CHAP. XI. Conquest. in the way of Siward's action. But as the boys grew to manhood the ties of kinship told on Siward,' The Norman while the political advantages to which such a kinship might be turned may have influenced Eadward and Harold. A new cause for action had now made itself felt. The flight of a body of Normans to the Scottish court on Godwine's return from exile forced on the struggle. The power of Macbeth had been doubled by his close alliance with the Orkney jarls, and his reception of the Normans threatened danger to the English realm. It was "by the king's order" that Siward marched over the border to fight Macbeth. The danger was soon dispelled. In 1054 a Northumbrian fleet appeared off the Scottish coast, and a Northumbrian army met Macbeth and his Orkney allies in a desperate battle. The English victory was complete; the Normans were cut to pieces, and Macbeth fled to his Norse lies to perish after four years of unceasing struggle with Duncan's son, Malcolm, whom Siward placed on the Scottish throne. But the English loss was heavy. Many of the hus-carls, both of Siward and of the king, lay on the field. There too fell his son, Osbeorn, and his sister's son, Siward. "Were his wounds in front or behind him?" Siward was said to have asked at the news of Osbeorn's fall, and when assured that all were in front, to have said he wished no other end, either for Osbeorn or himself. But while Macbeth escaped, Siward was 1 Duncan must have been closely connected with the Northumbrian earls; for he was the father of these two boys by a wife whom Fordun (iv. 44) calls "consanguinea Siwardi comitis." 10531071. Death of СНАР. ХІ. Conquest. 1053 1071. forced to fall back to prepare a fresh attack. His end The Norman however was near. Early in the next year, 1055, he died at York.1 Legend told how, as sickness grew on him in the year after his victory, the earl called for his arms and stood harnessed to meet the call of death. "It was shame," he said, "for warrior to die like a COW!" 2 At Galmanho, in a suburb of York, he had reared a minster to St. Olaf,3 and there he lay buried. The church grew into the great abbey of St. Mary, but a parish church beside it still preserves Olaf's name. Tostig in Northumbria. The death of Siward, and the old age of Leofric, who was now drawing to the grave, removed the check which their power had laid alike on Godwine and his son since the earl's return. The moment was come for undoing all that the revolution of 1051 had done; and Harold took up again his father's policy of gathering England, province by province, into the hands of his house. Siward had left but a boy, Waltheof, too young to bridle the rough men of the north; and passing over this child, Harold, in 1055, set his brother Tostig as earl over the Northumbrians. The step was a weighty one, not only in its relation to the house of Godwine, but as carrying forward the gradual consolidation of England itself. How steadily the royal authority had made its way during Eadward's reign was now shown by the accomplishment of what Eadgar and Dunstan had been unable to attempt, the bringing of Northumbria itself frankly As this marriage was before 1040 the kinship must have come about through Siward's wife, Earl Ealdred's daughter. 1 Eng. Chron. 1055. 2 Hen. Huntingdon (Hamilton), pp. 195, 196. 3 Eng. Chron. 1055, into the general system of the realm. Till now CHAP. XI. Conquest. 10531071. Northumbria had held jealously to a partial indepen- The Norman dence. Siward was a Dane, and he was wedded to a wife who sprang from the blood of the old Northumbrian rulers. Loyal as he was to Eadward, his temper was too fierce to brook interference from the south, nor did royal court or council concern themselves with Siward's earldom. Little of the justice and order which prevailed south of the Humber had as yet made their way to the north of it. It was only by cruelty and violence that Siward held the country together. But, stern as Siward's temper was, he was of kin to the men he ruled. Tostig, dear as he was to Eadward, and matched though he might be with the daughter of the Flemish count, had nothing to link him with the north. He was neither Dane nor Northumbrian. He was a WestSaxon who came solely in right of his choice by the West-Saxon king and the far-off Witan in the south, and with him came the English rule;' under the new earl, king's writs ran to the north of Humber as they ran to the south of it. Nor was Tostig's temper likely to win the love of the Northumbrians. Stern, grave, reserved, he carried a passionate love of justice into this chaos of feuds and outrages. He forced peace upon the land by taking of life and by maiming 1 The very character of the rising against Tostig in later days shows that the Northumbrians now considered themselves fully subjects of the English realm, and bound to appeal for justice to the English king; while the failure of Harald Hardrada to attract their support even against Harold shows at least how much the old sense of northern isolation had been weakened. CHAP. XI The Norman 1053- 1 of limb. Only over his northern border did he carry out the policy of his predecessor. Malcolm, still 1 Tostig's order was bought by a merciless justice, "patriam purgando talium cruciatu vel nece, et nulli quantumlibet nobili parcendo qui in hoc deprehensus esset crimine" (Vita Edw. (Luard) 422). There was nothing wonderful in Northumbria in his having Gamel son of Orm and Ulf son of Dolfin cut down in 1064 "Eboraci in camerâ suâ sub pacis fœdere per insidias" (Flor. Worc. (Thorpe) i. 223). What marked it was the rank of the sufferers. Orm, Gamel's father, had married a daughter of Earl Ealdred and a sister of Siward's wife; and though Gamel was not her son, he was thus of kin to the house of Siward. Englishmen and Danes alike joined in the bitter hostility awakened by Tostig's rule. In the leaders of the rising of 1065, we see among other great nobles, Gamel-bearn, who added to vast estates in Yorkshire a holding in Staffordshire; Dunstan, the son of Ethelnoth, whose lands may have lain about Pomfret; and Glonieorn, the son of Heardolf. With them also was young Waltheof. Siward's son, and his kinsman, Oswulf, Eadwulf of Bernicia's son, whom the revolution of 1065 was to set for a while in his father's Bernician earldom; Copsige, too, who for a time had been Tostig's deputy in the north, and was under William to seek to become Bernician earl, and to fall by Oswulf's sword; and Siward and Ealdred, descendants of Earl Uhtred by his third wife, Elfgifu. Also Mærleswegen the shire-reeve, to whom Harold gave the north in hand after the battle of Stamford Bridge, the wealthiest of English proprietors, with great domains in the south-west as far as Cornwall; Archill “ potentissimus Northanhymbrorum" (Ord. Vit. (Duchesne), 511 C.), whose vast estates stretched from Yorkshire to Warwick (Ellis, Domesday," ii. 41); and Gospatric, the later earl of Northumbria, who through his mother Ealdgyth traced his descent to Earl Uhtred and his wife Elfgifu, the daughter of King Æthelred. 66 The incidents of the yet later struggle with William the Conqueror throw light on the wild life of the earlier Northumbria. Of the last hero of the north, Earl Waltheof, songs told how head after head of the Frenchmen was shorn off by his swordstroke as they sallied forth from the gate of York: told of his tall figure, and mighty strength, and sinewy arms, and bull-like CHAP. XI. Conquest. hard-pressed by Macbeth and the Orkney men, was thrown on the friendship of Northumbria; and The Norman Tostig, as his sworn brother,' gave him substantial help in the maintenance of his throne. 6 The death of Siward, the elevation of Tostig, could hardly fail to rouse to a new effort the one house which remained to vie with the house of Godwine. Girt in by Godwine's sons to north and to south, isolated in Mid-Britain, Leofric was too old and sickly to renew single-handed and without help from the king the struggle of 1051. the struggle of 1051. But his son, Ælfgar of East-Anglia, was now practically master of Mid-Britain, and in this emergency seems to have chest (Will. Malm. "Gest. Reg." (Hardy), i. 427). The Saga of the Scandinavians made him burn 100 Frenchmen in a wood after the fight and give their corpses to the wolves of Northumberland (Saga of Harald Hardrada (Laing), "Sea-kings of Norway," iii. 95). Oswulf, when Copsige dispossesses him, "in fame et egestate sylvis latitans et montibus, tandem collectis quos eadem necessitas compulerat sociis" (Sim. Durh. "Gest. Reg." a. 1072). Churches gave no sanctuary: Copsige takes refuge in one, but "incendio ecclesiæ compellitur usque ad ostium procedere, ubi in ipso ostio manibus Osulfi detruncatur" (ib.). Then a robber kills Oswulf: "cum in obvii sibi latronis lanceam præceps irruerat, illico confossus interiit " (ib.). So in the rising of 1068, "seditiosi silvas, paludes, æstuaria et urbes aliquot in munimentis habent (Ord. Vit. (Duchesne), 511 B). Plures in tabernaculis morabantur; in domibus, ne mollescerent, requiescere dedignabantur, unde quidam eorum a Normannis silvatici cognominabantur" (ib. C.). When Robert of Comines takes refuge in the bishop's house at Durham, "domum cum inhabitantibus concremaverunt" (Sim. Durh. "Gest. Reg." a. 1069). In the wild country beyond the Tyne the clerks with Cuthbert's body, as they fled to Holy Isle, found a " præpositus Gillo-Michael," a "son of the devil," who robbed them of all he could, sacred as their burthen was. Priests, whether a hundred or ten, were among the slain at Fulford. 10531071. Elfgar of East-Anglia. |