§ 2. William’s Wars with France. 1053–1060

The many points which are suggested by William’s marriage have led us some years away from our strict |Character of the period.| chronological order. But the years which were occupied by these discussions and delays were important and busy years in many ways. William, still young, was now in the full maturity of mind and body, and the renown of his exploits was spreading far beyond the bounds of his own Duchy. But he had still to struggle for its possession |Rebellions within Normandy supported by Anjou and France.| against foes both within and without its borders. Faithless vassals and jealous kinsmen were still constantly rising up against him, nor did they ever fail to find neighbouring potentates ready to abet them against their sovereign. The restless enmity of the Angevin never slept, and now King Henry himself relapsed into that same position of constantly recurring hostility which had marked the earlier days of William’s reign. Henry had acted as a good and faithful overlord at Val-ès-dunes; but William had paid the debt in full by no less good and faithful service against the King’s enemies. It was indeed in the King’s cause that he had drawn upon himself the abiding enmity of the Count of Anjou. But now we see France and Anjou leagued together against Normandy. Every Norman rebel is aided in his revolt and sheltered in his exile. Once at least, King and Count pass the Norman frontier together, but only to feel both the strength of the Norman arm and the subtlety of the Norman brain. Henry in short plays the part which he played in the days before Val-ès-dunes, and |France and Normandy naturally hostile.| he now has the power of Anjou to help him. The relapse on the King’s part is not wonderful; the real wonder is that he ever left his course of obvious, though crooked, policy, in order to act for once as a generous and honourable neighbour and suzerain. It was only natural that every advance which was made by the lord of Rouen, whether in the way of external greatness or of internal prosperity, should be felt by the lord of Paris as |Greatness of Normandy even in later times.| a blow dealt against himself and his kingdom. We may perhaps better understand the greatness of Normandy in the days of its independence, if we look at some of the signs of the greatness which it retained after two centuries and a half of subjection, after having long served as the chief battle-ground between England and France. In the days of Lewis the Eleventh, Normandy, far from being a third part in extent, was in wealth and importance a third part of the kingdom into which it had been merged, and it furnished a third part of the revenue of the Parisian Crown. The great object of every enemy of the Parisian Kingdom was to wrest Normandy from its grasp. No blow could be so great as to give even a qualified independence to the great province which cut off the city which was the cradle and kernel of the Kingdom from |Its importance in the English and Burgundian Wars.| all communication with the English seas. There was no object on which the enemies of France, English and Burgundian, were more strongly bent, than on the separation of Normandy from the French Crown. There was no sacrifice which a French King would not make rather than surrender the noblest province of his Kingdom. The last |1421.| dying injunction of the great English conqueror of France was, at all risks, at all sacrifices, to keep Normandy in full |1465.| possession. One main object of the great Burgundian rival of France was to give Normandy a Duke of her own, even though that Duke was himself a member of |Spirit of Norman independence still remaining in the fifteenth century.| the royal house of France. And, whatever we say of the wish of the Englishman, the wish of the Burgundian was certainly met by a strong vein of local feeling in Normandy itself. Even in those times, Norman patriotism still held that Normandy was too great for simple incorporation with France, and that so great a Duchy ought not to be without its Duke. On the other hand, there was no sacrifice from which French policy so instinctively shrank. Lewis the Eleventh, who at least knew his own interests, was willing to surrender anything rather than make that one great sacrifice. He would give up Champagne, even Aquitaine, far greater in extent than Normandy, anything rather than the |Independent Normandy threatening to France.| precious dominion itself. And, if the extended France of the fifteenth century could so little afford to see Normandy separated from its body, even though it was to form an appanage of one of its own princes, how far more threatening must a practically independent, and often hostile, Normandy have been to the infant France of the eleventh century, when Champagne and Anjou were the fiefs of princes well nigh as powerful as their overlord, when Aquitaine was, in all save a nominal homage, a foreign land? Independent Normandy, flourishing under its illustrious Duke, was as sharp an eye-sore to Paris as ever Aigina was to Peiraieus. As he who held Dêmêtrias, Chalkis, and Akrokorinthos was said to hold the fetters of Greece, so he who held Eu, Cherbourg, Honfleur, and Rouen, might truly be said to hold the fetters of royal France.

The King of the French then, throughout this period, is the arch-disturber, powerfully helped on occasion by his now loyal vassal the Count of Anjou. We shall see both of them advance, step by step, from giving shelter and comfort to Norman rebels to giving them active help in their warfare, and from giving them active help in their warfare to formal invasions of the Norman land at the head of their own armies.

The first revolt against William after the war of Domfront and Alençon is wrapped up in great obscurity. One ancient writer alone records it; among modern writers, some pass it by unnoticed, while others recount it with a singular amount of confusion. But there seems reason to believe that, at the beginning of this period, at some time after the affair of William of Mortain, the Duke was disturbed by a revolt of another kinsman of his |The Counts of Eu.| own name at the other end of his Duchy. Duke Richard the Good had granted to his half-brother William the castle and county of Eu, the old border-fortress of Rolf. |Castle of Eu.| That famous spot, known in modern times as the last home of lawful royalty in France, was marked by a castle, every trace of which has given way to a palace of the sixteenth century, but which was long the chief guard of Normandy towards the frontier of Ponthieu. It was no hill-fort, like Domfront or, in another way, like Falaise. |The earlier Norman sites on the coast.| It was a fortress of the older Norman type, a stronghold of the days when the Normans had not yet cast off the feelings of the old Wikings, when to command the sea was their main object, and when princes placed their dwelling-places on points close to the sea or to some navigable river. Placed on comparatively low ground, with hills overlooking town and castle on every side, the fortress of Eu no doubt had its value in the days of Hasting and Rolf. It immediately commands the flats, in those days no doubt not fully reclaimed from the sea, which lie skirted by the hills which end in the cliffs of Tréport. Count William and his wife Lescelina were among the most lavish benefactors of the Church |Church of Eu founded for secular Canons, 1002; changed to regulars, 1177.| among the princes and nobles of Normandy. The church of Eu was built and endowed by Count William as a foundation of secular canons, which, like so many other foundations of the same kind, like Waltham in the very same year, was afterwards changed into an establishment of regulars. Small, if any, are the traces which remain of the church where the Great William received his bride; it is to the monastic occupants of Eu that we owe that stately and soaring pile which needs only fitting towers to rank among the noblest |Other ecclesiastical foundations of the family.| minsters of Normandy. Lescelina, the Count’s wife, who herself in her widowhood took the monastic habit, lives in Norman ecclesiastical history as the foundress of the Abbey of Saint Peter on the Dive, whose noble tower forms the most striking object on the way from the birthplace of the Great William to the place of his |Sons of William and Lescelina; Robert Count of Eu;| burial. Two of their sons, the eldest and the youngest, walked in the steps of their parents. Robert succeeded his father in the County of Eu; he lived a loyal and honoured subject of Duke William, one of his chosen counsellors and valiant soldiers, whose name will often occur in this history alike among the defenders of Normandy and the invaders of England. He too was bountiful to ecclesiastical foundations, and at his bidding the Abbey of Tréport arose on the rocks which bound the view from the now forsaken walks which surround his |Hugh, Bishop of Lisieux. 1050–1077.| dwelling-place. His younger brother, Hugh, mounted the episcopal throne of Lisieux. In that office he is described as showing himself a model of ecclesiastical |His virtues.| perfection of every kind. Among his other good deeds, his panegyrist records that, when the synod was held in his own church for the trial of his kinsman and metropolitan Malger, he preferred the cause of God to the ties of blood, and was foremost to give his voice against the son of his uncle. There is no need to doubt the purity of Hugh’s motives; yet an historian who judged Norman Bishops by a rule as uncharitable as that by which his panegyrist judges English Earls might doubt whether it was necessarily a disinterested act when the Bishop of Lisieux pleaded for the condemnation of the Archbishop of Rouen. The eldest and the third son of William and Lescelina were thus memorable and honoured |William Busac.| in their several walks. Their second son, William, called Busac, has left behind him a less worthy name. He is |His rebellion.| known in Norman history only for his rebellion, a rebellion of which the exact cause and the exact date are alike uncertain. But it is plain that he asserted a right to the Duchy. This claim must have been made on much more frivolous grounds than those which had been put forth by some other pretenders; for, to say nothing of his having an elder brother living, the birth of his father was as distinctly illegitimate as the birth of the reigning Duke. William Busac seems to have been at this time, by what means does not appear, in possession of his brother’s fortress of Eu, which he made the centre of his revolt. |Duke William takes Eu.| But he had provoked a foe stronger than himself. Duke William gathered a force, and besieged and took the fortress of his great ancestor. He acted with the same politic lenity which, at this time of his life, he always showed, except when his passions were specially aroused |William Busac banished. He takes refuge in France, and receives the County of Soissons. 1058.| in the way that they had been at Alençon. He merely required his rebellious kinsman to go into banishment. The castle of Eu was restored to its lawful owner Count Robert. As for William Busac, he distinctly gained by his exile. A younger son in Normandy, he became the founder of a great house in a foreign land. He took shelter in France, where King Henry received him with all honour, and after a while promoted him to a splendid marriage and a great fief. He bestowed on the exile the hand of Adelaide, heiress of Reginald Count of Soissons, sprung from a younger branch of that house of Vermandois which traced its descent from the direct and legitimate male line of Charles the Great. But the direct line of the banished rebel did not flourish. Two sons succeeded Count William in the possession of Soissons, and the heritage then passed away into the hands of descendants in the female line.

The next revolt against which the Duke had to struggle was of a much more formidable kind. Of no man could it be more truly said than of William that his foes were they of his own household. The rebel was again a kinsman, and the scene of the rebellion was again laid in those lands beyond Seine which had remained loyal during the revolt which ended at Val-ès-dunes. William, in short, was destined to fight for his crown with every branch of his family, and with the men of every part of his dominions. The kinsman who now revolted was an uncle, another William, a son of Richard the Good by Papia, a brother therefore of Archbishop Malger. The legitimacy of his own birth was perhaps not absolutely beyond doubt, yet we are told that he, like Guy of Burgundy and others, as the son of a lawful wife, despised the Bastard of Herleva, |Wide-spread movement| and asserted his own better right to the Duchy. In this movement against Duke William many conspirators, both |against the Duke;| in and out of Normandy, had a share. And at their head stood one, the highest of all in rank, and now again the |share taken by King Henry;| foremost in hatred against the prince by whose side he once had fought, Henry, King of the French. It is also |perhaps by Archbishop Malger.| quite possible that the Primate of Normandy himself had a share in his brother’s intrigues. Acts of distinct treason may thus have been among the causes which led to his deposition, as well as either neglect of ecclesiastical rule in his own person or an intemperate zeal for its observance in |The Duke suspects William of Arques.| the persons of others. At all events, the Primate’s brother was now strongly, most likely deservedly, suspected by the |His earlier conduct;| Duke. We are told that he had been engaged in secret plots ever since William’s childhood; but it is certain that |his desertion at Domfront. 1048–1049.| his name has not openly appeared in any of the conspiracies and revolts which we have thus far had to record. We are told also that, at the siege of Domfront, he acted something like the part of a deserter, leaving his post without any |Duke William occupies the castle of Arques.| leave from his sovereign and general. On these and on other grounds it was that Duke William, as a matter of precaution, without as yet interfering with any other of the rights and possessions of his uncle, took possession of and garrisoned his castle of Arques.

Arques, the small capital of the district of Talou, plays a part in warfare both earlier and later than the days with which we are concerned. Its name is now best known through the victory which was won in its neighbourhood by Henry of Navarre over the forces of the League. |1589.| But Arques had become famous in far earlier times. In the troubled minority of Richard the Fearless, when King |944.| Lewis of Laôn and Count Arnulf of Flanders invaded the Duchy, the Flemish Count, in marching along the Norman coast, had been checked by the resistance of the Norman garrison which defended Arques. The position then contended for was probably the town of Arques, now sunk to a village, but which was in those days a place of some importance. As an important position according to earlier Norman ideas, it became an occasional dwelling-place of the Dukes, and it was in its neighbourhood that Duke Richard first made the acquaintance of the famous Gunnor. Arques had also given its name to a line of Viscounts, themselves descended from another daughter of the lucky forester, and whose names will be found enrolled |Duke William grants the County to his Uncle.| among the conquerors of England. But the County of Arques or Talou had been granted, seemingly by William himself in the early part of his reign, to his uncle the son of Papia. Count William now proceeded, after the |Count William builds the Castle of Arques.| manner of that time, to secure himself by the erection of a fortress on a new site, a fortress which is undoubtedly one of the earliest and most important in the history of Norman military architecture. The castle of Arques, the work of William’s rebellious uncle and namesake, is one of the few examples still remaining of the castles which were raised by the turbulent Norman barons in |The later Norman castles on heights.| the stormy days of William’s minority. In the stage of the military art which now opens, the lower ground is forsaken, and the square donjon is almost always found placed on a height. Such a position at once added to the strength of the castle in case of attack, and enabled it to command the surrounding country like an eagle’s nest perched on a rock. Still, in days before the introduction of artillery, it was no objection to a site, otherwise convenient, that it was commanded by ground higher still. It was not till the days of the English wars that William’s own Falaise had been commanded by the rock on the opposite side of his maternal beck. An insular or peninsular site was specially preferred; and this is very |Position of Arques.| conspicuously seen in the site of the Castle of Arques. At a distance of about three miles from the haven whose name of Dieppe is but a slight corruption of the old Teutonic deeps, near the point of junction of the river of the same name with the Eaulne and with the northern Varenne, a narrow tongue of land immediately commands the low, and in old times marshy, flats which lie between the high ground and the sea. The range of hills which ends in the cliffs of Dieppe rises close to the left; to the right, at a greater distance, lie the heights covered by the Forest of Arques. These heights are separated from the peninsular hill by the town of Arques, with its rich and picturesque church of the latest mediæval work, and by the battle-ground which made Arques famous in later days. In fact both Williams, the founder and the Conqueror alike, seem to be eclipsed even in local memory by the fame of the more modern hero. It was on the end of this tongue of land that Count William fixed his castle, the outer wall fencing in the greater part of the peninsula, while the donjon itself |Strength of the castle.| was placed on the neck of the isthmus. At Arques no artificial mound was needed; the sides of the hill are naturally of no slight steepness; but, even on such a site as this, a Norman castle-builder was not satisfied with trusting to natural defences only. Between the wall and the slope of the hill Count William dug a fosse of enormous depth, such a fosse as may be seen in our own land at Old Sarum. An enemy who scaled the sides of the hill thus found himself, not under the castle wall, but on a narrow ledge of ground, a mere pathway in short, with a deep and wide ditch between himself and the fortress. This gigantic work still remains; so does the donjon itself, but, stripped as it is of all its smooth stone and of every fragment of architectural detail, it appears to the ordinary eye little more than a shapeless mass. The inner gate and part of the outer wall are perhaps also of the original work; but the castle received large additions and alterations in very late times, some of which did not even spare the donjon itself. Still the site remains untouched, and the huge stern mass of the donjon is still there, at least more fortunate in its decay than Falaise in its “restoration.” There is no spot in Normandy on which the true Norman spirit is more thoroughly impressed.

Such a fortress as this Duke William could not afford to |Duke William puts a garrison in the castle.| leave in the hands of a suspected enemy. He therefore, as I have just said, placed a garrison in the castle of Arques, seemingly thinking that, in so doing, he had done enough to provide for the safety of that quarter of the Duchy. At all events he did not think that his personal presence was |Duke William at Valognes.| needed; for we find him once more in the distant Côtentin, once more, as before the day of Val-ès-dunes, to be summoned from his quarters at Valognes by the news of a rebellion in the land. This time it was not his personal safety that was threatened, but everything was in jeopardy for which William could deem it worth while to reign or to |The Duke’s garrison at Arques betrays the castle to Count William.| live. The garrison which he had placed on the steep of Arques had proved faithless. Count William had appeared before the gate of the fortress which he had himself raised; threats, gifts, promises, solicitations of every kind, had won over the minds of its unsteady defenders. The Lord of |Count William openly revolts.| Arques once more stood as master within his own castle, and now, in reliance on the support of their common overlord, he openly defied his nephew and immediate sovereign.

The anarchy which had overspread all Normandy in the days of Duke William’s childhood, now broke forth again, |Ravages of the rebels.| no less terrible in kind if greatly narrowed in extent. But it was at least spread over as wide a range as could be commanded from the Castle of Arques. The hill-fortress became a mere nest of robbers, by whom every sort of damage was ceaselessly inflicted on the country around. As ever happened in these wretched conflicts, the blow fell heaviest on those who were least able to bear it. The goods of the churches, the crops and cattle of the peasant, the wares of the travelling merchant, became the prey of Count William and his soldiers. This kind of excess it was ever the great Duke’s boast, as it was his highest glory, to put down with all the weight of his hand. We may well believe his panegyrist when he tells us that it was in answer to the cry of his suffering people, no less than to avenge the insult done to his own authority, that William set forth in all haste |Duke William’s march from Valognes.| from Valognes. He set forth on a march only less speedy than the headlong ride which had once borne him across the estuary of the Vire and by the minster and the mount of the faithful Hubert. No longer alone, he again made his way across the ford which he had passed on that memorable night, but now he had no need to slink in by-paths or to fear to present himself before the gates of any city in his dominions. He pressed on by now loyal Bayeux, safe under the episcopal care of his brother, or rather of those who ruled under the name of the youthful Prelate. He passed by Caen, where the anathema had been spoken against evil-doors such as those whom he was hastening to chastise. There he made a feint of going on towards his capital; but he turned his steps to Pontaudemer, he crossed the Seine at Caudebec, one of the spots where the ancient speech of the Northman still lives in the local name; he hastened on by Baons-le-Comte, till he found himself, at the head of |He reaches Arques with a small company,| six followers only, at the foot of the hill of Arques. All the rest of the company at whose head he had set forth from Valognes had broken down on the way beneath the |and meets a reinforcement from Rouen.| haste and weariness of that terrible ride. But a reinforcement was already waiting for him. Some of the Duke’s chiefest and most trusty vassals had deemed that, in such a moment of peril, there was no need to wait for formal orders to do the duty of every loyal subject. They had set forth from Rouen at the head of a troop numbering three hundred knights, meaning to keep the revolters in check and to hinder the carrying of any kind of provisions into the rebellious fortress. But they found the forces gathered in the castle to be so numerous, and they found the loyalty of some of their own men to be so doubtful, that, on the second day of their adventure, they made up their minds to turn home again before the dawn of the next day. Hard by the castle |William exhorted to delay.| they found the Duke with his small company. They told him the state of affairs; the disaffection was greater than he thought; nearly the whole neighbourhood—that is, we may suppose, the noble portion of its inhabitants—was hostile; it was dangerous to go on further with so small a force. But the victor of Val-ès-dunes and Domfront had learned something like confidence in his star. “The rebels,” said the Duke, “if once they see me face to face, will |He hastens on; his successful skirmish before the gates.| never dare to withstand me.” At once, we are told, he spurred on his horse at full speed. His rebel uncle and his followers, a greater company than his own, were to be seen on the steep, returning, it would seem, from a plundering excursion. They were therefore no doubt disordered and encumbered with booty. The Duke determined on an instant attack. He followed them up to the only accessible point of the hill, by the path leading straight to the gate of the castle. A skirmish followed before the gateway, on the ground now covered by the later defences of the castle. The defenders of the fortress gave way before the impetuous charge of the Duke, and it was only, we are told, through their suddenly shutting the gates that the quarrel failed to be decided on the very day in which William had come in sight of the rebel stronghold.

The castle of Arques might possibly have been taken by such a sudden blow as the Duke had done his best to deal; but he knew well that to attempt to carry his uncle’s fortress by storm while its defenders were on their guard was an undertaking which surpassed even his prowess. Horse and foot could only have pressed up the sides of the peninsula, probably to fall headlong into the deep chasm which yawned between them and the outer walls of the castle. Duke William was too wary a warrior to waste his strength on such attempts as this; moreover, at this time of his life at least, he had no mind for wanton slaughter, and he wished for the honour of recovering the castle and subduing the rebellion without the shedding of Norman blood. A blockade was therefore |William blockades the castle.| the only course open to him; Arques was to be another Brionne. The Duke had now been joined by a large following, counting among them some of the best knights of Normandy. He could therefore afford to divide his forces. One party was left to continue the blockade of the castle. |Walter Giffard commands the blockading party.| Its command was entrusted to Walter Giffard, a loyal knight of the neighbourhood. He was a kinsman of William of Arques, that is, not of the rebel Count, but of the faithful Viscount, and a more distant kinsman of the Duke himself, both owning a common ancestor in the forester of Equiqueville, the father of Gunnor and her sisters. The chief who now commanded below the steep of Arques lived to refuse to bear the banner of Normandy below the steep of Senlac. He lived to make up for a forced inaction against rebels in his own land, by dealing blows with all the remaining strength of his aged arm against men who were fighting for their homes against an unprovoked invasion. He lived to have his name written in the great record of the Conquest, and to found, like so many others among the baronage of Normandy, a short-lived Earldom in the land which he helped to conquer. The force under Walter now remained to guard the works which the Duke raised for the blockade of the castle. A ditch and palisade at the foot of the hill protected a wooden tower, which was raised, as usual, in order to cut off the besieged from all communication with the neighbourhood. With the other party William himself departed, to keep in check some of the more powerful allies by whom it was likely that supplies or reinforcements would be furnished to the besieged.

At the head of these was King Henry. It would seem that a scruple of feudal honour made William shrink from meeting his lord face to face in battle, even though his lord was in the act of committing a breach of every feudal tie towards a vassal who had fully discharged every feudal |William’s feudal scruple against meeting the King in arms.| duty. One reason, we are told, for the Duke’s entrusting the blockade to others was that the King was known to be marching to the relief of the castle. Rather than do aught against his oath of homage, William would run all the risk involved in carrying his own arms elsewhere, while he left others to head the resistance against the most dangerous of his foes. And so it happened. The King came and went unhurt in person, but he was far from |Ambush of the Normans at Saint Aubin.| being successful in his enterprise. The besiegers laid an ambush in the way of the French army, near the dwelling of one of the few men in the County of Talou who remained loyal. The scene of this stratagem was the castle of Saint Aubin, a point on the Dieppe at a short |Loyalty of Richard of Hugleville.| distance above Arques. There dwelt a valiant knight of princely descent, Richard of Hugleville, a son of Papia, a daughter of Richard the Good. She had married beyond the limits of Normandy. Her husband was Gulbert, Advocate of Saint Valery in Ponthieu, a name soon to become so famous in Norman history. The Ponthevin dignity continued in the elder branch of the family; but Richard, the second son of Gulbert and Papia, had received an establishment in the land of Talou, and he now stood firmly by his cousin the Duke, while nearly the whole of the surrounding country was hostile. With him no doubt stood his son, the younger |His son Gulbert.| Gulbert, a man whose name we shall again greet with honour, one whom Englishmen at least may look on as the noblest among the chivalry of Normandy. With Richard too stood his son-in-law Geoffrey, the husband of his daughter Ada, and Geoffrey’s brother Hugh, the sons of Thurcytel who held the lordship of Neufmarché by the famous forest of Lions. Of these, Hugh had already fallen in an earlier |Richard’s son-in-law Geoffrey and his son Bernard of Newmarch.| skirmish with the rebels of Arques. Geoffrey lived to be father of one who made himself a name in a remote corner of our own island. Bernard of Newmarch, the son of Ada the daughter of Richard of Hugleville, became as terrible an enemy to the central land of the Cymry, as the son of Hamon Dentatus showed himself to the Cymry of the southern coasts. His fame still |His priory and castle at Brecknock.| lives, far away from the forest of Lions and the hill of Arques, where the minster and the castle of Brecknock look forth on the vale of the Welsh Axe, and on the mountain rampart which, when Arques was beleaguered and defended, still guarded the realm of Gruffydd the son of Rhydderch.

The King of the French and his comrades must have been strangely ignorant of the state of the country, when they chose a spot for their halting-place so near to the home of such tried and loyal warriors as these. They had brought with them a good stock of provisions of corn and of wine, for the relief of the besieged of Arques. At Saint Aubin they began to make ready a train of sumpter-horses with a military convoy, to carry these good things to their suffering friends, just as if they had been in a country where no danger was to be looked for. But, no doubt by the help of the loyal lord of Saint Aubin, the besiegers of Arques, in their wooden castle, soon learned the careless |Success of the Norman ambush.| approach of the French. A plan was speedily devised; an ambush was laid; a smaller party was sent forth to practise that stratagem of pretended flight which Norman craft was to display thirteen years later on a greater scale. The Normans turned; the French pursued; presently the liers-in-wait were upon them, and the noblest and bravest of the invading host were slaughtered or taken prisoners before |Capture of Hugh Bardulf.| the eyes of their King. One Norman traitor at least was taken. “Hugh Bardulf himself, that great man,” was among the captives. The exact nature and measure of Hugh’s greatness does not appear; but his capture is spoken of as one of the most important events of the fight. I know of no record of his earlier exploits or of his later fate; but the name of Bardulf occurs repeatedly in the later records both of the Norman and of the English Exchequer, and one at least of his descendants seems to have been as |Death of Count Ingelram of Ponthieu.| little amenable to lawful authority as his ancestor. By the side of the captive Bardulf died a sovereign prince, a neighbour of Normandy, bound by ties of the closest affinity |The Counts of Ponthieu.| alike to William the Duke and to William the rebel. The house of the Counts of Ponthieu is one whose name will meet us more than once again in the course of the present volume. Sprung of the blood of Herlwin of Montreuil, a name so familiar to us in Norman history a hundred years before, they held, as he had done, the border land between Normandy and Flanders. But they had held it by various |Hugh the First, Advocate of Saint Riquier.| tenures and under various titles. Hugh, the great-grandfather of the present ruler, a prince, if we may so call him, high in the favour of his namesake the Parisian King, had borne no title but that of Advocate of Saint Riquier. He was, as the chronicles of the Abbey take care to tell us, enriched at the expense of the great monastery of which he was bound to be the defender. The house of Saint Riquier was the work of the bounty of the great Charles; it was the house where a saintly Abbot and an Emperor’s daughter so strangely became the parents of that famous Nithard, who figures alike as Count and as Abbot, and who is yet more renowned as a lay historian in whose steps neither Æthelweard |Ingelram the First, Count of Ponthieu or Abbeville.| nor Fulk knew how to walk. The son of Hugh, Ingelram or Enguerrand the First, was the first to bear the title of Count of Ponthieu, a title sometimes exchanged for that of Count of Abbeville. The grange stolen away from the house of Saint Riquier grew into the capital of a principality, and the town was in after days adorned with that unfinished minster, which, as it is looked at from the west or from the east, may be called the noblest or the meanest in France. This elder Ingelram has already appeared in our history as a foe of Count Gilbert of Brionne, his antagonist on the field where Herlwin, not yet of Bec, taught the contending chiefs how a Christian soldier had learned to |Hugh the Second. 1046–1052.| return good for evil. From him the County passed to a second Hugh, and from him, only a year before, it had |Ingelram the Second. 1052–1053.| passed to a second Ingelram. This prince now, whether led by border enmity, by loyalty to his suzerain, or by preference to one domestic tie over another, had joined the call of King |His affinity with both Williams.| Henry to an invasion of the Norman Duchy. The Count of Ponthieu went forth to help the husband of his sister against the brother of his wife. Count Hugh had given his daughter in marriage to William of Arques, but his son was also the husband of a full sister of Duke William. As such, he was himself the son-in-law of the Tanner’s daughter, and he had therefore no right to join the Lord of Arques in his sneers at the Bastard of Falaise. He now felt the strength of the Norman steel, even in the absence of the Prince against whom he came. He fell in the ambush |Guy, 1053–1100.| of Saint Aubin; his County passed to his brother Guy, soon again to appear in our story; but his daughters, |Daughters of Ingelram.| the nieces of Duke William, were treated as members of the ducal family, and one of them, Judith the wife of Waltheof, lived to leave behind her an evil renown in the history of our own land.

The Count of Ponthieu was thus slain fighting valiantly. His overlord King Henry escaped the ambush, and pressed on towards the hill of Arques, in the hope of relieving the besieged. But he found Duke William’s wooden castle too strong, and the courage of its defenders too determined, for his attacks upon it to prevail. He accordingly returned home, having done nothing towards the immediate object of his journey, the relief of the besieged Count of Arques. He had however gained some partizans in Normandy, and one Norman fortress at least was betrayed into his hands. Its position shows that the rebellion must have spread far beyond the immediate neighbourhood of |Moulins betrayed to the King by Wimund.| Arques. One Wimund, who commanded the fortress of Moulins, surrendered it to the King. The fortress thus gained by Henry lay on the other side of the Seine, in the County of Hiesmes and Diocese of Seez, on the very frontier of the debateable land of the House of Belesme. |It is garrisoned under Guy of Poitiers or Gascony.| The post was therefore an important one. It received a French garrison, and its command was entrusted to a man of princely rank from a distant quarter of Gaul, whose presence in the royal host is not the least perplexing thing about the story. This was Guy-Geoffrey, Count of Gascony, son of that William of Aquitaine who bore the title of the Great. He was therefore brother of the prince who had suffered so hardly at the hands of Geoffrey of Anjou; he was brother of the reigning Duke, who, from Peter, had changed his name to William, and brother too of Agnes, the wife of the reigning Emperor, whose name was soon to become famous during the minority of her son. Guy-Geoffrey himself, on his accession to his brother’s dominions a few years later, also changed his baptismal name |1058–1087.| for that so familiar to his family, and reigned as William |Return of Duke William.| the Eighth of Aquitaine and Sixth of Poitiers. By this time Duke William had returned to the siege; he had no longer to fear the commission of any feudal offence by |The besieged hard pressed.| fighting personally against his lord. The defenders of Arques were now sorely pressed by hunger. They contrived to send messages to King Henry; but all was in vain; no help came from their royal ally. At last the sure but slow means to which the Duke had trusted had |The castle surrenders; wretched state of the besieged.| thoroughly done its work; Count William and his garrison surrendered, on the sole condition that the horrors of Alençon were not to be repeated. Safety for life and limb was promised; the gates were opened, and a company came forth in whose sad condition the Norman panegyrist sees at least as much matter for scorn as for pity. Knights of renown throughout France and Normandy came forth with marks of hunger on their faces, and with their necks bowed down alike by hunger and by shame. Some rode on famished horses, whose feeble feet could hardly raise the dust or give forth an audible sound as they crept along. Others came forth on foot, booted and spurred, bearing saddles on their backs, seemingly ready for that last symbolical rite of humiliation in which the vanquished offered himself for the victor to mount upon his back. And, if the proud gentlemen of France and Normandy were brought so low as this, it is not wonderful if the aspect of their more lowly followers, the light-armed troops |Guy of Poitiers surrenders Moulins.| of the garrison, was equally sad. The news soon reached the fortress of Moulins, which was still held by the French troops under Guy of Aquitaine. The Poitevin prince, the brother-in-law of Cæsar, had no mind to tempt the strength of the Norman. He and his garrison, and the garrisons of such other posts as had been occupied by the royal forces, fled |The Duke’s clemency to his uncle.| out of the land without waiting to be attacked. Towards his own subjects the Duke more than kept the terms of his capitulation. Count William was not even required to leave Normandy. He was offered licence to remain in the land and to retain possession of a considerable estate, of which however it need hardly be said that his own famous hill-fortress was not to form a part. But life in his native |Count William of Arques retires to Boulogne.| country had no longer any charms for him. The dispossessed Count and his wife, the sister of the slain Count of Ponthieu, retired to the court of Count Eustace of Boulogne. The fall of one William of Arques led the way to the advancement of the other. The Viscount had had no share in the treasons of the Count. He was not indeed raised to fill a place which the Duke had learned to be |The castle intrusted to William the Viscount.| too dangerous an elevation for any subject. The County of Talou was abolished; the castle of Arques became a ducal possession; but the care of the fortress reared by the William of Arques who figures in Norman history was entrusted to that other William of Arques whose name is written in Domesday.

Duke William was now allowed a few months of peace, and, having brought one troublesome matter to a happy end, he seems to have thought it a fitting time to bring another matter of no less moment in his eyes to an end no less happy. It was in this year, therefore probably in the short interval between the French invasion which we have thus far followed and the second invasion which followed it in the next year, that William at last won his long-wished-for bride. Count Baldwin now brought his daughter to the frontier castle of Eu, and William led her thence to his palace at Rouen. I have already discussed the puzzling circumstances of this marriage; I have already spoken of the indignation which it called forth among men so unlike one another as Malger and Lanfranc. Malger, it must not be forgotten, was a brother of the fallen Count of Arques; he may have been concerned in his treason; his deposition may have been his punishment. But the clemency which William showed towards the uncle who had been actually in arms may make us doubt whether he would have taken this kind of revenge on a kinsman who was at least not more guilty.

King Henry had failed to give any help to the defenders of Arques in their last extremity; but hatred towards Normandy was far from being lulled to rest in the breasts |Hatred of the French towards Normandy.| either of the French King or of the French people. We seem to be carried back a hundred years, to the wars waged by Lewis and Hugh and Arnulf against the defenceless childhood of William Longsword. Through the whole extent of the King’s domains, and through the domains of his chief vassals, the feeling of jealousy against Normandy was bitter indeed. The King complained that Normandy, a land which had been part of the immediate possessions of his forefathers, even before they wore a Crown, had now itself become almost a Kingdom. He, a crowned King, the overlord of so many Princes, the ally of the Roman Emperor himself, looked with an evil eye on the one corner of his realm whose master paid him no obedience. We may doubt whether the vassalage of Flanders or Aquitaine, to say nothing of Barcelona, involved more of practical submission than the vassalage of Normandy; but, as I have explained more than once, there was no other among the great vassals of the Crown whose greatness seemed so directly stolen from that of the Crown itself, no other whose fief, by its very position, seemed |Jealousy of the other Princes against William.| so literally to hold its royal overlord in fetters. And jealousy of William and his Duchy was by no means confined to the King and his immediate subjects; nearly all the Princes of Gaul seem to have been for once ready to abet their suzerain against one whom they all equally |Geoffrey Martel;| dreaded and envied. That the Hammer of Anjou was eagerly waiting for the fitting moment to deal another |Theobald of Blois and Champagne;| blow need hardly be said. And the old hereditary grudge may have rankled in the breast of Theobald of Blois, now rejoicing in the higher dignity of Count of Champagne. He had won that County by driving out his nephew Odo, and the favourable reception which the dispossessed prince found at the court of William, his marriage with a near kinswoman of the Duke, may have been either the cause or |William [Peter] of Aquitaine.| the result of his uncle’s enmity. But it is hard to see how the power of Normandy could be threatening to a prince so distant as the Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine. Nor had William given his southern namesake any offence, unless indeed the Duke of Aquitaine thought it his duty to avenge the ignominious escape of his brother from the dominions of the Duke of the Normans. Yet all these princes, we are told, were eager, in an unusual fit of loyalty, to avenge the wrongs of the King whom they all so faithfully served, but to whom the upstart Bastard at Rouen refused all obedience. And all, King and Princes, were specially stirred up by certain members of the royal family, whom it is not easy to identify, but who are said to have thought that Normandy, or some part of it, might form convenient appanages for themselves. A joint expedition against Normandy, on a scale which should surpass all former expeditions, was agreed upon.

The panegyrist of William lavishes all his rhetoric and all his powers of classical allusion to set forth the greatness of the danger by which Normandy was now |Danger of Normandy.| threatened. Cæsar himself, the conqueror of the Gauls, or a general greater than Cæsar, if Rome herself had produced a greater, might have felt fear at the approach of such a host as was now poured from every region of Gaul upon the devoted Duchy. The whole land was stirred even to its remotest corners. The movement reached to the Ducal Burgundy, the most eastern fief of the Parisian Crown. It aroused the Gascon at the foot of the Pyrenees, and the men who dwelt among the volcanic peaks of less distant Auvergne. All these drew the sword; but France and Britanny, as the nearest of all to the Norman land, were the most eager for its destruction. Through all Normandy, the men of peaceful callings, the priest, the peasant, the burgher, all trembled for their wives, their children, their goods, their very lives. But they thought what a champion they had in their mighty Duke, and their hearts were comforted. Laying aside flourishes like these, and confessing the extreme difficulty of seeing the warriors of Gascony and Auvergne, or even those of Burgundy, there is no doubt that a great and unusual effort was made, both by the King and by those of his great vassals who were |Union of several Princes against Normandy.| most immediately open to his influence. An invasion of Normandy was decreed, which really was planned on a greater scale, and carried out in a more systematic way, than any that had ever gone before it. The whole forces of the royal domain—of France, in the language of the time—together |Guy of Ponthieu and Theobald.| with the forces of Count Theobald and of Count Guy of Ponthieu, were assembled for a combined attack |Seeming absence of Geoffrey of Anjou.| on the Duchy. Guy came, naturally enough, to avenge the death of his brother; what is most to be remarked is the seeming absence of the Prince whom we should have expected to find first at the muster, the restless Hammer of Anjou. Some of his subjects seem indeed to have shared in the expedition, but there is no certain account of Geoffrey himself till the campaign was over. His absence is not easily to be accounted for. The chronicles of his own country do not supply us with any records of other undertakings which might explain his failure to share in an enterprise which one would have thought would have had every charm for him. But, even in his |Double invasion of Normandy. 1054.| absence, the muster was a great one. The forces of the King and his vassals were divided into two armies for the invasion of Normandy at two distinct points. Our Latin authorities, glad as ever to fall back on the geography of a past age, tell us how the forces both of Celtic and of Belgic Gaul were gathered together in two divisions. The Celtic host was to march under the command of the King in person, the forces of the Belgian lands under that of his brother Odo. With Odo was joined in command the King’s special favourite, Reginald of Clermont, not the more famous Clermont in the distant land of Auvergne, but the lowlier Clermont in the nearer land of Beauvais. With them marched two other leaders of the rank of Count, Ralph of Montdidier and he of whom we have already heard, Guy of Ponthieu. The vernacular poet more kindly helps us to the real names of the districts which are veiled under the obsolete titles delighted in by the Latin writers. Normandy was to be invaded on each side of the Seine, and the Seine was taken as the limit alike of the lands to be invaded and of the hosts which |Forces of “Belgic Gaul” under Odo.| were severally to invade them. The Northern, the Belgic, host was to enter the elder Normandy, the first home of Rolf, the French-speaking land of Rouen. They were to enter by way of Beauvais, to advance and ravage the land of Caux, the coast-land to the right of the Seine, the land around the minster of Fécamp and the castle of Lillebonne. They were to harry the whole district and diocese of Rouen, and to carry their ravages up to the metropolis itself. To the muster of Odo came the men of primatial Rheims; the men too of Soissons, once the home of Merovingian royalty, and so soon to become the guerdon of a Norman traitor. There also were the men of Laôn, where the line of the Teutonic Emperor had so long lingered, and the men of Noyons, the city which had beheld the permanent inauguration of the Parisian Kingdom. There marched the forces of Vermandois, whose Carolingian Lord appeared as the loyal homager of the upstart dynasty. The promise of Norman spoil drew the men of Amiens, soon to become the flock of the Prelate whose verse was to hand down to us the minutest contemporary record of Norman victory. Himself, not yet a father of the Church, may well have followed, among the men of his native Ponthieu, to avenge a slaughtered nephew and a self-banished niece. Thither men came from Meulan on the Seine and from Beaumont on the Oise, from the corn-fields of Brie and from the rose-gardens of Provins. By twenties, by hundreds, by thousands, the force of all the lands right of the Seine gathered under the banners of Guy and Odo, to carry slaughter and devastation through those parts of Normandy which lay on their own side of the great Norman river. |Forces of “Celtic Gaul” under the King.| The other muster gathered round the standard of the King himself. Thither came the men of those ancient cities of central Gaul, which, now no less than then, which then no less than in the days of Cæsar and in the old time before him, still sit, each one as a lady for ever, by the banks of their ancient rivers or on the proud crests of their everlasting hills. If their peaceful calling did not keep them by their thrones and altars, the crosses of three Metropolitans might have been borne to the camp of Henry. The men of Bourges and Berry came from around the steep of old Avaricum, whence Ambigatus had sent forth his swarming colonists to more southern lands, and where Vercingetorix had bid defiance to the mightiest of southern invaders. Thither too came the men of Sens, the countrymen of Brennus and his host, the city whose sons had encamped upon the Roman forum and had wound their way round the steep of the Roman capitol. And from the banks of the rushing Loire, from around the towers of Saint Martin and Saint Gatian, came the men of Tours, the fellow-citizens of so many saints, whose land, now crushed beneath the Hammer of Anjou, had once seen |732.| the Hammer of Christendom break in pieces the hosts of the False Prophet. Thither too came the contingents of the other cities by the great boundary stream, the men of Count Theobald’s Blois and of King Henry’s Orleans. There were the men of the border-land of Perche, and of the King’s own towns of Etampes and Montlhery, towns whose fame, such as it is, was reserved for later days. Thither came the men of the bocage and the men of the plain, the men of the vast cornland which surrounds the hill of Chartres, the hill where Druids had once held their orgies, but where the rites of the heathen had now given way to the learning and holiness of Prelates like Fulbert and like Ivo. Full no doubt of faith in that revered relic before which Rolf and his pirate-host had quailed, the land of the old enemy of Richard the Fearless sent forth its forces to wreak a tardy vengeance on the successor alike of Rolf and of Richard.

The host of Celtic Gaul held its trysting-place at a spot doomed to be memorable and fatal above all other spots in the history of the Conqueror. King Henry’s standard was pitched in the border town of Mantes, the town ruled by a grandson of Æthelred, a nephew of Eadward, a prince whose death was to bring undeserved reproach upon the Conqueror’s name and whose city was to behold the last |Description of the town.| and the least worthy of his exploits. Mantes, the frontier post of France against Normandy, was a spot whose position had made it a favourite haunt of William’s Wiking fathers in the days when Rouen was still a post to be won, and when Paris was still a post to be threatened. No other spot lay as a more convenient centre between the two great cities of the Seine. On the left bank, the higher ground on which the town itself stands slopes gently to the river. A range of loftier hills, as all along this part of the course of the Seine, bounds the valley on the other side. But at this point the stream divides, and two large islands, resorts such as the pirates of the North so dearly loved, at once divide and unite by bridges, old and new, the town itself and its suburb of Limay. The islands of the Seine, like the islands of the Loire, had ofttimes seen Rolf and Hasting moor their barks and tell over their plunder; and now it was around those islands that the host assembled which was at last to take vengeance for those old wrongs, and to bring the sons of the Pirates to an utter, if a tardy, submission. The host that gathered at Mantes, the host under the command of the King himself, was to enter and harry the land of Evreux and the land of Rouen; the King of the French would ride by Lisieux to the sea from which the hated intruders could no longer keep him; he would return by Auge, lord of all those lands within the Norman border where the tongue and life of France had taken root, and whose inhabitants had been his brothers-in-arms on the day of Val-ès-dunes. The Bastard might perhaps still be allowed to reign over his old enemies; the rough Northern blood of Bayeux and Coutances might have him, if they would, for their ruler; but the old grant, wrung in the days of weakness from King Charles and Duke Robert, should be recovered by a prince who united the claims of Laôn and of Paris, and who had made up his mind to be no longer kept out of his own Rouen and cut off from the mouth of his own Seine.

The preparations of Duke William were equal to the |He gathers two armies.| great emergency in which he found himself. He called out the whole force of his Duchy. To meet the twofold invasion he gathered a twofold army, each division of which was to defend one side of the Seine against the |His own division is opposed to the King.| approaching enemy. For his own share he took the defence of the lands on the left bank of the river, the lands threatened by the King in person. Had he cast |Question of the feudal scruple.| away the feudal scruple which we have seen acting upon his mind during the siege of Arques? Did he now deem that so many injuries had at last absolved him from every duty of a vassal, and that he might now, without a stain on his honour or his conscience, go forth, and, if need be, meet his lord in battle face to face? Or did he foresee that, as the event proved, no such meeting would be needful? Did he know that the surest way to avoid meeting his lord face to face was to go forth in person to meet him? However this may be, William now took on himself the immediate duty of protecting the lands against which King Henry was marching, the lands between the |William’s muster from Western Normandy.| Seine and the Dive. For their defence he gathered the forces of the neighbouring districts. The warriors of the hilly land of Auge, where the mouth of the Dive was then a famous haven, came to meet the King who had specially marked out their district as one object of his attack. The men of Falaise and of the whole County of Hiesmes pressed as ever to the standard of the sovereign who was more specially their own. Ralph of Tesson, no longer doubtful, no longer hesitating between his loyalty and his plighted oath, came once more to yield that help which had been found so effectual on an earlier day of battle. All these were men who had fought on William’s side when the French monarch had passed as a deliverer through the lands which he now entered as an enemy. |Loyalty of the Bessin and the Côtentin.| But others came on that day to William’s muster who, at Henry’s former coming, had fought against King and Duke alike. The men of the Bessin were there to atone for the error of the day when they had met their prince in arms. Hamon Dentatus slept in his honoured tomb at Esquay; Grimbald lay with his fettered limbs in some lowlier grave; and, since they were gone, no traitor had disturbed the fidelity of the Saxon land. And it is with a special thrill of pride that the island poet tells us how the Barons of the Côtentin were there too, ready as before to break a lance with the French invader, but this time to break it not as the rebels but as the loyal subjects of their own prince. And from still more distant corners of his Duchy men pressed to William’s standard. The brother whom he had advanced, Robert the son of Herleva and Herlwin, led the men of his county to |Contingent from Mortain,| the ducal muster. He came from the fortress of which the Duke had deprived, perhaps defrauded, his cousin and namesake, now a wanderer and an adventurer in the most distant field of Norman valour. The Lord of Mortain had fixed his home in perhaps the most picturesque of all the picturesque sites in which the Norman chiefs seem to have delighted. His castle on the rock has been wantonly destroyed to make way for one of the barbarous official buildings of modern France. But the land from which Robert brought his warriors still retains its charm; the cliffs, the winding dells, and, rarest sight of all, the waterfalls, great and small, bounding from one rocky stage to another, are there still; the grand and simple church, of a somewhat later age, still remains, and, yet above town and castle, rise still loftier heights, from which the eye may range as far as the Mount of the Archangel. And, |and Avranches.| more distant still than the men of Mortain, came the men of the march against the Breton, the men of Avranches, viscounty and city, where the proudest steep in all the Norman land, crowned, alas, no longer by its vanished minster, takes in the Archangel’s Mount as but one point in a landscape where half Normandy and Britanny seem to lie at the beholder’s feet. From the Coesnon to the Dive, from Seez to Cherbourg, all were there, stout of heart and ready of hand, to guard their country and their sovereign against the attacks of their faithless overlord.

The plan of the Duke was to stand wholly on the defensive. All provisions of every kind were to be moved out of the King’s line of march; the cattle were to be driven to the woods, and the peasants to be sent to take care of them there. He would himself with his division follow the King’s steps; he would encamp near him, and be sure to cut off every man who strayed from the royal camp for forage or plunder. The like policy was enjoined |The leaders beyond the Seine.| on the defenders of the lands beyond the Seine. The men of Caux and of the other districts in that quarter were placed under four of the chief men of their own district. Old Hugh of Gournay, at the head of the men of Braye, came from his frontier town by the minster of Saint Hildebert, the town whose name he was to transfer to more than one spot in conquered England. Count Robert of Eu came from the other frontier town so lately honoured by the marriage rites of his sovereign. William Crespin came from the less famous Bec of the land of Caux, whose name is eclipsed by that more honoured namesake which was then the light of Normandy. And Walter Giffard, who had so well kept the wooden castle below the steep of Arques, was now to take his share in warfare of a freer and a wilder kind. Till the whole force of the land could be got together, the Barons of Eastern Normandy were bidden to watch the foe, to skulk in the woods, and to give the invaders no opportunity for an attack.

The right division of the French army, the division of Belgic Gaul, seems to have entered Normandy somewhere near the frontier town of Aumale. They passed on, committing every sort of ravage as they went. Saracens, we are told, could not have done worse. Houses great and small were burned, so were churches and monasteries, moveable goods were carried off, among which, as in old Greek warfare, human prey seems to have been thought not the least valuable. The peasants whom they fell in with were seized and carried off; women were everywhere ravished; children and old men seem to have been dispatched at |They reach Mortemer.| once. In this way they marched on till they reached Mortemer, not Mortemer by the forest of Lions, but a more northern Mortemer, which draws its whole claim to remembrance from the events of this campaign. The country through which they passed may be called hilly; but the hills have no specially marked or picturesque character. The town of Aumale stands on a comparative height, which slopes away by a gradual descent to the west. A bottom, in no way specially marked by nature, divides this hill from another of the same kind, the road over which leads the traveller to the town of Drincourt on the Dieppe, now known as Neufchâtel-in-Braye. From the neighbourhood of this point the river Eaulne flows down to meet the Dieppe and the Varenne |Description of the place.| by the castle of Arques. In the space between the two hills, a little way from the road, and almost hidden by trees, lie the shell of a round tower on its mound, a church of but small attractions, and a few scattered houses and gardens, so far from forming a town that they are hardly |The town destroyed and not rebuilt.| worthy to be called a village. That spot is Mortemer; and the absence of anything remarkable in the Mortemer of the present day is the best witness of the event which made Mortemer famous in the days of William. In those days Mortemer was evidently a town of some size, according to the standard of the eleventh century. There is no sign that the town was fortified; the tower which still remains has doubtless supplanted a donjon of the earlier type; but it was the mere private fortress of the lord and not the defence of the town itself. The change in the condition of the place must have been great. Mortemer could now hardly supply entertainment to a passing traveller; but we are told that the French army took up their head-quarters there, on account of the good and plentiful accommodation which the town afforded. Mortemer became a centre of systematic plunder. The French devoted the day to pillage; the neighbourhood was harried with fire and sword; stores of cattle and wine were brought in to Mortemer; and the night was given to feasting, drinking, and every sort of excess.

The Norman leaders had been well served by spies, and they had now found exactly the opportunity for which they had been waiting. One vigorous blow might crush one division of the invaders altogether, and the force of all Normandy might then turn against the other. The four leaders, with Hugh of Montfort, and Roger of Mortemer, the lord of the town in which the enemy had fixed themselves, at the head of the whole levies of the country, made a night march upon the unexpecting invaders. The Norman force reached Mortemer at day-break. They found no preparations for defence; most of the French were still asleep. With the true Norman instinct, fire was the first means of attack resorted to. The Frenchmen were awakened by the burning of the houses in which they were quartered. The confusion was frightful; men had to arm themselves in the midst of the flames and with the enemy pressing around them. One man would fain mount his horse, but he could not find his bridle; another, still less lucky, could not find the door of the house in which he was lodged. The most part strove to cut their way out of the burning town, but they found the head of each street guarded by Norman soldiers. Yet, according to every account, the French, though taken at such a disadvantage, resisted manfully, and kept up the struggle for several hours, from the dawn of a winter’s day, |Utter discomfiture of the French.| till three hours after noon. The great mass of the French were cut to pieces; a few escaped to skulk in the woods, but the greater number were cut down either in the town itself or in the attempt to escape. The burned and charred ruins, the dunghills, the fields and paths around the town, were covered with dead and wounded men. Only those were spared who were worth sparing for the sake of their ransom. Many a Norman soldier, down to the meanest serving-man in the ranks, carried off his French prisoner; many an one carried off his two or three goodly steeds with their rich harness. In all Normandy there was not a prison that was not full of Frenchmen. As for the leaders |Fate of the leaders. Escape of Odo and Reginald.| of the expedition, Odo the King’s brother was among the first to escape; Reginald of Clermont was equally lucky. But the princes of Ponthieu were less fortunate. Waleran, |Death of Waleran of Ponthieu.| the Count’s brother, was slain, fighting valiantly. Count |Imprisonment of Count Guy.| Guy himself was taken prisoner, and was kept as the Duke’s captive at Bayeux for two years. He was at last |He is released on doing homage to William.| released, but only on doing homage and binding himself to the Duke of the Normans for the yearly service of a hundred knights whenever called upon. Ralph of Montdidier fell into the hands of Roger of Mortemer, whose castle, perhaps |Roger of Mortemer releases Ralph of Montdidier through a feudal scruple.| the only stone building in the town, remained standing among the flames. By one of those strange feudal complications which we so often meet with in those times, the Lord of Mortemer had become the man of the Count of Montdidier. Roger remembered his duty to his lord, even when that lord appeared in the guise of an enemy. He tended him friendly in his castle for three days, and then took him to his own house in peace. But this discharge of feudal duty was held by Duke William to be inconsistent with his duty as the vassal and the subject of a greater master. All Roger’s services could not plead against this |Roger banished by the Duke, and his castle confiscated,| ill-timed tenderness to a foe. He was banished from Normandy, and, though after a while he was allowed to return and to receive again the rest of his lands, the castle from which he drew his name was withheld from him. |and bestowed on William of Warren.| That castle the Duke granted to a brave and rising knight, William of Warren, who took his name from a fortress by the northern Varenne which has since exchanged its name for that of Bellencombre. He, like his predecessor Roger, and so many others, was the Duke’s kinsman through the forester of Caux; he lived to become the husband of the Duke’s stepdaughter, to win for himself an Earldom in England, and to be the forefather of one who, two hundred years later, could appeal, like the Bastard himself, to his own sword as the surest tenure by which he held it.

The joyful news, we are told, was carried the same night to the Duke in his quarters on the other side of the Seine. His first impulse was thankfulness to God, who had given him so great a success without any loss, at any rate without any considerable loss, of his own men. His next thought was how to improve the occasion so as to get rid of the other division of the invading army with |His stratagem and message to the King.| even less trouble. He would himself send the news to his royal overlord. We are not told exactly where the two armies were encamped, but it was doubtless somewhere between the Seine and the Dive, and one description places the French army by the side of a river with overhanging cliffs. The camp of the Duke was not far off. A messenger was at once sent off, to announce in a startling way the loss which had fallen on the royal army on the |Ralph of Toesny.| other side of the Seine. Some make the messenger chosen for his task a man of lofty and famous lineage. He was, we are told, Ralph of Toesny or of Conches, the grandson of the famous Roger, the proud descendant of Malahulc, the man who had sought for a kingdom in Spain, and had been one of the scourges of Normandy in the days of William’s childhood. Of Ralph we shall hear again at Senlac, how he refused, like Walter Giffard, to discharge any function, however honourable, which kept him back from dealing his blows against the English. Thus high of birth and of spirit, he and his were connected by marriage with other houses of equal fame. His own wife was of the line of Montfort; his sister was the wife of the famous William Fitz-Osbern, and his son, in after years, when his house was transferred from Normandy to England, became the husband of one of the daughters |Delivery of the message at midnight.| of our martyred Waltheof. Ralph of Toesny then, or it may be some lowlier messenger, rode to the French camp; he climbed, some say a tree, some say a lofty rock, which overlooked the tent of the King. The stillness of the night was broken, the slumbers of the King were disturbed, by a voice, which might seem to come from another world, shouting aloud, “Frenchmen, awake, ye are sleeping too long; go forth and bury your friends who lie dead at Mortemer.” The King and his friends talked together and wondered. But the tidings thus strangely brought to them were soon spread abroad. Some make the Norman Baron reveal himself, and tell in his own person how Odo had fled, how Guy was in bonds, how Waleran was slain. Others seem to make the news come from some other source, from some fugitive escaped from Mortemer, or from that mere mysterious power of rumour which seems to travel faster than any |Panic and retreat of the French army.| post. At all events we are told that a panic fell on King Henry and his host. Before the sun had well dawned, all was ready for a retreat. Horsemen were mounted, sumpter-horses were loaded, the tents and huts which had formed the royal camp were all burning. All faces were now turned, not towards Rouen or Lisieux, but towards Paris or more distant cities. The retreat was a hasty one; men were glad to get as fast as they could out of so dangerous a land. Their march, or rather their flight, was undisturbed by William; King Henry reached his capital in safety, and his Barons and other followers, the mighty armament of all Celtic Gaul, were scattered every man to his own home.

There is something half romantic, half grotesque, about the details of this campaign. Yet the substance of the tale comes from contemporary writers, and the whole story is eminently characteristic of William, and indeed of his people. No people of warriors were ever more ready than the Normans to exchange, whenever need called for the exchange, the skin of the lion for that of the fox. Assuredly neither William the Bastard nor Robert Wiscard was at all lacking in any form of courage; but it was, after all, their craft rather than their courage which set them so high |Illustration of William’s character.| above the rest of the world. It is quite possible that seven years may have abated somewhat of that impetuous energy of early youth with which William spurred across the plain of Val-ès-dunes to smite the rebel of Bayeux |His policy.| with his own hand. He may have learned—perhaps from the teaching of King Henry himself—that it is not always the duty of a general to thrust himself forward wherever danger happens to be keenest. But it is certain that, twelve years later, William was as ready as he had ever been for deeds of the highest personal prowess, whenever personal prowess was the surest way to success. The difference between William and most men of his age was that he had now learned that it was no mark of wisdom or of courage to run risks which might be avoided, or to jeopard his own life and the lives of his followers, when the same object might be gained by easier means. He had, by this time at least, learned to rise above the follies of mere chivalry, above the mere senseless love of giving and taking blows without an object. Nor had he a spark of that impetuous patriotism which led the nobler soul of Harold to deem no shame so great as the shame of leaving a rood of English ground to be harried by the stranger. We may acquit William of all wanton oppression; we may fully believe that the sufferings of his people roused his indignation. But he could stifle that indignation; he could stand calmly by and behold their sufferings, if he thought that he could gain his object better by biding his time and letting the |Vein of pleasantry in the Norman character.| enemy for a while work his wicked will. And, mingled with all this, there is a certain element of grim merriment, a delight in a joke spoken or acted, which runs through the whole career of the Conqueror. It needed a ready wit to send Roger of Toesny, or any other man, to the top of a tree or of a rock to announce in the dead of the night that the French had been cut to pieces at Mortemer. Here again William is only a representative of his people. A touch of pleasantry, however rough, runs through most Norman sayings and doings. We may be sure that the messenger, whoever he was, thoroughly enjoyed his errand and entered into its spirit. And the policy of William in this campaign, whatever we think of it in any other light, had at least, as his policy commonly had, the merit of success. Most princes of his time would have sought eagerly for a pitched battle. Most of the few princes who might have shrunk from a pitched battle would have been unable to form any intelligible military plan of any other kind. William, evidently seconded by men who understood him, knew how to win victories without fighting. His dominions were invaded by two powerful armies at once. He laid his plans; he bode his time. One army was cut to pieces with hardly the loss of a Norman life. The other was hurried out of the land without so much as striking a blow.

King Henry seems by this time to have had enough of Norman warfare for a while. We hear vaguely of hostilities still going on, but there is only one act on either side of which we meet with any distinct mention. This is the fortification by the Duke of a post which was intended to check for the future such incursions as his southern march had just undergone. The time had not yet come for William again to demand that fortress of Tillières of which Henry had so unfairly dispossessed him in the early days of his reign. But he now raised a counter-fortress within his own dominions, which was expressly designed to act as a check on Tillières itself. This was at Breteuil on the Iton, a tributary of the Eure, near the wood of its own name, in the Diocese of Evreux, not far |It is entrusted to William Fitz-Osbern.| from Ralph of Toesny’s castle and abbey of Conches. The castle was built, and was committed to the trusty care of William Fitz-Osbern.

At last the King sought for peace. His main object was to bring about the redemption of the many French captives who were still lingering in Norman prison-houses. The knights were at last set free on paying their ransoms, but their harness remained as the prey of the victors. |William authorized to make conquests at the expense of Anjou.| A more remarkable article of the peace was that by which the King engaged not to interfere with any conquests which William had made, or might make, at the expense of the Count of Anjou. Henry indeed seems to have done more, and to have promised William the regular feudal investiture of any such possible conquests. This agreement seems to amount almost to proof positive that Geoffrey had not had any share in the late invasion of Normandy. It was seemingly as a punishment for his defection that his possessions were now openly offered to the Norman. Before long we shall again find Henry and Geoffrey allied against William, but just at this moment we must look upon King and Duke as once more allies against the Angevin Count.

It was in William’s earlier days of good service to his overlord that he had first carried his arms, and extended his dominion, beyond the range of hills which seems to form the natural southern frontier of Western Normandy. In his first campaign against the Angevin he had added or restored to his Duchy the Cenomannian fortress of |Domfront.| Domfront, a prize which was no unworthy instalment of the nobler and more distant prize in the same region which was, before many years, to fall into his hands. That first campaign, William’s first deed of prowess beyond the bounds of his own Duchy, had made him master of a fortress which men deemed impregnable, and of a district which, as his earliest conquest, he no doubt looked on with special affection. That part of the ancient Cenomannian Diocese and County which surrounds the hill of Domfront has remained to this day an integral portion of the Norman land. The southern bulwark of William’s Duchy was now the proud fortress by the Varenne, the town which, still largely girded by its ancient walls, abides to this day perched on its ancient eyrie, and has not, like so many greater cities, descended into the plain below. The shattered donjon, reared, like that of his own Falaise, on wild and craggy rocks, looks forth on the wilder and heath-crowned rocks of a rival height, whose distorted strata bear witness to the struggles and revolutions of days before man had yet appeared on earth. The fortress won by the terror of his name, once an outpost threatening the Norman border, was now the surest guard of the Norman heights to the north, the most threatening menace to that boundless plain, broken by gentler hills, which stretched away over the disputed land of Maine towards the home of the hostile Angevin. Around the hill lay the thickly wooded land, rich in the silvan sports so dear to William’s heart, the land which the Hammer of Anjou had yielded without a stroke to the youthful lord of Normandy. Lower down the stream stood what was now his furthest outpost, his own creation |Ambrières.| of Ambrières, another donjon on a height, hard by the point where the Varenne joins the greater stream of the Mayenne. The shattered walls of that donjon still bear the impress of William’s age, though the district in which it stands is no longer entitled to the honours of the Norman name.

Domfront then had passed irrevocably into William’s hands, but Ambrières was still, in some way or other, a |Its former occupation by William, [1049];| subject of contention. There seems no doubt that William had occupied and fortified the post in the earlier campaign. Possibly it had been since that time taken and dismantled by Geoffrey; possibly the post was to be made stronger and more extensive, with a view to further conquests in the same direction. At all events, works of some kind at |its present rebuilding or strengthening.| Ambrières, whether works of mere strengthening or of construction from the ground, were just now an object on which William’s mind was eagerly set. His first act after the conclusion of the peace with France, at the very meeting—was it a meeting with the King in person?—at which the peace was signed, was to summon all the chief military tenants of Normandy to appear within forty days to help in carrying on the needful works at Ambrières. A message to the same effect was sent to Count Geoffrey. |William’s challenge to Geoffrey Martel.| The Duke of the Normans would, on the fortieth day, appear at Ambrières with his force and take possession of his fortress. The prospect of so terrible a neighbour struck dread into the heart of the nearest vassal of Anjou, |Geoffrey of Mayenne;| Geoffrey, Lord of Mayenne, a town on the lower course of the river from which it takes its name, and which was, a few years later, to be the scene of one of William’s |his counsel to Geoffrey Martel.| boldest exploits. The Lord of Mayenne poured his forebodings into the ears of his own lord at Angers. If the Normans were allowed to take possession of Ambrières, nothing but ravage and utter destruction would be the fate of the Angevin lands. The heart of Count Geoffrey was lifted up, and he bade his namesake of Mayenne cast him aside as a base and shameful lord, if he allowed the threats of the Norman to be carried |William at Ambrières.| out in act. The appointed day came; the Duke appeared at Ambrières; the works, of whatever nature, were begun. News came that Geoffrey Martel was |Geoffrey’s delay.| on his march. William waited a while, but the enemy came not, and provisions began to fail. Great and small began to complain of the lack of food; and no doubt, in Normandy as well as in England, men were much more ready to fight than to remain under arms without fighting. |William garrisons the castle, and goes away.| The Duke therefore left a garrison in Ambrières, and retired with the remainder of his army, bidding them hold themselves in readiness to assemble again at a moment’s notice. It would have been foolhardiness indeed to have shut himself up without any adequate cause |Geoffrey and his allies come to Ambrières.| within the walls of a border fortress. But, if the Norman historian is to be believed, the Norman Duke’s back was no sooner turned than the Angevin Count and his allies came hastening to the siege of the stronghold of Ambrières. |William of Aquitaine.| With Count Geoffrey came his lord, as he is called—at all events his step-son—Peter, now William, Count of Poitou and Duke of Aquitaine. He came perhaps to avenge the ignominious flight of his brother from Moulins; but with him came another chief in whose heart many an old enmity must have been choked, many a bitter remembrance must have been handed over to forgetfulness, before he could consent to take service in the same host as Geoffrey. |Odo of Britanny.| Yet so it was; a Breton prince, Odo, the uncle of the reigning Count Conan, came to fight under the Angevin banner |They besiege Ambrières.| against the common enemy at Rouen. The three princes attacked the castle of Ambrières with all the resources known to the military art of the time. An attempt at a storm was beaten back by the defenders. The archers shot their arrows, the petraria hurled its stones, the ram was dashed against the wall, but all was in vain. Meanwhile the news of the siege, and of the gallant resistance of the |Return of William.| garrison, was borne to Duke William. He collected his troops with all speed, and hastened, with such haste as he knew how to use when haste was needed, to the relief of |Flight of the besiegers.| Ambrières. At his mere approach, we are told, the three allied Counts took to flight. The Lord of Mayenne was less lucky; he was carried off as a prisoner into the |Homage of Geoffrey of Mayenne.| furthest parts of Normandy, and he was not released till he had acknowledged himself the man of Duke William.

The fame of William was no doubt widely spread by this series of successful exploits and stratagems, and his direct influence was distinctly increased by his receiving the homage of the Count of Ponthieu in one direction and |Extension of his frontier towards Anjou.| of the Lord of Mayenne in another. It would seem also that this was the time when William made, in conformity with the licence granted him by King Henry, a further acquisition of Cenomannian territory at the cost of the Count of Anjou. It was not unimportant to him to extend his power as far as might be in the district through |1049.| which he had, six years before, made his famous night-march from Domfront to Alençon. At a short distance west of Alençon, and south-west of the episcopal town of Seez, the Sarthon, a small tributary of the Sarthe, was the boundary between Normandy and Maine. The Duke now took possession of a point beyond the frontier stream; a castle and town arose, which were entrusted to the care of Roger of Montgomery. It lay in the near neighbourhood of the hereditary possessions of his wife, and from her the new bulwark of Normandy was honoured or disgraced by the name of the Rock of Mabel.

The strength of William’s enemies seems to have been nearly exhausted by their late efforts, or else their courage was chilled by the ill success of their arms. For three years Normandy saw neither rebellion nor foreign war. William thus had time to devote himself either to the prosecution of his vengeance, or to the vindication of ecclesiastical discipline, in the deposition of his uncle the |1055.| Primate Malger. This took place in the same year as the campaign of Ambrières. After that date, besides the Duke’s quarrel and reconciliation with Lanfranc, there is nothing to recount till, three years later, we come to another, and the last, invasion of Normandy by the combined |Last French and Angevin invasion. August, 1058.| forces of France and Anjou. Geoffrey, the old enemy, was, we are told, ever ready to strike a blow at Normandy, and no doubt the memory of his late losses rankled in his mind. Another great expedition was planned and carried out. In August, when the corn was on the ground, the King and the Count entered Normandy in the quarter most convenient for a junction of French and Angevin forces, in William’s own County of Hiesmes. Their design was a systematic plundering expedition through all Normandy west of the Seine. They were to pass through the district of Hiesmes into the land of Bayeux and Caen; then they were to cross the Dive and, after harrying Auge and the district of Lisieux, to return home with their plunder. Above all things, they were to reach the sea in the districts both west and east of the Dive, and to show that the upstart Duke of the Pirates could no |William’s scheme of defence. He waits at Falaise till the enemy reach the Dive.| longer keep his liege lord barred up in an inland prison. The scheme was laid, and one half of it was carried out. William determined not to attack the invaders on their entrance into his Duchy. His plan was to wait for a favourable moment when he might smite them on their return, gorged with the plunder of his subjects, and no doubt with their discipline and their energy not a little relaxed. He gathered his knights, not indeed for immediate action; he gave orders for the strengthening of castles and the cleansing of their fosses; and then, leaving the open country exposed to the ravages of the enemy, he waited in his own stronghold of Falaise for the moment which |Advance and ravages of the French.| he knew would not fail soon to come. The French and Angevin host entered Normandy, and passed through the land burning and plundering in the usual fashion. They took the town of Hiesmes, which gave its name to the County. They then marched on to Saint Peter on the Dive; they occupied the whole town, and the King was lodged at the great Abbey, then in all the freshness of its new foundation by the pious Lescelina of Eu. They then struck westward, ravaging the whole Bessin; but the city itself, as well as the various castles of the district, seems to have remained untouched. The sea-coast especially, the land of William’s faithful Hubert, was harried as far as the mouth of the Seule. The enemy then marched in a |Caen as yet unfortified.| south-easterly direction to Caen. That town was growing in importance, but as yet it neither contained anything which could withstand the attacks of an enemy nor anything which was likely to remain to later days as a memorial of his visit. Caen was as yet undefended by walls or castle; the foundations of the two great Abbeys which are its chief glory were as yet not laid. Whatever Caen then consisted of, it was certainly sacked, most likely burned. King Henry and Count Geoffrey had now successfully carried out one half of their scheme of ravage. They had now to cross the Dive, and to carry fire and sword into the other half of the doomed region.

The moment for which William had so long been waiting had at last come. His policy had been in some sort a cruel policy for his Duchy; but it now enabled him to strike a vigorous and decisive blow at the retreating enemy. French warfare in Normandy was destined to be successful only when the banners of King and Duke floated side by side. King Henry had shared in the triumph of Val-ès-dunes; his men had been smitten by William’s men in the ambush of Saint Aubin and in the surprise of Mortemer; he had now himself to feel the might of William’s own |They reach the Dive at Varaville.| hand in the second surprise of Varaville. In their march eastward the French had reached the village of that name, the point which had been chosen for their passage across the Dive into the land of Auge. Varaville, now, and probably then, only a small village, lies north-east of Caen, a little way from the left bank of the old frontier stream. It was an old battle-ground of France and Normandy. On that spot, or at least in that neighbourhood, it was that King Harold of Denmark and King Lewis of France had met face to face; |945.| it was there that the Karling had found his master in the valiant heathen who came to defend the last planted outpost of his race. And now another King of the French, of another line, of another speech, and another royal city, came to undergo an overthrow yet more ignominious at the hands of a Norman Duke who could now hold his own independently alike of French and of Danish help. Varaville was seemingly an usual point for crossing into the lands on the right bank |Description of the spot.| of the river. The contrast between the two sides of the Dive is here very striking. On the left, the side of Varaville, the land is flat, and it was in those days doubtless a mere marsh. A causeway, which still exists, and which is maintained as a modern road, leads from the village to a point where the stream has for many ages been crossed by a bridge, but which, in the eleventh century, seems to have been known only as a ford. Here the French army was to pass over to the opposite side, the land of Auge. There, within the original settlement of Rolf, the country is of quite a different character. The right bank of the Dive is backed at a short distance by a range of hills of height considerable enough to form a very marked object in any country not strictly mountainous. They form in fact a bold and picturesque range, stretching right away to the seashore. Over these hills the army had to make its way into the rich land of Lisieux. |The French vanguard crosses the river.| The vanguard, under the command of the King, had already begun to climb the heights, when unexpected sounds from the rearward smote on their ears. From the high ground of Bastebourg, commanding a view of the whole valley, King Henry turned round only to behold the |William’s march.| utter discomfiture of his host. The Duke of the Normans had laid his plan with all the subtlety of his wily brain, and he was now carrying it out with all the might of his irresistible arm. He had watched the spot, he had watched the hour, which the enemy seem not to have watched, and he came upon them at the very moment when he was able to strike a deadly blow with most effect, and at the same time once more to avoid the necessity of meeting his lord face to face in battle. William knew every movement of the enemy; when the right time was come, he marched forth from Falaise with such troops as he had kept around him, and summoned all the peasantry of the district to join them. They came, armed as they were able to arm themselves, with clubs, darts, anything; no sort of warrior, no sort of weapon, was unfit to bear a part in the enterprise |Battle of Varaville. August, 1058.| which William now designed. He marched in stealth up the valley by Bavent, and reached Varaville in the very nick of time. The King and his vanguard were, as we have seen, far ahead; the long baggage train, rich with Norman spoil, and the whole rear-guard of the army, were still on the left bank. The tide was flowing in, and it soon became impossible to cross. The French stood in perplexity, one half of the army finding itself utterly cut off from the other half. In a moment Duke William was upon them. Every weapon known to Norman warfare was at once in its fullest activity; the lance and the sword of the knight on his destrier, the club and dart of the peasant on foot, |First mention of the Norman archers.| were all alike plied against the unlucky Frenchmen. And along with these older arms, we now hear for the first time of another weapon, destined to be, above all others, terrible and deadly upon a more awful field. For the first time in our story, the thunder-shower of the Norman arrows is heard of as carrying dismay and slaughter among the ranks of the enemy. And no enemy could well be more helpless than those on whom knights, archers, clubmen, were now called on to display their prowess. Encumbered as they were with their baggage train, huddled together on the long, narrow, neglected causeway, resistance |The French rear-guard cut to pieces.| was almost impossible. A desperate effort carried the foremost among them to the banks of the river; but, except to skilful swimmers, the ford was impassable because of the tide. Multitudes fell into the water and were drowned; the surface of the Dive was soon covered with floating bodies and harness. Others strove to escape how they might among the ditches and paths of the marshy shore. They cast away their weapons, and blundered on hopelessly through the unknown and treacherous country. The Normans, knowing the ground, followed, and cut them down without mercy. Of the whole rear-guard of the French army not a man is said to have escaped. All were slain, or taken captive, or swept away by the waters.

It must not be forgotten that all this went on under the eye of the King of the French—and doubtless of his Angevin ally also—who was looking down from the high ground which the vanguard had already reached. Beneath him in full view lay the plain, the causeway, the stream, the marshes, where the work of death was going on. Like Xerxes, Henry beheld his subjects cut in pieces before his eyes; but unlike Xerxes, he was at least eager to go to their help. The Norman poet tells us how the King saw his men speared and shot down, some struggling in the waters, some bound and borne off as captives. His limbs trembled, his face was hot with rage, he was eager and yet unable to strike a blow or take any step for the rescue of his unfortunate soldiers. In a moment of desperation he proposed to descend the hill, and to seek for some other spot where he might cross the river, and do something at least to avenge, if not to rescue, his rear-guard. But he had men around him who knew the hopelessness of |His retreat.| such an attempt. Their counsels persuaded him to submit to a fate which he could not resist, and to march with all speed out of the Norman land with the half of his army which was still left to him.

The battle, or rather massacre, of Varaville was the last act of the wars between William and Henry. The King was now growing old, and he might well think that he had had enough of Norman warfare. He presently brought himself to ask for peace, and to offer as its price the restoration of the famous fortress of which he had deprived William in his childhood. The terms were accepted; peace was made, and Tillières, so long lost to Normandy, became |Death of Henry. 1060.| once more a bulwark of the Norman frontier. Henry did not long survive this happy ending of this long struggle. Two years afterwards he died. His death was attributed to poison, seemingly accidentally administered. He left his Crown to an heir still under age. The mother of the new |His Russian marriage.| King had been brought from a distant land. Henry saw the difficulty of finding any wife among the princely houses of Western Europe who was not related to him within the forbidden degrees; he was specially warned by the troubles which his father had undergone through his first uncanonical marriage. He therefore sought for a bride in a land among whose princes there was little fear of any kindred or affinity with a King of the French. He married Anne, the daughter of the Russian Duke Yaroslaf. The princes of Russia boasted of a connexion with the Emperors of the East; and the happy ambiguity of the Macedonian name had led the great dynasty which was founded by a Slavonian groom to identify itself with the ancient Kings of Pella and Edessa. The Russian princess brought with her into France the ancient Macedonian name of Philip, and her son became the first of a long line of Kings, princes, and nobles, through whom a name hitherto unknown to Western Europe became one of |Coronation and accession of Philip the First. 1059–60.| the most renowned in French history. In the last year of his father’s lifetime, the young Philip was, according to several precedents, crowned at Rheims, and the ceremony was attended by most of the great vassals of his Kingdom. We do not however hear whether the Duke of the Normans so far honoured his youthful overlord as to make one of the illustrious assemblage. But the ties between Normandy and France were now for a time drawn much more closely than before. Henry had chosen the nearest ally of William as the guardian of his son and as the |Baldwin of Flanders Regent of France.| Regent of his Kingdom. During the minority of the young King, the government of the royal domain was placed in the hands of William’s father-in-law, the “mighty Marquess” of Flanders. Baldwin honourably fulfilled his trust towards France, and we need not say that he kept the peace towards Normandy.

The same year which beheld the death of King Henry beheld also the death of the most inveterate enemy of Normandy among his great vassals. The Angevin chroniclers significantly cut short the Norman warfare of Geoffrey Martel, a sure sign that, however much Norman vanity may have exaggerated in detail, the general result of the struggle cannot have been greatly misrepresented. |Last days and death of Geoffrey Martel. 1060.| Geoffrey’s last days seem to have been clouded over by ill-success in other quarters. He indeed recovered the city of Nantes from Hoel of Britanny. But we also read of his being besieged by his step-son, Peter or William of Poitiers, in the castle of Saumur, on the steep which looks down, not on the Varenne or on the Mayenne, but on the mighty Loire itself. The siege was raised through the sudden death of the Aquitanian prince, and we hear of no further |His dominions divided between his nephews, Geoffrey and Fulk Rechin.| exploit on the part of Geoffrey of the Hammer. On the day before his death he assumed the monastic habit, and, as he left no sons, he divided his dominions between the two sons of his sister Hermengarde, the wife of Alberic, Count of the Gatinois. To his namesake Geoffrey, surnamed the Bearded, he left Anjou and Saintogne, while Fulk Rechin, already known to us as one of our authorities for Angevin history, received the city and county of Tours. Normandy was thus delivered from both her enemies. In her next warfare we shall find her seeking, not merely to defend her borders, but to extend them.

It may be worth notice that the great invasion of Normandy which ended, so disastrously for the French, in the rout of Varaville, happened in the very year in which there is every reason to believe that Earl Harold made his remarkable journey to examine into the political state of Gaul. His inquiries might perhaps lead him to different conclusions, according as his visit happened before or after the utter discomfiture of Henry and Geoffrey. Yet the campaign of Varaville could do little more than add one more to the many proofs that William was a foe whom no |Harold’s possible negotiations.| enemy could afford to neglect. I have already hinted that the mysterious words of Eadward’s Biographer might perhaps be taken as implying that Harold sought the friendship, if not the actual alliance, of the King or of some of his great vassals, as a support in case of any hostile movements on the part of Normandy. If this be so, we may see in the almost contemporary deaths of so many French princes a reason why such negotiations bore |Changes in the aspect of Gaul by the deaths of Geoffrey Martel and King Henry.| no fruit. King Henry, Geoffrey Martel, William of Aquitaine, all died within two years after Harold’s journey. By their deaths the political state of Gaul was altogether changed, and changed in a direction altogether favourable to William of Normandy. William of Aquitaine was the only one of the three who had a successor at all likely to act as a check upon any designs of his Norman namesake. Guy, Geoffrey, or William, whichever we are to call the prince who made so hasty a flight from Moulins, was not likely to cherish much love for William of Normandy, but he seems to have been mainly occupied by wars with Anjou, and by an expedition into Spain, in which last, by some means or other, he was followed by Norman warriors. In any case his solitary help could be of little service. If Harold hoped to meet any attack on England on the part of William by a diversion in his rear in the form of a joint attack of his continental neighbours, the chance of organizing such a confederacy died with King Henry and Geoffrey Martel. Under the Regency of Baldwin the Court of Paris became the closest ally of Normandy, and the new Count of Anjou seems to have been fully occupied at home. We hear of him chiefly as engaged in asserting certain novel claims over the Abbey of Marmoutiers, and as having, at the very crisis of the fate of England, to defend his dominions against his brother Fulk. He was therefore by no means likely to bear a part in any schemes of policy which reached |England’s lack of continental allies.| as far as Britain. The death of the Emperor Henry a few years earlier had deprived England of another friend. She had in short no continental ally left except Swend of Denmark. I merely throw out these remarks as vague hints on a very obscure subject; but it certainly is striking that the intentionally mystified language of the Biographer should admit of an interpretation which falls in so well with the state of things at the particular moment of Harold’s journey.