HIS PHYSIQUE AND CHARACTER. 411 strange chance, Gunilda, Harold's sister, who had lived a life of ascetic devotion in the convent of St. Ouen, died some days before the Conqueror, and was buried within a few feet of him.' William was the founder of a line of princes who have never perhaps been surpassed in the world's history for vigour of character and statesman-like ability. It seemed as if William's mother, the tanner's daughter of Falaise, had tempered the fervid energy of Robert the Devil's nature with the practical broad sense of the Norman lower classes. Her son's physique was an index of his character: the forehead vaulted and high; the eye hawk-like; the body broad-chested and sinewy; the arm so strong that he could bend on horseback the bow which common men could not bend on foot. His training was in rebellions and wars, and he grew up selfreliant and implacable. Of the basest crime ascribed to him, the assassination of Conan, he is probably innocent, as Conan did not die till some months after the reasons for wishing him dead had ceased to operate. The severity shown to the conquered Northumbrians, which was a bloody political crime, admits of no excuse and no palliation. But the king's treatment of the great lords will be judged leniently by all who remember what the barons of those times were: how Morcar and Waltheof had been false to their own country before they were false to William; how Roger de Breteuil and Eudes of 1 Orderic, vol. iii. p. 253; note by M. le Prevost. "Suivant l'épitaphe de Conan, il ne serait mort que le 11 Décembre, ce qui semblerait indiquer que les effets du poison ne furent pas immédiats." Note by M. le Prevost; Orderic, vol. ii. p. 260. As Wil 2 liam was accused of causing Conan's gloves and hunting-horn to be poisoned, the charge is not very probable. Pathology was so little understood in the middle ages, that the unexpected death of any eminent man was always ascribed to poison. 412 WILLIAM'S GOVERNMENT Bayeux were only anxious to let loose the worst horrors of feudal anarchy on the country. William was pitiless and unscrupulous, but not wantonly cruel. He evicted a tenantry to form a forest, and let his lands to the highest bidder; but he forbade the sale of slaves out of the land, declared the fugitive free if he remained unchallenged a year within a town, abolished punishment by death, and tried honestly to do justice to every man. Never had the king's peace been so good; never were murder, robbery, and violence so unsparingly punished as under the Conqueror. His fame has suffered unfairly because the strong government which he introduced was less popular, especially in the hands of foreigners, than the disorder to which the people had been accustomed. His taxation and high rentals, even his admirable census, were thought unkingly, and ascribed to avarice; yet every man allowed that William kept royal state and generously rewarded those who served him; the people, could they have understood his policy, might have admired the man who spent a little money to keep foes from our shores, while he yet never compromised England's honour in the field. The castles that grew up by town and strand made civil war difficult under a strong rule, and foreign invasion a danger only to the enemy. In an age of gross profligacy, William's private life was severely pure.' He found the Norman clergy illiterate; and before he died that province was the centre of European thought. He was 2 1 Dugdale's scandal about a concubine of William's afterwards married to William Peverel (Baronage, vol. i. p. 436) is directly refuted by Malmesbury, who gives a similar story in naked absurdity. Lib. iii. p. 453. 2 John of Salisbury says that as soon as peace was established in England he sent commissioners into foreign nations to procure "whatever might seem magnificent or curious." Polycraticus, lib. viii. c. 7. BENEFICIAL TO ENGLAND. 413 a devout man for his times, and one who attended mass regularly, founded abbeys, and promoted good men when he could do it without loss to his own interests. But with Hildebrand for pope, and Lanfranc for primate, William inaugurated the greatest change in our history, and commenced the substitution of criminal courts for a church inquisition. He put aside omens with a jest, and excused the sentence of a powerful bishop with a pregnant pleasantry. There were few to mourn for the iron soldier, whose tears at Edwin's death are the only womanly touch in his history. But those who remembered the drivelling superstition of Edward's court, the crafty and unscrupulous nature of Harold, and the long records of Anglo-Saxon feebleness, might admit that the change to Norman rule, though carried out with much suffering, had been good; and those who lived to witness the orgies of the second William's court, the feudal disorders of Normandy under Robert, or the worse horrors of Stephen's reign in England, might well look back with regret to "the famous baron," who " was mild to the good men who loved God, and beyond all measure severe to the men who gainsayed his will." It was doubtless the presage of future evil, as well as grief for his old master, that almost broke the heart of Lanfranc when he heard of William's death.2 1 A. S. Chronicle, A. 1085; Malmesbury, lib. iii. pp. 453-459; Orderic, vol. ii. p. 218; vol. iii. p. 3. 2 ACCESSION OF WILLIAM II. REVOLT AND DEFEAT OF THE NOBLES. MINISTRY OF RANULF FLAMBARD. CHARACTER OF WILLIAM AND HIS GOVERNMENT. PETTY WARS. THE FIRST CRUSADE. OPPRESSION OF THE People. CIRCUMSTANCES OF WILLIAM'S DEATH. WIL ILLIAM RUFUS lost no time in setting sail for England. He had a letter from his father for Lanfranc, and the primate was well inclined to a prince whom he had educated and consecrated knight; but as the price of his adhesion, he took care to exact a promise that William would show grace and right, defend the Church, and follow Lanfranc's counsel. The English clergy would naturally follow their head, and William was politic enough to fulfil the terms of his father's bequest to the monasteries and royal servants, and even added large gifts to the churches of the crucifixes and precious plate which the treasury contained. His coronation at Winchester was apparently accepted by the nobles, but was not confirmed by a vote from the royal council. The English were well pleased at a change that promised to sever the connection with Normandy. But the great lords who owned estates in both countries foresaw that they might be exposed to the hazards and losses of a divided allegiance. Enough of William's character was already known to show that his vices had no alloy of weakness, and that he would exact obedience as unsparingly as his father. Their first exercise of kingly power showed the difference between the brothers; Robert dismissed the prisoners or hostages at his father's court with presents proportioned to their rank; William took the earl Morcar and Wulfnoth, Harold's brother, with him to England, and at once consigned them again to a prison. use. It was certain that the Norman barons would not long allow such excellent reasons and excuses for rebellion, as a doubtful succession afforded, to rust for want of Eudes of Bayeux had been restored to his former position of nominal first man in the kingdom: and his old jealousy of Lanfranc, the real depository of power, soon revived.' A rebellion was plotted with the principal lords, and so contrived as to break out in every part of the kingdom at the same time (April, a. D. 1088). Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester, succeeded in driving back the insurgent army of Shropshire and Herefordshire; but Norwich, Durham, and Bristol, fell into the hands of the rebels, who spread over the neighbouring districts, laying waste the country as if they had no share in it. In this extremity William appealed to the lesser gentry, chiefly of English origin, and promised them better laws, in particular some relaxation of the forest-laws, if they would support him in a cause that was really their own. The instinct of confidence in a new king had not yet been worn out by William's acts, and a well-appointed, though not very numerous, army of English Compare the two statements; "Ad nutum illius (sc. Lanfranci) totius Regni spectabat intuitus." Eadmer, Hist. Nov., lib. i. p. 301. "So well did the king by the bishop (Eudes), that all England fared according to his counsel and as he would." A. S. Chron., A. 1088. |