GENERAL FLIGHT OF THE NORMANS. Arch 329 to the castle in Herefordshire, Pentecost's castle, the first CHAP. IX. cause of so much evil; some rode towards a castle in the north, belonging to the Norman Staller, Robert the son of Wymarc.1 The Bishops, perhaps the objects of a still fiercer popular indignation than even the lay favourites, undertook a still more perilous journey by themselves. What became of William of London is not quite plain,2 Flight of but we have a graphic description of the escape of the bishop Prelates of Canterbury and Dorchester. Robert and Ulf, Robert and Bishop Ulf. mounted and sword in hand, cut their way through the streets, wounding and slaying as they went; they burst through the east gate of London; they rode straight for the haven of Eadwulfsness; there they found an old crazy ship; they went on board of her and so gat them over sea. Never again did those evil Prelates trouble England with their personal presence; but the tongue of Robert was still 5 1 Chron. Petrib. "Sume west to Pentecostes castele, sume nord to Rodbertes castele." Pentecost, as we gather from Florence, who speaks of "Osbernus cognomento Pentecost"-what can be the meaning of so strange a surname ?-is the same as Osbern, the son of Richard of Richard's Castle, of whom we have already heard so much. Robert's castle must be some castle belonging to Robert the son of Wymarc, as distinctly the most notable man of his name in the country after Robert the Archbishop. Most of his lands lay in the East of England; but he had also property in the shires of Hertford, Huntingdon, and Cambridge, though I do not find any mention of a castle on any of his estates there. 2 The Abingdon Chronicle, followed by Florence, makes William accompany Robert and Ulf on their desperate ride; "Rodbeard bisceop and Willelm bisceop and Ulf bisceop uneade ætburstan mid pam Frenciscum mannum þe heom mid waron, and swa ofer sæ becomon." But the Peterborough writer speaks only of Robert and Ulf, and William's restoration to his see a matter of which there is no kind of doubt, would hardly have followed if he had any share in the murderous adventure of his brethren. Chron. Petrib. "And Rodbert arcebisceop and Ulf bisceop gewendon út æt æst geate, and heora geferan, and ofslogon and elles amyrdon manige iunge men." One might almost fancy London apprentices, as in after times, zealous for the popular cause. 4 Walton-on-the-Naze in Essex; see above, p. 108. 5 Chron. Petrib. "And weard him þær on anon unwræste scipe, and ferde him on an ofer sæ. See Mr. Earle's note on "unwræste," p. 346. CHAP. IX. busy in other lands to do hurt to England and her people. the open "He The patriotic chronicler raises an emphatic note of triumph Meeting of In the morning the great Assembly met.2 The great the Mycel Gemót. city and its coasts were now clear of strangers, save such Tuesday, as had come in the train of the deliverers.3 The people of September 15th. England-for such a gathering may well deserve that name -came together to welcome its friends and to give judgement upon its enemies. The two armies and the citizens of London formed a multitude which no building could It meets in contain. That Mickle Gemót, whose memory long lived in the minds of Englishmen, came together, in old Teutonic fashion, in the open air without the walls of London.* Its popular The scene was pictured ages before by the pencil of Tacitus and sung in yet earlier days by the voice of Homer. It may still be seen, year by year, among the mountains of Uri and in the open market-place of Trogen. Other Assemblies of those times may have shrunk into Councils of a small body of Thegns and Prelates; but on that great day the English people stood forth, in all the air. character. 1 Chron. Petrib. "And forlet his pallium and Christendom ealne her on lande, swa swa hit God wolde; þæ he ær begeat bone wurdscipe swa swa hit God nolde." The English tongue has not gained by dropping the negative verb, which survives only in the saying "will he, nill he." 2 Chron. Petrib. "Da cwæð mann mycel gemót wiðutan Lundene;" "Statutum est magnum placitum" is the translation in the Waverley Annals, p. 186 Luard. Flor. Wig. "Mane autem facto, concilium Rex habuit." Chron. Ab. "And was pa Witenagemót." But it is the Peterborough writer only who dwells with evident delight on the popular character of the Assembly. 3 Compare the position of the Dutch Guards and other foreign troops who accompanied William of Orange. "Wiðutan Lundene," says the Peterborough Chronicler. See Appendix AA. GODWINE BEFORE THE GEMÓT. 331 fulness of its ancient rights, as a coordinate authority CHAP. IX. with the English King. Men came armed to the place of meeting; our fathers did so in their old homes beyond the sea, and our distant kinsmen still preserve the same immemorial use in the free assemblies of Appenzell.3 But the enemy was no longer at hand; in that great gathering of liberated and rejoicing Englishmen sword and axe were needed only as parts of a solemn pageant, or to give further effect to the harangue of a practised orator. There, girt with warlike weapons, but shorn of the help and countenance of Norman knights and Norman churchmen,1 sat the King of the English, driven at last to deal face to face with a free assembly of his people. There were all the Earls and all the best men that were in this land; there was the mighty multitude of English freemen, gathered to hail the return of the worthiest of their own blood. And there, surrounded by his four valiant sons, stood the great Godwine deliverer, the man who had set the King upon his throne, Gemót. the man who had refused to obey his unlawful orders, who had cleared the land of his unworthy favourites, but who 1 Chron. Petrib. "þær bær Godwine Eorl úp his mal, and betealde hine þær wið Eadward cyng his hlaford and wið ealle landleodan." 2 We shall presently see that Godwine and Eadward were both armed; it is not at all likely that they stood alone in being so. We have already heard enough of votes passed by the army and the like to make an armed Gemót nothing wonderful. 3 I saw the armed Landesgemeinde of Appenzell-ausser-rhoden in 1864. The Law requires each landman to bring his sword; it also forbids the sword to be drawn. In Uri the custom of bearing arms has been given up. Cf. Thục. i. 5, 6. Vita Eadw. 406. "Destitutus inprimis fugâ Archipræsulis et suorum multorum verentium adspectum Ducis." 5 Chron. Petrib. "And ealle ba eorlas and pa betstan menn þe wæron on bison lande wæron on þam gemote." Does this merely mean the Earls who had been already spoken of, Godwine and Harold on the one side, Ralph and Odda on the other? Or does it imply the presence of Leofric, Ælfgar, and Siward? Their presence is perfectly possible; but, if they had had any share either in this Gemót or in the earlier military proceedings, it is odd that they are not spoken of. at the cates the King; CHAP. IX. had never swerved in his true loyalty to the King and his Kingdom. The man at whose mere approach the foreign knights and Prelates had fled for their lives,1 could now He suppli- afford to put on the guise of humble supplication towards the sovereign who had received his Crown at his hands. Godwine stood forth; he laid his axe at the foot of the throne, and knelt, as in the act of homage, before his Lord the King. By the Crown upon his brow, whose highest and brightest ornament was the cross of Christ, he conjured his sovereign to allow him to clear himself before the King and his people of all the crimes which had been laid against him and his house. The demand could not be refused, and the voice which had so often swayed assemblies of Englishmen was heard once more, in all the fulness of its eloquence, setting forth the innocence of Godwine himself and of Harold and all his house. Few and weighty were the words which the great he speaks to the people. 1 II. Z. 198; 5 3 ἀλλ ̓ αὕτως ἐπὶ τάφρον ἰὼν, Τρώεσσι φάνηθι, αἴ κε σ ̓ ὑποδδείσαντες ἀπόσχωνται πολέμοιο. "Verentes adspectum Ducis," says the Biographer just above. 2 Vita Eadw. 406. "Viso Rege, protinus abjectis armis, ejus advolvitur pedibus." I conceive the weapon borne to have been the axe, as a sort of official weapon. It appears in the Bayeux Tapestry in the hands of the attendants upon Eadward; so also in the scene where the Crown is offered to Harold, both Harold himself and one of those who make the offer to him bear axes. 3 Ib. "Orans suppliciter ut in Christi nomine, cujus signiferam regni coronam gestabat in capite, annueret ut sibi liceret purgare se de objecto crimine, et purgato pacem concederet gratiæ suæ." This surviving fragment of Godwine's eloquence shows how well he could adapt himself to every class of hearers. But what was the Crown like? The allusion seems to point to something like the Imperial Crown with a eross on the top, but the crowns in the Tapestry are quite different. Chron. Petrib. "pet he was unscyldig þæs þe him geled wæs, and on Harold his sunu and ealle his bearn." This is the "purgatio " of the Biographer. So Will. Malms. ii. 199. "Probe se de omnibus quæ objectabantur expurgavit." Compurgators seem not to have been called for. 5 Will. Malms. u. s. "Tantum brevi valuit ut sibi liberisque suis honores integros restitueret." THE GEMÓT DECREES GODWINE'S RESTORATION. 333 restoration. Earl spoke that day before the King and all the people of CHAP. IX. the land.1 But they were words which at once carried the whole Assembly with them. Those who have heard the most spirit-stirring of earthly sounds, when a sovereign people binds itself to obey the laws which it has itself decreed, when thousands of voices join as one man in the rehearsal of one solemn formula,2 can conceive the shout of assent with which the assembled multitude agreed to the proposal that Godwine should be deemed to have cleared. himself of every charge. The voice of that great Assembly, The Assemthe voice of the English nation, at once declared him by decrees his acquitguiltless, at once decreed the restoration of himself, his tal and sons, and all his followers, to all the lands, offices, and honours which they had held in the days before his outlawry. The old charges were thus again solemnly set aside, and an amnesty was proclaimed for all the irregular acts of the last three months of revolution. The last year was as it were wiped out; Godwine was once more Earl of the West-Saxons, Harold was once more Earl of the EastAngles, as if Eustace and Robert had never led astray the simplicity of the royal saint. And yet more; it was not It decrees enough merely to put England again into the state which she stood at the moment of the banishment Godwine. It was needful to punish the authors of the evils that had happened, and to take heed that such evils should ever happen again in days to come. Normans. The deepest in guilt of all the royal favourites was felt to be the Norman Archbishop. He had taken himself beyond 1 in the out lawry and of deprivation of Arch Robert all bishop "Ealle landleodan." We have lost this, like so many other expressive words. "Landleute" is the old official name of the people of the democratic cantons of Switzerland; but Land is there used in its ordinary opposition to Stadt. "I refer to the oath of the people of Appenzell-ausser-rhoden in their Landesgemeinde. First the newly elected Landammann swears to obey the laws; he then administers the oath to the vast multitude before him. The effect of their answer is something overwhelming in its grandeur. other |