Page images
PDF
EPUB

those lofty titles, William was already known by another surname drawn from the circumstances of his birth. Of all princely lines the ducal house of Normandy was that which paid least regard to the canonical laws of marriage or to the special claims of legitimate birth.1 The Duchy had been ruled by a whole succession of princes who either were sprung from that irregular kind of union which was known as the Danish marriage,2 or else were the sons of concubines raised to the rank of wives after the birth of their children. But, among all this brood of spurious or irregular heirs, the greatest of the whole line was the one to whom the reproach, if reproach it was deemed, of illegitimate birth clave the most abidingly. William the son of Robert was emphatically William the Bastard, and the name clave to him through life, on the Imperial throne of Britain no less than on the ducal chair of Normandy. For of the whole line William was the one whose bastardy was the most undoubted, the least capable of being veiled under ambiguous and euphemistic phrases. The position of Popa and Sprota was a doubtful one; it may, according to Danish ideas, have been perfectly honourable. The children of Richard and Gunnor were, according to the law recognized everywhere but in our own country, legitimated by the subsequent marriage of their parents. But we may doubt whether the notion of the Danish marriage survived as late as the days of Robert, and it is certain that no ecclesiastical sacrament ever gave William a right, according to the law of the Church, to rank as the lawful son of his father. The mother of William is never spoken of in the respectful terms which we find applied to the mother of Richard the Fearless. Throughout the whole of Duke Robert's life, she remained in the position of an acknowledged mistress, and her illustrious son came forth before the world with no other description than the Bastard.

The irregular birth of one so renowned naturally became the subject of romance and legend. And the spot on which William first saw the light is one which seems to call for the tribute of the legendmaker as its natural due. The town of Falaise, in the Diocese of Seez, is one of the most famous spots both in the earlier and in the later history of Normandy, and none assuredly surpasses it in the striking character of its natural position. Lying on the edge of the great forest of Gouffer, the spot had its natural attractions for a line of princes renowned, even above others of their time, for their

1 Rob. Glab. iv. 6. "Fuit enim usui a primo adventu ipsius gentis in Gallias, ut superius pernotavimus, ex hujusmodi concubinarum commixtione illorum Principes exstitisse." He goes on, if not to justify, at least to palliate, the practice by the examples of the patriarch Jacob and the

Emperor Constantius. British patriotism would perhaps not have endured that the mother of Constantine should be dragged down to the level of the mother of William.

2 See vol. i. pp. 21, 139, 414.

HIS ILLEGITIMATE BIRTH.

115

devotion to the sports of the field. The town itself lies in a sort of valley between two heights. The great Abbey, a foundation of a later date than the times which we are concerned with, has utterly vanished; but two stately parish churches, one of them dating from the days of Norman independence, bear witness to the ecclesiastical splendour of the place. Passing by them, the traveller gradually ascends to the gate of the Castle, renowned alike in the wars of the twelfth, the fifteenth, and the sixteenth centuries. A tall round tower still bears the name of the great Talbot, the guardian of the castle in the great English war, and who afterwards won a still higher fame as the last champion of the ancient freedom of Aquitaine against the encroachments of the Kings of Paris.1 But this witness of comparatively recent strife is but an excrescence on the original structure. It is the addition made by an English King to one of the noblest works of his Norman forefathers. The Castle where legend fixes the birth of William of Normandy, and where history fixes the famous homage of William of Scotland, is a vast donjon of the eleventh or twelfth century. One of the grandest of those massive square keeps which I have already spoken of as distinguishing the earliest military architecture of Normandy crowns the summit of a precipitous rock, fronted by another mass of rock wilder still, on which the cannon of England were planted during Henry's siege. To these rocks, these felsen, the spot owes its name of Falaise,3 one of the many spots in Normandy where the good old Teutonic speech still lingers in local nomenclature, though in this case the Teutonic name has also preserved its permanent being in the general vocabulary of the Romance speech. Between these two rugged heights lies a narrow dell, through which runs a small beck, a tributary of the neighbouring river Ante. dell is crowded with mills and tanneries, but the mills and tanneries of Falaise have their share in the historic interest of the place. The mills play no inconsiderable part in the records of the Norman

2

1 For the sieges of Falaise in 1417 and 1450, see Monstrelet, i. 263 and iii. 30 b (ed. Paris 1595). Talbot was not actually present during the defence against the French King.

2 More probably, I think, of the twelfth than of the eleventh. Not that I at all think the building of such a castle to have been impossible in the eleventh century, but because it seems likely that Falaise was one of the castles which were destroyed and rebuilt in the wars of William and his successors. This point is well put by M. Ruprich-Robert, the architect employed in the "restoration "—that is, of

course, the destruction
of this venera-
ble keep. See his "Rapport," 1864,
p. 27.

3 Will. Brit. Philipp. lib. viii. Du-
chèsne, Hist. Franc. Scriptt. v. 183;
"Vicus erat scabrâ circumdatus undique

rupe,

Ipsius asperitate loci Falesa vocatus, Normannæ in medio regionis, cujus in altâ

Turres rupe sedent et moenia, sic ut ad illam

Jactus nemo putet aliquos contingere posse."

Exchequer,1 and the tanneries at once suggest the name of the greatest son of Normandy. In every form which the story has taken in history or legend, the mother of the Conqueror appears as the daughter of a tanner at Falaise, who plied his unsavoury craft on the spot where it has continued to be plied through so many ages. The conquered English indeed strove to claim the Norman Duke as their own, by representing his mother as a descendant of their own royal house.2 But even in this version the traditional trade of her father is not forgotten. The daughter of the hero Eadmund disgraced herself by a marriage or an intrigue with her father's tanner, to whom in process of time she bore three daughters. The pair were banished from England, and took refuge on the opposite coast. In the course of their wanderings they came to beg alms at the gate of Duke Richard the Good. The Prince discovered the lofty birth of the mother, and took the whole family into his favour. The youngest daughter became the mistress of his son Robert, and of them sprang the mighty William, great-grandson of Eadmund Ironside no less than of Richard the Fearless.

Such a tale is of course valuable only as illustrating the universal tendency of conquered nations to try to alleviate the shame and grief of conquest by striving to believe that their tyrants are at least their countrymen. The story of William's English origin clearly comes from the same mint as the story in which Egyptian vanity gave out that Kambysês was Egyptian by his maternal origin, as the story which saw in Alexander himself a scion of the royal house of Persia.* It seems however to preserve one grain of truth in the midst of so much that is mythical. It represents the connexion between Robert and his mistress as having begun before he ascended the ducal throne. There can be little doubt that this was the case, though the story is generally told as if Robert had been already Duke of the Normans at the time of William's birth. But it is more likely that Robert was as yet only Count of the Hiesmois, and, as such, Lord of Falaise, when his eye was first caught by the beauty of Arlette, or rather Herleva, the daughter of Fulbert the Tanner. Some say that he first saw her engaged in the dance,5 others that she was busied in the more homely work of washing linen in the beck which flows by her father's tannery at the foot of the castle. The prince, himself a mere stripling, saw

1 Stapleton, Roll of the Norman Exchequer, i. xcvi.; ii. cix. 2 See Appendix T.

3 Herod. iii. 2.

Malcolm's History of Persia, i. 70. 5 Will. Malms. iii. 229; R. Wend. i. 469. Cf. Chron. Alberici, 1035 (ap. Leibnitz, Accessiones, ii, 66), and Appendix U.

6 Benoît de Ste. More, 31216 et seqq. (vol. ii. p. 555), who becomes rapturous in his description of her beauty. He makes Robert see her on his return from hunting. Local tradition, endowing Robert with a singular gift of discerning beauty at a distance, makes him see her from a window of the castle.

BIRTH OF WILLIAM.

6

117

and loved her. He sought her of her father, who, after some reluctance, gave up his child to his lord, by the advice, according to one account, of a holy hermit his brother. She was led the same evening to the castle; the poetical chroniclers are rich in details of her behaviour.2 She became the cherished mistress of Robert, and her empire over his heart was, we are told, not disturbed by any other connexion, lawful or unlawful.3 After the example of former princes, Robert in after times raised the kinsfolk of his mistress to high honours. Half the nobility of Normandy had sprung from the brothers and sisters of Gunnor, so now Fulbert the Tanner, the father of Herleva, was raised to the post of ducal chamberlain, and her brother Walter was placed in some office which in after times gave him close access to the person of his princely nephew. After Robert's death, Herleva obtained an honourable marriage, and became, by her husband Herlwin of Conteville, the mother of two sons who will fill no small space in our history. But her union with the Duke produced but one son, perhaps but one child. That child however was one whose future greatness was, so we are told, prefigured by omens and prodigies from the moment of his birth, and even from the moment of his conception. On the night of her first visit to the castle, Herleva dreamed that a tree arose from her body which overshadowed all Normandy and all England. At the moment of his birth, the babe seized the straw on the chamber floor with so vigorous a grasp that all who saw the sight knew that he would become a mighty conqueror, who would never let go anything that he had once laid his hand upon. Leaving tales like these apart, it is certain that William, the bastard son of Robert and Herleva, was born at Falaise (1027-1028), perhaps in the year in which the Great Cnut made his famous pilgrimage to the threshold of the Apostles."

Before Robert undertook the same perilous enterprise, it was clearly needful for him to regulate the succession to the Duchy. The reigning prince had no legitimate child, no undoubtedly legitimate brother. The heir, according to modern notions of heirship, was a churchman, Robert Archbishop of Rouen. This Prelate we have already seen in rebellion against his namesake the Duke,11 probably on account of this very claim to the succession. He was one of

[blocks in formation]

3

2

As

those children of Richard the Fearless who were legitimated and made capable of ecclesiastical honours by the tardy marriage of their parents. Indeed, according to one account, the marriage of Richard and Gunnor was contracted expressly to take away the canonical objections which were raised against the appointment of a bastard to the metropolitan see.1 Archbishop Robert was thus an uncle of Duke Robert and a great-uncle of the child William. Besides his Archbishoprick, he held the County of Evreux as a lay fee. Like the more famous Odo of Bayeux, he drew a marked distinction between his ecclesiastical and his temporal character. Count of Evreux, he had a wife, Herleva by name, and was the father of children of whom we shall hear again in our history. In his latter days, his spiritual character became more prominent; he repented of his misdeeds, gave great alms to the poor, and began the rebuilding of the metropolitan church. There were also two princes whose connexion with the ducal house was by legitimate, though only female, descent. One was Guy of Burgundy, a nephew of Duke Robert, being grandson of Richard the Good through his daughter Adeliza.1 The other was Robert's cousin, Count Alan of Britanny, the son of Hadwisa daughter of Richard the Fearless.5 Nearer in blood, but of more doubtful legitimacy, were Robert's own half-brothers, the sons of Richard the Good by Papia. These were the churchman Malger, who afterwards succeeded Archbishop Robert in the see of Rouen, and William, who held the County and castle of Arques near Dieppe.7 There was also the monk Nicholas, the young, and no doubt illegitimate, son of Richard the Third. None of these were promising candidates for the ducal Robert, the lineal heir, might be looked on as disqualified by his profession; Alan and Guy were strangers, and could claim

crown.

1 Will. Gem. viii. 36.

66

6

2 Ord. Vit. 566 B. Conjugem nomine Herlevam ut Comes habuit, ex quâ tres filios Ricardum, Radulfum, et Guille!mum genuit, quibus Ebroicensem comitatum et alios honores amplissimos secandum jus sæculi distribuit."

3 Ib. C. This church was finished by Maurilius in 1c63. Ib. 568 B. See Pommeraye, Concilia Ecclesiæ Rotomagensis, p. 73; Bessin, Concilia, p. 49. No part of his building remains. The account of the Archbishops of Rouen in Mabillon (Vet. Anal. ii. 438), written while Robert's church was standing ("Ecclesiam præsentem miro opere et magnitudine ædificare cœpit "), gives him much the same character; "Ante obitum suum,

[blocks in formation]
« PreviousContinue »