2 were selves at their pleasure in the houses of the burghers. There was one Englishmen 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 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 wounded. Count Eustace and the remnant of his party made their way out of the town, and hastened back to King Eadward at Gloucester. They there told the story after their own fashion, throwing of course all the blame upon the insolent burghers of Dover. It is not hard to throw oneself into the position 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 3 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. 3 Chron. Petrib. "Forpan Eustatius hæfde gecydd þam cynge pet hit sceolde beon mare gylt þære burhwaru þonne 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." 4 Herod. vii. 104. ἔπεστι γάρ σφι δεσπότης νόμος, τὸν ὑποδειμαίνουσι πολλῷ ἔτι μᾶλλον ἢ οἱ σοὶ σέ· ποιεῦσι γῶν τὰ ἂν ἐκεῖνος ἀνώγῃ. EADWARD BIDS GODWINE PUNISH THE BURGHERS. 87 without a hearing. When Eustace had told his tale, the King became very wroth with the burghers of Dover,1 and this time he thought that he had not only the will but the power to hurt. 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 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 a political object. An alliance with a prince reigning in 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 marriagefeast 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. Godwine had once before been sent on the like errand in the days of Harthacnut. He then had not dared to refuse, though he had done what he could to lighten the infliction of a harsh and unjust sentence. And, after all, the two cases were not alike. In the case of Worcester, Godwine was called on to act as a military commander against a town which was not within his 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 sound policy in Godwine to undertake the early as this time, see Appendix G. 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 England, he told them, there was a Law supreme over all, and courts in which justice could be denied to no man. Count Eustace had brought a charge against the men of Dover. They had, as he alleged, broken the King's peace, and done personal wrong to himself and his companions. Let then the magistrates of the town be sum 1 Chron. Petrib. "And se eorl nolde na geowærian pære infare; forpan him was lad to amyrrene his agene folgad." 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 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 inauditos 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? GODWINE DEMANDS JUSTICE. 89 moned 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 all hope of any such peaceful settlement of the matter. Eustace probably still lingered about the King, to repeat his own story, to enlarge on the insolence of the men of Dover, and on the disobedience-he would call it the treason-of the West-Saxon Earl himself. And there was another voice ever at the royal ear, ever ready to poison the royal mind against the English people and their leader. The foreign monk who sat on the throne of so many English saints again seized the opportunity to revive the calumnies of past times. Robert once more reminded the King that the man who refused to obey his orders, the man who had protected, perhaps stirred up, rebellious burghers against his dearest friends, was also the man who had, years before, betrayed his brother to a death of torment.2 The old and the new charges worked together on the King's mind, and he summoned a meeting of the Witan at Gloucester, to sit in judgement, no longer on the men of Dover, who seem by this time to have been forgotten, but on Godwine himself. The Earl now saw that he must be prepared for all risks. And, just at this moment, another instance of the insolence and violence of the foreigners in another part of the Kingdom served to stir up men's minds to the highest pitch. Among the Frenchmen who had flocked to the land of promise was one named Richard the son of Scrob, who had received a grant of lands in Herefordshire. He and his son Osbern had there built a castle on a spot which, by a singularly lasting tradition, preserves to this day the memory of himself and his building.1 The fortress itself has vanished, but its site is still to be marked, and the name of Richard's Castle, still borne by the parish in which it stood, is an abiding witness of the deep impression which its erection made on the minds of the men of those times. The building of castles is something of which the English writers of this age frequently speak, and speak always with a special kind of horror. Both the name and the thing were new. Το fortify a town, to build a citadel to protect a town, were processes with which England had long been familiar. To contribute to such necessary public works was one of the three immemorial obligations from which no Englishman could free himself. But for a private landowner to raise a private fortress to be the terror of his neighbours was something to which Englishmen had hitherto been unaccustomed, and for such a structure the English language had hitherto contained no name. But now the tall, square, massive donjon of the Normans, a class of buildings whose grandest type is to be seen in the Conqueror's own Tower of London and in the more enriched keep of Rochester, began, doubtless on a far humbler scale, to rear itself over the dwellings of Englishmen. Normandy had, during the minority of William, been covered with such buildings, and his wise policy had levelled many of them with the ground. Such strongholds, strange to English eyes, bore no English name, but retained their French designation of castles. Such a castle at once became a centre of all kinds of oppression. Men were harboured in it, and deeds were done within its impregnable walls, such as could find no place in the open hall of the ancient English Thegn. So it was with the castle which was now raised within the government of the eldest son of Godwine. The Welshmen, as they are called—that is, not Britons, but Frenchmen, Gal-Welsh, not Bret-Welsh-built their castle, and "wrought all the harm and besmear "– -an expressive word which has dropped out of the language—" to the King's men thereabouts that they might." 4 Here then was another wrong, a wrong perhaps 1 Richard, the son of Scrob or Scrupe, and son-in-law of Robert the Deacon (Flor. Wig. 1052), appears in Domesday, 186 b. His son Osbern, of whom we shall hear again, appears repeatedly in Domesday as a great landowner in Herefordshire and elsewhere. See 176 b, 180, 186 b, 260. Welisce menn gewroht ænne castel on Herefordscire on Swegenes eorles folgore, and wrohton ælc þæra harme and bismere pæs cynges mannan þær abutan þe hi mihton." These Welshmen are undoubtedly Frenchmen (see Earle, p. 345; Lingard, i. 337; Lappenberg, 508); Britons did not build castles, nor were they on such terms of friendly intercourse with King Eadward. William of Malmesbury's misconception of pa hæfdon pa the whole passage (ii. 199) is amusing; 2 On the castles and the English feeling with regard to them, see Appendix S. 3 See vol. i. p. 63. Chron, Petrib. 1048. 66 |