Chapter III: The First Wars of William Rufus (1)

1090-1092.[479]

[Sidenote: Character of the year 1089.]

[Sidenote: Natural phænomena.]

[Sidenote: The great earthquake. Aug. 11, 1089.]

The rest of the year in which Lanfranc died was unmarked by any striking public event, political or military. The causes of evil which had begun to play their part before the Primate’s death, which were enabled to play it so much more powerfully after his death, were no doubt already at work; but they had as yet not wrought any open change, or done anything specially to impress men’s minds. The writers of the time have nothing to record, except natural phænomena, and it must be remembered that natural phænomena, and those mostly of a baleful kind, form a marked feature of the reign of William Rufus. Even he could hardly be charged with directly causing earthquakes, storms, and bad harvests; but, in the ideas of his day, it was natural to look on earthquakes, storms, and bad harvests, either as scourges sent to punish his evil deeds, or else as signs that some more direct vengeance was presently coming upon himself. The ever-living belief of those times in the near connexion between the moral and the physical world must always be borne in mind in reading their history. And in the days of William Rufus there was plenty in both worlds to set men’s minds a-thinking. Lanfranc had not been dead three months before the land was visited with a mighty earthquake. The strongest buildings――the massive keeps and minsters lately built or still building――seemed to spring from the ground and sink back again into their places.[480] Then came a lack of the fruits of the earth of all kinds; the harvest was slow in ripening and scanty when it came; men reaped their corn at Martinmas and yet later.[481]

[Sidenote: Character of the year 1090.]

[Sidenote: Beginnings of foreign adventure.]

[Sidenote: First mention of domestic opposition.]

The next year we find no entries of this kind. There was a mighty stir in England and in Normandy; but it was not a mere stirring of the elements. We now enter on the record of the foreign policy and the foreign wars of the Red King, and we hear the first wail going up from the oppressed folk within his kingdom. Throughout his reign the growth of the prince’s power and the grievances of his people go together. In the former year there was nothing to chronicle but the earthquake and the late harvest. This year we hear of the first successes of the King beyond the sea, and we hear, as their natural consequence, that the “land was fordone with unlawful gelds.”[482]

[Sidenote: The years 1090-1091.]

[Sidenote: Successes in Normandy.]

[Sidenote: Supremacy over Scotland. 1091.]

[Sidenote: Annexation of Cumberland. 1092.]

The two years which followed the death of Lanfranc saw the attempt of the first year of Rufus reversed. Instead of the lord of Normandy striving to win England, the lord of England not only strives, but succeeds, in making himself master of a large part of the Norman duchy. Having thus become a continental potentate, the King comes back to his island kingdom, to establish his Imperial supremacy over the greatest vassal of his crown, and to do what his father had not done, to enlarge the borders of his immediate realm by a new land and a new city.

[Sidenote: Close connexion of English and Norman history.]

[Sidenote: The same main actors in both.]

[Sidenote: Normandy the chief seat of warfare.]

[Sidenote: Contrast between Normandy and England as to private war.]

Through a large part then of the present chapter the scene of our story will be removed from England to Normandy. Yet it is only the scene which is changed, not the actors. One main result of the coming of the first William into England was that for a while the history of Normandy and that of England cannot be kept asunder. The chief men on the one side of the water are the chief men on the other side. And the fact that they were so is the main key to the politics of the time. We have in the last chapter seen the working of this fact from one side; we shall now see its working from the other side. The same men flit backwards and forwards from Normandy to England and from England to Normandy. But of warfare, public and private, during the reign of William Rufus and still more during the reign of Henry the First, Normandy rather than England is the chosen field. Without warfare of some kind a Norman noble could hardly live. And for that beloved employment Normandy gave many more opportunities than England. The Duke of the Normans, himself after all the man of a higher lord, could not be――at least no duke but William the Great could be――in his continental duchy all that the King of the English, Emperor in his own island, could be within his island realm. Private war was lawful in Normandy――the Truce of God itself implied its lawfulness; it never was lawful in England. And wars with France, wars with Anjou, the endless struggle in and for the borderland of Maine, went much further towards taxing the strength and disturbing the peace of the Norman duchy, than the endless strife on the Welsh and Scottish marches could go towards taxing the strength and disturbing the peace of the English kingdom. Normandy then will be our fighting-ground far more than England; but the fighting men will be the same in both lands.

[Sidenote: The old and the new generation.]

[Sidenote: Bishop Odo.]

[Sidenote: Hugh. d. 1101.]

[Sidenote: Roger. d. 1094.]

[Sidenote: Robert of Mowbray.]

[Sidenote: William of Warren.]

[Sidenote: Walter Giffard, d. 1102.]

[Sidenote: William of Eu.]

[Sidenote: Robert of Bellême.]

[Sidenote: Robert of Meulan.]

The old companions of the Conqueror were by this time beginning to make way for a new generation. The rebellion of 1088 saw the last exploits of some of them. Yet others among them will still be actors for a while. Bishop Odo, cut off from playing any part in England, still plays a part in Normandy. The great border earls, Hugh of Chester and of Avranches, Roger of Shrewsbury and of Montgomery, die in the course of our tale, but not till we have something more to tell about both of them, and a good deal to tell about the longer-lived of the two. Their younger fellow, Robert of Mowbray, after becoming the chief centre of one part of our story, leaves the world by a living death. The new Earl of Surrey, if not already dead, passes away without anything further to record of him; Walter Giffard, old as a man, but young as an earl, still lives on. But younger men are coming into sight. William of Eu, the son of the still living Count Robert, has already come before us as a chief actor in our story, and we shall see him as the chiefest sufferer. But above all, two men, whom we have hitherto seen only by fits and starts, now come to the front as chief actors on both sides of the sea. Before we enter on the details of Norman affairs, it will be well to try clearly to take in the character and position of two famous bearers of the same name, great alike in England, in Normandy, and in France, Robert of Bellême, afterwards of Shrewsbury, of Bridgenorth, and of both Montgomeries, and Robert, Count of the French county of Meulan, heir of the great Norman house of Beaumont, and forefather of the great English house of Leicester.

[Sidenote: History and character of Robert of Bellême.]

[Sidenote: Succeeds his mother Mabel. 1082.]

[Sidenote: Her inheritance.]

[Sidenote: Succeeds his father at Montgomery, 1094;]

[Sidenote: and his brother at Shrewsbury, 1098.]

[Sidenote: His wife Agnes of Ponthieu.]

[Sidenote: Guy Count of Ponthieu. 1053-1100.]

[Sidenote: Greatness of Robert’s possessions.]

[Sidenote: Great part played by him.]

The two Rogers, fathers of the two Roberts, are still living; but for the rest of their days they play a part quite secondary to that played by their sons. Robert of Bellême, the eldest son of Roger of Montgomery, has already come before us several times, most prominently as a sharer in the rebellion raised by the present Duke against his father in Normandy[483] and in the rebellion raised on his behalf against his brother. As son of the slain Countess Mabel,[484] he was heir of the house of Talvas, heir alike of their possessions and of their reputed wickedness. Lord through his mother of the castle from which he took his name, lord of a crowd of other castles on the border-lands of Normandy, Perche, and Maine, Robert of Bellême, Robert Talvas, stands forth for the present as the son of Mabel rather than as the son of Roger. In after times counties and lordships flowed in upon him from various sources and in various quarters. The death of his father gave him the old Norman possessions of the house of Montgomery; the death of his brother gave him the new English possessions of that house, the great earldom of Shrewsbury and all that went with it. We seem to be carried back to past times when we find that Robert of Bellême was married to the daughter of Guy of Ponthieu, the gaoler of Harold, and that, at the accession of William Rufus, Guy had still as many years to reign as the Red King himself. Guy’s death at last added Ponthieu to the possessions of the house of Bellême, nominally in the person of Robert’s son William Talvas, practically in that of Robert himself. The lord of such lands, master of four and thirty castles,[485] ranked rather with princes than with ordinary nobles; and even now, when Robert held only the inheritance of his mother, the extent and nature of his fiefs gave him a position almost princely. The man alike of Normandy and of France, he could make use of the profitable as well as the dangerous side of a divided allegiance, and it is not without reason that we find the lord of the border-land spoken of by the fitting title of Marquess.[486] From the death of the Conqueror onwards, through the reigns of Robert and William, till the day when Henry sent him to a life-long prison, Robert of Bellême fills in the history of Normandy and England a place alongside of their sovereigns.

[Sidenote: His character.]

[Sidenote: His surname.]

[Sidenote: His skill in engineering.]

[Sidenote: His special and wanton cruelty.]

[Sidenote: His treatment of his wife]

[Sidenote: and his godson.]

With the inheritance of Mabel and William Talvas, their son and grandson was believed to have succeeded in full measure to the hereditary wickedness of their house. That house is spoken of as one at whose deeds dæmons themselves might shudder,[487] and Robert himself bears in the traditions of his Cenomannian enemies the frightful surname which has been so unfairly transferred to the father of the Conqueror. His name lives in proverbs. In the land of Maine his abiding works are pointed to as the works of Robert the Devil. Elsewhere the “wonders of Robert of Bellême” became a familiar saying.[488] That Robert was a man of no small natural gifts is plain; to the ordinary accomplishments of the Norman warrior he added a mastery of the more intellectual branches of the art of warfare. As the Cenomannian legend shows, he stood at the head of his age in the skill of the military engineer.[489] Firm and daring, ready of wit and ready of speech, he had in him most of the qualities which might have made him great in that or in any other age. But, even in that age, he held a place by himself as a kind of incarnation of evil. Restless ambition, reckless contempt of the rights of others, were common to him with many of his neighbours and contemporaries. But he stands almost alone in his habitual delight in the infliction of human suffering. The recklessness which lays waste houses and fields, the cruelty of passion or of policy which slays or mutilates an enemy, were common in his day. But even then we find only a few men of whom it was believed that the pangs of other men were to them a direct source of enjoyment. In Robert sheer love of cruelty displaced even greediness; he refused ransom for his prisoners that he might have the pleasure of putting them to lingering deaths.[490] The received forms of cruelty blinding and mutilation, were not enough for him; he brought the horrors of the East into Western Europe; men, and women too, were left at his bidding to writhe on the sharp stake.[491] Distrustful of all men, artful, flattering, courteous of speech, his profession of friendship was the sure path to destruction.[492] The special vices of William Rufus are not laid to his charge; it is at least to the credit of Latin Christendom in the eleventh century that it needs the union of its two worst sinners to form the likeness of an Ottoman Majesty, Excellency, or Highness in the nineteenth. But his domestic life was hardly happy. His wife Agnes, the heiress of Ponthieu, the mother of his one child William Talvas, was long kept by him in bonds in the dungeons of Bellême.[493] And, more piteous than all, we read how a little boy, his own godchild, drew near to him in all loving trust. Some say, in the sheer wantonness of cruelty, some say, to avenge some slight fault of the child’s father, the monster drew the boy under his cloak and tore out his eyes with his own hands.[494]

[Sidenote: His enmity]

[Sidenote: to the men of Domfront;]

[Sidenote: to Helias;]

[Sidenote: to Rotrou of Perche;]

[Sidenote: to the prelates of Seez.]

[Sidenote: Abbot Ralph, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury.]

[Sidenote: His imprisonment by Henry. 1110.]

The list of the men, great and small, who were simply wronged and dispossessed by Robert of Bellême, is long indeed.[495] Some of them, it is true, were now and then able to revenge their wrongs with their own arms. He seems, as might have been expected, to have been the special enemy of all that was specially good in individuals or in communities. He was the bitter foe of the valiant and faithful men of Domfront.[496] He was before all things the enemy of Helias of La Flèche. He was the enemy of his neighbour Count Rotrou of Perche, who also bears a good character among the princes of his day.[497] As temporal lord of Seez, he was the enemy of its churches, episcopal and abbatial; he had not that reverence for the foundation of his father which is one of the redeeming features in the character of the Red King. He underwent excommunication from the zeal of Bishop Serlo, and by the wrongs done by him to Abbot Ralph of Seez, which drove that prelate to seek shelter in England, he unwittingly gave England a worthy primate and Anselm a worthy successor.[498] One is inclined to wonder how such a man gained the special favour of the Conqueror, whose politic sternness had nothing in common with the fiendish brutality of Robert.[499] Perhaps, as in William Rufus, the worst features of his character may for a while have been hidden. It is less surprising that, in the days of William’s sons, we find him in honour at the courts of England, Normandy, and France. But at last vengeance came upon him. When King Henry sent him to spend his days in prison, it was in a prison so strait and darksome that the outer world knew not whether he were dead or alive, nor was the time of his death set down in any record.[500]

[Sidenote: Robert Count of Meulan and Earl of Leicester.]

[Sidenote: His father Roger of Beaumont.]

[Sidenote: He inherits Meulan from his uncle,]

[Sidenote: and Beaumont from his father.]

[Sidenote: His earldom of Leicester.]

[Sidenote: His exploits at Senlac.]

[Sidenote: His fame for wisdom.]

[Sidenote: Character of his influence with Rufus and Henry.]

[Sidenote: His sons.]

[Sidenote: His last days.]

[Sidenote: His death. 1118.]

[Sidenote: Story of his death-bed.]

The other Robert, the son of the other Roger, was a man of a different mould, a man who would perhaps seem more in place in some other age than in that in which he lived. He was the son of the old and worthy Roger of Beaumont, the faithful counsellor of princes, who, like Gulbert of Hugleville, refused to share in the spoils of England.[501] Great, like his namesake, in France, Normandy, and England, Robert passed through a long life unstained by any remarkable crime, though it was hinted that, of his vast possessions on both sides of the sea, some were not fairly come by.[502] He is known in history by the name of his French county of Meulan, which he inherited from his mother’s brother, Count Hugh, son of Count Waleran, who withdrew to become a monk of Bec.[503] From his father, when he too had gone to end his days in his father’s monastery of Preaux, Robert inherited the lordship of Beaumont, called, from his father’s name, Beaumont-le-Roger.[504] He shared in the Conqueror’s distribution of lands in England, and in after days he received the earldom of Leicester from King Henry, as his less stirring brother Henry had already received that of Warwick from the Red King. That he was a brave and skilful soldier we cannot doubt; his establishment in England was the reward of good service done at one of the most critical moments of the most terrible of battles.[505] But the warrior of Senlac hardly appears again in the character of a warrior; he lives on for many years as a cold and crafty statesman, the counsellor of successive kings, whose wisdom, surpassing that of all men between Huntingdon and Jerusalem, was deemed, like that of Ahithophel, to be like the oracle of God.[506] His counsels were not always of an amiable kind. Under Rufus, without, as far as we can see, sharing in his crimes, he checked those chivalrous instincts which were the King’s nearest approach to virtue.[507] Under Henry his influence was used to hinder the promotion of Englishmen in their own land.[508] Yet on the whole his character stands fair. He discouraged foppery and extravagance by precept and example; he was the right-hand man of King Henry in maintaining the peace of the land, and he seems to have shared the higher tastes of the clerkly monarch.[509] Of Anselm he was sometimes the enemy, sometimes the friend.[510] His sons were well taught, and they could win the admiration of Pope and cardinals by their skill in disputation.[511] The eldest, Waleran, his Norman heir, plays an unlucky part in the reign of Henry;[512] his English heir Robert continued the line of the Earls of Leicester.[513] His last days were clouded by domestic troubles;[514] and he is said to have formally perilled his own soul in his zeal for the temporal welfare of his sons. On his death-bed, so the story runs, Archbishop Ralph and other clergy bade him, for his soul’s health, to restore whatever lands he had gained unjustly.[515] What then, he asked, should he leave to his sons? “Your old inheritance,” answered Ralph, “and whatever you have acquired justly. Give up the rest, or you devote your soul to hell.” The fond father answered that he would leave all to them, and would trust to their filial piety to make atonement for his sins.[516] But we are told that Waleran and Robert were too busy increasing by wrong what had been won by wrong to do anything for the soul of their father.[517]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Prominence of the two Roberts.]

These are the two men who, of secondary importance in the tale of the Conquest and of the reign of the first William, become the most prominent laymen of the reign of the second. The churchmen of the time who stand forth conspicuously for good and for evil will have their place in another chapter. But the two Roberts will, next to the King and the Ætheling, hold the first place in the tale which we have immediately to tell, as they held it still in days of which we shall not have the telling, long after the Ætheling had changed into the King. The force of him of Bellême, the wit of him of Meulan, had their full place in the affairs both of Normandy and of England, and both were brought to bear against the prince and people of Maine.

§ 1. _Normandy under Robert. 1087-1090._

[Sidenote: Temptations to the invasion of Normandy.]

[Sidenote: Interest of those who held land in both countries.]

[Sidenote: Provocation given by Robert.]

[Sidenote: State of Normandy.]

[Sidenote: His invasion likely to be largely welcome.]

That the thought of an invasion of his elder brother’s duchy should present itself to the mind of William Rufus was not very wonderful. The fact that it was his elder brother’s duchy might perhaps be of itself enough to suggest the thought. The dutiful son of his father, whom alone his father had called to rule of his own free will, might feel himself in some sort defrauded, if any part of his father’s dominions was held by a brother whose only claim was the accident of his elder birth, and whose personal unfitness for the rule of men his father had emphatically set forth. Indeed, without seeking for any special motive at all, mere ambition, mere love of enterprise, might be motive enough to lead a prince like Rufus to a campaign beyond the sea, a campaign which might make him master of the native dominion of his father, the land of his own birth. And such schemes would be supported on grounds of reasonable policy by a large part of the Norman possessors of the soil of England. Holding, many of them, lands on both sides of the sea, it was their interest that the same prince should reign on both sides of the sea, and that they themselves should not be left open to the dangers of a divided allegiance. They had failed to carry out this purpose by putting Robert in possession of England; they might now carry it out by putting William in possession of Normandy. And the attempt might even be made with some show of justice. The help which Robert had given to the rebellion against Rufus might, in the eyes of Rufus, or of a much more scrupulous prince than Rufus, have been held to justify reprisals. And to a prince seeking occasions or excuses for an invasion of Normandy the actual condition of that duchy might seem directly to invite the coming of an invader. The invader might almost comfort himself with the belief that his invasion was a charitable work. Any kind of rule, almost any kind of tyranny, might seem an improvement on the state of things which was now rife through the whole length and breadth of the Norman land. William Rufus might reasonably think that no small part of the inhabitants of Normandy would welcome invasion from an invader of their own blood, the son of their greatest ruler. And the event showed that he was by no means mistaken in so thinking.

[Sidenote: The Conqueror foretells the character of Robert’s reign.]

[Sidenote: Utter anarchy of the duchy.]

[Sidenote: Character of Robert.]

[Sidenote: His weak good-nature.]

[Sidenote: Revival of brigandage and private war.]

[Sidenote: Lack of “justice.”]

No words of man were ever more truly spoken than the words in which William the Great, constrained, as he deemed himself, to leave Normandy in the hands of Robert, was believed to have foretold the fate of the land which should be under his rule. Robert was, so his father is made to call him, proud and foolish, doomed to misfortune; the land would be wretched where he was master.[518] The Conqueror was a true prophet; when Robert stepped into his father’s place, the work of the fifty years’ rule of his father was undone in a moment. Normandy at once fell back into the state of anarchy from which William had saved it, the state into which it fell when the elder Robert set forth for Jerusalem.[519] Once more every man did what was right in his own eyes. And the Duke did nothing to hinder them. Again we are brought to that standard of the duties of a sovereign of which we have heard so often, that standard which was reached by the Conqueror and by his younger son, but which neither Robert in this generation nor Stephen in the next strove to reach. Robert, it must always be noticed, is never charged with cruelty or oppression of any kind in his own person. His fault was exactly of the opposite kind. He was so mild and good-natured, so ready to listen to every suppliant, to give to every petitioner, to show mercy to every offender, that he utterly neglected the discharge of the first duty of his office, that which the men of his time called doing justice.[520] William the Great had done justice and made peace. The smaller brood of thieves and murderers had been brought to feel the avenging arm of the law. Thieves and murderers on a greater scale, the unruly nobles of the duchy, had been forced to keep back their hands from that form of brigandage which they dignified with the name of private war. Under Robert both classes of offenders found full scope for their energies. He did nothing to restrain either. He neither made peace nor did justice. Brave, liberal, ready of speech, ready of wit and keen of sight in supporting the cause of another, Robert undoubtedly could be. But stronger qualities were needed, and those qualities Robert had not. Sunk in sloth and dissipation, no man heeded him; the land was without a ruler. Forgetful alike of injuries and of benefits, Robert, from the first moment of his reign, tamely endured the most flagrant outrages to the ducal authority, without doing anything to hinder or to avenge.[521]

[Sidenote: Spread of vice and evil fashions.]

[Sidenote: Weakness of the spiritual power.]

In other respects also Normandy suddenly changed from what it had been under the great King-duke. William the Great, strict to austerity in his private life, careful in the observance of all religious duties, a zealous supporter of ecclesiastical discipline, had made his duchy into a kind of paradise in ecclesiastical eyes. All this was now swept away. The same flood of foolish and vicious fashions which overspread England overspread Normandy also. There is nothing to convict Robert personally of the special vices of Rufus; but the life of the unmarried Duke was very unlike the life of his father. And vice of the grossest kind, the vices of Rufus himself, stalked forth into broad daylight, unabashed and unpunished.[522] The ecclesiastical power, no longer supported by the secular arm, was too weak to restrain or to chastise.[523] As every form of violence, so every form of licentiousness, had its full swing in the Normandy of Robert Curthose.

[Sidenote: Building of castles.]

[Sidenote: The Conqueror keeps garrisons in the castles of the nobles.]

[Sidenote: Instances at Evreux, and in the Bellême castles.]

[Sidenote: Robert of Bellême drives out the ducal forces.]

[Sidenote: The like done by the Count of Evreux and others.]

[Sidenote: Robert’s lavish grants.]

[Sidenote: Ivry.]

[Sidenote: Brionne.]

But, above all, this time stood out, like all times of anarchy, as a time of building and strengthening of castles. One of the means by which the Conqueror had maintained the peace of the land had been by keeping garrisons of his own in the castles of such of his nobles as were likely to be dangerous. He had followed this wise policy with the castle of Evreux, the stronghold of his kinsman Count William. He had followed it with the crowd of castles which, as the inheritance of his mother, had passed to Robert of Bellême, the man who is to be the leading villain of our present drama. But the precautions of the Conqueror lasted no longer than his life; his successor might be defied without danger. At the moment of the King’s death, Robert of Bellême was on his way to the court to “speak with the King,” in the ordinary phrase,[524] on some affairs of his own. He had reached Brionne when he heard of the Conqueror’s death. Instead of going on to offer his homage or support to the new Duke, he turned back, gathered his own followers, marched on Alençon, and by a sudden attack drove the ducal garrison out of the fortress by the Sarthe, the southern bulwark of Normandy. He did the same with better right on his own hill of Bellême, which was not strictly Norman soil. He did so with all his other castles, and with as many of the castles of his neighbours as he could.[525] The lord of Bellême in short established himself as a prince who might well bear himself as independent of the lord of Rouen. Count William of Evreux followed his example; the late King’s garrison was driven out of the fortress which had arisen within the walls of the Roman Mediolanum. William of Breteuil, Ralph of Toesny or of Conches, the nobles of Normandy in general wherever they had the power, all did the like.[526] They drove out the garrisons; they strengthened the old fortresses; they raised new ones, adulterine castles in the phrase of the day, built without the Duke’s licence and placed beyond his control. Those who were strong enough seized on the castles of weaker neighbours. The land was again filled with these robbers’ nests, within whose walls and circuit law was powerless, lairs, as men said, of grievous wolves, who entered in and spared not the flock.[527] Some nobles indeed had the decency to go through the form of asking the Duke for gifts which they knew that he would not have strength of mind to refuse them. One of them was William of Breteuil, the son of the famous Earl William of Hereford, the brother of the rebel Roger,[528] and once a sharer in Robert’s rebellion against his father. He asked and received the famous tower of Ivry, the tower of Albereda, the now vanished stronghold which once looked down on the plain where Henry of Navarre was in after ages to smite down the forces of the League. This gift involved a wrong to the old Roger of Beaumont, who had held that great fortress by the Conqueror’s commission. Roger was accordingly recompensed by a grant of Brionne, the island stronghold in the heart of Normandy, which had played such a part in the early wars of the Conqueror.[529] Thus places specially connected with the memory of the great William, places like Alençon and Brionne, which had cost him no small pains to win or to recover, passed away from his son without a thought. Robert gave to every man everything that he asked for, to the impoverishment of himself and to the strengthening of every other man against him.[530]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The Ætheling Henry.]

[Sidenote: He claims his mother’s lands.]

[Sidenote: Lavish waste of Robert.]

[Sidenote: He asks a loan of Henry.]

[Sidenote: Henry buys the Côtentin and Avranchin.]

[Sidenote: Henry’s firm rule.]

In one corner only of the duchy was there a better state of things to be seen. The Ætheling Henry had received from his dying father a bequest in money, but no share in his territorial dominions.[531] He claimed however the English lands which had been held by his mother Matilda, but which the late King had kept in his own hands after her death.[532] This claim had not as yet been made good, and Henry’s possessions still consisted only of his five thousand pounds in money. With part of this he was presently to make a splendid investment. While Henry had money but no lands, Robert had wide domains, but his extravagance soon left him without money. The Norman portion of the Conqueror’s hoard was presently scattered broadcast among his mercenary soldiers and other followers. Of these he kept a vast number; men flocked eagerly to a prince who was so ready to give; but before long he was without the means of giving or paying any more. He asked Henry for a gift or a loan. The scholar-prince was wary, and refused to throw his money away into the bottomless pit of Robert’s extravagance.[533] The Duke then proposed to sell him some part of his dominions. At this proposal Henry caught gladly, and a bargain was struck. For a payment of three thousand pounds, Henry became master of a noble principality in the western part of the Norman duchy. The conquest of William Longsword,[534] the colony of Harold Blaatand,[535] the whole land from the fortress of Saint James to the haven of Cherbourg, the land of Coutances and Avranches, the castle and abbey of Saint Saviour,[536] and the house that was castle and abbey in one, the house of Saint Michael in Peril of the Sea――all this became the dominion of Henry, now known as Count of the Côtentin. With these territories he received the superiority over a formidable vassal; he became lord over the Norman possessions of Earl Hugh of Chester.[537] Thus the English-born son of the Norman Conqueror held for his first dominion no contemptible portion of his father’s duchy, as ruler of the Danish land which in earlier days had beaten back an English invasion.[538] In that land, under the rule of him who was one day to be called the Lion of Justice, there was a nearer approach to peace and order than could be found in other parts of Normandy. The young Count governed his county well and firmly; no such doings went on in the lands of Coutances and Avranches as went on in the rest of the duchy under the no-rule of Duke Robert.[539]

[Sidenote: Henry goes to England. Summer, 1088.]

[Sidenote: William promises him the lands of Matilda.]

[Sidenote: He seizes them again.]

[Sidenote: They are granted to Robert Fitz-hamon.]

Henry, Ætheling on one side of the sea and now Count on the other side,[540] next thought of crossing the channel to seek for those estates in his native land which he claimed in right of his mother.[541] These lands, in Cornwall, Buckinghamshire, and specially in Gloucestershire, had mostly formed a part of the forfeited possessions of Brihtric, the man whose name legend has so strangely connected with that of Matilda.[542] Henry must have reached England about the time when the rebellion had been put down, and when the new King might be expected to be in a mood inclined either to justice or to generosity. William received his brother graciously, and granted, promised, or pretended to grant, the restitution of the lands of their mother.[543] Henry, already a ruler on one side of the sea, a sharer in his father’s inheritance, went back to his peninsula in a character which was yet newer to him, that of a sharer in his father’s conquest, a great land-owner on the other side of the sea. But his luck, which was to shine forth so brightly in after times, forsook him for the present. If Henry ever came into actual possession of his English estates, his tenure of them was short. At some time which is not distinctly marked, the lands which had been Matilda’s were again seized by William. They were granted to one of the rising men of the time, one of the few who had been faithful to the King in the late times of trouble, to Robert Fitz-hamon, perhaps already the terror of the southern Cymry. Thus the old possessions of Brihtric passed into the hands of the lord of the castle of Cardiff, the founder of the minster of Tewkesbury.[544] In the next generation the policy of Henry was to win them back, if not for himself, yet for his son.[545]

[Sidenote: Influence of Odo with Robert.]

[Sidenote: Autumn, 1088.]

[Sidenote: Henry brings back Robert of Bellême.]

[Sidenote: They are seized and imprisoned.]

[Sidenote: Earl Roger makes war on the Duke.]

[Sidenote: His fortresses.]

If the Count of Coutances failed of his objects in England, a worse fate awaited him for a season on his return to Normandy. He had enemies at the court of Duke Robert; first of all, it would seem, his uncle Odo, lately Earl of Kent and still Bishop of Bayeux. He was now driven from his earldom to his bishopric, like a dragon, we are told, with fiery wings cast down to the earth.[546] The tyrant of Bayeux, the worst of prelates――such are the names under which Odo now appears in the pages of our chief guide[547]――had again become Robert’s chief counsellor. His counsel seems to have taken the form of stirring up the Duke’s mind to abiding wrath against his brother of England, and against all who were, or were held to be, his partisans.[548] When Henry left England to come back to Normandy, he brought with him a dangerous companion in the person of Robert of Bellême. That rebel of a few months back was now thoroughly reconciled to Rufus. Duke Robert was even made to believe that his namesake of Bellême, so lately his zealous supporter, was joined with Henry by a mutual oath to support the interests of the King of the English at the expense of the Duke of the Normans.[549] The measures of Robert or of Odo were speedily taken; the coasts were watched; the voyagers were seized before they could disembark from their ships.[550] They were put in fetters, and presently consigned to prisons in the keeping of the Bishop. They had not even the comfort of companionship in bonds. While the Ætheling, Count of the Côtentin, was kept in Odo’s episcopal city, the place of imprisonment for the son of the Earl of Shrewsbury was the fortress of Neuilly, in the most distant part of Odo’s diocese, near the frontier stream of Vire which parts the Bessin from Henry’s own peninsula. The less illustrious captive was the first to find a champion. Earl Roger, by the licence of the King, left England, crossed into Normandy, entered into open war with the Duke on behalf of his son, and garrisoned all his own castles and those of his son against him. Vassal of three lords, the lord of Montgomery and Shrewsbury, the father of the lord of Bellême, might almost rank as their peer. As a prince rather than as a mere baron, Earl Roger took to arms. The border-fortresses on the frontier ground of Normandy, Maine, and Perche were all put into a state of defence.[551] Alençon, by the border stream, was again, as in the days when its burghers mocked the Tanner’s grandson,[552] garrisoned against his son and successor. Bellême itself, the cradle of the house of Talvas――the Rock of Mabel, bearing the name of her who had united the houses of Talvas and Montgomery, and whose blood had been the price of its possession――Saint-Cenery on its peninsula by the Sarthe, another of the spoils of Mabel’s bloody policy――all these border strongholds, together with a crowd of others lying more distinctly within the Norman dominions, had again become hostile spots where the Duke of the Normans was defied.

[Sidenote: Odo’s exhortation to Robert.]

[Sidenote: Rivalry of Normandy and France.]

[Sidenote: The line of Talvas to be rooted out.]

The episcopal gaoler of Bayeux, in his character of chief counsellor of Duke Robert, is described as keeping his feeble nephew somewhat in awe. But his counsels, it is added, were sometimes followed, sometimes despised.[553] Now that all Normandy was in a blaze of civil war, Odo came to Rouen, and had an audience of the Duke, seemingly in an assembly of his nobles.[554] If our guide is to be trusted, Robert, who had no love for hearing sermons even from the lips of his father, was now condemned to hear a sermon of no small length from the perhaps even readier lips of his uncle. Odo gave Robert a lecture on the good government of his duchy, on the duty of defending the oppressed and putting down their oppressors. A long list of princes are held up as his examples, the familiar heroes of Persia, Macedonia, Carthage, and Rome, among whom, one hardly sees why, Septimius Severus takes his place along with the first Cæsar. On the same list too come the princes of his own house, the princes whom the warlike French had ever feared, winding up with the name of his own father, greatest of them all.[555] In all this we hear the monk of Saint Evroul rather than the Bishop of Bayeux; but any voice is worth hearing which impresses on us a clearer understanding of the abiding jealousy between Normandy and France. But we may surely hear Odo himself in the practical advice that follows. Now is the time to root out the whole accursed stock of Talvas from the Norman duchy. They were an evil generation from the beginning, not one of whom ever died the death of other men.[556] It is as the son of Mabel, not as the son of Roger, that Robert of Bellême comes in for this frightful inheritance, and Odo could not foresee how pious an end the Earl of Shrewsbury was to make in a few years.[557] He reminded the Duke that a crowd of castles, which had been ducal possessions as long as his father lived, had been seized on his father’s death by Robert of Bellême, and their ducal garrisons driven out.[558] It was the Duke’s duty, as the ruler of the land, as a faithful son of Holy Church, to put an end to the tyranny of this usurper, and to give to all his dominions the blessing of lawful government at the hand of their lawful prince.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Affairs of Maine.]

[Sidenote: Helias and Hildebert.]

[Sidenote: History of Maine under the Conqueror.]

[Sidenote: 1063.]

[Sidenote: 1073.]

[Sidenote: 1083.]

[Sidenote: 1086.]

[Sidenote: Dissatisfaction in Maine.]

[Sidenote: Relations with Fulk of Anjou.]

[Sidenote: Robert’s homage to Fulk.]

But the overthrow of the house of Talvas was not the only work to which Odo stirred up his nephew. There was another enterprise to be undertaken before the great lord of the Cenomannian border could be safely attacked. These early days of Robert lead us on at once to that side of the continental wars and continental policy of Rufus which seems to have drawn to itself the smallest amount of English interest at the time,[559] but which is that on which we are now led to look with a deeper interest than any other. Before Robert could safely attack Bellême, he must make sure of Le Mans and of all Maine. Every mention of that noble city, of its counts and its bishops, its renowned church, and its stout-hearted citizens, has a charm which is shared by no other spot between the Loire and the Channel. And at no stage of its history did the Cenomannian state stand forth with greater brilliancy than in the last days of its independent being, when Le Mans had Helias to its count and Hildebert to its bishop. Those days are still parted from us by a few years; but the advice given by Odo to Robert brings us to the beginning of the chain of events which leads straight to them. The historian of William Rufus must now begin to look forward to the days when Rufus, like his father, tried his strength against the valiant men of the Cenomannian land and city, and tried it at a time when land and city could put forth their full strength back again under a leader worthy of them. But as yet the land of Maine has neither to deal with so mighty a foe nor to rejoice in the guardianship of so worthy a champion. In the stage of the tale which we have now reached, Rufus plays no part at all, and Helias plays only a secondary part. The general story of Le Mans and Maine has been elsewhere carried down to the last mention of them in the days of the Conqueror.[560] It has been told how the land passed under William’s power in the days before he crossed the sea to win England[561]――how the city and land had revolted against the Norman――how, after trying the rule of a foreign branch of their own princely house, its people had risen as the first free commonwealth north of the Loire――how they had been again brought into William’s hand, and that largely by the help of his English warriors[562]――and how, after the final submission of the city, isolated spots of the Cenomannian land had again risen against the Norman power. The last act of this earlier drama was when a single Cenomannian fortress successfully withstood the whole strength of Normandy and England.[563] We have seen how Hubert of Beaumont beheld the Conqueror baffled before his hill fortress of Sainte-Susanne, the shattered keep which still stands, sharing with Dol in the Breton land the honour of being the two spots from which William had to turn away, conqueror no longer.[564] But, if Hubert had beaten back William from his castle, he had found it expedient to return to his allegiance; and, at the death of the Conqueror, Maine seems to have been as thoroughly under William’s power as Normandy and England. Things changed as soon as the great King had passed away. The land and city which had striven so often against the Conqueror himself were not likely to sit down quietly under the feeble rule of Robert. And, besides the standing dislike of the people of Maine to Norman rule, there was a neighbour who was likely to be stirred up by his own ambition to meddle in the affairs of Maine, and to whom the actual provisions of treaties gave at least a colourable claim to do so. By the terms of the peace of Blanchelande, the new Duke of the Normans had become the man of Count Fulk of Anjou for the county of Maine.[565] It is true that the homage had been of the most formal kind. There had been no reservation of authority on the part of the superior lord, nor, as far as we can see, was any service of any kind imposed on the fief, if fief it is to be called. The homage might almost seem to have been a purely personal act, a homage expressing thankfulness for the surrender of all Angevin rights over Maine, rather than an acknowledgement of Angevin superiority over the land and city. Still Robert, as Count of Maine, had, in some way or other, become Count Fulk’s man, and Count Fulk had, in some way or other, become Robert’s lord. A relation was thus established between them of which the _Rechin_ was sure to take advantage, whenever the time came.

[Sidenote: Robert Count of Maine.]

[Sidenote: State of things in Maine.]

[Sidenote: Howel.]

[Sidenote: Geoffrey of Mayenne.]

[Sidenote: Helias.]

[Sidenote: His descent and position.]

[Sidenote: Story of Bishop Howel’s appointment.]

[Sidenote: Samson recommends him for the see.]

[Sidenote: Temporal relations of the bishopric of Le Mans.]

[Sidenote: Howel consecrated at Rouen. April 21, 1085.]

Robert, on his father’s death, had taken his title of Prince of the Cenomannians as well as that of Duke of the Normans,[566] and his authority seems to have been acknowledged at Le Mans no less than at Rouen. We may suspect that there was no very deep felt loyalty in the minds of a people whose rebellious tendencies had deeply impressed the mind of William the Great. He is said――though we may guess that the etymology comes rather from the reporter than from the speaker――to have derived the name of their land and city from their currish madness.[567] But there was as yet no open resistance. Of the three chief men in Church and State, Bishop Howel was an active supporter of the Norman connexion, while Geoffrey of Mayenne and Helias of La Flèche were at least not ready openly to throw it off. Geoffrey, who had fought against the Conqueror twenty-five years before,[568] who had betrayed the young commonwealth of Le Mans fifteen years before,[569] must have been now advanced in life; but we shall still hear of him for some years to come. Helias, the chief hero of later wars, was of a younger generation, and now appears for the first time. He was, it will be remembered, the son of John of La Flèche and of Paula the youngest sister of the last Count Herbert.[570] He was therefore, before any other man in the land, the representative of Cenomannian independence, as distinguished both from Norman rule and from Angevin superiority. But his father had, in the Conqueror’s second Cenomannian war, remained faithful to the Norman, alike against commonwealth, Lombard, and Angevin.[571] His son for the present followed the same course. Bishop Howel was in any case a zealous Norman partisan; according to one story he was a special nominee of the Conqueror, appointed for the express purpose of helping to keep the people of Maine in order. According to the local historian, he had been appointed Dean of Saint Julian’s by his predecessor Arnold, and was, on Arnold’s death, freely and unanimously chosen to the bishopric.[572] In Normandy it was believed that King William, on Arnold’s death, offered the bishopric to one of his own clerks, Samson of Bayeux, who declined the offer on the ground that a bishop, according to apostolic rule, ought to be blameless, while he himself was a grievous sinner in many ways. The King said that Samson must either take the bishopric himself or find some fit person in his stead. Samson made his nomination at once. There was in the King’s chapel a clerk, poor, but of noble birth and of virtuous life, Howel by name, and, as his name implied, of Breton birth or descent.[573] He was the man to be bishop of Le Mans. Howel was at once sent for. He came, not knowing to what end he was called. Young in years, slight and mean in figure, he had not the stately presence with which Walcher of Durham had once impressed the mind of Eadgyth, perhaps of William himself.[574] But Howel was not called upon, like Walcher, to be a goodly martyr, but only a confessor on a small scale. William was at first tempted to despise the unconscious candidate for the chair of Saint Julian. But Samson, who, sinner as he may have been, seems not to have been a bad preacher or reasoner, warned the King that God looked not at the outward appearance, but at the heart. William examined further into Howel’s life and conversation, and presently gave him the temporal investiture of the bishopric.[575] At the same time a _congé d’élire_ went to Le Mans, which led to Howel’s “pure and simple” election by the Chapter.[576] A point both of canon and of feudal law turned up. The old dispute between the Norman Duke and the Angevin Count about the advowson of the bishopric had never been settled; the Peace of Blanchelande was silent on that point. Legally there can be no doubt that the true temporal superior of the Bishop of Le Mans was neither Fulk nor William, but their common, if forgotten, lord King Philip.[577] But, whoever might be his temporal lord, no one doubted that the Bishop of Le Mans was a suffragan, and the suffragan highest in rank, of the Archbishop of Tours.[578] Yet, as things stood, as Tours was in the dominions of Fulk, a subject of William who went to that metropolis for consecration might have been called on to enter into some engagement inconsistent with his Norman loyalty. By a commission therefore from Archbishop Ralph of Tours, Howel received consecration at Rouen from the Primate of the Normans, William the Good Soul.[579]

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Howel’s Norman loyalty.]

[Sidenote: Robert before Le Mans.]

[Sidenote: General submission of the county.]

[Sidenote: Ballon holds out.]