WILLIAM'S SIEGE OF FALAISE. 207 made a breach, perhaps not in the donjon itself, but at any CHAP. VIII. rate in its external defences; night alone, we are told, put an end to the combat, and saved Thurstan and his party from all the horrors of a storm. But the rebel chief now saw that his hopes were vain; he sought a parley with the Duke, and was allowed to go away unhurt on condition of perpetual banishment from Normandy. Thurstan's son, Richard, Viscount of Avranches, proved a Thurstan's loyal servant to William, and in the end procured the ants, the pardon of his father. The son of the loyal Richard, the Earls of grandson of the rebel Thurstan, finds a place in English history by the name of Hugh the Wolf, the first of the mighty but short-lived line of the Counts Palatine of Chester.2 descend Chester. ment of character. The young Duke's great qualities were now fast dis- Developeplaying themselves. At the earliest age which the rules William's of chivalry allowed, he received the ensigns of knighthood from King Henry, and his subjects now began, not without reason, to look forward to a season of peace and order under his rule. We hardly need the exaggerated talk of his extravagant panegyrist to feel sure that William, at an unusually early age, taught men to see in him the born ruler. We hear, not only of his grace and skill in every warlike exercise, not only of his wisdom in the choice of his counsellors, but of his personally practising every virtue that becomes a man and a prince. William, we are told, was fervent in his devotions, righteous in his judgements, and he dealt out a justice as strict as that of Godwine or 1 Will. Gem. vii. 6. He founded St. Gabriel's Priory near Bayeux, the small remains of which are among the finest Romanesque work in Normandy. See De Caumont, Statistique Monumental du Calvados, i. 306. 2 See Will. Gem. viii. 38. Ord. Vit. 488 B, 522 A, B. 3 Will. Malms. iii. 240. "At ille, ubi primùm per ætatem potuit, militiæ insignia à Rege Francorum accipiens, provinciales in spem quietis erexit." CHAP. VIII. Harold upon all disturbers of the public peace.1 All this we can well believe. Of all these virtues he retained many traces to the last. A long career of ambition, craft, and despotic rule, never utterly seared his conscience, never brought him down to the level of those tyrants who neither fear God nor regard man. And in the fresh and generous days of youth, we can well believe that one so highly gifted, and who as yet had so little temptation to abuse his gifts, must have shone forth before all men as the very model of every princely virtue. In one important point however, the public acts of William, or of those who acted in his name, hardly bear out the language of his Ecclesias panegyrists. His first ecclesiastical appointments were pointments quite unworthy of the prince who was, somewhat later in abused by life, to learn to appreciate and to reward the virtues of tical ap the Nor man Dukes. Lanfranc and Anselm. The two greatest preferments of the Norman Church fell vacant during this period, and the way in which they were filled illustrates a not uncommon practice of the Norman princes which had few or no parallels in England. There have been few instances in England in any age of great spiritual preferments being perverted into means of maintenance for cadets or bastards of the royal house. In Normandy, at least since the days of Richard the Fearless, the practice had been shamefully common, and in the early days of William the scandal still continued. It must be remembered that the Prelates of Normandy, 1 See above, p. 172. William of Poitiers (Giles, Scriptt. Will. Conq. 80; Duchesne, 179 B) gives him, as might be expected, a splendid panegyric. Among other virtues we read, "Summo studio cœpit ecclesiis Dei patrocinari, caussas impotentium tutari, jura imponere quæ non gravarent, judicia facere quæ nequaquam ab æquitate vel temperantiâ deviarent. Imprimis prohibere cædes, incendia, rapinas. Rebus enim illicitis nimia ubique, ut suprà docuimus, licentia fuit." See also the later panegyrics on his administration of justice, p. 88, and on his piety in 113, to which I shall have again to refer. POSITION OF THE NORMAN PRELATES. 209 Position of lates. like the Prelates of the other great fiefs of the French CHAP. VIII. Crown, were, in every sense, the subjects of the Princes the Norwithin whose immediate dominions they found themselves. man PreHere was one great point of difference between the condition of France and the condition of Germany. In Germany all the great churchmen, in every part of the country, held immediately of the Emperor. Every Bishop was therefore reckoned as a Prince. The episcopal city also commonly became a Free City of the Empire, and, as such, a commonwealth enjoying practical independence. No such oases of ecclesiastical or municipal privilege in- Their subjection to terrupted the continuous dominion of a Norman or Aqui- the Ducal tanian Duke. The Metropolitan of Rouen or of Bourdeaux authority. might be either the loyal subject or the refractory vassal of his immediate Prince; but in no case was he a coordinate sovereign, owning no superior except in the common overlord. It is only among the Bishops within the Crown lands, those who, in the extemporized jurisprudence of a later age, sat as Peers of France, alongside of the great Dukes and Counts, that the slightest signs of any such hierarchical independence can be discerned. At an earlier age we have indeed seen the metropolitan see of Rheims holding a position which faintly approached that of Mainz or Köln;1 but even Rheims had now considerably fallen from its ancient greatness, and no such claims to princely authority were at any time put forward by the proudest Prelate of Rouen or Bayeux. It was as Count of Evreux, rather than as Primate of Normandy, that Archbishop Robert had been able to make himself so troublesome to his nephew and sovereign. That turbulent Prelate, after Death of an episcopate of forty-eight years, had amended his ways, bishop and had at last vacated both County and Archbishoprick Robert. by death. In his temporal capacity he was succeeded by Arch 1037. CHAP. VIII. a son and a grandson, after whom the County of Evreux passed by an heiress to the house of Montfort, giving the Count-Primate the honour of being, through female descendants, a forefather of the great Simon. The vacancy of the Archbishoprick placed the greatest spiritual preferment in the Duchy at the disposal of the young Duke. The choice of the new Primate was as little directed by considerations of ecclesiastical merit as that of his predecessor, and it proved in every way unfortunate. At the head of the Norman Church William's counsellors placed bishop of his uncle Malger, one of the sons of Richard the Good by 1037-1055. Papia. We shall presently find him displaying no very priestly qualities, and the only act of his life which could be attributed to Christian or ecclesiastical zeal was one which wounded the Duke himself in the tenderest point. ODO, BiSo too, when, some years later, the great see of Bayeux shop of Bayeux. fell vacant, William bestowed it on his half-brother Odo, 1048-1098. the son of Herleva by her husband Herlwin of Conteville.3 Malger, Rouen. Odo, like Hugh of Rheims in earlier times, must have been a mere boy at the time of his appointment; but he 1 Robert was succeeded at Evreux by his son Richard and his grandson William. On the death of William his inheritance passed to his sister Agnes, wife of Simon the Second of Montfort, ancestor of the great Simon. See the pedigrees in Duchesne, pp. 1084, 1092, and Pauli, 19. 2 Will. Gem. vii. 7. Ord. Vit. 566 D. The verses on him in the series of Archbishops are, "Malgerius juvenis sedem suscepit honoris, Natali clarus, sed nullo nobilis actu." See, for a fearful description of his misdeeds, Will. Pict. 116 ed. Giles. Amongst other things, he never received the pallium. The list of Archbishops in Mabillon (Vet. An. ii. 439) says, "Non electione meriti, sed carnali parentum [parents in the French sense] amore et adulatorum suffragio in pueritiâ sedem adeptus est pontificalem; omni destitutus tutelâ, potiùs adquievit carni et sanguini quam divinis mandatis." 3 Will. Pict. 118 Giles. Will. Gem. vii. 3, 17. Ord. Vit. 660 B. See Appendix N. See vol. i. p. 230. 5 A son of Herlwin and Herleva could not be born before 1036; Odo therefore, at the time of his appointment, could not have been above twelve years old. ODO OF BAYEUX. 3 211 racter in 1086. held the see of Bayeux for fifty years,' and, during most CHAP. VIII. part of that time, his name was famous and terrible on both sides of the Channel. The character which he left behind him was a singularly contradictory one.2 In Eng- His chaland he was remembered only as the foremost among the England, conquerors and oppressors of the land, the man who gained for himself a larger share of English hatred than William himself, the man whose career of wrong was at last cut short by his royal brother, who, stern and unscrupulous as he was, at least took no pleasure in deeds of wanton oppression. Of Odo's boundless ambition and love of enterprise there is no doubt. The one quality led him to aspire to the Papal throne; the other led him first to forsake his diocese to rule as an Earl in England, and then to forsake it again to follow his nephew Duke Robert to the first Crusade. That he was no strict observer of ecclesiastical rules in his own person is shown by the fact that he left behind him a son, on whom however he at least bestowed the ecclesiastical name of John.4 Still Norman ecclesiastical history sets Odo before us in a somewhat and in Normandy. fairer light than that in which we see him in English secular history. He at least possessed the episcopal virtue of munificence, and, whatever were the defects of his own conduct, he seems to have been an encourager of learning and good conversation in others. He was bountiful to all, 1 Will. Gem. vii. 17. Ord. Vit. 664 D. 2 See especially the portrait of him in Orderic, u. s. William of Poitiers (118 Giles) ventures to say, "Odonem ab annis puerilibus optimorum numero consona præconia optimorum inseruerunt. Fertur hic in longinquas regiones celeberrima fama; sed ipsius liberalissimi atque humillimi multa et industria et bonitas amplius meretur." 3 Ord. Vit. 646 D. Here Odo is "præsumptor episcopus, cui principatus Albionis et Neustriæ non sufficiebat." Ib. 665 A. Up to this time scriptural names seem to have been hardly more usual in Normandy than in England. The sons of Archbishop Robert bore names of the usual Teutonic cast, but his successor Malger called his son Michael. Ib. 566 D. |