The castle besieged and taken by the Duke and Ralph of CHAP. VIII. naturally great. To select that particular spot as a centre of rebellion was not only a flagrant act of disloyalty, but the grossest of personal insults. Acting under the guidance of his guardian Ralph of Wacey, the Duke summoned all loyal Normans to his standard, and advanced to the siege of his birthplace. The castle was attacked by storm, a fact which shows that the town was loyal, proud as it well might be of numbering among its sons not only a sovereign, but a sovereign who was beginning to be renowned even in his boyhood. It was only on the side of the town. that the castle could be assaulted in this way. William himself could hardly have swarmed up the steep cliffs which looked down upon the dwelling of his grandfather, nor could he, like the English invader four centuries later, command the fortress by artillery planted on the opposite height. By dint of sheer personal strength and courage, the gallant Normans assaulted the massive walls of the Norman fortress, in the heart of the Norman land, which French hirelings, in the pay of a Norman traitor, were defending against the prince to whom that fortress. owes a renown which can never pass away. Their attacks made a breach, perhaps not in the donjon itself, but at any 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 Thurstan's son, Richard Viscount of Avranches, proved a ants, the loyal servant to William, and in the end procured the descend Duci serviret, sibi adscivit." The presence of the French soldiers is thus plain enough, and their presence seems to imply the complicity of the French King; but there seems to be no sufficient authority for bringing in a second devastating invasion of the County of Hiesmes by Henry in person, as we find described in the Roman de Rou, 8526, where I do not understand Prevost's note. WILLIAM'S SIEGE OF FALAISE. Earls of 205 pardon of his father. The son of the loyal Richard, the CHAP. VIII. grandson of the rebel Thurstan, finds a place in English Chester. history by the name of Hugh the Wolf, the first of the mighty but short-lived line of the Counts Palatine of Chester.2 ment of 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 character. 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 and righteous in his judgements, and he dealt out a justice as strict as that of Godwine or Harold upon all disturbers of the public peace.1 All this we can well believe. Of all these virtues he 1 Will. Gem. vii. 6. He founded Saint 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 primum per ætatem potuit, militiæ insignia a Rege Francorum accipiens, provinciales in spem quietis erexit." See above, p. 170. 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 supra 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. CHAP. VIII. 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. But in one important point 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 tical appointments quite unworthy of the prince who was, somewhat later in abused by life, to learn to appreciate and to reward the virtues of Maurilius, 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. the Nor man Dukes. Position of the Nor lates. It must be remembered that the Prelates of Normandy, man Pre like the Prelates of the other great fiefs of the French Crown, were, in every sense, the subjects of the Prince within whose immediate dominions they found themselves. Here 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, was a commonwealth enjoying practical independence. POSITION OF THE NORMAN PRELATES. 207 No such oases of ecclesiastical or municipal privilege in- CHAP. VIII. terrupted the continuous dominion of a Norman or Aqui- Their subjection to tanian Duke. The Metropolitan of Rouen or of Bourdeaux the Ducal 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 those Bishops whose sees lay 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; but even Rheims had now fallen not a little from its ancient greatness, and no such claims to princely authority were at any time put forward by the proudest Prelate of Bayeux or Rouen. 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 Death of turbulent Prelate, after an episcopate of forty-eight years, bishop had mended his ways, and had at last vacated both Robert. County and Archbishoprick by death. In his temporal capacity he was succeeded by 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.3 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 1 See vol. i. p. 194. 2 Ord. Vit. 566, B, C. See above, p. 179. 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. Arch 1037. Malger, Archbishop of Rouen. 1037-1055. Odo, Bishop of Bayeux. CHAP. VIII. 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 his uncle Malger, one of the sons of Richard the Good by 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. So too when, some years later, the great see of Bayeux fell vacant, William 1048-1098. bestowed it on his half-brother Odo, the son of Herleva by her husband Herlwin of Conteville. Odo, like Hugh of Rheims in earlier times,3 must have been a mere boy at the time of his appointment; but he held the see of Bayeux for fifty years, and during most 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. In England he was remembered only as the foremost among the conquerors and oppressors of His cha racter in England, 5 4 1 Will. Gem. vii. 7; Ord. Vit. 566 D. The verses on him in the series of Archbishops are, Malgerius juvenis sedem suscepit honoris, See, for a fearful description of his misdeeds, Will. Pict. 116 ed. Giles. 2 Will. Pict. 118 Giles; Will. Gem. vii. 3, 17; Ord. Vit. 660 B. See Appendix U. 3 See vol. i. p. 204. 4 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. Will. Gem. vii. 17; Ord. Vit. 664 D. William of Poitiers • See especially the portrait of him in Orderic, u. s. (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." |