still to keep some remnants of their ancient wealth.[430] They belonged doubtless to the class of King’s thegns; if we were told in what shire the tale was laid, Domesday might help us to their names. This is one of the very few passages which might suggest the notion that Englishmen, as Englishmen, were specially picked out for oppression. And it may well be true that the forest laws pressed with special harshness on native Englishmen; no man would have so great temptation to offend against them as a dispossessed Englishman. What is not shown is that a man of Norman birth who offended in the same way would have fared any better. The mention of the accused men as Englishmen comes from the teller of the story only; and he most likely points out the fact in order to explain what next follows. On their denying the charge, they were sent to the ordeal of hot iron. Granting that killing a deer was a crime at all, this was simply the ancient English way of dealing with the alleged criminal. We are therefore a little surprised when our informant seems to speak of the appeal to the ordeal as a piece of special cruelty.[431] The fiery test was gone through; but God, we are told, took care to save the innocent, and on the third day, when their hands were formally examined, they were found to be unhurt. The King in his wrath uttered words of blasphemy. Men said that God was a just judge; he would believe it no longer. God was no judge of these matters; he would for the future take them into his own hands.[432] To understand the full force of such words, we must remember that the ordeal was, in its own nature, an appeal to the judgement of God in cases when there was no evidence on which man could found a judgement.[433] What happened further we are not told; it can hardly be meant that the men in whose favour the judgement of God was held to have been given were sent to the gallows all the same.

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[Sidenote: Special vices of Rufus.]

In this last story the most distinctive feature of the character of William Rufus comes out. In many of his recorded deeds we see the picture of an evil man and an evil king, but still of a man and a king whose deeds might find many parallels in other times and places. But the story in which he mocks at the ordeal leads us to those other points in him which give him a place of his own, a place which perhaps none other in the long roll-call of evil kings can dispute with him. Other kings have been cruel; others have been lustful; others have broken their faith with their people, and have said in their hearts that there was no God. But the Red King stands well nigh alone in bringing back the foulest vices of heathendom into a Christian land, and at the same time openly proclaiming himself the personal enemy of his Maker.

[Sidenote: Contrast between Rufus and his father.]

[Sidenote: Old and new fashions of dress.]

[Sidenote: The pointed shoes.]

[Sidenote: Fashionable vices of the time.]

[Sidenote: Personal crimes of the King.]

It is with regard to his daily life and to the beliefs and objects which his age looked on as sacred that William Rufus stands out in the most glaring contrast to his father. William the Great, I need hardly repeat, was austere in his personal morals and a strict observer of every outward religious duty. His court was decent; the men who stood before him kept, we are told, to the modesty of the elder days. Their clothes were fitted to the form of their bodies, leaving them ready to run or ride or do anything that was to be done.[434] They shaved their beards――all save penitents, captives, and pilgrims――and cut their hair close.[435] But with the death of William, of Pope Gregory, and of other religious princes, the good old times passed away, and their decorous fashions were forgotten through all the Western lands.[436] Then vain and foppish forms of attire came in. The gilded youth of Normandy and of Norman England began to wear long garments like women, which hindered walking or acting of any kind; they let their hair grow long like women; they copied the walk and mien of women.[437] Above all, their feet were shod with shoes with long curved points, like the horns of rams or the tails of scorpions. These long and puffed shoes were the device of a courtier of Rufus, Robert henceforth surnamed the _Cornard_, and they were further improved by Count Fulk of Anjou, when he wished to hide the swellings on his gouty feet.[438] The long hair and the long-pointed shoes serve as special subjects for declamation among the moral writers of the time.[439] But these unseemly fashions were only the outward signs of the deeper corruption within. The courtiers, the minions, of Rufus, forerunners of the minions of the last Henry of Valois, altogether forsook the law of God and the customs of their fathers. The day they passed in sleep; the night in revellings, dicing, and vain talk.[440] Vices before unknown, the vices of the East, the special sin, as Englishmen then deemed, of the Norman, were rife among them. And deepest of all in guilt was the Red King himself. Into the details of the private life of Rufus it is well not to grope too narrowly. In him England might see on her own soil the habits of the ancient Greek and the modern Turk. His sins were of a kind from which his brother Henry, no model of moral perfection, was deemed to be wholly free, and which he was believed to look upon with loathing.[441]

[Sidenote: His irreligion.]

[Sidenote: Coming of the Jews.]

[Sidenote: Their position in England.]

[Sidenote: Favour shown to them by Rufus.]

[Sidenote: Comparison with the Sicilian Saracens.]

[Sidenote: William’s vein of mockery.]

Sinners, even of the special type of the Red King, have before now been zealous supporters of orthodoxy. If William persecuted Anselm, Constans defended Athanasius. But the foulness of William’s life was of a piece with his open mockery of everything which other men in his day held sacred. Whatever else divided Englishman and Norman, they were at least one in religious doctrine and religious worship. In matters of dogma Stigand was as orthodox as Lanfranc. But now, among the endless classes of adventurers whom the Conquest brought to try their luck in the conquered land, came men of a race whom Normans and Englishmen alike looked on as cut off from all national and religious fellowship. In the wake of the Conqueror the Jews of Rouen found their way to London,[442] and before long we find settlements of the Hebrew race in the chief cities and boroughs of England, at York, Winchester, Lincoln, Bristol, Oxford, and even at the gates of the Abbots of Saint Edmund’s and Saint Alban’s.[443] They came as the King’s special men, or more truly his special chattels, strangers alike to the Church and to the commonwealth of England, but strong in the protection of a master who commonly found it to his interest to defend them against all others. Hated, feared, and loathed, but far too deeply feared to be scorned or oppressed, they stalked defiantly among the people of the land, on whose wants they throve. They lived safe from harm or insult, save now and then, when popular wrath burst all bounds, and when their proud mansions and fortified quarters could shelter them no longer from raging crowds eager to wash out their debts in the blood of their creditors.[444] The romantic picture of the despised, trembling, Jew, cringing before every Christian that he meets, is, in any age of English history, simply a romantic picture. In the days of Rufus at all events, the Jews of Rouen and London stood erect before the prince of the land, and they seem to have enjoyed no small share of his favour and personal familiarity. The presence of the unbelieving Hebrew supplied the Red King with many opportunities for mocking at Christianity and its ministers. He is even said to have shown himself more than once, when it was to his interest so to show himself, as a kind of missionary of the Hebrew faith. He was not the only prince of his age who discouraged conversions to Christianity on the part of distinct races who could be made more useful, if they remained distinct, and who could in no way be kept so distinct as if they remained in the position of infidels. Count Roger of Sicily found that the unbelieving Saracens,[445] and William Rufus found that the unbelieving Hebrews, were, each in their own way, more profitable to their several masters than if they had been allowed to lose their distinct being among their Christian neighbours. But in the whole dealings of Rufus with the Jews there is a vein of mockery in which, if Roger shared, it is not recorded. It is true that we do not find Rufus taking the part of the Jew, except when the Jew made it worth his while to do so. But when he did take the Jew’s part, he clearly found a malicious pleasure in taking it. He enjoyed showing favour to the Jew, because so to do gave annoyance to the Christian.

[Sidenote: Question of William’s scepticism.]

[Sidenote: The dispute between Jews and Christians.]

[Sidenote: Jews turn back again.]

[Sidenote: Story of the convert Stephen and his father.]

[Sidenote: Dispute between Stephen and the King.]

[Sidenote: The King’s compromise with Stephen’s father.]

Whether Rufus was in any strict sense an intellectual sceptic may be doubted. That he was such cannot be inferred from his bidding in bitter mockery the Jewish rabbis and the bishops of England to dispute before him on the tenets of their several creeds, promising to embrace the faith of the strangers, if they should have the better in the discussion. The discussion took place in London, most likely when the prelates were gathered for some Whitsun Gemót. The Christian cause was supported by several bishops and clerks――one would like to have their names――who argued, we are told, in great fear on behalf of the faith which was thus jeoparded.[446] As is usual in such cases, each side claimed the victory;[447] but in any case the arguments on the Hebrew side were not so overwhelming as to make the King become an avowed votary of Moses. Still he did what he could to hinder the ranks of the Church from being swelled at the cost of the synagogue. In a story which must belong to the latter part of his reign, we read how the Jews of Rouen began to be frightened at the great numbers of their body who fell away from the law of their fathers. They came to the King, and, by a large bribe, obtained from him a promise that the converts should be constrained to go back to the faith which they had forsaken. They were brought before Rufus, and most of them were by his terrible threats forced again to apostatize.[448] The tale of the Red King’s success in this crooked kind of missionary enterprise reached the ears of a Jew father――where we are not told――whose only and well-beloved son was lost to him by conversion to the Christian faith. The young man had been favoured with a vision of the protomartyr Stephen, who had bidden him ask for baptism and take his own name at the font.[449] He went to a priest, told his tale, and was admitted to baptism by the name which was appointed to him. His father, mourning for his loss, went to King William and made his complaint; praying that at his command his son might be restored to his old faith.[450] Rufus held his peace; the argument which alone persuaded him to meddle in such matters had not yet been urged.[451] A promise of sixty marks of silver, payable on the second conversion of the youth, brought the King to another mind,[452] and Stephen was called into the royal presence. A dialogue took place between the King and the neophyte, in which Rufus, remembering perhaps the one redeeming feature in his own life, pressed Stephen’s return to Judaism as a matter of filial duty. The youth humbly suggests that the King is joking. Rufus waxes wroth, and takes to words of abuse and to his usual oath. Stephen’s eyes shall be torn out, if he does not presently obey his bidding.[453] The youth stands firm, and even rebukes the King. He can be no good Christian who, instead of trying to win to Christ those who are estranged from him, strives to drive back those who have already embraced his faith. Rufus, put to shame by the answer, has nothing to say, but drives Stephen from his presence with scorn.[454] The Jew father is waiting without. His son overwhelms him with words of abuse which even zeal for his new faith would hardly justify. He would no longer acknowledge a father in one whose own father was the Devil, and who, not satisfied with his own damnation, sought the damnation of his son.[455] With this somewhat harsh way of putting matters, the zealous youth vanishes from the story; the Jew father has yet another turn with the Red King. He is called in, and Rufus says that he has done what he had been asked to do, and demands the promised payment for his pains.[456] The Jew expostulates. His son, he says, is firmer than ever in his Christian faith and in his hatred towards himself. Yet the King says that he has done what he had been asked, and demands payment. “Finish,” he goes on, with a boldness which challenges some sympathy, “what you have begun, and then we will settle about my promise; such was our agreement.”[457] It is characteristic of Rufus not to be angry at a really bold word. Evidently entering into the grotesque side of the dispute, he rejects the doctrine of payment by results; he answers that he has done his best, and that, though he had not succeeded, he cannot go away with nothing for his trouble.[458] At last, after some further haggling, the parties in this strange dispute come to a compromise. The Jew pays, and the King receives, half the sum which had been promised in the beginning.

[Sidenote: William’s defiance of God.]

[Sidenote: 1093.]

[Sidenote: His contempt for the saints.]

[Sidenote: Frequency of blasphemy.]

[Sidenote: Contrast of Saint Lewis.]

[Sidenote: Case of Henry the Second.]

A king of whom such stories as these could be told, whether every detail is literally true or not, must have utterly cast aside all the decencies of his own or of any other age. But Rufus, according to the tales told of him, went even further than this. He is charged with a kind of personal defiance of the Almighty, quite distinct alike from mere carelessness and from speculative unbelief. When he recovered from the sickness which forms such an epoch in his life, “God,” he said, “shall never see me a good man; I have suffered too much at his hands.”[459] He mocked at God’s judgement and doubted his justice――his disbelief in the ordeal is quoted as an instance. Either God did not know the deeds of men, or else he weighed them in an unfair balance.[460] He was wroth if any one ventured to add the usual reserve of God’s will to anything which he, King William, undertook or ordered to be undertaken. He had that belief in himself that he would have everything referred to his own wisdom and power only.[461] Modern ideas might be less shocked at another alleged sign of his impiety. He was said to have declared publicly that neither Saint Peter nor any other saint had any influence with God, and that he would ask none of them for help.[462] In all this we are again left in doubt whether we are dealing with a speculative unbeliever, or only with one who was so puffed up with pride that he liked not to be reminded of any power greater than his own, least of all of a power which might some day call him to account for his evil deeds. And though William Rufus clearly went lengths in his defiance of God to which even bad men were unaccustomed, we must remember that something of the same kind in a less degree was not uncommon in his time. Blasphemy strictly so called, that is, neither simple irreverence nor intellectual unbelief, but direct reviling and defiance of a power which, by the very terms of the defiance, is believed in, is a vice of which Englishmen of our own day have hardly any notion. But, as it has many parallels in heathen creeds, as it has not yet died out in all parts of Christendom, so it was by no means unknown in the days with which we are dealing. Its frequency at a somewhat later time is shown when the biographer of Saint Lewis sets it down as one of his special virtues, that he never, under any circumstance, allowed any reviling of God or the saints.[463] On the other hand, we find Henry the Second, whom there is no reason whatever to look on as a speculative unbeliever, indulging, as in lesser forms of irreverence, so also in direct reviling of God.[464] But the vice, to us so revolting and unintelligible, seems to have reached its highest point in the King of whom men said in proverbs that he every morning got up a worse man than he lay down, and every evening lay down a worse man than he got up.[465]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Redeeming features in Rufus’ character.]

[Sidenote: Little personal cruelty.]

[Sidenote: Respect to his father’s memory.]

[Sidenote: His foundations.]

[Sidenote: Le Mans.]