# The Normans in European History/Chapter 3

III
NORMANDY AND ENGLAND
AFTER the coming of the Northmen the chief event in Norman history is the conquest of England, and just as relations with the north are the chief feature of the tenth century, so relations with England dominate the eleventh century, and the central point is the conquest of 1066. In this series of events the central figure is, of course, William the Conqueror, by descent duke of Normandy and by conquest king of England.
Of William's antecedents we have no time to speak at length. Grandson of the fourth Norman duke, Richard the Good, William was the son of Duke Robert, who met his death in Asia Minor in 1035 while returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. To distinguish him from the later duke of the same name he is called Robert I or Robert the Magnificent, sometimes and quite incorrectly, Robert the Devil, by an unwarranted confusion with this hero, or rather villain, of romance and grand opera. A contemporary of the great English king Canute, Robert was a man of renown in the Europe of the early eleventh century, and if our sources of information permitted us to know the history of his brief ​reign, we should probably find that much that was distinctive of the Normandy of his son's day can be traced back to his time. More than once in history has a great father been eclipsed by a greater son. The fact should be added, which William's contemporaries never allowed him to forget, that he was an illegitimate son. His mother Arlette was the daughter of a tanner of Falaise, and while it is not clear that Duke Robert was ever married to any one else, his union with Arlette had no higher sanction than the Danish custom of his forefathers. Their son was generally known in his day as William the Bastard, and only the great achievements of his reign succeeded in replacing this, first by William the Great and later by William the Conqueror.
No man that ever trod this earth was ever endowed with greater natural gifts; to no man was it ever granted to accomplish greater things. If we look only to the scale of a man's acts without regard to their moral character, we must hail in the victor of Val-ès-dunes, of Varaville, and of Senlac, in the restorer of Normandy, the Conqueror of England, one who may fairly claim his place in the first rank of the world's greatest men. No man ever did his work more thoroughly at the moment; no man ever left his work behind him as more truly an abiding possession for all time....If we cannot give him a niche among pure patriots and heroes, he is quite as little entitled to a place among mere tyrants and destroyers. William of Normandy has no claim to a share in the pure glory of Timoleon, Ælfred, and Washington; he cannot even claim the more mingled fame of Alexander, Charles, and Cnut; but he has still less in common with the mere enemies of their species, with the Nabuchodonosors, the Swegens, and the Buonapartes, whom God has sent from time to time as simple scourges of a guilty world....He never wholly cast away the thoughts of justice and mercy, and in his darkest hours had still somewhat of the fear of God before his eyes.
I have quoted the essence of Freeman's characterization, not because it seems to me wholly just or even historical, but in order to set forth vividly the importance of William and his work. It is not the historian's business to award niches in a hall of fame. He is no Rhadamanthus, to separate the Alfreds of this world from the Nebuchadnezzars, the Washingtons from the Napoleons. So far as he deals with individuals, his business is to explain to us each man in the light of his time ​and its conditions, not to compare him with men of far distant times and places in order to arrange all in a final scale of values. It was once the fashion in debating societies to discuss whether Demosthenes was a greater orator than Cicero, and whether either was the equal of Daniel Webster. It is even more futile to consider whether William the Conqueror was a greater man than Alexander or a less than George Washington, for the quantities are incommensurable. So far as comparisons of this sort are at all legitimate, they must be instituted between similar things, between contemporaries or between men in quick sequence. When they deal with wide intervals of time and circumstance, they wrest each man from his true setting and become fundamentally unhistorical.
An able general, strong in battle and still stronger in strategy and craft, a skilful diplomat, a born ruler of men, William was yet greater in the combination of vision, patience, and masterful will which make the statesman, and the results of his statesmanship are writ large on the page of English history. To his contemporaries his most striking characteristic was his pitiless strength and inflexible will, and if they had been familiar with Nietzsche's theory of the 'overman,' they would certainly have placed him in that class. Stark and stern and wrathful, the author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle approaches him, as Freeman well says, "with ​downcast eyes and bated breath, as if he were hardly dealing with a man of like passions with himself but were rather drawing the portrait of a being of another nature." This, the most adequate characterization of the Uebermensch of the eleventh century, runs as follows:
If any would know what manner of man king William was, the glory that he obtained, and of how many lands he was lord ; then will we describe him as we have known him, we, who have looked upon him and who once lived in his court. This king William, of whom we are speaking, was a very wise and a great man, and more honoured and more powerful than any of his predecessors. He was mild to those good men who loved God, but severe beyond measure towards those who withstood his will. He founded a noble monastery on the spot where God permitted him to conquer England, and he established monks in it, and he made it very rich. In his days the great monastery at Canterbury was built, and many others also throughout England; moreover this land was filled with monks who lived after the rule of St. Benedict; and such was the state of religion in his days that all that would might observe that which was prescribed by their respective orders. King William was also held in much reverence: he wore his crown three times every year when he was in England: at Easter he wore it at Winchester, at Pentecost at Westminster, and at Christmas at Gloucester. And at these times, all the men of England were with him, archbishops, bishops, abbots, and earls, thanes, and knights. So also, was he a very stern and a wrathful man, so that none durst do anything against his will, and he kept in prison those earls who acted against his pleasure. He removed bishops from their sees, and abbots from their offices, and ​he imprisoned thanes, and at length he spared not his own brother Odo. This Odo was a very powerful bishop in Normandy, his see was that of Bayeux, and he was foremost to serve the king. He had an earldom in England, and when William was in Normandy he was the first man in this country, and him did he cast into prison. Amongst other things the good order that William established is not to be forgotten; it was such that any man, who was himself aught, might travel over the kingdom with a bosom-full of gold unmolested; and no man durst kill another, however great the injury he might have received from him. He reigned over England, and being sharp-sighted to his own interest, he surveyed the kingdom so thoroughly that there was not a single hide of land throughout the whole of which he knew not the possessor, and how much it was worth, and this he afterwards entered in his register. The land of the Britons was under his sway, and he built castles therein; moreover he had full dominion over the Isle of Man [Anglesey]: Scotland also was subject to him from his great strength; the land of Normandy was his by inheritance, and he possessed the earldom of Maine; and had he lived two years longer he would have subdued Ireland by his prowess, and that without a battle. Truly there was much trouble in these times, and very great distress; he caused castles to be built, and oppressed the poor. The king was also of great sternness, and he took from his subjects many marks of gold, and many hundred pounds of silver, and this, either with or without right, and with little need. He was given to avarice, and greedily loved gain. He made large forests for the deer, and enacted laws therewith, so that whoever killed a hart or a hind should be blinded. As he forbade killing the deer, so also the boars; and he loved the tall stags as if he were their father. He also appointed concerning the hares, that they should go free. The rich complained and the poor murmured, but he was so sturdy that he recked nought of them; they ​must will all that the king willed, if they would live; or would keep their lands; or would hold their possessions; or would be maintained in their rights. Alas! that any man should so exalt himself, and carry himself in his pride over all! May Almighty God show mercy to his soul, and grant him the forgiveness of his sins! We have written concerning him these things, both good and bad, that virtuous men might follow after the good, and wholly avoid the evil, and might go in the way that leadeth to the kingdom of heaven.
This Requiescat of the monk of Peterborough has carried us forward half a century, till the Conqueror, in the full maturity of his power and strength, rode to his death down the steep street of the burning town of Mantes and was buried in his own great abbey-church at Caen. And the good peace that he gave the land at the end came, both in Normandy and in England, only after many stormy years of war, rebellion, and strife. William was but sixty when he died; when his father was laid away in the basilica of far-off Nicaea, he was only seven or at most eight. The conquest of England was made in his fortieth year, when he had already reigned thirty-one years as duke. Or, if we deduct the years of his youth, the conquest of England falls just halfway between his coming of age and his death. I give these figures to adjust the perspective. William's place in the line of English kings is so prominent and his achievements in England are so important that they always tend to overshadow in our minds his earlier years as duke. Yet without these formative years there could ​have been no conquest of England, and without some study of them that conquest cannot be understood.
If we pass over rapidly, as for lack of information we must needs do, the dozen years of William's minority, we find his reign in Normandy chiefly occupied with his struggles with his vassals, his neighbors, and the king of France, all a necessary consequence of his feudal position as duke. The Norman vassals, always turbulent and rebellious, seem to have broken forth anew upon the death of Robert the Magnificent, and such accounts as have reached us of the events of the next twelve years reveal a constant state of anarchy and disorder. The revolt of the barons came to a head in 1047, when the whole of Lower Normandy rose under the leadership of the two chief vicomtes of the region, Ranulf of Bayeux and Néel of Saint-Sauveur, the ruins of whose family castle of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte still greet the traveller who leaves Cherbourg for Paris. William, who was hunting in the neighborhood of Valognes, was obliged to flee half-clad in the night and to pick his way alone by devious paths across the enemy's country to his castle of Falaise. With the assistance of the French king he was able to collect an army from Upper Normandy and meet the rebels on the great plain of Val-des-Dunes, near Caen, where the Mont-joie of the French and the Dex aie of the duke's followers answered the barons' appeals to their local saints of St. Sauveur, St. Sever, and St. Amand. William was victorious; the ​leaders of the revolt were sent into exile, but one of them, Grimoud of Plessis, the traitor, apparently he who had sought William's death in the night at Valognes, was put in prison at Rouen in irons which he wore until his death.
With the collapse of the great revolt and the razing of the castles of the revolting barons, Normandy began to enjoy a period of internal peace and order. Externally, however, difficulties rather increased with the growing power of the young duke. In discussions of feudal society it is too often assumed that if the feudal obligations are observed between lords and vassals, all will go well, and that the anarchy of which the Middle Ages are full was the result of violations of these feudal ties. Now, while undoubtedly a heavy account must be laid at the door of direct breaches of the feudal bond, it must also be remembered that there was a fundamental defect in the very structure of feudal society. We may express this defect by saying that the feudal ties were only vertical and not lateral. The lord was bound to his vassal and the vassal to his lord, and so far as these relations went they provided a nexus of social and legal relations which might hold society together. But there was no tie between two vassals of the same lord, nothing whatever which bound one of them to live in peace and amity with the other. Quite the contrary. War being the normal state of European society in the feudal period, the right to carry on private war was one of the cherished rights ​of the feudal baron, and it extended wherever it was not restricted by the bonds of fealty and vassalage. The duke of Normandy and the count of Anjou were both vassals of the king of France, but their relations to each other were those of complete independence, and, save for some special agreement or friendship, were normally relations of hostility.
And so an important part of Norman history has to treat of the struggles with the duchy's neighbors, Flanders on the north, the royal domain on the east, Maine and Anjou to the southward, and Brittany on the west. Fortunately for Normandy, the Bretons were but loosely organized, while the Flemings, compacted into one of the strongest of the French fiefs, were generally friendly, and the friendship was in this period cemented by William's marriage to Matilda, daughter of the count of Flanders, one of the few princely marriages of the time which was founded upon affection and observed with fidelity. With Anjou the case was different. Beginning as a border county over against the Bretons of the lower Loire, with the black rock of Angers as its centre and fortress, Anjou, though still comparatively small in area, had grown into one of the strongest states of western France. Under a remarkable line of counts, Geoffrey Greygown, Fulk the Red, and Fulk the Black, ancestors of the Plantagenet kings of England, it had become the dominant power on the Loire, and now under their successor Geoffrey the Hammer it threatened ​further expansion by hammering its frontiers still further to the north and east. Geoffrey, William's contemporary and rival, is known to us by a striking characterization written by his nephew and successor and forming a typical bit of feudal biography:
My uncle Geoffrey became a knight in his father's lifetime and began his knighthood by wars against his neighbors, one against the Poitevins, whose count he captured at Mont Couër, and another against the people of Maine, whose count, named Herbert Bacon, he likewise took. He also carried on war against his own father, in the course of which he committed many evil deeds of which he afterward bitterly repented. After his father died on his return from Jerusalem, Geoffrey possessed his lands and the city of Angers, and fought Count Thibaud of Blois, son of Count Odo, and by gift of King Henry received the city of Tours, which led to another war with Count Thibaud, in the course of which, at a battle between Tours and Amboise, Thibaud was captured with a thousand of his knights. And so, besides the part of Touraine inherited from his father, he acquired Tours and the castles round about—Chinon, L'Ile-Bouchard, Châteaurenault, and Saint-Aignan. After this he had a war with William, count of the Normans, who later acquired the kingdom of England and was a magnificent king, and with the people of France and of Bourges, and with William count of Poitou and Aimeri viscount of Thouars and Hoel count of Nantes and the Breton counts of Rennes and with Hugh count of Maine, who had thrown off his fealty. Because of all these wars and the prowess he showed therein he was rightly called the Hammer, as one who hammered down his enemies.
​In the last year of his life he made me his nephew a knight at the age of seventeen in the city of Angers, at the feast of Pentecost, in the year of the Incarnation 1060, and granted me Saintonge and the city of Saintes because of a quarrel he had with Peter of Didonne. In this same year King Henry died on the nativity of St. John, and my uncle Geoffrey on the third day after Martinmas came to a good end. For in the night which preceded his death, laying aside all care of knighthood and secular things, he became a monk in the monastery of St. Nicholas, which his father and he had built with much devotion and endowed with their goods.
The great source of conflict between William and Geoffrey was the intervening county of Maine, whence the Angevins had gained possession of the Norman fortresses of Domfront and Alençon, and it was not till after Geoffrey's death, in 1063, that the capture of its chief city, LeMans, completed that union of Normandy and Maine which was to last through the greater part of Norman history. The conquest of Maine was the first fruit of William's work as conqueror.
With William's suzerain, the king of France, relations were more complicated. Legally there could be no question that the duke of Normandy was the feudal vassal of the French king and as such bound to the obligations of loyalty and service which flowed from his oath of homage and fealty. Actually, in the society of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such bonds were freely and frequently broken, yet they were not thrown off. Here, as in many other phases of mediæval life, ​we meet that persistent contradiction between theory and practice which shocks our more consistent minds. Just as the men of the Middle Ages tolerated a Holy Roman Empire which claimed universal dominion and often exercised only the most local and rudimentary authority, so they accepted a monarchy like that of the early Capetians, which claimed to rule over the whole of France and was limited in its actual government to a few farms and castles in the neighborhood of Paris. And just as they maintained ideals of lofty chivalry and rigorous asceticism far beyond the sordid reality of ordinary knighthood or monkhood, so the constant violation of feudal obligations did not change the feudal bond or destroy the nexus of feudal relations. In this age of unrestraint, ferocious savagery alternated with knightly generosity, and ungovernable rage with self-abasing penance.
At such times the relations of the king and his great feudatories would depend very largely upon personal temperament, political situations, and even the impulse of the moment, and we must not expect to find such purpose and continuity in policies as prevail in more settled periods. Nevertheless, with due allowance for momentary variations, the relations of Normandy with the Capetian kings follow comparatively simple lines. The position of Normandy in the Seine valley and its proximity to the royal domain offered endless opportunity for friction, yet for about a century strained ​relations were avoided by alliance and friendship based upon common interest. Hugh Capet came to the throne with the support of the Norman duke, and his successors often found their mainstay in Norman arms. Robert the Magnificent on his departure for the East commended his young son to King Henry, and the heir seems to have grown up under the king's guardianship. It was Henry who saved William from his barons in 1047, and it was William that furnished over half the king's soldiers on the campaign against Anjou in the following year. Then, about the middle of the eleventh century, comes a change, for which the growing power and influence of Normandy furnish a sufficient explanation. Henry supported the revolt of William of Arques in 1053 and attempted a great invasion of Normandy in the same year, while in 1058 he burnt and pillaged his way into the heart of the Norman territory. A waiting game and well-timed attacks defeated these efforts at Mortemer and at Varaville, but William refused to follow up his advantage by a direct attack upon his king, whom he continued to treat with personal consideration as his feudal lord. Even after William himself became king, he seems to have continued to render the military service which he owed as duke. By this time, however, the subjection had become only nominal; merely as duke, William was now a more powerful ruler than the king of France, and the Capetian monarchy had to bide its time for more than a century longer.
​Before we can leave the purely Norman period of William's reign and turn to the conquest of England, it is important to examine the internal condition of Normandy under his rule. Even the most thorough study possible of this subject would need to be brief, for lack of available evidence. Time has not dealt kindly with Norman records, and over against the large body of Anglo-Saxon charters and the unique account of Anglo-Saxon England preserved in the Domesday survey, contemporary Normandy can set only a few scattered documents and a curious statement of the duke's rights and privileges under William, drawn up four years after his death and only recently recovered as an authority for his reign. The sources of Norman history were probably never so abundant as those of England ; certainly there is now nothing on the Continent, outside of the Vatican, that can compare with the extraordinarily full and continuous series of the English public records. The great gaps in the Norman records, often supposed to be due to the Revolution, really appear much earlier. Undoubtedly there was in many places wanton destruction of documents in the revolutionary uprisings, and there were many losses under the primitive organization of local archives in this period, as there undoubtedly were during the carelessness and corruption of the Restoration. Nevertheless, an examination of the copies and extracts made from monastic and cathedral archives by the scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth ​centuries shows that, with a few significant exceptions, the materials for early Norman history were little richer then than now, so that the great losses must have occurred before this time, that is to say, during the Middle Ages and in the devastation of the English invasion and of the Protestant wars of the sixteenth century. The cathedral library at Bayeux, for example, possesses three volumes of a huge cartulary charred by the fire into which it was thrown when the town was sacked by the Protestants. On the other hand, it should be noted that the French Revolution accomplished one beneficent result for local records in the secularization of ecclesiastical archives and their collection into the great repositories of the Archives Départementales, whose organization is still the envy of historical scholars across the Channel. One who has enjoyed for many months access to these admirable collections of records will be permitted to express his gratitude to those who created them, as well as to those by whom they are now so courteously administered.
Piecing together our scattered information regarding the Normandy of the eleventh century, we note at the outset that it was a feudal society, that is to say, land was for the most part held of a lord by hereditary tenure on condition of military service. Indeed feudal ideas had spread so far that they even penetrated the church, so that in some instances the revenues of the clergy had been granted to laymen and archdeaconries and ​prebends had been turned into hereditary fiefs. With feudal service went the various incidents of feudal tenure and a well-developed feudal jurisdiction of the lord over his tenants and of the greater barons over the less. In all this there is nothing to distinguish Normandy from the neighboring countries of northern France, and as a feudal society is normally a decentralized society, we should expect to find the powers of government chiefly in the hands of the local lords. A closer study, however, shows certain peculiarities which are of the utmost importance, both for Norman and for English history.
First of all, the military service owing to the duke had been systematically assessed in rough units of five or ten knights, and this service, or its subdivisions, had become attached to certain pieces of land, or knights' fees. The amounts of service were fixed by custom and were regularly enforced. Still more significant are the restrictions placed upon the military power of the barons. The symbol and the foundation of feudal authority was the castle, wherefore the duke forbade the building of castles and strongholds without his license and required them to be handed over to him on demand. Private war and the blood feud could not yet be prohibited entirely, but they were closely limited. No one was allowed to go out to seek his enemy with hauberk and standard and sounding horn. Assaults and ambushes were not permitted in the duke's forests; captives were not to be ​taken in a feud, nor could arms, horses, or property be carried off from a combat. Burning, plunder, and waste were forbidden in pursuing claims to land, and except for open crime, no one could be condemned to loss of limb unless by judgment of the proper ducal or baronial court. Coinage, generally a valued privilege of the greater lords, was in Normandy a monopoly of the duke. What the absence of such restrictions might mean is well illustrated in England in the reign of Stephen, when private war, unlicensed castles, and baronial coinage appeared as the chief evils of an unbridled feudal anarchy.
In the administration of justice, in spite of the great franchises of the barons, the duke has a large reserved jurisdiction. Certain places are under his special protection, certain crimes put the offender at his mercy. The administrative machinery, though in many respects still primitive, has kept pace with the duke's authority. Whereas the Capetian king has as his local representatives only the semi-feudal agents on his farms, the Norman duke has for purposes of local government a real public officer, the vicomte, commanding his troops, guarding his castles, maintaining order, administering justice, and collecting the ducal revenues. Nowhere is the superiority of the Norman dukes over their royal overlords more clear than in the matter of finance. The housekeeping of the Capetian king of the eleventh century was still what the Germans call a Naturalwirthschaft, an ​economic organization based upon payment in produce and labor rather than in money. "Less powerful than certain of his great vassals," as he is described by his principal historian, Luchaire, "the king lives like them from the income from his farms and tolls, the payments of his peasants, the labor of his serfs, the taxes disguised as gifts which he levies from the bishops and abbots of the neighborhood. His granaries of Gonesse, Janville, Mantes, Étampes, furnish his grain; his cellars of Orleans and Argenteuil, his wine; his forests of Rouvrai (now the Bois de Boulogne), Saint-Germain, Fontainebleau, Iveline, Compiègne, his game. He passes his time in hunting, for amusement or to supply his table, and travels constantly from estate to estate, from abbey to abbey, obliged to make full use of his rights of entertainment and to move frequently from place to place in order not to exhaust the resources of his subjects."
In other words, under existing methods of communication, it was easier to transport the king and his household than it was to transport food, and the king literally 'boarded round' from farm to farm. Such conditions were typical of the age, and they could only be changed by the development of a revenue in money, enabling the king to buy where he would and to pay whom he would for service, whether personal or political or military. Only by hard cash could the mediaeval ruler become ​independent of the limitations which feudalism placed upon him. Now, while the Norman duke derived much of his income from his farms and forests, his mills and fishing rights and local monopolies and tolls, he had also a considerable revenue in money. Each vicomté was farmed for a fixed amount, and there was probably a regular method of collection and accounting. If the king wished to bestow revenue upon a monastery he would grant so many measures of grain at the mills of Bourges or so many measures of wine in the vineyards of Joui; while in a similar position the Norman duke would give money—twelve pounds in the farm of Argentan, sixty shillings and tenpence in the toll of Exmes, or one hundred shillings in the prévôté of Caen. Nothing could show more clearly the superiority of Normandy in fiscal and hence in political organization, where under the forms of feudalism we can already discern the beginnings of the modern state.
To William's authority in the state we must add his control over the Norman church. Profoundly secularized and almost absorbed into the lay society about it as a result of the Norse invasion, the Norman church had been renewed and refreshed by the wave of monastic reform which swept over western Europe in the first half of the eleventh century, and now occupied both spiritually and intellectually a position of honor and of strength. But it was not supreme. The duke appointed its bishops and most of its abbots, sat in its provincial ​councils, and revised the judgments of its courts. Liberal in gifts to the church and punctilious in his religious observances, William left no doubt who was master, and his respectful but independent attitude toward the Papacy already foreshadowed the conflict in which he forced even the mighty Hildebrand to yield.
I have dwelt at some length upon these matters of internal organization, not only because they are fundamental to an understanding of many institutions of the Norman empire, but because they also serve to explain how there came to be a Norman empire. The conquest of England has been so uniformly approached from the English point of view that it is often made to appear as more or less of an accident arising from a casual invasion of freebooters. Viewed in its proper perspective, which I venture to think is the Norman perspective, it appears as a natural outgrowth of Norman discipline and of Norman expansion. Only because the duke was strong at home could he hope to be strong abroad, only because he was master of an extraordinarily vigorous, coherent, and well-organized state in Normandy could he attempt the at first sight impossible task of conquering a kingdom and the still greater task of organizing it under a firm government. We must take account, not only of the weakness of England, but also of the strength of Normandy, stronger than any of its continental neighbors, stronger even than royalty itself.
​That the expansion of Normandy should be directed toward England was the result, not only of the special conditions of the year 1066, but of a steady rapprochement between the two countries, in which the active effort was exerted from the Norman side. By geographical position, by the Scandinavian settlement of both countries, and by the commercial enterprise of the merchants of Rouen, the history of Normandy and England had in various ways been brought together in the tenth century, till in 1002 the marriage of the English king Ethelred with Emma, sister of Duke Richard the Good, created dynastic connections of far-reaching importance. Their son Edward the Confessor was brought up at the Norman court, so that his habits and sympathies became Norman rather than English, and his accession to the English throne in 1042 opened the way to a rapid development of Norman influence both in church and in state, which Freeman, with his strong anti-foreign feelings, considered the real beginning of the Norman Conquest. As Edward's childless reign drew near its end, there were two principal claimants for the succession, Harold, son of Godwin, the most powerful earl of England, and Duke William. Harold could make no hereditary claim to the throne, nor until the eve of Edward's death does he seem to have had the king's support, but he was a man of strength and force and was clearly the leading man of the kingdom. William, as the great-nephew of Ethelred and Emma, was ​cousin (first cousin once removed) of Edward, a claim which he strengthened by an early expression of Edward in his favor and by an oath which he had exacted from Harold to support his candidacy. The exact facts are not known regarding Harold's oath, made during an involuntary visit to Normandy two or three years before, but it enabled William to pose as the defender of a broken obligation and gave him the great moral advantage of the support of Pope Alexander II, to whom he had the question submitted. At Edward's death Harold had himself chosen by the witan, or national council, and crowned, so that he had on his side whatever could come from such legal forms and from the support which lay behind them. We must not, however, commit the anachronism of thinking that he was a national hero or even the candidate of a national party. There was in the eleventh century no such thing as a nation in the sense that the term is understood in the modern world, and the word could least of all be applied to England, broken, divided, and harried by Danish invasions and by internal disunion. Even the notion of the foreigner was still dim and inchoate, and the reign of Canute, to cite no others, had shown England that she had nothing to fear from a king of foreign birth. The contest between Harold, who was half-Danish in blood, and William, big as it was in national consequences, cannot be elevated to the rank of a national struggle.
​From the death of Edward the Confessor and the coronation of Harold, in January, 1066, until the crossing of the Channel in September, William was busy with preparations for the invasion of England. Such an expedition transcended the obligation of military service which could be demanded from his feudal vassals, and William was obliged to make a strong appeal to the Norman love of adventure and feats of arms and to promise wide lands and rich booty from his future conquests. He also found it necessary to enlist knights from other parts of France—Brittany, Flanders, Poitou, even adventurers from distant Spain and Sicily. And then there was the question of transport, for Normandy had no fleet and it was no small matter to create in six months the seven hundred boats which William's kinsmen and vassals obligated themselves to provide. All were ready by the end of August at the mouth of the Dives,—as the quaint Hôtel Guillaume-le-Conquérant reminds the American visitor,—but mediæval sailors could not tack against the wind, and six weeks were passed in waiting for a favoring breeze. Finally it was decided to take advantage of a west wind as far as the mouth of the Somme, and here at Saint-Valéry the fleet assembled for the final crossing. Late in September the Normans landed on the beach at Pevensey and marched to Hastings, where, October 15, they met the troops of Harold, fresh from their great victory over the men of Norway at Stamfordbridge.
​Few battles of the Middle Ages were of importance equal to that of Hastings, and few are better known. Besides the prose accounts of the Latin chroniclers, we have the contemporary elegiacs of Guy of Amiens and Baudri of Bourgueil, the spirited verse of the Roman de Rou of Master Wace, the most detailed narrative but written, unfortunately, a century after the event, and the unique and vivid portrayal of the Bayeux Tapestry. This remarkable monument, which is accessible to all in a variety of editions, consists of a roll of cloth two hundred and thirty feet long and twenty inches in breadth, embroidered in colors with a series of seventy-nine scenes which narrate the history of the Conquest from the departure of Harold on the ill-fated journey which led him to William's court down to the final discomfiture of the English army on the field of Hastings. The episodes, which are designated by brief titles, are well chosen and are executed with a realism of detail which is of the greatest importance for the life and culture of the age. Preserved in the cathedral and later in the municipal Museum of Bayeux—save for a notable interval in 1804, when Napoleon had it exhibited in Paris to arouse enthusiasm for a new French conquest of England,—the tapestry appears from internal evidence to have been originally executed as an ornament for this cathedral by English workmen at the command of Bishop Odo, half-brother of the Conqueror. There is no basis for the common ​belief that it was the work of Queen Matilda or her ladies, but efforts to place it one or even two centuries later have proved unavailing against the evidence of armor and costume, and the general opinion of scholars now regards it as belonging to the eleventh century and thus substantially contemporary with the events which it depicts.
The modern literature of the battle is also commensurate with its importance. The classic account is found in the third volume of Freeman's majestic History of the Norman Conquest, where the story is told with a rare combination of minute detail and spirited narrative which reminds us, it has been said, of a battle of the Iliad or a Norse saga. Splendid as this narrative is, its enthusiasm often carries it beyond the evidence of the sources, and in several fundamental points it can no longer be accepted as historically sound. The theory of the palisade upon which Freeman's conception of the English tactics rested has been destroyed by the trenchant criticism of that profound student of Anglo-Norman history, J. Horace Round, and his whole treatment has been vigorously attacked from the point of view of the scientific study of military history by Wilhelm Spatz and his distinguished master, Hans Delbrück, of Berlin. Unfortunately the Berlin critics are influenced too much by certain theories of military organization; they do not call the English soldier of the period a degenerate, but they consider him, and the Norman knight as well, ​incapable of the disciplined and united action required by all real strategy, incapable even of forming the shield-wall and executing the feigned flight described by the contemporary chroniclers of the battle. While it is true that mediæval fighting was far more individualistic than that of ancient or modern armies and lacked also the flexible conditions which lie at the basis of modern tactics, there is the best of contemporary evidence for a certain amount of strategical movement at Hastings. On one point, however, the modern military critics have compelled us to modify our ideas of the battles of earlier times, namely, with respect to the numbers engaged. Against the constant tendency to magnify the size of the military forces, a tendency accentuated in the Middle Ages by the complete recklessness of chroniclers when dealing with large figures, modern criticism has pointed out the limitations of battle-space, transportation, and commissariat. The five millions with which Xerxes is said to have invaded Greece are a physical impossibility, for Delbrück has shown that, with this number moving under normal conditions, the rear-guard could not have crossed the Tigris when the first Persians reached Thermopylæ. Similarly the fifty or sixty thousand knights attributed to William the Conqueror shrink to one-tenth the number when brought to face with the official lists of English and Norman knights' fees. If William's army did not exceed five or six thousand, that of Harold could ​not have been much greater and may well have been less; though William's panegyrist places the number of English at 1,200,000, not more than 12,000 could have stood, in the closest formation, on the hill which they occupied at Hastings. Small skirmishes these, to those who have followed the battles of the Marne, the Aisne, the Vistula, and the San, yet none the less important in the world's history!
In spite of all the controversy, the main lines of the battle seem fairly clear. The troops of Harold occupied a well-defended hill eight miles inland from Hastings on the London road, the professional guard of housecarles in front, protected by the solid wall of their shields and supported by the thegns and other fully armed troops, the levies of the countryside behind or at the sides, armed with javelins, stone clubs, and farmers' weapons. They had few archers and no cavalry, but the steep hill was well protected from the assaults of the Norman horse and favored the firm defence which the English tactics dictated. The Norman lines consisted first of archers, then of heavy-armed foot-soldiers, and finally of the mailed horsemen, their centre grouped about William and the standard which he had received from the Pope. After a preliminary attack by the archers and foot, the knights came forward, preceded by the minstrel Taillefer, "a jongleur whom a very brave heart ennobled," qui mult bien chantout, throwing his sword in the air and catching it as he sang—
| De Karlemaigne e de Reliant | Of Roland and of Charlemagne, |
| E d'Oliver e des vassals | Oliver and the vassals all |
| Qui morurent en Rencevals. | Who fell in fight at Roncevals. |
But the horses recoiled from the hill, pursued by many of the English, and only the sight of William, his head bared of its helmet so as to be seen by his men, rallied the knights again. The mass of the English stood firm behind their shield-wall and their line could be broken only by the ruse of a feigned flight, from which the Normans turned to surround and cut to pieces their pursuers. Even then the housecarles were unmoved, until the arrows of the high-shooting Norman bowmen finally opened up the gaps in their ranks into which William's horsemen pressed against the battle-axes of the king's guard. And then, as darkness began to fall, Harold was mortally wounded by an arrow, the guard was cut to pieces, and the remnant fled. "Here Harold was killed and the English turned to flight" is the final heading in the Bayeux Tapestry, while in the margin the spoilers strip the coats of mail from the dead and drive off the horses of the slain knights.
"A single battle settled the fate of England." There was still grim work to be done—the humbling of Exeter, the harrying of Northumberland, the subjection of the earls, but these were only local episodes. There was no one but William who could effectively take Harold's place, and when on Christmas Day he had ​been crowned at London, he could reduce opposition at his leisure. The chronicle of these later years belongs to English rather than to Norman history.
The results of the Conquest, too, are of chief significance for the conquered. For the Normans the immediate effect was a great opportunity for expansion in every department of life. There was work for the warrior in completing the subjugation of the land, for the organizer and statesman in the new adjustments of central and local government, for the prelate in bringing his new diocese into line with the practice of the church on the Continent, for the monks to found new priories and administer the new lands which their monasteries now received beyond the Channel. The Norman townsman and the Norman merchant followed hard upon the Norman armies, in the Norman colony in London, in the traders of the ports, in the boroughs of the western border. In part, of course, the change was simply the replacing of one set of persons by another, putting a Norman archbishop in place of Stigand at Canterbury, spreading over the map the Montgomeries and Percies, the Mowbrays and the Mortimers and scores of other household names of English history; but it was also a work of readjustment and reorganization which required all the Norman gift for constructive work. A certain élan passes through Norman life and reflects itself in Norman literature, as the Normans become more conscious of the glory of their achievements and the ​greatness of their new empire. England had become an appendage to Normandy, and men did not yet see that the relation would soon be reversed.
For England, the Norman Conquest determined permanently the orientation of English politics and English culture. Geographically belonging, with the Scandinavian countries, to the outlying lands of Europe, the British Isles had been in serious danger of sharing their remoteness from the general movements of European life and drifting into the back waters of history. The union with Normandy turned England southward and brought it at once into the full current of European affairs—political entanglements, ecclesiastical connections, cultural influences. England became a part of France and thus entered fully into the life of the world to which France belonged. It received the speech of France, the literature of France, and the art of France; its law became in large measure Frankish, its institutions more completely feudal. Yet the connection with France ran through Normandy, and the French influence took on Norman forms. Most of all was this true in the field in which the Norman excelled, that of government: English feudalism was Norman feudalism, in which the barons were weak and the central power strong, and it was the heavy hand of Norman kingship that turned the loose and disintegrating Anglo-Saxon state into the English nation. England was Europeanized only at the price of being Normanized.
​From the point of view both of immediate achievement and of ultimate results, the conquest of England was the crowning act of Norman history. Something doubtless was due to good fortune,—to the absence of an English fleet, to the favorable opportunity in French politics, to the mistakes of the English. But the fundamental facts, without which these would have meant nothing, were the strength and discipline of Normandy and the personality of her leader. Diplomat, warrior, leader of men, William was preëminently a statesman, and it was his organizing genius which "turned the defeat of English arms into the making of the English nation." This talent for political organization was, however, no isolated endowment of the Norman duke, but was shared in large measure by the Norman barons, as is abundantly shown by the history of Norman rule in Italy and Sicily. For William and for his followers the conquest of England only gave a wider field for qualities of state-building which had already shown themselves in Normandy.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
A detailed narrative of the relations between Normandy and England in the eleventh century is given by E. A. Freeman in his History of the Norman Conquest (Oxford, 1870-79), but large portions of this work need to be rewritten in the light of later studies, especially those of Round. There is a brief biography of William the Conqueror by Freeman in the series of "Twelve English Statesmen" (London, 1888), and a fuller one by F. M. Stenton in the "Heroes of the Nations" (1908). For the institutions of Normandy see my articles on ​"Knight Service in Normandy in the Eleventh Century," in English Historical Review, xxii, pp. 636-49; "The Norman 'Consuetudines et lusticie' of William the Conqueror," ibid, xxiii, pp. 502-08; and "Normandy under William the Conqueror," in American Historical Review, xiv, pp. 453-76 (1909); also L. Valin, Le duc de Normandie et sa cour, 912-1204 (Paris, 1910). For church and state, see H. Böhmer, Kirche und Staat in England und in der Normandie (Leipzig, 1899). The dealings of the Norman dukes with their continental neighbors are narrated by A. Fliche, Le règne de Philippe I$^{er}$ roi de France (Paris, 1912); L. Halphen, Le comté d'Anjou au XI$^e$ siecle (Paris, 1906); R. Latouche, Histoire du comte du Maine pendant le X$^e$ et le XI$^e$ siècle (Paris, 1910); F. Lot, Fidèles ou vassaux (Paris, 1904), ch. 6 (on the feudal relations of the Norman dukes and the French kings). There is a good sketch of France in the eleventh century by Luchaire in the Histoire de France of Lavisse, ii, part 2; a fuller work on this period is expected from Maurice Prou. For the literature of the battle of Hastings, see Gross, Sources and Literature, nos. 707a, 2812, 2998-3000; the most important works are those of Round, Spatz, and Delbrück, Geschichte der Kriegskunst, iii, pp. 147-62 (1907). The Bayeux Tapestry is most conveniently accessible in the small edition of F. R. Fowke (reprinted, London, 1913); see also Gross, no. 2139, and Ph. Lauer, in Mélanges Charles Bémont (Paris, 1913), pp. 43-58. Freeman discusses the results of the Conquest in his fifth volume; see also Gaston Paris, L' esprit normand en Anglterre, in La poésie du moyen âge, second series (Paris, 1895), pp. 45-74.
* ↑ History of the Norman Conquest (third edition), ii, pp. 164-67.
* ↑ Norman Conquest, ii, p. 166.
* ↑ Translated by Giles (London, 1847), pp. 461-63.
* ↑ Fulk Rechin, in Chroniques des comtes d'Anjou (ed. Marchegay), p. 378 f; (ed. Halphen and Poupardin, Paris, 1913). pp.235-37.
* ↑ Luchaire, Les quatre premiers Capétiens, in Lavisse, Histoire de France (Paris, 1901), ii, 2, p. 176.
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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