СНАР. Х. Godwine. 10351053. attack on the Count of Anjou. A wooded hillcountry formed the southern border of the Norman The House of duchy, and from the hills of Vire and Mortagne the rivers Mayenne and Sarthe flow down to the heart of Geoffrey's country to Le Mans and Angers. It was on this border that war broke out in 1048, centering round Domfront and Alençon, towns which command the head-waters of the two streams. But the duke's success was as rapid and decisive as before. While Geoffrey marched to meet the French army, William surprised Alençon, avenged the insult of its burghers, who had hung skins over its walls on his approach, with shouts of "Hides for the tanner," by ruthlessly hewing off hands and feet, and returned as rapidly to secure the surrender of Domfront. The quick, sturdy blows put an end to the war; Geoffrey Martel made peace with king and duke, and the peace left the two fortresses he had won in the hands of William, to serve as a base for his future conquest of Maine. If Val-ès-Dunes had left William master of Normandy, the defeat of Count Geoffrey left him first among the powers of France. But it was not France. only which was watching William's course. His new strength told at once on English politics. The victory of his cousin over the rebels who would have made him a puppet duke, must have spurred Eadward to struggle against the earl who had made him a puppet king, and his little group of foreign counsellors would watch the triumphs that followed Val-ès-Dunes as if every victory of William was a blow at Godwine and his house. We shall soon see that William himself Norman aims in England. CHAP. X. Godwine. 10351053. was watching closely the struggle between Godwine The House of and the king. What shape the young duke's dreams may have taken, whether he had already conceived the design which was two years later disclosed of following his cousin Eadward on the English throne, we cannot tell. But communications must have already passed between the Norman group around Eadward and the court of Rouen; and the nomination of an English prelate from among the circle of Norman courtiers showed the new confidence which Eadward was drawing from his cousin's victories. In the year of William's triumph over Geoffrey Martel one of the king's Norman chaplains, Ulf, was raised to the see of Dorchester, a diocese which stretched from the Humber to the Thames. As yet, however, there was nothing in William's attitude to mark hostility to the house of Godwine. But the next step in the young duke's policy was to set their attitude to each other in a clearer light. Flanders. Already the course of events was drawing England into relations with the western world at once closer and more extensive than any she had formed since the days of Æthelstan. The first breath of the later Conquest passes over us as English politics interweave themselves with the politics, not of Scandinavia only, but of Normandy and France, of Flanders and Boulogne, of the Empire and the Papacy. It was to this wider field that the contest between Godwine and the Normans was to drift; and to follow the thread of English politics at this moment we have to turn to Flanders. Flanders was now one of the leading states of Western Christendom. The wild reach of forest and fen which Cæsar had seen stretching along CHAP. X. Godwine. 1035 1053. the Scheldt and the Lower Rhine, a region veiled in The House of bitter mist and swept by the frost-winds of the northern seas, had been subdued by the Roman sword, and won from the dying empire by men of kindred stock with the English conquerors of Britain. A portion of this wild land, the great triangle of territory between the Scheldt, the Channel, and the Somme, which was known as Flanders, became a county in the storm of the Danish inroads. Its counts won their lordship by hard fighting against the northmen. But the quick rise of Flanders to wealth and greatness was due to the temper of the Flemings themselves. At the time we have reached their steady toil was already laying the foundation of that industrial greatness which the land preserved through the Middle Ages, and of that commercial activity which was to make it ere a hundred years had gone by the mart of the world. The industry of the Flemings found from the first a shelter in their counts. All the traditions of the country ascribed to its rulers a love of justice which lifted them above the princes of their time. Story told how Lyderic, the founder of their race, beheaded his eldest son for taking a basket of apples from an old woman without payment. The very feuds of the land were bounded by strict rule. Baron might wage his petty war with baron; but old usage and enacted law forbade the extension of the strife to husbandman or trader. Hot as the quarrel might be, too, fighting was its only outlet, for none might harry or imprison within the count's domain. CHAP. X. Godwine. 10351053. Its importance. It was in the peace and order which this strict But it The House of rule secured that the Flemings toiled their way to wealth. The counts understood and identified themselves with their people's love of industry and freedom, and Arnulf the Old, our Ælfred's grandson by the mother's side, became the Ælfred of Flemish history. The little boroughs of the land grew up for the most part beneath the shelter of its vast abbeys; names such as those of St. Omer, St. Gherlain, St. Amand, St. Vedast, show that municipal life was almost a creation of the Church. Even the lordly Ghent of after days was but a borough which had clustered round the abbey of St. Bavon. was to Arnulf that tradition ascribed the institution of the great fairs which raised them into centres of commercial life, as well as the introduction of the weaving trade which made Flanders the earliest manufacturing country of Western Christendom. With equal sagacity the counts saw that the most precious gift they could confer on this rising industry was the gift of freedom. "Little charm," says Baldwin of Mons, "is there in a town for men to dwell therein save it be sheltered by the uttermost liberty." The freedom of settlement, the security of trade, the right of justice within their walls, the liberty of bequest and succession, which the Flemish boroughs were already acquiring, were soon to ripen into an almost complete self-government. The rapid prosperity of the country gave a corresponding importance to its rulers; and this importance was heightened by the situation of Flanders as a borderland between France and the Empire. Feudatories of the Emperor CHAP. X. Godwine. 1035. 1053. as of the king at Paris, though for different portions of their dominion, the counts soon learned to use The House of their double allegiance to win a practical independence of either suzerain. The present ruler of Flanders, Baldwin of Lille, had reached a yet higher position than his predecessors. His wife was the sister of King Henry of France. He was among the most powerful vassals of the Empire. The Empire had risen at this moment to a height Revival of the Empire. unknown since the days of Charles the Great; a height from which it was from that hour slowly to fall. The wide dominion of Charles had been broken up by the quarrels of his house, the incursions of the northmen, and the rise of a national temper in the peoples whom he had bound into a state. But the tradition of a single Christendom with one temporal as with one spiritual head lived on in the minds of men; and in the German king Otto the Great the tradition again became a living fact. Conqueror of Italy, crowned at Rome as Emperor of the world, the claims of Otto to the supremancy of Western Christendom found no acknowledgment in Spain, in what we now call France, nor in England; in our own land indeed the assumption of imperial titles by Eadgar and Æthelred looks like a purposed answer to the imperial claims of Otto and his successors. But even apart from its claims over realms which denied its sway, the Empire stood from the hour of this revival high both in strength and in extent above all other European powers. Lords of Germany and of the greater part of Italy, of the subject realms of Bohemia, Moravia, and Poland to the east, of the L L |