William the Conqueror

“ Unfailing luck no longer waited on him; after Waltheof’s death he never, till his last campaign of all, won a battle or took a town. In this change of William’s fortunes the men of his own day saw the judgement of God upon his crime. And in the fact at least they were undoubtedly right. Henceforth, though William’s real power abides unshaken, the tale of his warfare is chiefly a tale of petty defeats. The last eleven years of his life would never have won him the name of Conqueror. But in the higher walk of policy and legislation never was his nobler surname more truly deserved. ”

“ William and Arlotte.
William's mother.
Although the dukes of Normandy were very powerful potentates, reigning, as they did, almost in the character of independent sovereigns, over one of the richest and most populous territories of the globe, and though William the Conqueror was the son of one of them, his birth was nevertheless very ignoble. His mother was not the wife of Robert his father, but a poor peasant girl, the daughter of an humble tanner of Falaise; and, indeed, William's father, Robert, was not himself the duke at this time, but a simple baron, as his father was still living. ”

“ William the Conqueror is another of the pious patterns he recommends, 'who would suffer nothing,' he says, 'to be determined in any ecclesiastical causes without leave and authority first had from him.'... His present majesty is not William the Conqueror; and can no more by our constitution rule absolutely either in Church or State than he would if he could: his will and pleasure is indeed a law to all his subjects ”

“ Even a conquest of England was nothing new, and William at this stage contrasted favourably with Cnut, whose early days were marked by the death of not a few. William, at any rate since his crowning, had shed the blood of no man. Men perhaps thought that things might have been much worse, and that they were not unlikely to mend. Anyhow, weakened, cowed, isolated, the people of the conquered shires submitted humbly to the Conqueror’s will. It needed a kind of oppression of which William himself was never guilty to stir them into actual revolt. ”

“ William was now lord of all Normandy, and able to put down all later disturbers of the peace. His real reign now begins; from the age of nineteen or twenty, his acts are his own. According to his abiding practice, he showed himself a merciful conqueror. Through his whole reign he shows a distinct unwillingness to take human life except in fair fighting on the battle-field. No blood was shed after the victory of Val-ès-dunes; one rebel died in bonds; the others underwent no harder punishment than payment of fines, giving of hostages, and destruction of their castles. ”

“ At the epoch when William the Conqueror ascended the throne, hardly any other power was possessed by the king of France than what he inherited from the great fiefs of the Capetian family. War with such a potentate was not exceedingly to be dreaded, and William, besides his immense revenue, could employ the feudal services of his vassals, which were extended by him to continental expeditions. ”

“ The pitiless warrior, the stern and aweful king was a tender and faithful husband, an affectionate father. The lonely silence of his bearing broke into gracious converse with pure and sacred souls like Anselm. If William was "stark" to rebel and baron, men noted that he was "mild to those that loved God."
William and feudalism
But the greatness of the Conqueror was seen in more than the order and peace which he imposed upon the land. Fortune had given him one of the greatest opportunities ever offered to a king of stamping his own genius on the destinies of a people ”

“ That the history of England for the last eight hundred years has been what it has been has largely come of the personal character of a single man. That we are what we are to this day largely comes of the fact that there was a moment when our national destiny might be said to hang on the will of a single man, and that that man was William, surnamed at different stages of his life and memory, the Bastard, the Conqueror, and the Great.
With perfect fitness then does William the Norman, William the Norman Conqueror of England, take his place in a series of English statesmen. ”

“ William's claims to the English throne. It is not to be supposed that, even in the warlike times of which we are writing, such a potentate as a duke of Normandy would invade a country like England, so large and powerful in comparison to his own, without some pretext. William's pretext was, that he himself was the legitimate successor to the English crown, and that the English king who possessed it at the time of his invasion was a usurper. In order that the reader may understand the nature and origin of this his claim, it is necessary to relate somewhat in full the story of the Lady Emma. ”

“ Coronation of William the Conqueror.
(From the picture by John Cross.)
When William was being crowned in Westminster Abbey, the archbishop, according to the old custom, asked the Norman and English nobles if they would have William for their king. They replied with loud shouts. The Norman soldiers outside the abbey thought that William was being attacked. They therefore fell on the people and set fire to the neighbouring houses. The picture shows the scene of alarm within the abbey. After a time order was restored, and the archbishop placed the crown on William’s head. ”

“ The eldest son of William the Conqueror, cheated of a kingdom by his more aggressive brothers, defeated in battle, deprived of his duchy, and condemned to perpetual imprisonment, would hardly be selected as one of the heroic figures of French history. ”

“ It was this feeling, probably, quite as much as any settled hostility to William's right to reign, that made his barons so eager to engage in insurrections and rebellions. There was, however, after all, a real and deep-seated opposition to William's right of succession, founded in the ideas of the day. They could not well endure that one of so humble and even ignominious birth, on the mother's side, should be the heir of so illustrious a line as the great dukes of Normandy. William's enemies were accustomed to designate him by opprobrious epithets, derived from the circumstances of his birth. ”

“ He gave fiefs liberally to his followers; but he took care that the gifts should be in small and scattered parcels. No one man controlled any region sufficiently extensive to give him the faintest chance of defying the King. William had the famous Domesday Book [14] compiled, that he might know just what every freeman in his dominions owned and for what he could be held accountable. The England of the later days of the Conqueror seemed far advanced upon our modern ways. ”

“ The name of William the Deliverer stands, if not beside that of his namesake the Conqueror, yet surely alongside of the lawgiver from Anjou. And we count among the later worthies of England not a few men sprung from other lands, who did and are doing their work among us, and who, as statesmen at least, must count as English. As we look along the whole line, even among the conquering kings and their immediate instruments, their work never takes the shape of the rooting up of the earlier institutions of the land. ”

“ In the execution of his threat to make Philip's dominions too hot to hold him, William, as soon as he was able to mount his horse, headed an expedition, and crossed the frontiers of Normandy, and moved forward into the heart of France, laying waste the country, as he advanced, with fire and sword. He came soon to the town of Mantes, a town upon the Seine, directly on the road to Paris. William's soldiers attacked the town with furious impetuosity, carried it by assault, and set it on fire. William followed them in, through the gates, glorying in the fulfillment of his threats of vengeance. ”

“ William, however, was not in a mood to be pleased. He told Philip, on taking leave of him, that he was losing the most powerful vassal that any lord sovereign ever had, by the course which he had decided to pursue. "I would have held the whole realm of England as a part of your dominions, acknowledging you as sovereign over all, if you had consented to render me your aid, but I will not do it since you refuse. I shall feel bound to repay only those who assist me." ”

“ For in every English soldier whom William carried into Maine he won a loyal English subject. To men who had fought under his banners beyond the sea he would be no longer the Conqueror but the victorious captain; they would need some very special oppression at home to make them revolt against the chief whose laurels they had helped to win. As our own gleeman tells the tale, they did little beyond harrying the helpless land; but in continental writers we can trace a regular campaign, in which we hear of no battles, but of many sieges. ”

“ The revolt of western Normandy which took place in the year 1047 marks the close of this obscure and difficult period in William’s life; it is in the crisis of this year that something of the personality of the future Conqueror is revealed to us for the first time. With the battle of Val-es-dunes William attained his true majority and became at last the conscious master of his duchy, soon to win the leading place among the greater vassals of the French crown. ”

“ All the wrongs of the days of William the Elder were to be put an end to in the days of William the Younger. The English folk should have again the best laws that ever before were in this land. King William would reign over his people like Eadward or Cnut or Ælfred. The two great grievances of his father’s days were to cease; the King’s coffers were no longer to be filled by money wrung from his people; the King’s hunting-grounds were no longer to be fenced in by the savage code which had guarded the Conqueror’s pleasures. ”

“ To turn the fighting energy inherent in feudal life from its thousand unauthorised channels, and to direct it towards a single aim controlled and determined by himself, was to be the work which led to his greatest achievements. In the incessant tumults of the first ten years of his reign we see the aimless stirring of that national force which it is William’s truest glory to have mastered and directed to his own ends. ”

“ In fact William never claimed the crown by conquest, as conquest is commonly understood. He always represented himself as the lawful heir, unhappily driven to use force to obtain his rights. The other pleas were quite enough to satisfy most men out of England and Scandinavia. William’s work was to claim the crown of which he was unjustly deprived, and withal to deal out a righteous chastisement on the unrighteous and ungodly man by whom he had been deprived of it. ”

“ It wanted but a little to arouse in many hearts a sense of revolt and anger against the absent William. No man can rise so suddenly to such power without raising up a host of enemies amongst those who begin to feel the iron hand of monarchy, where once was only the clasp of a friend. The genius of the Conqueror had won him a kingdom, supported by the loyal assistance of the Norman and Breton nobles ”

“ Although William was generally victorious in the battles that he fought, and succeeded in putting down one rebellion after another with promptness and decision, still, new rebellions and new wars were constantly breaking out, which kept his dominions in a continual state of commotion. In fact, the chieftains, the nobles, and the knights, constituting the only classes of society that exercised any influence, or were regarded with any respect in those days, were never contented except when actively employed in military campaigns. ”

“ William could leave his duchy in her hands when he set out to win a kingdom for himself and her, and William was no contemptible judge of practical ability in others. We shall hardly find in all English medieval history another queen consort who takes a place at once more prominent and more honourable.
In the year following Queen Matilda’s death, the Conqueror’s attention was for the last time concentrated on the affairs of Maine, and in a manner which illustrates the uncertain tenure by which the Normans still held their southern dependency. ”

“ This is the portrait of a man in his personal character, a man whose life takes up only a part of the time treated of in the other work. We have now to look on William as one who, though stranger and conqueror, is yet worthily entitled to a place on the list of English statesmen. There is perhaps no man before or after him whose personal character and personal will have had so direct an effect on the course which the laws and constitution of England have taken since his time. Norman as a Conqueror, as a statesman he is English, and, on this side of him at least, he worthily begins the series. ”

“ Men were no longer keeping out an invader; when they rose, they rose against a power which, however wrongfully, was the established government of the land. Two such movements took place. One was a real revolt of Englishmen against foreign rule. The other was a rebellion of William’s own earls in their own interests, in which English feeling went with the King. Both were short sharp struggles which stand out boldly in the tale. More important in the general story, though less striking in detail, are the relations of William to the other powers in and near the isle of Britain. ”