CHAP. XI. that only a few months had passed after the battle of The Norman Senlac when, leaving England in charge of his Conquest. 10531071. The Norman brother Odo, bishop of Bayeux, and his minister, William Fitz-Osbern, the king returned in 1067 for a while to Normandy. The peace he left was soon indeed disturbed. Bishop Odo's tyranny forced the Kentishmen to seek aid from Count Eustace of Boulogne ; while the Welsh princes supported a similar rising against Norman oppression in the west. But as yet the bulk of the land held fairly to the new king. Dover was saved from Eustace; and the discontented fled over sea to seek refuge in lands as far off as Constantinople, where Englishmen from this time formed great part of the bodyguard or Varangians of the eastern emperors. William returned to take his place again as an English king. It was with an English force that he subdued a rising in the south-west with Exeter at its head, and it was at the head of an English army that he completed his work by marching to the North. His march brought Eadwine and Morkere again to submission; a fresh rising ended in the occupation of York, and England as far as the Tees lay quietly at William's feet. It was in fact only the national revolt of 1068 that transformed the king into a conqueror. The signal for the revolt came from Swein, king of Denmark, who had for two years past been preparing to dispute England with the Norman, but on the appearance of his fleet in the Humber all northern, all western and south-western England, rose as one man. Eadgar the Ætheling with a band of exiles who had found refuge CHAP. XI. Conquest. 10531071. in Scotland took the head of the Northumbrian revolt; in the south-west the men of Devon, Somerset, The Norman and Dorset gathered to the sieges of Exeter and Montacute; while a new Norman castle at Shrewsbury alone bridled a rising in the west. So ably had the revolt been planned that even William was taken by surprise. The outbreak was heralded by a storm of York and the slaughter of three thousand Normans who formed its garrison. The news of this slaughter reached William as he was hunting in the forest of Dean; and in a wild outburst of wrath he swore "by the splendour of God" to avenge himself on the North. But wrath went hand in hand with the coolest statesmanship. The centre of resistance lay in the Danish fleet, and pushing rapidly to the Humber with a handful of horsemen William bought at a heavy price its inactivity and withdrawal. Then turning westward with the troops that gathered round him he swept the Welsh border and relieved Shrewsbury, while William Fitz-Osbern broke the rising around Exeter. His success set the king free to fulfil his oath of vengeance on the North. After a long delay before the flooded waters of the Aire he entered York and ravaged the whole country as far as the Tees. Town and village were harried and burned, their inhabitants were slain or driven over the Scottish border. The coast was especially wasted that no hold might remain for future landings of the Danes. Crops, cattle, the very implements of husbandry were so mercilessly destroyed that a famine which followed is said to have swept off more than a hundred thousand victims. Half a century later indeed the Conquest. 1053. 1071. CHAP. XI. land still lay bare of culture and deserted of men for The Norman sixty miles northward of York. The work of vengeance once over, William led his army back from the Tees to York, and thence to Chester and the west. Never had he shown the grandeur of his character so memorably as in this terrible march. The winter was hard, the roads choked with snowdrifts or broken by torrents, provisions failed; and his army, storm-beaten and forced to devour its horses for food, broke out into mutiny at the order to cross the bleak moorlands that part Yorkshire from the west. The mercenaries from Anjou and Brittany demanded their release from service, William granted their prayer with scorn. On foot, at the head of the troops which still clung to him, he forced his way by paths inaccessible to horses, often helping the men with his own hands to clear the road, and as the army descended upon Chester the resistance of the English died away. Its completion. For two years William was able to busy himself in castle-building and in measures for holding down the conquered land. How effective these were was seen when the last act of the conquest was reached. All hope of Danish aid was now gone, but Englishmen still looked for help to Scotland, where Eadgar the Ætheling had again found refuge, and where his sister Margaret had become wife of King Malcolm. It was probably some assurance of Malcolm's aid which roused the Mercian earls, Eadwine and Morkere, to a fresh rising in 1071. But the revolt was at once foiled by the vigilance of the Conqueror. Eadwine fell in an obscure skirmish, while Morkere found CHAP. XI. Conquest. 10531071. shelter for a while in the fen country where a desperate band of patriots gathered round an out- The Norman lawed leader, Hereward. Nowhere had William found so stubborn a resistance: but a causeway two miles long was at last driven across the marshes, and the last hopes of English freedom died in the surrender of Ely. It was as the unquestioned master of England that William marched to the north, crossed the Lowlands and the Forth, and saw Malcolm appear in his camp upon the Tay to swear fealty at his feet. P P CHAP. XI. The Norman 1053- Notes. (Unfinished Notes on Archbishop Stigand.) At the head of the English Church, in name at least, stood Stigand of Canterbury. We have seen the political importance of his elevation and the disappointment of the hopes embodied in it; but he represented in its highest form the principle of the house of Godwine, whose chaplain and negotiator he had been, and illustrates the conception of a High Churchman which that house entertained. His beginning had been strangely picturesque. On the site of his great victory at Assandun Cnut reared in 1020 a minster of stone, a rare sight in that country of timber and brick, and set Stigand there as its priest. Mr. Freeman and Mr. St. John assume this Stigand to be "no other than the famous archbishop. Stigand the Priest signs charters of Cnut in 1033 and 1035, and one without date, and one of Harthacnut in 1042 (Cod. Dip. iv. 46, vi. 185; vi. 187; iv. 65). He seems to be the only person of the name who signs." (Freeman," Norm. Conq." i. 424, note 4.) He remained steadfast to the cause of the Danish house. He was chaplain to Harald Harefoot (Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), i. 193) as he had been to Cnut (Freeman, "Norm. Conq." i. 425), and afterwards the nearest friend and adviser of Cnut's widow (Eng. Chron. (Abingdon), 1043). Although it is said that in 1038 he was nominated to a bishopric, yet he was deposed before consecration for lack of money to out-bid his rivals for the office. (The story is only given by Flor. Worc. (Thorpe), i. 193. He signs as bishop in Cod. Dip. 787. For date, see Freeman, "Norm. Conq." ii. 64, note.) At the accession of Eadward however, and possibly as a part of the price which the new king paid for his crown, he was named and consecrated to the bishopric of Elmham in the Easter Gemot of 1043. But before the year was over it would seem that some suspicion of political intrigues carried on by him through the Lady Emma had been awakened in men's minds. The seizure of the lands and treasures of Emma into the king's hands by decree of the Gemot was followed by the deposition of Stigand from his seat, and the confiscation of |