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CHAPTER VIII.

THE EARLY YEARS OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.1
A.D. 1028–1051.

§ 1. Birth, Character, and Accession of William.
A.D. 1028-1035-

WILLIAM, King of the English and Duke of the Character

forth

and great

ness of

Normans, bears a name which must for ever stand
the foremost of mankind. No man that ever WIL-

among

1 In this Chapter I have had of course mainly to depend on the Norman writers as my authorities. The Latin writers are to be found in the great collection of Duchèsne. The first place is of course due to William of Poitiers. His Gesta Guillelmi has every advantage which can belong to the writings of a well-informed contemporary. But the work is disfigured by his constant spirit of violent partizanship (see above, p. 4). He must therefore be always followed with great caution, and in all purely English matters he is utterly untrustworthy. The beginning of his work is lost, so that we have no account from him of his hero's birth and childhood. William Calculus, a monk of Jumièges, according to Orderic (Prol. ad Lib. iii. p. 458), abridged Dudo, and continued the History of Normandy, through the reigns of Richard the Good, Richard the Third, Robert, and of William himself down to the Battle of Senlac (Ord. Vit. 618 D), presenting his work to William himself. This portion of the existing work ends at lib. vii. c. 42. He seems afterwards to have added the account of William's death (vii. 44), in which William of Poitiers and Guy of Amiens are spoken of. An eighth book, together with many interpolations in the earlier books, were added by a later hand, apparently by Robert of Torigny, Abbot of Saint Michael's Mount, commonly called Robert de Monte (see Pertz, vi. 475). William of Jumièges begins to be a contemporary writer in William's reign; with perhaps smaller opportunities of information than William of Poitiers, he is less violently prejudiced, and his work is of great value. His narrative forms the groundwork of the poetical history in the Roman de Rou. Its author, Master Wace, Canon of Bayeux early in the reign of Henry the Second, seems to have been a really honest and painstaking inquirer, and I do not look on his work as being any the less VOL. II.

M

LIAM.

CHAP. VIII. trod this earth was ever endowed with greater natural

Lasting results of

his career.

A good side to his

character.

gifts; to no man was it ever granted to accomplish greater things. If we look only to the scale of a man's acts without regard to their moral character, we must hail in the victor of Val-ès-dunes, of Varaville, and of Senlac, in the restorer of Normandy, the Conqueror of England, one who may fairly claim his place in the first rank of the world's greatest men. No man ever did his work more thoroughly at the moment; no man ever left his work behind him as more truly an abiding possession for all time. And when we consider all the circumstances of his life, when we judge him by the standard of his own age, above all when we compare him with those who came after him in his own house, we shall perhaps be inclined to dwell on his great qualities, on his many undoubted virtues, rather than to put his no less undoubted crimes in their darkest light. As we cannot refuse to place him among the greatest of men, neither will a candid judgement incline us to place him among the worst of men. If we cannot give him a niche among pure patriots and heroes, he is quite as little entitled to a place among mere tyrants and destroyers. William of Normandy has no claim to a share in the pure glory of Timoleôn, Ælfred, and Washington; he cannot even claim the more mingled fame of Alexander, Charles,

trustworthy on account of its poetical shape. But of course, whenever he departs from contemporary authority, and merely sets down floating traditions nearly a hundred years after the latest events which he records, his statements need to be very carefully weighed. I have used M. Pluquet's edition (Rouen, 1827) and the English Translation of part of the work by Mr. Edgar Taylor, whose genealogical and topographical notes are of great value. The other riming chronicler, Benoît de Sainte-More, a younger contemporary of Wace, is of a far more romantic turn, and is therefore of much smaller historical authority. Still he also preserves many curious traditions. Orderic Vital, whose work afterwards becomes of such preeminent importance, is just now beginning to be of use, but as yet his main value is for information about Norman families and Norman monasteries. But his constant repetitions and utter lack of arrangement make him still more difficult to read or consult than William of Malmesbury himself.

CHARACTER OF WILLIAM.

163

and Nor

him.

and Cnut; but he has even less in common with the CHAP. VIII. mere enemies of their species, with the Nabuchodonosors, the Swegens, and the Buonapartes, whom God has sent from time to time as simple scourges of a guilty world. Happily there are few men in history of whom we have better materials for drawing the portrait. We see him English as he appeared to admiring followers of his own race; we man porsee him also as he appeared to men of the conquered nation traits of who had looked on him and had lived in his household.1 We have to make allowance for flattery on the one side; we have not to make allowance for calumny on the other. The feeling with which the Normans looked on their conquering leader was undoubtedly one of awe rather than of love; and the feeling with which the vanquished English looked on their Conqueror was undoubtedly one of awe rather than of simple hatred. Assuredly William's English subjects did not love him; but they felt a kind of sullen reverence for the King who was richer and mightier than all the Kings that were before him. In speaking of him, the Chronicler writes as it were with downcast eyes and bated breath, as if he were hardly dealing with a man of like passions with himself, but were rather drawing the portrait of a being of another nature. Yet he holds the Justice balance fairly between the dark and the bright qualities of him by the one so far raised above the common lot of man. He does English not conceal his crimes and his oppressions; but he sets before us the merits of his government and the good peace that he made in this land; he judicially sums up what was good and what was evil in him; he warns men to follow the good and to avoid the evil, and he sends him out of the world with a charitable prayer for the repose of his

1 Chron. Petrib. 1087. "Gif hwa gewilniged to gewitane hu gedon mann he was, oððe hwilcne wurðscipe he hæfde, oððe hu fela lande he wære hlaford, bonne wille we be him awritan swa swa we hine ageaton, be him on locodan and oðre hwile on his hirede wunedon."

done to

Chronicler.

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