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OUTRAGES OF EUSTACE AT DOVER.

131

ers resist,

looked on matters in quite another light. The Frenchmen CHAP. VII. expected to find free quarters in the town of Dover, and they attempted to lodge themselves at their pleasure in the houses of the burghers. There was one Englishman especially his name unluckily is not preserved-into whose house a Frenchman was bent on forcing himself against the owner's will. The master of the house withstood him; The burghthe stranger drew his weapon and wounded him; the Englishman struck the intruder dead on the spot.1 Count Eustace mounted his horse as if for battle; his followers mounted theirs; the stout-hearted Englishman was slain within his own house. The Count's party then rode through the town, cutting about them and slaying at pleasure. But the neighbours of the murdered man had now come together; the burghers resisted valiantly; a skirmish began; twenty Englishmen were slain, and nineteen Frenchmen, besides many who were wounded. Count and drive Eustace and the remnant of his party made their way out of the town, and hastened back to King Eadward at Glou- town. cester. They there told the story after their own fashion, Eustace throwing of course all the blame upon the insolent burghers men of of Dover. It is not hard to throw oneself into the position

64

1 Chron. Petrib. pa com an his manna, and wolde wician æt anes bundan huse, his undances, and gewundode bone husbundon, and se husbunda ofsloh pone oderne." So Will. Malms. ii. 199; "Unus antecursorum ejus ferocius cum cive agens, et vulnere magis quam prece hospitium exigens, illum in sui excidium invitavit." I do not know why Sir Thomas Hardy says that William implies that all this happened at Canterbury. Surely "per Doroberniam means Dover.

2 Chron. Petrib. "Da wear Eustatius uppon his horse, and his gefeoran uppon heora, and ferdon to pam husbundon, and ofslogon hine binnan his agenan heorðæ." It shows how impossible it seemed to a French noble of that age to strike a blow except on horseback, that Eustace and his companions mounted their horses at such a moment as this, when one would have thought that horses were distinctly in the way.

Chron. Petrib. "Forban Eustatius hæfde gecydd þam cynge bet hit sceolde beon mare gylt þære burhwaru ponne his. Ac hit næs na swa." So William of Malmesbury; "Inde ad curiam pedem referens, nactusque secretum, suæ partis patronus assistens, iram Regis in Anglos exacuit."

the French

out of the

accuses the

Dover to the King.

CHAP. VII. of the accusers.

To chivalrous Frenchmen the act of the English burgher in defending his house against a forcible entry would seem something quite beyond their understandings. To their notions the appeal to right and law to which Englishmen were familiar, would seem, on the part of men of inferior rank, something almost out of the course of nature. We often see the same sort of feeling now-a-days in men whom a long course of military habits, a life spent in the alternation of blind obedience and arbitrary command, has made incapable of understanding those notions of right and justice which seem perfectly plain to men who are accustomed to acknowledge no master but the Law. The crime of Eustace was a dark one; but we may be inclined to pass a heavier judgement still on the crime of the English King, who, on the mere accusation of the stranger, condemned his own subjects without a hearing. When Eustace had told his tale, the King became very wroth with the burghers of Dover, and this time he thought that he had not only the will but the power to hurt.3 He sent for Godwine, as Earl of the district in which the offending town lay. The English champion was then in the midst of a domestic rejoicing. He had, like the King, been strengthening himself by a the town. foreign alliance, and had just connected his house with that of a sovereign prince. Tostig, the third son of Godwine, had just married Judith, the sister of Baldwin of Flanders.* Such a marriage could hardly have been contracted without

Eadward commands Godwine

to inflict military chastise

ment on

1 Herod. vii. 104. ἔπεστι γάρ σφι δεσπότης νόμος, τὸν ὑποδειμαίνουσι πολλῷ ἔτι μᾶλλον ἢ οἱ σοὶ σέ· ποιεῦσι γῶν τὰ ἂν ἐκεῖνος ἀνώγῃ. 2 Chron. Petrib. 1048. "And wear se cyng swype gram wið þa 3 See above, p. 26.

burhware."

Sister, not daughter. The whole matter is gone into in vol. iii. p. 656. It is from the Biographer (404) that we learn that all this happened just at the very time of Tostig's marriage; "Acciderant hæc in ipsis nuptiis filii sui ducis Tostini." The title of "Dux" seems to be premature. On the bare possibility that Tostig may have held some subordinate government as early as this time, see Appendix G.

EADWARD BIDS GODWINE PUNISH THE BURGHERS.

133

a political object. An alliance with a prince reigning in CHAP. VII. the debateable land between France and Germany, a land which, though its princes were rapidly becoming French, had by no means wholly lost its Teutonic character, was quite in harmony with the Lotharingian connexion so steadily maintained by Godwine and Harold. At the same time, an alliance with a prince who had been so lately in arms against England may not have tended to increase Godwine's favour with the King. The Earl left the marriage-feast of his son, and hastened to the King at Gloucester. Eadward then told him what insults had been offered within his Earldom to a sovereign allied to himself by friendship and marriage. Let Godwine go and subject the offending town to all the severity of military chastisement.1 Godwine had once before been sent on the

son be

tween the

Worcester

thacnut

under Ead

like errand in the days of Harthacnut.2 He then had Comparinot dared to refuse, though he had done what he could to lighten the infliction of a harsh and unjust sentence. cases of And, after all, the two cases were not alike. In the case under Harof Worcester, Godwine was called on to act as a military and Dover commander against a town which was not within his ward. government, and whose citizens stood in no special relation to him. The citizens of Worcester too had been guilty of a real crime. Their crime was indeed one which might readily have been pardoned, and the punishment decreed was out of all proportion to the offence. Still the death of the two Housecarls fairly called for some atonement, though certainly not for an atonement of the kind commanded by Harthacnut. At that time too it was probably

1 Chron. Petrib. "And ofsænde se cyng Godwine eorl, and bad hine faran into Cent mid unfriða to Dofran." The full force of the word "unfriða" may be understood by its being so constantly applied to the Danish armies and fleets. See vol. i. p. 629. So William of Malmesbury (ii. 199); "Quamvis Rex jussisset illum continuo cum exercitu in Cantiam proficisci, in Dorobernenses graviter ulturum."

2 See vol. i. p. 515.

CHAP. VII. sound policy in Godwine to undertake the commission in which he was joined with the other great Earls of England, and merely to do his best to lighten its severity in act. But in the present case all the circumstances were different. Dover was a town in Godwine's own Earldom; it would almost seem that it was a town connected with him by a special tie, a town whose burghers formed a part of his personal following. At all events it was a town over which he exercised the powers of the highest civil magistracy, where, if it was his duty to punish the guilty, it was equally his duty to defend and shelter the innocent. Such a town he was now bidden, without the least legal proof of any offence, to visit with all the horrors of fire and sword. Godwine was not long in choosing his course. Official duty and public policy, no less than abstract justice and humanity, dictated a distinct refusal. Now or never a stand was to be made against the strangers. Now that Englishmen had been insulted and murdered by the King's foreign favourites, the time was indeed come to put an end to a system under which those favourites were beginning to deal with England as with a conquered country. The eloquent voice of the great Earl was raised, in the presence of the King, probably in the presence of Eustace and the other strangers, in the cause of truth and justice.2 In

Godwine

refuses to obey the King's orders.

1 Chron. Petrib. "And se eorl nolde na gedwærian pære infare; forpan him was la to amyrrene his agene folgað." One might be tempted to believe that this last word implied some special connexion between Godwine and Dover, were it not that we directly after read, "on Swegenes eorles folgode," where it can hardly mean more than that the place was within his jurisdiction as Earl. The very first entry in Domesday represents Godwine as receiving a third of the royal revenues in Dover, but this was of course simply his regular revenue as Earl. The relations of the townsmen to the Crown are rather minutely described. They held their privileges by the tenure of providing twenty ships yearly for fifteen days; each had a crew of twenty-one men. There is not a word to show that the demands of Eustace and his followers were other than utterly illegal.

2 I get my speech from William of Malmesbury (ii. 119), whose account is very clear and full, and thoroughly favourable to Godwine; "Intellexit

GODWINE DEMANDS JUSTICE.

mands a

for the

135

England, he told them, there was a Law supreme over all, CHAP. VII. and courts in which justice could be denied to no man. He deCount Eustace had brought a charge against the men of legal trial Dover. They had, as he alleged, broken the King's peace, burghers. and done personal wrong to himself and his companions. Let then the magistrates of the town be summoned before the King and his Witan, and there be heard in their own defence and in that of their fellow-burghers. If they could make a good excuse for their conduct, let them depart unhurt; if they could be proved to have sinned against the King or against the Count, let them pay for their fault with their purses or with their persons. He, as Earl of the West-Saxons, was the natural protector of the men of Dover; he would never agree to any sentence pronounced against them without a fair trial, nor would he consent to the infliction of any sort of illegal hardship upon those whom he was bound to defend. The Earl then went his way; he had done his own duty; he was accustomed to these momentary ebullitions of wrath on the part of his royal son-in-law, and he expected that the affair would soon be forgotten.1

But there were influences about Eadward which cut off

vir acrioris ingenii, unius tantum partis auditis allegationibus, non debere proferri sententiam. Itaque . . . restitit, et quod omnes alienigenas apud Regis gratiam invalescere invideret, et quod compatriotis amicitiam præstare vellet. Præterea videbatur ejus responsio in rectitudinem propensior, ut magnates illius castelli blande in curiâ Regis de seditione convenirentur; si se possent explacitare, illæsi abirent; si nequirent, pecuniâ vel corporum suorum dispendio, Regi cujus pacem infregerant, et Comiti quem læserant, satisfacerent: iniquum videri ut quos tutari debeas, eos ipse potissimum ina uditos adjudices." Here are the words which either tradition put into the mouth of Godwine, or else which a hostile historian deliberately conceived as most in keeping with his character. Who would recognize in this assertor of the purest principles of right the object of the savage invectives of William of Poitiers?

1 Will. Malms. ii. 199. "Ita tunc discessum, Godwino parvi pendente Regis furorem quasi momentaneum." On these occasional fits of wrath on the part of Eadward, see above, p. 23.

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