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THE HOUSE OF MONTGOMERY.

129

sons.

In one of those sons we shall see the name of his maternal ancestors revive, and, with their name, a double portion of their wickedness.

But we have as yet to deal with the house of Montgomery only in its least honourable aspect. William, son of the elder, and uncle of the younger, Roger, stands charged with an attempt, aimed no longer at guardians or tutors, but at the person of the young Duke himself. William was staying with his guardian Osbern at Vaudreuil, a castle on an island in the Eure, said to have been the place of captivity of the famous Fredegunda in Merowingian times.1 Thorold, it would seem, had been already murdered, but his assassins are spoken of only in general terms.2 But Osbern still watched over his young lord day and night. But he was butchered at Vaudreuil by William of Montgomery in the very bedchamber of the Duke, and the young prince owed his own safety on this, and on many other occasions, to the zealous care of his maternal uncle Walter. Many a time did this faithful kinsman carry him from palace and castle to find a lurking-place in the cottages of the poor. The blood of Osbern was soon avenged; a faithful servant of the murdered Seneschal presently did to William of Montgomery as William of Montgomery had done to Osbern. In the state of things in Normandy at that moment crime could be punished only by crime. Thẹ remembrance of the faithful Osbern lived also in the memory of the Prince whose childhood he had so well guarded.. His son William grew up from his youth as the familiar friend and counsellor of his namesake the Duke. This is that famous William Fitz-Osbern who lived to be, next to the Duke himself, the prime agent in the

I Will. Gem. vii. 2. See Palgrave, iii. 198; Stapleton, i. cxxvi.

2 Will. Gem. ib. "Deinde [after the death of Gilbert] Turoldus teneri Ducis pædagogus perimitur a perfidis patriæ desertoribus."

3 This is the way in which I read the story in William of Jumièges (vii. 2), compared with that put into Duke William's own mouth by Orderic (656 C). Sir Francis Palgrave seems to make Thorold and Osbern be murdered at once (199). But William of Jumièges seems to make these murders two distinct events. After the passage just quoted he goes on; "Osbernus quoque quâdam nocte, dum in cubiculo Ducis cum ipso in Valle Rodoili securus soporatur, repente in stratu suo a Willelmo Rogerii de Monte-gumeri filio jugulatus." Orderic puts the murders of Gilbert, Thorold (or Thurcytel), and OsVOL. II,

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bern together in general terms; "Turchetillum nutricium meum et Osbernum Herfasti filium, Normanniæ dapiferum, Comitemque Gislebertum patrem patriæ, cum multis aliis reipublicæ necessariis fraudulenter interfecerunt." The murder of Osbern can hardly fail to have been one of the occasions so pathetically referred to in Orderic; "Noctibus multotiens cognatorum timore meorum a Gualterio avunculo meo de camerâ principali furtim exportatus sum, ac ad domicilia latebrasque pauperum, ne a perfidis, qui ad mortem me quærebant, invenirer, translatus sum.'

Will. Gem. vii. 2. "Barno quippe de Glotis, præpositus Osberni, injustam necem domini sui cupiens ulcisci, nocte quâdam expeditos pugiles congregavit, et domum, ubi Willelmus et complices sui dormiebant, adiit, ac omnes simul, sicut meruerant, statim trucidavit.'

Conquest of England, who won, far more than the Duke himself, the hatred of the conquered people, and who at last perished in a mad enterprise after a wife and a crown in Flanders.

The next enemy was Roger of Toesny, whom we have already heard of as a premature Crusader, the savage foe of the Infidels of Spain.1 Disappointed in his dream of a kingdom in the Iberian peninsula, he returned to his native land to find it under the sway of the son of the Tanner's daughter. The proud soul of the descendant of Malahulc scorned submission to such a lord; "A bastard is not fit to rule over me and the other Normans."2 He refused all allegiance, and began to ravage the lands of his neighbours. The one who suffered most was Humfrey de Vetulis, a son of Thorulf of Pont-Audemer and of Weva the sister of Gunnor. He sent his

son Roger of Beaumont against the aggressor. A battle followed, in which Roger of Toesny and his two sons were killed, and Robert of Grantmesnil received a mortal wound. This fight was fought rather in defence of private property than in the assertion of any public principle. But the country gained by the destruction of so inveterate an enemy of peace as Roger of Toesny. And here, as at every step of this stage of our narrative, we become acquainted with men whose names are to figure in the later portion of our history. Robert of Grantmesnil was the father of Hugh of Grantmesnil, who had no small share in the conquest of England and the division of its spoil. Roger of Beaumont became the patriarch of the first house of the Earls of Leicester. One of his descendants played an honourable part in the great struggle between King and Primate in the latter half of the twelfth century, and his honours passed by female succession to that great deliverer who made the title of Earl of Leicester the most glorious in the whole peerage of England.5

4

By this time William was getting beyond the years of childhood, and he was beginning to display those extraordinary powers of mind and body with which nature had endowed him. He could now in some measure exercise a will of his own. He still needed a guardian,

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1 See vol. i. p. 310. 2 Will. Gem. vii. 3. Comperiens autem quod Willelmus puer in Ducatu patri successerit, vehementer indignatus est, et tumide despexit illi servire, dicens quod nothus non deberet sibi aliisque Normannis imperare."

3 See Will. Gem. vii. 3, viii. 37; Ord. Vit. 460 C, 686 B.

Garnier, Vie de S. Thomas, 1830 (p. 66 ed. Hippeau); "E cil [quens] de Leicestre, ke mut par est senez." So William Fitz-Stephen (i. 235 Giles); "Comes Lege

cestriæ Robertus, qui maturitate ætatis et morum aliis prominebat ;" and Herbert of Bosham (i. 147 Giles); "Nobilis vir Robertus, tunc Leicestræ Comes, inter honoratos honoratior."

5 Amicia, daughter of Robert, third Earl of Leicester, married Simon the Third, Lord of Montfort. She was the mother of Simon the leader of the Crusade against the Albigenses, and the grandmother of our own Simon the Righteous. See Pauli, Simon von Montfort, 19, 20.

RELATIONS BETWEEN NORMANDY AND FRANCE. 131

but, according to the principles of Roman Law, he had a right to a voice in determining who that guardian should be. He summoned the chief men of his Duchy, and, by their advice, he chose as his own tutor and as Captain-General of the armies of Normandy,1 Ralph the son of Archbishop Robert. The choice seems a strange one, as Ralph was no other than the murderer of William's former guardian Count Gilbert.2 But it may have been thought politic for the young Duke to strengthen his hands by an alliance with a former enemy, and to make, as in the case of Count Alan of Britanny, a practical appeal to the honour of a possible rival. The appointment of Ralph seems in fact to have had that effect. A time of comparative internal quiet now followed. But still there were traitors in the land. Many, we are told, of the Norman nobles, even of those who professed the firmest fidelity to the Duke, and were loaded by him with the highest honours, still continued to plot against him in secret. For a while they no longer revolted openly on their own account; but there was a potentate hard by whose ear was ever open to their suggestions, and who was ever ready to help them in any plots against their sovereign and their country.

From this point a new chapter opens in the relations between Normandy and France. We have seen that, ever since the Commendation made by Richard the Fearless to Hugh the Great,1 the relations between the Norman Princes and the Dukes and Kings of Paris had been invariably friendly. It was to Norman help that the Parisian dynasty in a great measure owed its rise to royalty;" it was to Norman help that the reigning King of the French owed his restoration to his throne." Henry of Paris, made King by the help of Robert, had received Robert's son as his vassal, and had promised to afford him the protection due from a righteous over-lord to a faithful vassal. But we now, from the accession of William, begin to see signs of something like a return on the French side to the old state of feeling in the days when the Normans were still looked on as heathen intruders, and their Duke was held to be Duke only of the Pirates. We find the French applying con

1 Will. Gem. vii. 4. "Rodulphum de Wacceio ex consultu majorum sibi tutorem eligit, et principem militiæ Normannorum constituit."

2 See above, p. 127.

3 The expressions of William of Jumièges (vii. 4) are remarkable; "Henricum igitur Regem Francorum adeunt, et titiones ejus per Normannicos limites hac illacque spargunt. Quos nominatim litteris exprimerem, si inexorabilia eorum odia declinare

nollem. Attamen non alii exstiterunt, vobis in aure loquor circumstantibus, quam hi qui fideliores se profitentur et quos nunc majoribus Dux cumulavit honoribus."

4 See vol. i. p. 149.
5 Vol. i. p. 165.
6 Vol. i. pp. 150, 164.
7 Vol. i. p. 314.

8 See above, p. 123.

9 See vol. i. pp. 110, 129, 171.

temptuous epithets to the Norman people,' and we find the King of the French ready to seize every opportunity for enriching himself at the expense of the Norman Duke.

It is not easy at first sight to explain this return to a state of things which seemed to have passed away for more than a generation. Still we must not forget that any prince reigning at Paris could hardly fail to look with a grudging eye on the practically independent power which cut him off from the mouth of his own river. The great feudatory at Rouen seemed, in a way in which no other feudatory seemed, to shut up his over-lord in a kind of prison. The wealth and greatness and prosperity of Normandy might seem, both historically and geographically, to be something actually taken away from the possessions of France. This feeling would apply to Normandy in a way in which it did not apply to the other great fiefs of Flanders and Aquitaine. And the feeling would on every ground be stronger in the mind of a King reigning at Paris than in that of a King reigning at Laôn. To a French King at Paris the Normans were the nearest and the most powerful of all neighbours, those whose presence must have made itself far more constantly felt than that of any other power in Gaul. Hitherto this inherent feeling of jealousy had been kept in check by the close hereditary connexion between the two states. The league established between Richard and Hugh had hitherto been kept unbroken by their descendants. But the main original object of that league, mutual support against the Carolingian King at Laôn, had ceased to exist when the Parisian Duke assumed the royal dignity. Since that time, the league could have rested on little more than an hereditary sentiment between the Norman and French princes, a sentiment which probably was never very deeply shared by their subjects on either side. And now that sentiment was giving way to the earlier and more instinctive feeling which pointed out the Rouen Duchy as the natural enemy of the Parisian Kingdom. It had once been convenient to forget, it was now equally convenient to remember, that the original grant to Rolf had been made at the immediate expense, not of the King of Laôn but of the Duke of Paris. Under these changed circumstances, the old feeling,

1 Roman de Rou, 9907 et seqq. The great offence was calling the Normans "bigoz è draschiers." The first name has given cause to much controversy; the second is said to mean drinkers of ale, a wholesome witness of their Teutonic descent. But cf. Æsch. Suppl. 930;

ἀλλ ̓ ἄρσενάς τοι τῆςδε γῆς οἰκήτορας εὑρήσετ ̓, οὐ πίνοντας ἐκ κριθῶν μέθυ. 2 See vol. i. p. 166. The whole feeling between France and Normandy is best

summed up in the passage from Wace just referred to, especially the lines,

66

Sovent les unt medlé al Rei,
Sovent dient: Sire, por kei,
Ne tollez la terre as bigoz?
A vos ancessors e as nos
La tolirent lor ancessor,
Ki par mer vindrent robéor."
The feeling is thus represented as being
mainly a popular one.

SIEGE OF TILLIÈRES.

2

133

dormant for a time, seems to have again awakened in all its strength. And now that Normandy held out temptations to every aggressor, now that Norman nobles did not scruple to invite aid from any quarter against a prince whose years were the best witness of his innocence, every feeling of justice and generosity seems to have vanished from the mind of King Henry. The King who owed his Crown to the unbought fidelity of Duke Robert did not scruple to despoil the helpless boy whom his benefactor had entrusted to his protection. The border fortress of Tillières formed the first pretext. That famous creation of Richard the Good had been raised as a bulwark, not against the King, but against the troublesome Count of Chartres.1 But Odo had found it convenient to surrender the disputed territory of Dreux to the Crown; the Arve therefore now became the boundary between Normandy and the royal domain. Tillières was accordingly declared to be a standing menace to Paris, the further existence of which was inconsistent with any friendly relations between King and Duke. The loyal party in Normandy thought it better to yield than to expose their young Duke to fresh jeopardy.* But the actual commander of the fortress was of another mind. Tillières had been entrusted by Duke Robert to Gilbert Crispin, the ancestor of a race by whom, after its restoration to Normandy, the border fortress was held for several generations.5 He scorned to agree to a surrender which he looked on as dangerous and disgraceful; he shut himself up in the castle with a strong force, and there endured a siege at the hands of the King. Besides his own subjects, Henry had a large body of Normans in the besieging host.? It is not clear whether these were Normans of the disaffected party, or whether the Duke's own adherents, when they had once pledged themselves to surrender the castle, deemed it expedient to display this excess of zeal against a comrade who had carried his loyalty to the extreme of disobedience. It is certain that it was only in deference to orders given in the Duke's name, and which seem to imply the Duke's personal presence, that the gallant Gilbert at last surrendered

1 See vol. i. p. 307.

2 Art de Vérifier les Dates, ii. 670.

3 Will. Gem. vii. 5. "Duxit se placabilem ei nullo modo fore, quamdiu Tegulense castrum videret in pristino statu persistere."

4 Ib. "Cujus fraudes animi ob salutem pueri vitare cupientes, in fide stantes Normanni decreverunt fieri quod egisse postmodum poenituit."

5 On the family of Crispin or of Tillières see Stapleton, i. cxx.; ii. xliv. There is a special treatise, "De nobili Crispinorum

Genere," which will be found in Giles'
Lanfranc, i. 340. This Gilbert must not
be confounded with Count Gilbert of
Brionne, who seems also to be called
Crispin. See Prevost, note on Roman de
Rou, ii. 5.

6 Will. Gem. vii. 5. "Mox ut molestissimum agnovit decretum."

7 Ib. "Exercitibus tam Francorum quam Normannorum contractis."

8 Ib. "Gislebertus tandem, precibus Ducis victus, morens castrum reddidit."

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