XIII. THE NEGOTIATIONS OF DUKE WILLIAM.[752]…

XIII. THE NEGOTIATIONS OF DUKE WILLIAM.[752]

January–August, 1066.

[Sidenote: Position of William at the death of Eadward.]

The people of England had made their choice. They had placed the Crown of England upon the head of the foremost man of their own race. Harold, the son of Godwine, the son of Wulfnoth, sat in the kingly seat which had never before received an occupant of other than kingly birth. The news was not slow in reaching the ears of that mighty rival beyond the sea, who had long marked that kingly seat as his own heritage, and who could now complain to the world that his heritage had been torn from him by his own sworn vassal. We cannot doubt that William had long been watching every breeze which could bring tidings from England. The failing health of Eadward was known at Rouen as well as at Westminster,[753] and William was doubtless ready to put in his claim at the first moment that the throne should be actually vacant. Even after the homage done by Harold, even if we enlarge that homage to the full extent which it assumes in the statements of William’s own laureate, the Duke could hardly have looked forward with any confidence to a peaceful succession to the English Crown. He might well doubt how far he had really bound Harold, and, if he had bound Harold, he had at least not bound England. [Sidenote: Effect on his scheme of the sudden election of Harold.] But William was doubtless ready for every occasion, ready, whatever might happen, with a plausible case to set before the world on his own behalf. His claim was not likely to meet with any acknowledgement in England, but it would at least be a gain for him to be able to say that it had been formally put forth at the right moment. And yet the course which events really took was perhaps, after all, still more to the wily Duke’s advantage. The death, the burial, the coronation, followed so fast upon one another that William had no opportunity of pressing his claim till after the choice of England had been irrevocably made. He might now, if he would, call on the reigning King to descend from an usurped throne; he could not call on the English nation to elect himself to a vacant throne. But he gained thereby an advantage of which the writers in his interest have not been slow to make use, the advantage of being able to represent the reigning King as an intruder. He could speak of him as one placed on the throne by some hasty and irregular act, as one reigning in any case in opposition to William’s own earlier right, perhaps even as reigning without the full and free consent of the English people. It is not to be forgotten that one count which Norman partizans bring against England is that the English people failed in gratitude to the deliverer who came to set them free from a tyrannical usurper.[754]

§ 1. The Negotiations between William and Harold.

[Sidenote: The news brought from England to Normandy.]

Events had happened so fast at Westminster, on the eve of the Epiphany and on the festival itself, that the Duke of the Normans heard the whole story in a single message.[755] An English ship carried the news to Normandy; whether it was sent specially by any of William’s friends in England, or whether it went simply in the ordinary course of communication between two friendly countries, we are not distinctly told. But, as a special messenger brought the news to the Duke, we may conceive that some of the strangers whom Harold’s clemency had allowed to remain in the land[756] took the earliest opportunity of sending the news [Sidenote: Reception of the news by William.] to their native sovereign.[757] A graphic description is given of the reception of the news by the Duke.[758] He was in his park of Quevilly near Rouen,[759] with many knights and esquires[760] around him, going forth to the chase. He had in his hand his bow—the bow which, like that of Odysseus, no other man could bend[761]—strung and bent and ready for the arrow. He was in the act of giving it to a page to bear after him, when there came to the gate a messenger, a man-at-arms from England. The new comer went straight to the Duke; he greeted him, he took him aside, and told him the news privily and briefly. “King Eadward has ended his days and Earl Harold is raised to the Kingdom.”[762] The message at least acted as a respite for the destined victims of William’s bow, for the Duke had now other matters than hunting to think about. He turned aside from the craft of the woods; he was as a man in anger; ofttimes he laced and ofttimes he unlaced his mantle; he spake to no man and no man dared to speak to him.[763] He crossed the Seine in a boat; he went to his hall, and entered therein; he sat down on a bench and turned from one side to another. His head rested against a pillar,[764] and his face was covered with his mantle. Long time he thus sat in thought, no man daring to speak to him, though many asked one another what ailed him. [Sidenote: Dialogue between the Duke and William Fitz-Osbern.] At last one drew near whom long and intimate friendship allowed to deal more freely with his sovereign. The famous Seneschal, William Fitz-Osbern,[765] of whom we have so often heard, now rode back from the park and entered the hall, humming a tune[766] as he walked. He passed straight by the Duke, and many asked him what the news was which so ailed their sovereign. The Duke, hearing what passed between the Seneschal and the others, looked up. William Fitz-Osbern then told him that it was in vain for him to try to hide the news which he had heard, for that it was already blazed abroad through all the streets of Rouen. Every man in the city knew that Eadward was dead, and that Harold held the Kingdom of England. The Duke answered that that news was indeed the thing which grieved him. No news could grieve him more; he sorrowed alike for the death of Eadward and for the wrong done to him by Harold. Was he simply proving his friend? or were even his stout heart and wily brain cowed and perplexed for a moment by the suddenness of the tidings? At all events it is in the mouth of William Fitz-Osbern—the bold of heart[767]—that the first exhortation to action is placed in our story. He bids the Duke not mourn, but arise and be doing. Let him begin, let him carry through what he begins; let him, in a word, cross the sea and wrest the Kingdom from the usurper.

[Sidenote: William’s Embassy to Harold.]

The result of William’s deliberations with this trusty counsellor was the sending of an embassy to the King [Sidenote: Contradictory accounts of the nature of William’s message.] of the English. The nature of the message is as diversely told as the rest of the story of which it forms the sequel. Again the contemporary English writers are silent; they make no mention of Norman affairs till later in the year, till the very eve of the Norman invasion. And of the other writers, each naturally throws the message into such a shape as suits his own version of that oath of which the message was necessarily the counterpart. Whatever Harold had sworn, whatever it suited William to give out that Harold had sworn, that of course William now called on Harold to perform. But that demand ranges in different versions from a summons to Harold to resign his Kingdom to a simple summons to marry William’s daughter.[768] We hear of more messages than one, and in one account the tone of the second message is wonderfully lowered from the tone of the first. If Harold will not resign the Kingdom, nor give up the castle of Dover, nor do any of the other things which he has promised, let him at least marry the Duke’s daughter. If he declines to do even that, the Duke will certainly come against him in arms to support his rights. The date of the embassy, and the place of its reception by Harold, are as uncertain as the exact nature of the message or of the oath. It was a matter on which William was not likely to delay, and the number of events and negotiations which were crowded into a few months [Sidenote: Date of the Embassy uncertain.] show that he did not delay. But our only statement as to time is the assertion of a very untrustworthy writer that the message was either sent or received on the tenth day [Sidenote: [January 15, 1066?]] after Eadward’s death.[769] One would like on many grounds to know whether it was received before or after Harold had set forth on his mission to win the hearts of the malecontents of Northumberland. One would like to know whether Harold received the message of William when surrounded by his own West-Saxons, or whether it reached him, as an earlier embassy from Gaul had reached Glorious Æthelstan,[770] while he was engaged in arranging the affairs of the most distant and most troublesome portion of his [Sidenote: Possible bearing of the message on the discontents of Northumberland.] Kingdom. The point is interesting, as it is just possible that the Northumbrian opposition to Harold may have been in some degree connected with the challenge brought to him from Normandy. The succession of William was indeed not likely to be looked on with a whit more of favour in Northumberland than it was looked on in Wessex. But crafty spirits were at work, who might easily turn the claims of the Norman to their own ends. Such, it might be argued, were the results of the hasty election of Harold; such were the results of binding the free sons of the North by the voices of Wessex and East-Anglia. It would be better for the North again to choose its own King, a King who had never become the man of the stranger, a King whose right could not be challenged by any rival beyond the sea. Such arguments as these seem quite in character with the position of parties at the time, but we can neither affirm nor deny that they were actually used. The exact time of Harold’s northern journey, the exact time, place, and substance of the message which Harold received from the Norman Duke, are among those details of our story which must remain unknown to us.

[Sidenote: Object of William in the negotiation; the embassy intended to be fruitless.]

Whatever was the exact purport of the embassy, there can be no doubt as to its object. It was sent simply in order that William might add another count to his indictment against the English King. It was sent in order that William might be able to say, not only that Harold had neglected to perform his engagements, whatever they were, but that he had formally refused to perform them when formally called upon. Whatever William demanded, we may be sure that he demanded it only in the expectation, and even in the hope, that Harold would refuse it. He could not seriously expect that Harold would, at his bidding, either come down from his throne or consent to hold his Crown in vassalage. William knew the temper both of England and of her King a great deal too well for this. Even the summons to marry William’s daughter could hardly have been seriously meant; if Harold were already married, it could only have been sent in mockery.[771] At all events, the one object of the embassy was to put Harold, according to William’s view of the case, still further in the wrong. Its object was to supply William with fresh topics for argument and for rhetoric in the appeal which he was about to make to Normandy, to Gaul, and to Christendom.

[Sidenote: Different forms given to Harold’s answer.]

The answer of Harold to the message is of course differently conceived, according as the message is differently conceived. The answer depends on the message, just as the message depends on the oath. But all accounts agree [Sidenote: His answer in any case a distinct refusal.] in describing the answer as a complete refusal. Whatever William summoned Harold to do, Harold refused to do it. And, according to some versions, if mockery was intended by the Norman, it was answered with mockery in return. The English King is called upon to fulfil his promise of giving his sister in marriage to a Norman noble. Harold answers that his sister is dead, and he asks whether the Duke wishes her corpse to be sent to him for the purpose.[772] When called on himself to marry the Duke’s daughter, he answers, according to one version, that the daughter whom he promised [Sidenote: Constitutional language attributed to Harold. He cannot marry a foreign wife without the consent of the Witan.] to marry is already dead.[773] According to another account, he takes a high constitutional ground. A King of the English cannot marry a foreign wife without the consent of the Witan of England. Such an act could not be done without doing great damage to his Kingdom.[774] This answer, whether ever really made or not, is not likely to point to any formal enactment on the subject of royal [Sidenote: English feeling with regard to foreign marriages.] marriages. But it expresses the universal feeling of the nation that none but Englishwomen were fit to be wives and mothers of English Kings. England had seen one Norman Lady, and one King who was Norman on his mother’s side. There was no wish among the English people to see such another Lady or such another King. The marriage of Emma, and the Norman connexion which followed it, had well nigh been the undoing of England. That they had not been wholly her undoing was due to the reigning King and his father. Their dynasty at least, the Kings of the House of Godwine, should be for ever kept free from all foreign elements. Harold’s own Danish mother, the kinswoman or ally of the great Cnut, could hardly be looked on as a stranger. Tostig and his foreign wife were in banishment, and England had no wish for their return. The whole nation was no doubt fully purposed that the next brood of Æthelings whom England saw should be no half-caste offspring of Norman or even of German or Flemish mothers, but Englishmen of purely English blood. Against such a feeling as this Harold, even if he had wished, could not have dared to struggle. The answer put into his mouth, whether historically genuine or not, well expresses uncorrupted English feeling on this important point. It well expresses too the necessity under which a King of the English lay, not only to obey the written Law, but to consult in all things the wishes and feelings of the English people.

[Sidenote: Argument attributed to Harold as to the validity of his oath.]

Another form of the answer put into Harold’s mouth breathes an equally sound and constitutional spirit. William demands the Kingdom of England, which Harold, he alleges, had sworn to make over to him. The English King [Sidenote: The oath null without the consent of the Witan.] answers that such an oath was in itself void; to break it were a less evil than to keep it. The oath was one by which Harold bound himself to transfer to Duke William an heritage which was neither Harold’s nor William’s, but which only the voice of the English people could bestow on any man.[775] The oath or vow which a maiden in her father’s house made without her parents’ knowledge was void by the laws of God and man.[776] Much more then was the oath void which he, when still a subject, without the knowledge of King or people, had sworn under the pressure of a momentary constraint, on a matter touching the whole realm.[777] It was not reasonable to ask him to give up a Crown which had been placed on his head by the common voice of his countrymen, and of which their voice alone could lawfully deprive him.[778] Such is the doctrine which is put into Harold’s mouth by a writer whose divided [Sidenote: Constitutional importance of the answer.] sympathies lean decidedly to the Norman side. It is a doctrine most wholesome and necessary for a constitutional King, a doctrine which the historian himself allows to be true or at least highly plausible.[779] Valuable, if it be a genuine record of what Harold said, this speech becomes almost more valuable if we look on it as the speech which a writer a generation later deemed most in keeping with Harold’s character and position. The argument, for its own purpose, as an answer to William, is perfect. The accession of Harold was not the act of Harold only; it was equally the act of the English people. However guilty Harold might be towards William, the English people were free from all guilt towards William and towards all mankind. And, whatever might be the guilt of Harold, it was a guilt which, as his own argument assumes, lay wholly in taking the oath, not at all in breaking it.

[Sidenote: The Embassy fruitless in form, but William’s real point gained.]

The errand then of the Norman ambassadors was a bootless one. No doubt it was the intention of him who sent them that it should be bootless. Whatever were their demands, whether they came once only or oftener, whether they raised their demands or lowered them, whether they dealt in persuasion only or in threats as well as persuasion,[780] Harold, evidently speaking the voice of the English people, refused all that was demanded of him. No other course indeed was possible. The point hardly needs to be argued. Harold could not, without the consent of the Witan, either resign the Crown to William or hold it of him in vassalage. And the consent of the Witan would certainly not have been given for any such purpose. The whole question in short was frivolous. The dispute had reached a stage which was past negotiation, and Harold and William alike knew that all negotiation was vain. What William gained by his embassy was again to entangle Harold in the meshes of his subtle craft. Harold could only refuse every demand of William; but Harold’s refusal of William’s demands made another point on William’s side, of which he was not slow to take advantage.

§ 2. Claims and Arguments of William.

[Sidenote: William’s only hope lay in war.]

William had now no chance—in truth there had never been a time when he really had a chance—of winning the English Crown except by the sword. But, before he made that last appeal, he had many minds to work upon and to win over to his cause. An enterprise such as he designed was one such as no Norman Duke had ever before attempted. It was one which might seem altogether beyond the power of Normandy to achieve. William’s own father had indeed [Sidenote: 1028–1035.] contemplated an English war, and he had actually gathered together a fleet for the invasion of England.[781] But the enterprise of Robert was undertaken to restore the banished heir of England, driven from his native realm by a foreign invader. Such at least was the colour which Robert would put upon his schemes, and in carrying out such schemes he doubtless reckoned on a certain measure of English support. It was not really likely that Englishmen would have joined a Norman army to drive out Cnut in favour of the sons of Æthelred. But dreams of this kind are ever the food of exiles,[782] and of princes who take up the cause of exiles. But in William’s case there was [Sidenote: No English party in favor of William.] no room for any delusions of this kind. William had no rights but his own to assert, and those rights, he must have known very well, were not acknowledged by a single native partizan. He might gain somewhat by sowing dissensions within the island, by abetting any schemes on the part of Eadgar or Tostig or the sons of Ælfgar. But his only gain in this way would be the gain of dividing and weakening England. Any English party which was dissatisfied with the election of Harold would assert the claims, not of William but of some English competitor. For direct [Sidenote: Difficulties of his enterprise.] help in England William could look only to the Norman settlers whom Harold had allowed to remain in the country. He had, in short, to win the English Crown, if he won it at all, by no means but that of open war. And he had to wage his warfare at a time when England was ruled by a King who was his own peer in the art of war, when the land was defended by an army in the highest state of efficiency, an army which had never known defeat, and which was flushed with the remembrance of hard-won victories. William had in short to make good his rights in the absence of the least hope of native help, and withal in the teeth of King Harold and his Housecarls.

[Sidenote: Comparison of the Norman exploits in Apulia.]

Such an enterprise as this might well seem to be beyond the powers of a Duke of the Normans and of his Duchy. The successes of the Normans in Apulia might indeed make it seem as if no enterprise could be impossible to Norman valour. If private adventurers could thus carve out principalities for themselves, what conquests might not be made by the Duke himself at the head of the whole force of the Duchy? And no doubt the example of the conquests made by his countrymen in the South of Europe was ever present to the mind of William in planning his [Sidenote: Differences between the two cases.] great undertaking in the North. But the mere fact that the warfare was in the one case waged in the South and in the other in the North, was an important element of difference between the Apulian and the English enterprise. The actors indeed in the one case were private adventurers, while in the other it would be a sovereign at the head of his subjects and vassals. Duke William could no doubt command a far greater force than the sons of Tancred of Hauteville, but then he was also obliged to [Sidenote: Greater difficulty of the English enterprise.] wage a wholly different kind of warfare. The Duke of the Normans could not afford to sit down in some corner of England, and to win his way step by step, ever and anon gaining this or that skirmish or taking this or that castle. And again, without joining in any ignorant depreciation of Byzantine military prowess, we may doubt whether the sons of Tancred had ever joined battle with enemies who could be at all compared with the enemies with whom Duke William would have to join battle in England. If they had ever met with really equal foes, it was when they [Sidenote: 1053.] encountered Pope Leo’s German auxiliaries,[783] and, by that time, they had risen somewhat above the condition of private adventurers. They had waged a desultory warfare against a town here and a castle there, towns and castles defended for the most part by the mercenaries of a distant Emperor. They had never faced, what William would have to face in England, a native King at the head at once of an armed nation and of a native standing army. [Sidenote: William’s daring the highest prudence.] All ordinary prudence would naturally shrink from such a risk. It is only minds like that of William which can rise above all ordinary prudence, which know their own power as none but themselves can know it, which feel instinctively that undertakings which would be madness in [Sidenote: Necessity of winning public favour for his enterprise.] others are in their hands certain of success. But William himself could not hope for success, unless he could win over others far and near to look with favour upon his schemes, and unless he could inspire them with that confidence in themselves and in their leader without which [Sidenote: First in his own Duchy.] such an undertaking would be simply hopeless. He had first to deal with the chiefs and people of his own Duchy. Without their consent, without their thorough good-will, he could do nothing. To cross the sea to conquer England was quite another matter from putting down Norman rebels, from driving out French and Angevin invaders, or even from annexing neighbouring towns and provinces, like Domfront and Le Mans. William’s men were bound by their feudal tenure to follow his standard on the field of Val-ès-dunes and beneath the walls of Alençon. But it might well be doubted whether their feudal tenure bound them to follow his standard beyond the sea in an enterprise in which Normandy had no interest. At all events they were not likely to muster with the like zeal for the more hazardous undertaking. The Cenomannian war had been a war of aggression no less than the English war would be, and the spoils of conquered England would doubtless be far richer than the spoils of conquered Maine. But men would not be so ready to trust themselves in hope of spoil in the unknown land beyond the sea as they were to go on a foray in an adjoining province, from which it was an easy matter to make their way back to their [Sidenote: The Normans to be persuaded, not compelled, to the undertaking.] own homes. To attempt, by any mere stretches of the ducal authority, to carry men across the seas to win crowns for William’s own personal behoof would have been simply hopeless. William knew better than to risk his popularity and his authority by any attempt of the kind. His object was to carry the feelings of his people with him, and to conquer England by the swords of Norman volunteers.

[Sidenote: Various feelings to which William appealed.]

But the feeling to which William was about to appeal was something more than the mere desire of spoil, or even than the higher sentiment of feudal loyalty. Nor did he design to make his appeal to his own Normandy only. It suited William’s purpose and disposition to give his enterprise a [Sidenote: Religious character of the age; specially religious character of William.] far higher character and a far wider range. The age was a religious age; Normandy was an eminently religious country; William professed, and in many respects honestly practised, a devotion to religion beyond that of other men. It is not without real propriety that the panegyrist of William stops at this stage of his narrative to tell us of the flourishing state of Normandy and the Norman Church under a prince equally valiant, just, and devout. William laboured to preserve the peace of his Duchy by keeping down all its disturbers with the strong hand; the Truce of God was nowhere so strictly kept as in the Norman land.[784] William in his own person heard and judged the cause of the poor, the fatherless, and the widow; his justice kept back his courtiers and favourites from deeds of wrong; in his days the mighty man durst not remove the landmark of his poorer neighbour.[785] An orthodox believer, a diligent student of scripture, a devout worshipper and communicant,[786] a father careful for the education of his children,[787] William from his youth up, layman and prince as he was, set a model to priests and prelates. He chose the good among them for his friends and counsellors, and he visited the unjust and neglectful with his severest displeasure. A zealous reformer, he constantly attended in person at ecclesiastical synods,[788] and he kept a watchful eye over the administration of the episcopal and archidiaconal courts.[789] Under his government churches rose, monasteries were restored to the purity of their rule, Abbots, Bishops, all ranks of the clergy, became models [Sidenote: Influence of Lanfranc on William’s counsels.] of the due discharge of their several duties. Nor is it without reason that, immediately on this panegyric, our author adds his first mention of the great man whom William had now chosen as his special counsellor in all matters touching the Church and religion. The Prior of Bec, the renowned Lanfranc, was now, not indeed in rank but in influence, the first man in the Norman Church.[790] And it is impossible not to trace the hand of Lanfranc in the course which William now followed. The minds of the Duke and the Prior, exercised as they had been in such different pursuits, had still much in common. In both we see the same wide grasp, the same subtlety, the same daring. In many things Lanfranc would be the teacher, but he would ever find in William a pupil worthy of his teaching. The cosmopolitan traveller, who had migrated from Pavia to Bec—the scholar who had turned from the study of the laws of Cæsar[791] to the study of the laws of God—the theologian who had refuted the heretic face to face—the diplomatist who had won the consent of the [Sidenote: The religious character of the enterprise] Roman Court to his sovereign’s marriage—he it was, we cannot doubt, who put into William’s hands the surest weapon for his conquest. He it was who taught him to [Sidenote: probably due to Lanfranc.] lay his claim, not only before Normandy, but before all Christendom, and to cloke a wrongful aggression under the guise of a Holy War. He it was who taught him to gather round his standard crusaders from well nigh every Western land, and in the end to set foot on English ground, not as an adventurer avenging his private quarrel, but as the champion of the Church, marching forth with the approval and the blessing of the temporal and the spiritual chiefs of Christendom.

[Sidenote: Nature of William’s claim to the English Crown.]

Let us then see what was the case against Harold and against England which William thus brought to be judged, as we may say, by the public conscience of Europe. The pleading of William and his advocates, not only in his own Norman Parliament, but at the bar of the Pope, the Emperor, and the whole world, is one of the most memorable instances of human subtlety. It was a wonderful example of the way in which wily men, men like William and Lanfranc, can persuade others, and most likely persuade [Sidenote: No valid claim, either by hereditary right, by bequest, or by election.] themselves also, that the worse cause is the better. I have more than once incidentally shown that William had no valid claim of any kind to the English Crown. He had no claim by hereditary right; for the Crown of England was not hereditary, and, if it had been hereditary, no conceivable theory of succession could make William the heir. He had no claim by bequest; for a King of the English could not bequeath his Kingdom like a private estate, and such power of recommendation as the King did possess had been exercised in favour of another. He had no claim by election; for the people of England, in full Gemót assembled, had chosen another as their [Sidenote: Harold’s oath irrelevant to the question.] King. He had indeed suffered a wrong, whatever was its nature and degree, at the hands of the King whom England had chosen. Harold had sworn to do something, and he had not done what he had sworn to do. That was literally all, and, as a claim on the Crown of England, it was nothing. If Harold were to resign the Crown, if Harold were killed in battle or in single combat, William would not thereby gain any right to the Crown which he had not before. Harold had no power, any more than Eadward had, to make over the Crown to another; his resignation or death would simply create a vacancy, which the people of England might fill as they would. The utmost that could be said on William’s side was that Harold’s injury gave William a casus belli, and that a victory over Harold would give William, by right of conquest, all that Harold possessed, the English Crown included. But so odious a straining of the Law of Nations was too clearly unjust for William to venture publicly upon [Sidenote: The right of conquest not put forward. William’s appeal to public opinion a mark of advancing civilization,] it. The right of conquest was a right which he took care never to put prominently forward. He always claimed as a lawful heir defrauded of a lawful possession. And it marks a stage in the growth of European civilization, when William saw that his cause would be strengthened by making his claim, formally and solemnly, in the eyes of all men. The age of mere brute force was clearly past, when a prince claiming a foreign Crown took such infinite pains to win the public opinion of Europe, when he employed so many pens and so many voices on his side. Unjust and delusive as were his claims, it marks a great step in human progress that any man’s claims should be put forward in so solemn a way. It was a distinct [Sidenote: and of the growing power of the Papacy.] tribute to the power of law and right and opinion. But it was a tribute no less distinct to the growing power of the Papacy. The Bishop of Rome was invited, if not to dispose of the Crown of England, at least to determine who was its lawful possessor. Herein, if Lanfranc the Churchman triumphed, William the statesman undoubtedly erred. He did not indeed err as regarded his own personal interests. No crown that William held or won could ever be at the disposal of any other mortal. But he erred as regarded the common interest of Kings and [Sidenote: Effect of William’s application to Rome.] of all independent governments. He invited the alliance and interference of a power which he himself knew how to manage, but which proved too strong for smaller men. The blast of the Roman trumpet which declared Harold a perjured usurper, and William the lawful heir of England, was but the forerunner of a still mightier blast which pealed forth ten years later. The power which William now invoked to bless and hallow the schemes of his ambition learned, from the precedent set by William himself, to venture on that crowning act of daring which declared [Sidenote: 1076.] how King Henry, the son of Henry the Emperor, stood deprived of the Crowns of Italy and of the Teutonic Kingdom.[792]

[Sidenote: Fair colouring put by William and Lanfranc on a bad cause.]

The case then which William laid before Normandy, before Rome, and before all Western Christendom, was, in itself, a pretence utterly weak and fallacious. He claimed a crown which the solemn act of those who alone could dispose of it had, freely and lawfully, given to another. But the craft of William—we must doubtless add, the craft of his monastic ally—knew well how to put a fair colouring on their cause. The Law of England utterly rejected William’s claim; but the Law of England was likely to be known to few beyond the bounds of the island realm. Worthless as were William’s claims, they had a side which to many minds would be more attractive than that great principle of English Law that no man could reign in England save by the will of the English [Sidenote: Mixture of various irrelevant considerations.] people. It was easy to put William’s claims into a taking and rhetorical shape; it was easy to mix them up with a whole crowd of considerations, which had no real bearing on the case, but which were admirably fitted to enlist the sympathies of different classes of men. It was easy, by skilful management, to insist now on one point, now on another, with little care as to their logical consistency, provided one point gained one class of supporters and another point gained another.[793] In a large part of Europe, wherever the ideas of feudalism and chivalry had taken firm hold, the doctrine that the people alone had a right to choose their prince was fast passing [Sidenote: The hereditary principle was gaining strength on the Continent.] out of memory. The doctrine of hereditary right was daily spreading. It was daily taking firmer and firmer root, with regard both to the Crown of France and to the great fiefs which were held of that Crown. The doctrine that the King never dies had indeed not yet arisen; but the Parisian Kings had learned how to avoid the inconveniences of the interregnum and election by having their sons crowned in their own life-time.[794] That the Empire was other than elective no man had dared to affirm; no man then, or seven hundred years later, would have ventured to deny that the highest place on earth was in theory open to every baptized man. But the moment with which we are dealing was precisely the moment when the Empire was showing the strongest tendency to become practically hereditary. In the Teutonic Kingdom, no less than in Latin France,[795] the reigning King was at this moment a boy crowned as his father’s successor while his father still lived.[796] The great fiefs of both crowns were fast changing, from great magistracies like English Earldoms, into hereditary principalities. In France indeed they had passed the stage of change; they had been for some time, to all intents and purposes, sovereignties which passed as a matter of course to the heir of the last possessor. Kingdoms, Duchies, Counties, were now looked upon as, wherever strict feudal notions prevail, they cannot fail to be looked upon, as possessions in which the princes invested with them had a personal [Sidenote: Different position of England from other countries.] right. In England, almost alone, an Earldom still kept its character as a great office, for the good administration of which the magistrate entrusted with it was answerable to the power which appointed him, the King and the general Assembly of the Nation. In short, the political constitution, once common to every Teutonic people, still flourished in England, while it had greatly decayed in Germany and [Sidenote: Harold’s claim strange in continental eyes.] had quite died out in France. It follows that, to most continental hearers, the claim of Harold, a man not of kingly blood, to reign solely by the will of the people would already sound something strange and unnatural. The claim of William, a prince, would, simply because he was a prince, be looked on with more favourable eyes. A reigning prince, a kinsman of the late King, would seem far better fitted to reign than a mere subject, possibly the grandson of a churl.[797] Nor would the repugnance of the English to a King not of their own blood and speech be thoroughly intelligible on the Continent. England had never, except under constraint, chosen a foreign King, and Cnut the Dane was, after all, hardly a foreigner in the eyes of half the Kingdom. But on the Continent, at any rate among the nations of the various Romance tongues, princes had freely passed from one kingdom to another, as they could win them by conquest or by inheritance. Hugh of Provence had reigned in Italy;[798] Odo of Chartres had sought, not without a fair chance of success, for a kingdom in Burgundy;[799] and, the greatest instance of all, the Crowns of Burgundy and Italy, the Imperial Crown of Rome itself, were now, by the public Law of Europe, held to pass of right to the King of the Teutonic Kingdom. For the Duke of the Normans to grow into the King of the English would therefore seem a change far less strange in [Sidenote: No fixed law of succession anywhere.] continental than it seemed in insular eyes. And again, it was for William’s advantage that, though the doctrine of hereditary right was fast growing, the laws of hereditary succession had not yet been strictly fixed in any country. No one doubted that a son ought to succeed to his father, but it was by no means clear who ought to succeed to a prince who left no son. In fact this point has not to this day been settled by the common consent of Europe; it has followed in each kingdom the local law of that kingdom, and, I need not say, it is a point on which the Law of France and the Law of England have differed for ages. In truth it was only in an age when the law of hereditary succession was still very unsettled, that William the Bastard could have succeeded to anything, [Sidenote: No hereditary right in William.] whether in Normandy or in England. With regard to England, his claims would be at once set aside by a modern lawyer. He and Eadward had indeed a common ancestor in Richard the Fearless, but Richard the Fearless never was sovereign of England, nor was he in any line of succession which could have made him, under any circumstances, sovereign of England. Such a common ancestry [Sidenote: Doctrine of nearness of kin.] could give William no claim on the English Crown. But, till the law is very distinctly settled, the notion of nearness of kin is really more intelligible, and awakens more of sympathy, than the technical doctrine of representation. [Sidenote: Mixed nature of William’s claim.] William could therefore easily work on men’s minds by enlarging on his nearness of kin to Eadward, especially when that claim was mingled up with the claim founded on the alleged bequest of Eadward.[800] He could talk of the kindred by blood between himself and the English King; he could talk of their mutual affection and mutual good offices; he could tell of the promise of the succession made to him by his childless cousin. All this could easily be wrought up into a claim which, in the eyes of men ignorant of the Law of England and knowing no very strict law of succession of their own, might easily seem stronger than the claims of Harold, which rested solely on the election of the English people. As for Eadgar, nearer of kin to Eadward than William was, and born withal of the true kingly stock of England, it best suited William’s purpose to say nothing about him. Out of England his existence was most likely hardly known. Nay, in the unsettled state of men’s minds, William might, if the objection was ever started, argue that Eadward might rightly pass by an incompetent minor, and bequeath his Crown to a kinsman almost as near in blood and so much better fitted to rule.[801]

[Sidenote: William’s claim adapted to]

We thus see that William’s claim to the Crown, a claim artfully made up of bequest and hereditary right, was one [Sidenote: continental opinion at the time.] by no means ill suited to commend itself to many minds at the time. But it was not merely his claim as heir or legatee of Eadward that William now put forth to the world. There never was a more memorable example of the way in which one utterly fallacious argument can sometimes be made to bolster up another argument equally [Sidenote: The wrong done by Harold mixed up with William’s original claim.] fallacious. With William’s supposed original right by kindred or bequest the wrong done to him by Harold was cunningly mixed up. I have already argued that that wrong, whatever was its nature, could not really give William any right which he did not possess already. [Sidenote: Ingenuity and fallaciousness of this argument.] Neither Harold’s oath nor Harold’s breaking of his oath could, in law or morals, make William’s claim to the Crown one jot better or worse. But no tale could be better fitted further to inflame the minds of those who were already disposed to look on the Norman Duke as an injured man. It would indeed be a spirit-stirring tale in which William, and those who pleaded in William’s name, would set forth the wrong-doings of the faithless Englishman. [Sidenote: Aspect of the tale as told by William.] Harold, the sworn man of William, had turned against his lord; he had trodden under foot every duty of a vassal; rescued from the dungeon of Beaurain by William’s bounty, honoured with William’s personal friendship, admitted to the ranks of Norman chivalry by William’s hand, bound to William and his house by the promise of a daughter of Normandy to his wife—he had despised so many and so great favours; he had lifted up his heel against his lord and benefactor; the Kingdom which he had sworn to make over to William he had traitorously seized as his own; he had added, it might be, to his crime the further guilt of abusing the confidence of his own dying sovereign, and of wringing from him in his last moments an unwilling assent to the usurpation which he plotted. This was the light in which the tale of the election of Harold, a tale which seems so glorious in English eyes, would look in the eyes of those before whom William pleaded, of those on whom he called on to help him to assert his right and to chastise the wrong-doer. [Sidenote: Appeal to religious feelings.] Nor was this all; William had that to add which would speak at once to the deep religious feelings of his age and [Sidenote: Harold’s perjury no ordinary breach of feudal obligation, but a direct insult to the Norman Saints.] people. This was no common case of a vassal forgetting his duty to his lord. Who in that age could boast that he had always faithfully discharged all the duties arising out of the intricate, and often contradictory, relations of feudalism? On such mere backslidings as these William had never been unduly harsh. He had over and over again forgiven the men who had rebelled against him, and in the moment of victory he had ever kept his hands clean from bloodshed. But here was a wrong which he never could forgive, because a higher duty called on him to avenge it. He might pass by wrongs done against himself; but he would be himself a partaker in the guilt, if he passed by the wrongs done against a mightier power. Normandy had this time been wronged, not only in the person of her mortal sovereign but in the persons of her immortal guardians. Harold had done despite to all the saints of the Norman land; he had arrayed against him the wrath of every patron of every holy place from the stream of Eu to the Mount of the Archangel. The powers of Heaven were ready to fight against their blasphemer, and to bless the arms of him who stood forth as their earthly [Sidenote: The Crusades forestalled in William’s expedition.] avenger. Forestalling the enthusiasm with which, thirty years later, men pressed to wipe out their sins by a Crusade against the Infidel, William now called on all who would to win the favour of Heaven by going forth with him to avenge the insult offered to the saints of Normandy. William, in self-delusion, let us hope, rather than in conscious hypocrisy, called on all who would to aid him in the attack on an independent nation which he cloked under the name of a Holy War.

[Sidenote: General character of William’s case.]

Such was in truth the claim by virtue of which William threw down his challenge to England and to the King whom England had chosen. In the eye either of logic or of sound morals, his fabric was but as a house of cards; each fallacy rested on another fallacy as weak as itself, and when one frail support gave way, the fall of the whole must follow. But men are in general but little under the rule either of logic or of morals; they are apt to be guided by impulse rather than by judgement; they find it much less fatiguing to echo some easily repeated formula than to go into the facts or the reason of anything. A case then like William’s, artfully put together, and in which each fallacy fitted ingeniously into another, really told with more effect than the few plain facts which formed the defence of Harold and of England. Instead of being a house of cards, William’s fabric of fallacies, each resting on the other, did, as a matter of practical policy, win for itself the strength of the firmest arch. [Sidenote: Various incentives appealed unto.] And artfully mixed up with his formal claims were incentives of all kinds, adapted to the character and passions of the various kinds of men with whom he had to deal. [Sidenote: The plunder of England promised.] To all, of whatever nation, who would flock to his standard he offered a share in the spoils of England. He would lead them to a land abounding in all manner of good things, a land fruitful in meat and drink and rich in gold and silver.[802] The wealth of that goodly land should be the guerdon of all who had a share in its conquest. In that spirit of confident boasting which, in men like him, is often the highest wisdom, he promised beforehand all that was Harold’s, while Harold, he said, had not strength of mind to promise a single thing that was his.[803] William here lighted on the true difference between his own position and that of his rival. Harold, content with his own, planning no aggression against William or against any other man, was not likely to promise rewards in Normandy to his Thegns or his Housecarls. And, with his own people, William could appeal to feelings which were at least [Sidenote: Appeal to Norman patriotism.] higher than the mere love of plunder. It was possible to appeal to a certain vein of Norman patriotism, and to represent, not only the English King, but the English [Sidenote: Norman grudges against England.] nation, as laden with a heavy weight of offences against the Norman Duchy. The English invasion in Æthelred’s time[804] was perhaps forgotten—some critics may perhaps say that it never happened—at any rate it does not seem to have been prominently put forward. But William took care to announce himself as the true successor of his father in the expedition which his father undertook against England to support the rights of his cousins, [Sidenote: The murder of Ælfred.] the banished Æthelings.[805] He, the chosen heir of Eadward, went forth, among other high and righteous purposes, to avenge the blood of Ælfred, shed by the father of the reigning King, who was himself—so it was given out—art and part in his father’s deed.[806] The blood of a prince, partly Norman by birth, and endeared to Normandy by long residence in childhood and youth, might well call for vengeance at the hands of loyal Normans. [Sidenote: Expulsion of the Normans in 1052.] Then there was the wrong done, fourteen years back, to so many Normans, friends and guests of the late venerated King. Norman Knights and Prelates had had to flee for their lives before a lawless crowd of English rebels, hounded on against their own sovereign by the traitor Harold and [Sidenote: Special case of Archbishop Robert.] his traitor father. Chief among the victims was one whose wrongs, wrongs done against the Church and all godliness, were but the fit forerunners of the fouler wrong which had since been done directly against the saints in glory. The blasphemer of the Norman saints had been the despoiler of the Norman Primate. Robert of Jumièges, driven from the throne of Augustine, had come back to spend the remnant of his days in his own land, and to lay his bones beneath the slender towers and massive arches of the mighty minster which he himself had reared.[807] That the murder of Ælfred was a crime in which Harold could have had no share, that the flight of Robert was his own act, that his deprivation was a righteous process of English Law, that, even had Harold been the murderer of Ælfred and the unrighteous despoiler of Robert, neither count could in any way strengthen William’s claim to the English Crown—all these were points on which few minds in Normandy were likely to dwell. All these irrelevant matters could easily be made use of to stir up the mind of Normandy against Harold and against England. And, if this was done, no matter how logically weak were the arguments by which it was done, the aim of William was gained.

[Sidenote: General appeal against England.]

But William, in the course of this great argument, showed himself emphatically all things to all men. There were other minds than those of his own Normans to be persuaded, there were ears in which another line of argument [Sidenote: The invasion represented as a missionary enterprise.] would sound more convincing. No diplomacy short of that of William and Lanfranc could have contrived to represent the invasion of England as an undertaking designed for the spiritual welfare of England. No brains less subtle than theirs could have converted William and his host into armed missionaries, eager to reform at the sword’s point the evil lives and the ecclesiastical abuses of [Sidenote: Charges brought against the English Church.] the ungodly islanders.[808] A land which had not lost its ancient character of the Isle of Saints—a land which had so lately boasted of a King like Eadward and an Earl like Leofric—a land which was still illustrated by the virtues of the holy Wulfstan—a land where so many minsters were rising in increased stateliness, and where the wealth of the Church was daily added to—a land whose Earls and Bishops and sons of every degree pressed, year after year, to worship and to offer at the tombs of the Apostles—a land like this was branded as a land which needed to be again gathered [Sidenote: The Crusade preached against England.] in to the true fold, and the Crusade which had not yet been preached against Turks or Prussians or Albigenses was prematurely preached against the people of England. It was indeed easy to gather together, in England or in any other land, tales which showed that the Church had fallen from her first love. It was easy to tell of breaches of discipline and breaches of morals, to tell of the vast pluralities of Stigand and of the deeds of sacrilege wrought at Berkeley and Leominster. The orators of William may well have set forth tales like these before the Roman Court, alongside of the tale of the perjury of Harold and of the wrong done to their own master. But these were not the [Sidenote: Real crime of England its independence of Rome.] real crimes of England. Her crime in the eyes of Rome, the crime to punish which the Crusade of William was approved and blessed, was the independence still retained by the island Church and nation. A land where the Church and the nation were but different names for the same community, a land where Priests and Prelates were subject to the Law like other men, a land where the King and his Witan gave and took away the staff of the Bishop, was a land which in the eyes of Rome was more dangerous than a land of Jews or Saracens. Rome, ever watchful, ever mindful, had not forgotten the note of insular defiance when the heart of England spoke by the mouth of Tostig, and threatened the Pontiff on his throne.[809] Even under Eadward, England had been no unresisting bond-slave, and her independence, so boldly asserted by one son of Godwine, was likely to be as boldly maintained by another. The opportunity which Rome had doubtless long looked for now offered itself. A sword was put into her hand by which the rebellious islanders might be brought under her full obedience. It was a policy worthy of William to send to the threshold of the Apostles to crave their blessing on his [Sidenote: William outwitted by HILDEBRAND.] intended work of reducing the rebellious land. And it was a policy worthy of one greater than William himself to make even William, for once in his life, the instrument of purposes yet more daring, yet more far-sighted, than his own. On the steps of the Papal chair, and there alone, had William and Lanfranc to cope with an intellect loftier and more subtle than even theirs. The counsellor of so many Pontiffs, so soon to be himself the most renowned of Pontiffs, knew with whom he had to deal, and knew how to bide his time as well as William himself. William was sent on an errand which none but William could perform, but of which William himself knew not the full bearing. Under his rule no man could doubt that England would be subject to none but him. With William for her King, she was as little likely to be the unresisting slave of Rome as if Harold himself should continue to guard her. But a seed was sown which was to bear fruit in other times and under weaker rulers. When Rome once took upon her to adjudge the Crown of England, the path was opened for that day of [Sidenote: 1213.] shame and sorrow when a descendant of William stooped to receive the Crown of England as a fief of Rome.

§ 3. The Norman Council and the Assembly of Lillebonne.

[Sidenote: Various negotiations carried on by William.]

The case of William had thus to be brought to bear on the minds of his own people, on the minds of the neighbouring countries whence he invited and looked for volunteers, on the minds of the foreign princes whose help or at least whose neutrality he asked for, and, above all, on the minds of the Roman Pontiff and his advisers. The order of these various negotiations is not very clear,[810] and in all probability all [Sidenote: He first consults a select Council of his own Duchy.] were being carried on at once. But there is little doubt that William’s first step, on receiving the refusal of Harold to surrender his Crown—or whatever else was the exact purport of the English King’s answer—was to lay the matter before a select body of his most trusty counsellors. The names of most of the men whom William thus honoured with his special confidence are already familiar to us. They were the men of his own blood, the friends of his youth, the faithful vassals who had fought at his side against French [Sidenote: Names and characters of the men assembled by William.] invaders and Norman rebels. There was his brother, Robert Count of Mortain, the lord of the castle by the waterfalls,[811] the spoil of the banished Warling.[812] And there was one closer than a brother, the proud William the son of Osbern, the son of the faithful guardian of his childhood.[813] There, perhaps the only priest in that gathering of warriors, was his other brother, Odo of Bayeux, soon to prove himself a warrior as stout of heart and as strong of arm as any of his race.[814] There too, not otherwise renowned, was Iwun-al-Chapel, the husband of the sister of William, Robert, and Odo.[815] There was a kinsman, nearer in legitimate succession to the stock of Rolf than William himself, Richard of Evreux, the son of Robert the Archbishop, the grandson of Richard the Fearless.[816] There was the true kinsman and vassal who guarded the frontier fortress of Eu,[817] the brother of the traitor Busac and of the holy Prelate of Lisieux.[818] There was Roger of Beaumont, who rid the world of Roger of Toesny,[819] and Ralph, the worthier grandson of that old foe of Normandy and mankind.[820] There was Ralph’s companion in banishment, Hugh of Grantmesnil,[821] and Roger of Montgomery, the loyal son-in-law of him who cursed the Bastard in his cradle.[822] There too were the other worthies of the day of Mortemer, Walter Giffard[823] and Hugh of Montfort,[824] and William of Warren, the valiant youth who had received the chiefest guerdon of that memorable ambush.[825] These men, chiefs of the great houses of Normandy, founders, some of them, of greater houses in England, were gathered together at their sovereign’s bidding. They were to be the first to share his counsels in the enterprise which he was planning, an enterprise planned against the land which, with so many in that assembly, was to become a second home, a home perhaps all the more cherished that it was won by the might of their own right hands.

[Sidenote: William consults the Council.]

To this select Council the Duke made his first appeal. He told them, what some of them at least knew well already, of the wrongs which he had suffered from Harold of England.[826] It was his purpose to cross the sea, in order to assert his rights and to chastise the wrong-doer. With the help of God and with the loyal service of his faithful Normans, he doubted not his power to do what he purposed.[827] He had gathered them together to know their minds upon the matter. Did they approve of his purpose? Did they deem the enterprise within his power? Were they ready themselves to help him to the uttermost to [Sidenote: Answer of the Council.] recover his right? The answer of the Norman leaders, the personal kinsmen and friends of their sovereign, was wise and constitutional. They approved his purpose; they deemed that the enterprise was not beyond the power of Normandy to accomplish. The valour of the Norman knighthood, the wealth of the Norman Church,[828] was fully enough to put their Duke in possession of all that he [Sidenote: They pledge their own service, but recommend the calling of a larger assembly.] claimed. Their own personal service they pledged at once; they would follow him to the war; they would pledge, they would sell, their lands to cover the costs of the expedition. But they would not answer for others. Where all were to share in the work, all ought to share in the counsel.[829] Those whom the Duke had gathered together were not the whole baronage of Normandy. There were other wise and brave men in the Duchy, whose arms were as strong, and whose counsel would be as sage, as those of the chosen party to whom he spoke. Let the Duke call a larger meeting of all the Barons of his Duchy, and lay his designs before them.

[Sidenote: The Assembly of Lillebonne.]

The Duke hearkened to this advice, and he at once sent forth a summons for the gathering of a larger Assembly. This is the only time when we come across any details of [Sidenote: Difference between Norman and English Assemblies.] the proceedings of a Norman Parliament. And we at once see how widely the political condition of Normandy differed from that of England. We see how much further England had advanced, or, more truly, how much further Normandy had gone back, in the path of political freedom. The Norman Assembly which assembled to discuss the war against England was a widely different body from the Great Gemót which had voted for the restoration of Godwine. Godwine had made his speech before the King and all the people of the land.[830] That people had met under the canopy of heaven, beneath the walls of the greatest city of [Sidenote: No Clergy or Commons in the Norman Assembly.] the realm. But in William’s Assembly we hear of none but Barons. The old Teutonic constitution had wholly died away from the memories of the descendants of the men who followed Rolf and Harold Blaatand. The immemorial democracy had passed away, and the later constitution of the mediæval States had not yet arisen. There was no Third Estate, because the personal right of every freeman to attend had altogether vanished, while the idea of the representation of particular privileged towns had not yet been heard of. And, if the Third Order was wanting, the First Order was at least less prominent than it was in other lands. The wealth of the Church had been already pointed out as an important element in the Duke’s ways and means, and both the wealth and the personal prowess of the Norman Clergy were, when the day came, freely placed at William’s disposal. The peculiar tradition of Norman Assemblies,[831] which shut out the Clergy from all share in the national deliberations, seems now to have been relaxed. It is implied, rather than asserted,[832] that the Bishops of Normandy were present in the Assembly which now met; but it is clear that the main stress of the debates fell on the lay Barons, and that the spirit of the Assembly was a spirit which was especially theirs.

[Sidenote: Place of Meeting.]

And, if the constitution of the Assembly differed widely from that of an English Gemót, the place of its meeting differed no less characteristically from the places of meeting most familiar to Englishmen. The law or custom of Eadward’s reign had chosen three of the chief cities of England to be, each in turn, the place of meeting for English national assemblies. The Norman Assembly met in a ducal dwelling far away from any of the great cities of the Duchy. It was gathered on a spot which had been a post of strength in far earlier times, and which, after ages of neglect, had been once more called into importance by [Sidenote: Juliobona or Lillebonne; its Roman remains.] William himself. The old Roman town of Juliobona stood at no great distance from the right bank of the Seine, and its representative, the modern Lillebonne, is familiar to travellers and students as one of the spots in Northern Gaul which are most rich in antiquities of Roman date.[833] Within the present century a Roman theatre has been brought to light, where the main arrangements of the building are still perfectly preserved. Its solid arches and vast masses of walls still attest that matchless skill of the ancient conquerors in the constructive art of the builder which has made their works survive those of so many later ages. So it has been at Lillebonne; the works of the Roman Cæsars have proved more permanent than [Sidenote: Decay of the place.] the works of the Norman Dukes. Juliobona seems to have sunk into insignificance during the later days of Roman sway. It seems that, before the Imperial dominion had fully ceased, while the land was wasted alike by the Teutonic invasions and by the disputes of contending Emperors or Tyrants, the ancient buildings of the city had been largely destroyed of set purpose, in order to employ their materials in the construction of defences to shelter what was allowed to remain. Juliobona dwindled away, and the town makes no figure in history, until William called it again into being, as if expressly to become the scene of [Sidenote: The castle built by William.] this memorable meeting.[834] On a slight elevation alike above the modern town and above the old Roman relic, William had reared a fortress which has now given way, partly to the military reconstructions of later ages, partly to the sheer barbarism of times which are almost our own. The site was a noble one. The theatre below, if it was not already hidden, might have seemed but a feeble reproduction by the hand of man of the glorious amphitheatre in which Lillebonne has been placed by the hand of nature. [Sidenote: Present state of Lillebonne.] From the top of a lofty tower of later days the eye looks down on the theatre on one side, on the other side on the modern town, with the graceful spire of its church, a work of the latest days of mediæval art. But the eye may almost pass by both to gaze on the wooded hills which, save at one point alone, shut in the view on every side. At that point, immediately above the Roman ruin, the hills, like the walls of the theatre, leave a gap which opens a view of the Seine glistening in the distance, and of the higher hills of the land between the Seine and the Dive which form the distant horizon. But no portion of the work of the great Duke now remains on that noble site. His donjon has given way to a grand round tower of later times, and to a taller one of octagonal shape, whose shattered walls still rise as the loftiest point of town or fortress. These changes were doubtless due to the fair requirements of the military art of later ages. But William’s noblest work has yielded to baser agents of destruction. Within his fortress, immediately above the theatre, as if to put the skill of his own age in direct competition with that of the old masters [Sidenote: William’s hall; its destruction.] of the world, William had built a noble hall, every stone of which has been destroyed in utter wantonness, but of whose general aspect a sufficient record has been preserved.[835] Like most halls of that and of the two immediately succeeding ages—like that noble episcopal hall at Angers which we may take as the best representative of the ducal hall at Lillebonne—a vaulted undercroft supported the hall itself. A lower range of doorways, above them a range of the small coupled windows of the age, marked the two stages, and produced the effect, at once rich and solid, so characteristic of the best works of Norman skill. Within that stately hall, divided, no doubt, by ranges of pillars and arches which were then fresh from the hand of the craftsman, William now, as on more than one other occasion,[836] gathered together the wisdom and valour of his Duchy, to hear and to ponder the mighty scheme on which his heart was bent.

[Sidenote: Genuine parliamentary spirit of the Assembly.]

Narrow as was the constitution of the Assembly, it showed, when it met, no lack either of political foresight or of parliamentary boldness. In a society so aristocratically constituted as that of Normandy was, the nobles are in truth, in a political sense, the people, and we must expect to find in any gathering of nobles both the virtues and the vices of a real popular assembly.[837] William had already consulted his Senate; he had now to bring his resolution, fortified by their approval, before the body which came as near as any body in Normandy could come to the character of an Assembly of the Norman People. The valiant gentlemen of Normandy, as wary as they were valiant, proved good guardians of the public purse, trusty keepers of what one knows not whether to call the rights of the nation or the [Sidenote: William’s opening speech; he assumes the willingness of the Assembly, and asks only what amount they will contribute.] privileges of their order. The Duke laid his case before them. He told once more the tale of his own rights and of the wrong which Harold had done him. He said that his own mind was to assert his rights by force of arms. He would fain enter England in the course of the year on which they had entered.[838] But without their help he could do nothing. Of his own he had neither ships enough nor men enough for such an enterprise. He would not ask whether they would help him in such a cause. He took their zeal and loyalty for granted; he asked only how many ships, how many men, each of his hearers would bring as a free-will offering.[839]

[Sidenote: The Assembly asks time to consider.]

A Norman Assembly was not a body to be surprised into a hasty assent, even when the craft and the eloquence [Sidenote: Mingled feelings of the Assembly.] of William was brought to bear upon it. The Barons asked for time to consider of their answer. They would debate among themselves, and they would let him know the conclusion to which they came.[840] William was obliged to consent to this delay, and the Assembly broke up into knots, greater or smaller, each eagerly discussing the great question. Parties of fifteen, twenty, thirty, forty, sixty, a hundred, gathered round this or that energetic speaker.[841] Some professed their readiness to follow the Duke; others were in debt, and were too poor to venture on such hazards.[842] [Sidenote: Strong opposition to the enterprise.] Other speakers set forth the dangers and difficulties of the enterprise. Normandy could not conquer England; their fair and flourishing land would be ruined by the attempt.[843] The conquest of England was an undertaking beyond the power of a Roman Emperor.[844] Harold and his land were rich; they had wealth to take foreign Kings and Dukes into their service;[845] their own forces were in mere numbers such as Normandy could not hope to strive against.[846] They had abundance of tried soldiers, and, above all, they had a mighty fleet, with crews skilled beyond other men in all that pertained to the warfare of the sea.[847] How could a fleet be raised, how could the sailors be gathered together, how could they be taught, within a year’s space, to cope with such an enemy?[848] The feeling of the Assembly was distinctly against so desperate an enterprise as the invasion of England. It seemed as if the hopes and schemes of William were about to be shattered in their beginning through the opposition of his own subjects.

[Sidenote: Attempt of William Fitz-Osbern to cajole the Assembly.]

A daring, though cunning, attempt was now made by William Fitz-Osbern, the Duke’s nearest personal friend, to cajole the Assembly into an assent to his master’s will. He appealed to their sense of feudal honour; they owed the Duke service for their fiefs; let them come forward and do with a good heart all, and more than all, that their tenure of their fiefs bound them to. Let not their sovereign be driven to implore the services of his subjects. [Sidenote: He points out the danger of opposition.] Let them rather forestal his will; let them win his favour by ready offerings even beyond their power to fulfil.[849] He enlarged on the character of the lord with whom they had to deal. William’s jealous temper would not brook disappointment at their hands. It would be the worse for them in the end, if the Duke should ever have to say that he had failed in his enterprise because they had failed in readiness to support him.[850]

[Sidenote: He is commissioned to speak in]

The language of William Fitz-Osbern seems to have startled and perplexed even the stout hearts with whom [Sidenote: the name of the Assembly.] he had to deal. The Barons prayed him to be their spokesman with the Duke. He knew their minds and could speak for them all, and they would be bound by what he said.[851] But they gave him no direct commission to bind them to any consent to the Duke’s demand. Their words indeed tended ominously the other way; they feared the sea—so changed was the race which had once manned the ships of Rolf and Harold Blaatand—and they were not bound to serve beyond it.[852]

[Sidenote: His speech to the Duke;]

A point seemed to have been gained by the seeming licence given by the Assembly to the Duke’s most intimate friend to speak as he would in the name of the whole baronage. William Fitz-Osbern now spoke to the Duke. He began with an exordium of almost cringing loyalty, setting forth how great was the zeal and affection of the Normans for their prince, and how there was no danger which they would not willingly undergo in his service.[853] [Sidenote: his large offers] But the orator soon overshot his mark. He promised, in the name of the whole Assembly, that every man would not only cross the sea with the Duke, but would bring with him double the contingent to which his holding bound him. The lord of twenty knights’ fees would serve with forty knights, and the lord of a hundred with two hundred.[854] He himself, of his love and zeal, would furnish sixty ships, well equipped, and filled with fighting men.[855]

[Sidenote: disowned by the Barons.]

The Barons now felt themselves taken in a snare. They were in nearly the same case as the King against whom they were called on to march. They had indeed promised; they had commissioned William Fitz-Osbern to speak in their names. But their commission had been stretched beyond all reasonable construction; their spokesman had pledged them to engagements which had never entered into their minds.[856] Loud shouts of dissent rose through the hall. The mention of serving with double the regular [Sidenote: Fears and confusion of the Assembly.] contingent awakened special indignation. With a true parliamentary instinct, the Norman Barons feared lest a consent to this demand should be drawn into a precedent, and lest their fiefs should be for ever burthened with this double service.[857] The shouts grew louder; the whole hall was in confusion; no speaker could be heard; no man would hearken to reason or render a reason for himself.[858]

[Sidenote: No common vote passed, but the Barons severally]

The rash speech of William Fitz-Osbern had thus destroyed all hope of a regular parliamentary consent on the part of the Assembly. But it is possible that the Duke gained in the end by the hazardous experiment of [Sidenote: won over by the Duke.] his Seneschal. It is even possible that the manœuvre may have been concerted beforehand between him and his master. It was not likely that any persuasion could have brought the Assembly as a body to agree to the lavish offer of volunteer service which was put into its mouth by William Fitz-Osbern. There was no hope of carrying any such vote on a formal division. But the confusion which followed the speech of the Seneschal hindered any formal division from being taken. The Assembly, in short, as an assembly, was broken up. The fagot was unloosed, and the sticks could now be broken one by one. The baronage of Normandy had lost all the strength of union; they were brought, one by one, within the reach of the personal fascinations of their sovereign. William conferred with each man apart;[859] he employed all his arts on minds which, when no longer strengthened by the sympathy of a crowd, could not refuse anything that he asked. He pledged himself that the doubling of their services should not become a precedent; no man’s fief should be burthened with any charge beyond what it had borne from time immemorial.[860] Men thus personally appealed to, brought in this way within the magic sphere of princely influence, were no longer slack to promise, and having once promised, they were not slack to fulfil. William had more than gained his point. If he had not gained the formal sanction of the Norman baronage to his expedition, he had won over each individual Norman Baron to serve him as a volunteer. And, wary as ever, William took heed that no man who had promised should draw back from his promise. His scribes and clerks were at hand, and the number of ships and soldiers promised by each Baron was at once set down in a book.[861] A Domesday of the conquerors was in short drawn up in the ducal hall at Lillebonne, a forerunner of the greater Domesday of the conquered, which, twenty years later, was brought to King William of England in his royal palace at Winchester.

§ 4. William’s Alliance with Tostig.

[Sidenote: William’s chances of support in England]

William had thus, by a characteristic effort of his craft, won over his own Duchy to support him in his enterprise. He had now to seek for allies beyond his own borders. And, first and foremost, it concerned him to know whether he could look for any support in the land to whose dominion he aspired. There is not a shadow of evidence to show that William had a single native partizan within the four [Sidenote: confined to the Normans settled there.] seas of Britain.[862]He may have carried on intrigues with the Normans whom Harold had allowed to remain in England. But even on this head we have no distinct evidence. A single notice some months later seems to show that, even at the time of William’s landing, the Normans in England, however eagerly they may have wished for his success, looked on his enterprise as hopeless.[863] But it is certain that one, perhaps two,[864] native Englishmen [Sidenote: William’s cause embraced by the banished Tostig.] were zealous on William’s behalf. At what stage of his negotiations we know not, but seemingly early in the year, one Englishman at least came to William’s court, to excite him to war against England and to offer his own services for the cause. But that Englishman was no discontented noble at Harold’s court, no leader of a powerful faction within his realm. He was an exile, buoyed up by an exile’s proverbially desperate hopes. The first foreign volunteer who answered to William’s summons was Tostig the son of Godwine.[865]

[Sidenote: Position and schemes of Tostig.]

In the banished brother of the English King, William found an ally willing to help him in all his schemes, an ally far more impetuous than himself, far more eager to strike a blow at once and at all hazards. The fallen Earl of the Northumbrians had sunk from bad to worse. He had now thrown off every feeling of an Englishman and a brother of the English King. He had once perhaps dreamed of the Kingdom for himself; he now found himself shut out from all hopes of his Earldom, or indeed of restoration in any shape. Harold, as Earl, at the Northampton conference, had done all that he could do for his brother; but he had agreed to the sentence of outlawry which the national voice had called for, and he had not as King done anything to recall Tostig to his country. In fact the restoration of Tostig was in every way impossible. [Sidenote: His hopelessness of restoration.] He had shown his thorough unfitness to rule, and it is absurd to suppose that he would have been satisfied to sit down and live peaceably in England as a private man. Harold could have had neither the will nor the power to break the Oxford compact, to dispossess Morkere of the Earldom which had been so solemnly confirmed to him, and to set his brother to rule once more over the unwilling people of Northumberland. Nor could he be asked to depose in favour of a pardoned outlaw either of his two loyal brothers who ruled in Kent and in East-Anglia. Nor could Tostig reasonably hope that Harold would put him in a still closer relation to himself by restoring the West-Saxon Earldom in his favour. In short, no banished man ever seemed doomed to a more hopeless banishment. It is not wonderful then that the heart of Tostig was turned to an exceeding bitterness against the country which had cast him out, and against the brother who had refused to sacrifice the public weal to his interests. If he still retained the consciousness of originally right intentions, such a consciousness would only add fuel to the fire. It is quite possible that the murderer of Gamel and Ulf may have looked on himself as a martyr to the cause of good order among the barbarous Northumbrians. At all events, he looked on himself as absolved from all ties either to his [Sidenote: He determines on a restoration by force.] brother or to his country. An attempt at an armed return on the part of Tostig was no more than was to be expected. It was what any banished man of that age was sure to attempt, if he could only collect the needful force in any quarter. Osgod Clapa, Godwine, Ælfgar, Harold himself, had all set him the example. The practice was so common that it could hardly be looked upon as specially blameworthy. If we blame Harold severely for the slaughter at Porlock, it is really because he pays the penalty of his greatness, because we cannot help judging him by a severer standard than that by which we judge smaller [Sidenote: Difference between the case of Tostig and the cases of other returning exiles.] men.[866] But there are very marked degrees in a course which, however usual at the time, must be set down as being in every case contrary to ideal loyalty and patriotism. The case of Godwine needs no defence; it is covered by the general right of insurrection against mis-government. If Godwine came to restore himself, he came also to deliver England. Harold, like Osgod Clapa, tried to effect his return by the help of mercenaries hired in a foreign land. But he did not ally himself with any enemies of the King or Kingdom. Ælfgar, on his first banishment, went a step further by leaguing himself with a rebellious vassal, if not within the Kingdom of England, at least within the Empire of Britain.[867] On the occasion of his second banishment, he did not scruple to employ the help of a fleet of Wikings, who must have been cruising on the shores of England with no friendly intent.[868] All these are steps in a descending scale. But neither Osgod nor Harold nor Ælfgar sank to the wickedness of roaming over the world in search of any foreign potentate who would restore him by force, even at the expense of the utter subjugation of England. Tostig alone did not scruple at this depth of treason. He stands before us as acting more distinctly as the enemy of his country than any Englishman whom we have come across since the days of Ælfric and Eadric.

[Sidenote: Tostig goes from Flanders to Normandy.]

Tostig, we have seen, on his banishment from England, took refuge with his brother-in-law Count Baldwin, and spent the winter at his court.[869] But, early in the next year, perhaps not very long after the election of Harold, most likely as soon as the news of the messages which passed between William and Harold had found its way to Bruges, Tostig was at the Court of William, urging him to the invasion of England. He eagerly asked the Duke how he could suffer the perjurer to reign,[870] and promised his own [Sidenote: Relations between William and Tostig.] vigorous help in promoting all his plans.[871] It would seem that he reached Normandy before the Assembly at Lillebonne, and it is even implied that the exhortations of Tostig were among the inducements which led William to summon that Assembly.[872] But Tostig’s exhortations could have been only a very secondary inducement, serving at most to strengthen and hasten a resolution which William had already formed. It would be an insult to William to suppose that he really needed Tostig as a counsellor. The relations between the two men are perfectly easy to understand; the small man was likely to be useful as a momentary tool in the hands of the great man. Though Tostig left his wife at the court of her brother, the family connexion between Judith and Matilda would secure him a brotherly reception at the Court of Rouen; indeed we are told that, on the strength of that connexion, Tostig and William had long been intimate friends.[873] And now each of the two friends was in a position to be useful to the other. Tostig, driven from England, was in search of foreign help, and the Court of Normandy was the natural place for him to seek for it in the first instance. As soon as he knew of William’s designs on the English Crown, he would hail in him the very man for his purpose. And the prince who already contemplated the invasion of England would rejoice at an alliance with the banished and hostile brother of the English King. Tostig had doubtless, after the manner of exiles, persuaded himself that all England was ready to welcome, not only himself, but any stranger who might appear under the pretext of restoring him. William was too wise to believe tales of this kind, but he might well look on Tostig as likely to prove an useful tool, as one whose incursions might serve to harass the King of the English, and to distract his attention from the main danger. Tostig’s impetuous temper would naturally call for earlier and more effective support than the prudence of William would be inclined to give, or indeed than, at that early stage of his preparations, he was able to give. It was undesirable utterly to thwart Tostig, or to make an enemy of him; it was perhaps becoming [Sidenote: Tostig attacks England with William’s sanction. May, 1066.] desirable to get rid of him. He was therefore allowed to make an incursion on the English coasts. At his own risk, but with the Duke’s sanction, he set sail from the Côtentin at the head of such a naval force as he could get together. This force would doubtless consist of Flemish and Norman mercenaries and volunteers. The Norman account tells us that King Harold’s fleet was so vigorously on the alert that Tostig was unable to land in England, while contrary winds hindered his return to Normandy.[874] We know however that he did land in England, and that he committed considerable ravages. [875] But, from this point, the career of Tostig and that of William become altogether distinct, and the story of Tostig’s later doings will join itself to another thread of my narrative. Tostig probably chafed under the restraints of William’s prudence; perhaps he thought himself forsaken, or even betrayed, by an ally whose support was so slowly and grudgingly given. It is certain that he soon threw up his alliance with the Norman Duke, and sought for more ready aid elsewhere.

§ 5. William’s Negotiations with Foreign Powers.

[Sidenote: William invites volunteers from all parts.]

The alliance with Tostig was a mere episode. The banished Earl could only be useful so far as he was likely to make a diversion of which William might take advantage. The Duke’s serious business lay on the continent. He invited soldiers from every quarter; the spoils of England were promised as their reward, and that promise brought abundance of volunteers from all parts of Gaul, from the royal domains, from Britanny, from Poitou and Aquitaine, and from the more distant land of Burgundy.[876] Some accounts even bring men to William’s muster from the Norman colonies in Southern Italy.[877] The presence of large bodies of these mercenaries or volunteers from all parts of Romance-speaking Europe is an undoubted fact, and it is [Sidenote: The Conquest not a national Norman enterprise.] one which it is most important to bear in mind. There can be no greater mistake than to look on William’s invasion as a national Norman undertaking, or on his army as consisting wholly of native Normans. We have just seen that it was only as volunteers that William’s own subjects followed him, and as volunteers men of any nation who chose to join him followed him equally. But it is a speaking witness, alike to William’s personal capacity for rule and to the inherent superiority of the Norman national character, that all this mixed multitude should have received a thoroughly Norman impress. The [Sidenote: Norman character impressed on the whole.] spoils of England were offered to all who would come, and from a large part of Europe men flocked eagerly to share them. But the head and the heart of the whole enterprise was Norman. The leaders of the enterprise, the Duke himself and most of the chief commanders, [Sidenote: Few foreign princes served; the mass of the foreign troops mere adventurers.] were Norman. A few princes or men of princely houses, like Eustace of Boulogne and Alan of Britanny, commanded their contingents in person. But the mass of the foreigners were mere adventurers, and we shall find that, when the day of battle came, they served under a Norman commander. We are indeed told that men came from all lands, not only for the sake of plunder, but to maintain the righteous cause of William.[878] It is likely enough that, when the Papal approval was once given to the enterprise, men pressed, as they did in after years to the Crusade, to atone for past acts of robbery and slaughter by renewing them with the Church’s blessing. But all that redeemed William’s enterprise from being an enterprise of mere brigandage came from the presence of his own subjects. The instinct of mankind is right, after all, in looking on the Conquest as a Norman Conquest. It was the native Normans who were really foremost in the strife, and it was the native Normans who took the firmest root in the conquered land. William’s true strength lay, after all, in the gallant men who could at least boast of the comparatively ennobling motive that they were supporting their native sovereign in the pursuit of his fancied rights.

[Sidenote: William’s embassies to foreign powers.]

The share then, numerically a very important share, taken in the expedition by foreign adventurers is beyond all doubt. But the negotiations between William and the neighbouring potentates are involved in no small obscurity and contradiction.[879] It was William’s manifest interest to obtain, if not the active alliance, at any rate the neutrality of all his neighbours. It was necessary for his purpose to feel as secure as he could make himself that no French or Angevin or Breton invasion of Normandy would take place during his absence. It was also an important subsidiary object to obtain from the neighbouring princes full licence for their subjects to take a share in the enterprise. For these [Sidenote: His embassy to King Henry. Condition of Germany and the Empire. 1056–1066.] objects he sent embassies as far as Germany and Denmark. The great Emperor Henry the Third had been, as I need hardly repeat, the constant ally of England. But he had now been dead ten years, and the childhood and youth of his son, the young King Henry, was a time of distress and confusion for the Teutonic Kingdom. The minority [Sidenote: Comparison between the minorities of William and of Henry the Fourth.] of Henry had been, in many points, a repetition of the minority of William. But there was one marked difference between the German and the Norman period of chaos. William had been constantly exposed to the attacks of traitors, and of foreign enemies who sought to deprive him of his coronet and his life. Henry had not as yet had to fear either foreign invaders or home-bred rebels; he was simply passed to and fro between the hands of several ambitious men who sought to reign in his name. And it is an instructive mark of the difference between the political systems of Germany and Normandy that the men who sought to rule in Henry’s name were almost wholly the great spiritual Princes of the Empire. While still a child, he had been, by [Sidenote: 1062.] a mixture of craft and violence, transferred from the care of his mother to that of Hanno Archbishop of Köln,[880] and [Sidenote: 1063.] from the hands of Hanno he had passed into those of another princely churchman, the famous Adalbert of Bremen.[881] The young King was now perhaps just beginning in some degree to exercise a will of his own. [Sidenote: 1065.] He had, in the course of the last year, been girded with [Sidenote: 1066.] the sword of knighthood;[882] and this very year had witnessed the fall of Adalbert and the partial restoration of the power [Sidenote: No mention of the Norman embassy in German writers.] of Hanno.[883] But, full as the German writers are as to the reign of Henry the Third and the minority of Henry the Fourth, they tell us absolutely nothing as to any relations between the Empire and Normandy.[884] William is not spoken of by them till after he had obtained the Crown of England.[885] From Norman sources we seem to hear both of an alliance with the great Emperor himself and of a later alliance entered into during his son’s minority.[886] Such an alliance in the Emperor’s life-time, ten years or more back, need not have been in any way directed against England. [Sidenote: Possible influence of the Empress Agnes in favour of Normandy.] And an alliance with Normandy during the earliest years of King Henry, while he was still under his mother’s guardianship, might seem no unlikely object of his mother’s policy. The Empress Agnes, it must be remembered, was a member of that house of Poitiers which had suffered so deeply at the hands of Geoffrey of Anjou,[887] and she might very naturally seek to maintain or to renew a connexion with a power which was the strongest enemy of the enemy of her own family. But, at the time which we have now reached, the power of Agnes had wholly passed away; alliance with Normandy moreover now meant hostility to England; and it is utterly impossible to see what interest either the young King or his successive archiepiscopal advisers could have in supporting the claims of William against the claims of [Sidenote: German help said to be promised to William.] Harold. Our Norman informant however describes Henry as, in high-sounding but somewhat vague terms, committing his Kingdom to an active support to the Norman side.[888] This again, strange as it sounds, can hardly be sheer invention, though we instinctively suspect exaggeration [Sidenote: Probable state of the case.] in no small degree. It may be enough if we suppose that Henry or his counsellors agreed to put no hindrance in the way of such subjects of the Empire as might choose to join the Norman standard as volunteers.

[Sidenote: Negotiations with Swend of Denmark; his alleged promises and faithlessness.]

The negotiations with Swend of Denmark again rest wholly on Norman authority. We are told that the Danish King promised help to William, which promise he was so far from keeping that he sent a large body of troops to the support of Harold.[889] With this latter statement I shall deal in its proper place. As for negotiations between William and Swend, they are perfectly possible. [Sidenote: Position and interests of Swend.] But it is hard to see what interest Swend could have had in supporting William. Swend was the cousin of Harold, and, though Godwine had resisted his claims on the English Crown, alliance with him as King of the Danes had always formed part of the Earl’s policy.[890] If Swend at this time cherished any hopes of the English Crown, the succession of William stood far more directly in the way of those hopes than the succession of Harold. Nothing could be a more complete hindrance to any schemes of the kind than the transfer of the Crown to a wholly alien invader. On the other hand, Swend’s chances were distinctly bettered by the transfer of the Crown to a dynasty of which he might almost count as a member. If then Swend had really determined to interfere in English affairs, we may be sure that his intervention would have been on the side of Harold and not on the side of William. But it is far more probable that the wariest prince in Europe promised neutrality and kept it.

[Sidenote: Negotiations with King Philip. Difficulty as to the relations between Philip and Baldwin.]

Even the negotiations of William with princes much nearer home are wrapped up in no small obscurity. One manifest object was to insure the safety of his frontier in the direction of Paris. William’s close connexion with Baldwin of Flanders, and the guardianship exercised by Baldwin over the young King Philip, might seem enough to make matters tolerably safe on that side. If Baldwin’s affinity with William did not absolutely secure the co-operation both of France and Flanders, it would at any rate, it might be thought, secure Normandy against all fear of attack from either quarter while her sovereign was engaged in his great enterprise. But, in the only account that we have, Baldwin is not introduced as acting at all in his character of guardian. William goes as [Sidenote: Interview between Philip and William.] his own ambassador to King Philip. The two princes meet at the great Abbey of Saint Germer in the district of Beauvais, a spot within the royal dominions, but only a few miles from the border Norman town of Gournay.[891] [Sidenote: William offers to hold England as a fief of the French Crown.] William asks for his overlord’s help in his enterprise, and offers, in return for such help, to hold England, no less than Normandy, as a fief of the French Crown.[892] Philip consults his nobles, who argue, naturally enough, that nothing can be more dangerous to the French Kingdom than any increase of the strength of the Norman Duchy. The offer to hold England in fief does not blind them; William’s vassalage for England will be still more nominal than his [Sidenote: Philip hostile to the enterprise.] vassalage for Normandy.[893] The answer given is therefore unfavourable; and William leaves the presence of his suzerain with very high words on his lips. Whether this story be literally true or not, it shows how familiar to men’s minds the notion of Commendation, even on the greatest scale,[894] still was. It shows how little of indignity attached to the vassal’s position, and of how little practical value was the oath of homage. We are presently told that Philip in no way promoted William’s object, but that he rather did all that he [Sidenote: Negotiations with Baldwin of Flanders.] could to hinder it.[895] Instead of any distinct account of William’s negotiations with his father-in-law, we get only an unintelligible romance.[896] But the practical issue of both the French and the Flemish negotiations seems plain. Neither Philip nor Baldwin, in their character as sovereigns, gave William any help. It is even probable that Philip, so far as he either had a will of his own or was guided by French counsellors, discouraged William’s enterprise rather than [Sidenote: French and Flemish volunteers in William’s army.] promoted it. But abundance of volunteers from both France and Flanders took service in William’s army. The Flemings, above all, the countrymen of Matilda, pressed eagerly to his standard, and they formed an important element in the Conquest and in the settlement which followed it. Matilda’s son Gerbod,[897] Gilbert of Ghent,[898] and Walter of Flanders,[899] are all names which occur among the conquerors of England, and those of Gerbod and Gilbert will again appear in our history.

[Sidenote: Eustace of Boulogne a zealous ally of William.]

In the region intermediate between Normandy and Flanders, the cause of William was eagerly taken up by Count Eustace of Boulogne, the brother-in-law of King Eadward. He had, of all men, wrongs, as he would deem them, to avenge on Harold and on England. The chastisement which Godwine had refused to work on the insolent burghers of Dover[900] might now at last be wrought on them and on their whole race, with the usurping son of the old traitor at their head. Eustace probably needed no invitation to take his share in the enterprise. He came himself, and he induced others to follow the same course. An incidental notice of one of his followers throws some light on the class of men who flocked to William’s banners, and on [Sidenote: Story of Arnold of Ardres.] the rewards which they received. One Geoffrey, an officer of the Abbey of Saint Bertin at Saint Omer, who had the charge of its possessions in the County of Guisnes, sent his sons Arnold and Geoffrey to the war. A daily pay and various gifts from the Duke were their immediate reward, and in the end they received an establishment of lands both in Essex and in the border shires of Mercia and East-Anglia, under the superiority of their patron Count Eustace.[901]

[Sidenote: Great number of auxiliaries from Britanny.]

But the country from which, next to his own Duchy, William drew most support in his enterprise, was undoubtedly the neighbouring, the nominally vassal, land of Britanny. When we remember the internal dissensions of [Sidenote: State of the country; war against England probably popular in Britanny.] that country, and the way in which a party among the Bretons had supported William against their own sovereign,[902] this is in no way wonderful. And, though loyalty to a Norman overlord is not likely to have counted for much, another motive may well have worked to fill the Norman host with Breton recruits. The Celtic race has a long memory, and the prospect of waging war in the insular Britain against the Saxon intruder may not have been without charms for the descendants of the Armorican exiles. [Sidenote: Services of Alan Fergant.] Certain it is that the Breton auxiliaries, under Alan Fergant, a cousin of the reigning Count Conan, one of the many sons of his uncle Odo,[903] played an important part in the conquest of England. Even Dinan, so lately besieged by William, now sent its lord to swell William’s muster.[904] Helpers came also from more southern regions; Hamon, Viscount of Thouars in the land of Poitou, came at the head of his force, and, as we shall hereafter see, [Sidenote: Volunteers from Anjou, Touraine, &c.; Geoffrey of Chaumont.] was admitted to William’s most intimate counsels.[905] Angevin auxiliaries we should have been less inclined to look for; but they too are mentioned in our lists.[906] We find also a warrior from the marchland of Tours and Blois, Geoffrey of Chaumont, a homager of Count Stephen of Chartres. He, as we read in the annals of his house, gave up all his fiefs to Sulpicius of Amboise the husband of his niece, and himself went forth to win new fortunes in England.[907] [Sidenote: State of Anjou.] Yet one would have thought that the condition of that part of Gaul would just now have afforded scope enough [Sidenote: War between Geoffrey and Fulk Rechin.] for the energies of the most warlike. The two successors of Geoffrey Martel, Geoffrey the Bearded and our historian Fulk Rechin, were now engaged in a war of brother against brother.[908] It was in this very year that the city of Angers was betrayed[909] to Fulk, and that Count [Sidenote: Geoffrey betrayed to Fulk. 1066.] Geoffrey was led away as a captive to Chinon,[910] the fortress overhanging the Vienne, the fortress so famous in the days when Counts of Anjou were also Kings of England, and so famous again when Capetian royalty, banished from its own Paris, found shelter in the lands which had once [Sidenote: Conan of Britanny; his war against Anjou and death. 1066.] been Angevin. In this same year too Conan of Britanny met with his death, and met it, as some said, by the machinations of William.[911] Strange to say, this suspicion reaches us only from the Norman side. Other authorities, Breton and Angevin, speak only of a war which Conan waged against Anjou, and in which, by whatever means, [Sidenote: Legend of Conan’s death.] he lost his life. It is a Norman writer[912] who tells us how, when William was preparing for the invasion of England, Conan sent to wish him good luck in his enterprise, but at the same time to demand the cession of Normandy to himself. He, Conan, was the lawful heir of the Duchy; the Bastard could have no right; the Bastard too, with his accomplices, had poisoned Conan’s father Alan, and had, up to that day, usurped the possession of a land which should have been his. If Normandy was not at once surrendered to its lawful prince, Conan would at once assert his rights with his whole force. William, we are told, was somewhat frightened, but God delivered him out of his danger. There was a Breton noble, a chamberlain of Conan, who had sworn fealty to William and to Conan alike, and who had borne the message to William as Conan’s ambassador. He undertook—at whose bidding or from what motive we are not told—to rid the world of his Breton master. He anointed the gloves, the bridle, and the hunting-horn of Conan with poison. The Count was engaged in his Angevin campaign, and was besieging the fortress of Château-Gontier, not far from the Cenomannian border. The defenders had capitulated, and Conan seems to have been in the very act of making his triumphal entry into the town. The Count put on his gloves, he grasped the bridle, and unwittingly raised his hand to his mouth. The poison took effect, and before long Conan was a corpse. The murderer left the Breton army, and brought the news to William. The Duke was now at leisure to give his whole mind to the expedition against England.

[Sidenote: William charged with the death of Conan; probabilities of the case.]

If such a tale as this was current, it is not wonderful that rumour went on to charge William with having instigated a crime by which he so greatly profited. As to the probabilities of the case, I might almost repeat what I have already said when the same charge was brought against William in the matter of Walter and Biota.[913] The whole tale, from the threat of Conan onwards, reads like a romance. Did we find it in a hostile Breton or Angevin writer, we should at once set it down as an invention of hostile spite. And does the romance really gain any further authority, because it has found its way into a Norman chronicle? The silence of the hostile writers surely tells more on the other side. Conan, it seems plain, died suddenly during his Angevin expedition; it was easy to attribute the deed to William; it was no less easy to deck out the story with romantic details. That William was a secret poisoner I, for one, do not believe; but an English writer can hardly avoid the remembrance that, while the deaths of Walter and Conan were attributed to William, perhaps in the eleventh, certainly in the twelfth century, it was reserved for the nineteenth century to attribute the death of the Ætheling Eadward to Harold.[914]

[Sidenote: Negotiations with the Pope.]

The exact order of all these proceedings it is hopeless to try to fix, and it is equally hopeless to try to fix their relations to the great embassy of all. Negotiations with Counts and Kings were, in the age which was just opening, of less moment than negotiations with the Apostolic throne. And indeed it marks a distinct epoch in the history of European politics, when, for the first time, the occupant of the Apostolic throne was called on to adjudge [Sidenote: Alexander the Second. 1061–1073.] a disputed diadem.[915] The reigning Pontiff was Anselm of Lucca, who, under the title of Alexander the Second, had succeeded Nicolas; and, after a violent struggle with the [Sidenote: 1064.] Anti-pope Cadalous of Parma, he was now in full possession [Sidenote: Influence of HILDEBRAND.] of the Holy See.[916] But the ruling genius of the Papacy was already the Archdeacon Hildebrand. He it was who discerned how much the Roman Church might [Sidenote: William’s embassy.] gain by identifying itself with the cause of William. The ambassador of William, Gilbert, Archdeacon of Lisieux,[917] came and pleaded his master’s cause. He told the tale which had been so often told before, the rights of William, the usurpation and perjury of Harold, the despite done [Sidenote: He asks the Papal approval of his enterprise.] by him to the holy relics. William craved the blessing of the Holy See upon his righteous cause; he offered, we are told, but in vague and ambiguous language, to hold of God and of the Apostle the Kingdom which he hoped [Sidenote: Debate in the Conclave. No advocate sent by Harold.] to win.[918] The cause was debated in the Conclave, but it was debated after the hearing of one side only. No advocate of England appeared at the bar of Alexander to defend the right of Harold to the Crown which England had given him. It is needless to seek for the English King’s reasons for not appearing to answer the accusation [Sidenote: A defence on Harold’s side would have compromised the rights of his Crown.] of William.[919] It is enough that, however ready Harold, as a loyal son of the Church, might be to seek spiritual benefits at the threshold of the Apostles, he could not, as a King of the English, allow that any power to give or take away the English Crown was vested anywhere save in the Assembly of the English people. To plead before Alexander would have been to recognize his jurisdiction; it would have been to acknowledge that the Emperor of Britain had a superior [Sidenote: No summons probably sent to Harold.] upon earth. But, before we ask why Harold did not appear, we might perhaps ask whether he was ever summoned to appear, and whether the Roman judgement was not pronounced without so much as an opportunity for defence being allowed to the accused. No writer speaks of any summons as being addressed to the English King; one writer alone hints at the possibility of any hearing [Sidenote: William’s cause opposed by many of the Cardinals.] of the defence.[920] But the cause of justice did not lack advocates even in the Roman Conclave. When Hildebrand dwelt on the benefits which the Church would gain by accepting the jurisdiction thus laid at its feet, many of the Cardinals rejected his arguments with horror. It was not for the Church to become a partaker in deeds of blood, and to sanction claims which could only be enforced by the slaughter of so many men.[921] But in the end the worse reason prevailed. Even in ordinary times, it would have been no more than sound policy to welcome, as far as might be, the advances of a prince like William, who, pious as he might be, had not always shown himself the obedient servant of Rome. His uncanonical marriage,[922] and one or two other exercises of independence on William’s part,[923] would not be forgotten. But, far above all these [Sidenote: Policy of Hildebrand.] lesser questions, Rome was already beginning to practise her characteristic arts under their greatest master. Slaughter, robbery, devastation, all the horrors of an unprovoked war against an unoffending nation, were to be held as nothing when the interest of the Roman See was in the other scale. Never before had such an opportunity been offered to the successor of the Fisherman. It was not merely to win greater authority over a single island. The appeal of William to the Papal Court created a precedent by which the Papal Court might claim the disposal of all the Crowns in Christendom. The voice of [Sidenote: Alexander issues a Bull in favour of William.] Hildebrand conquered. The decree went forth which declared Harold to be an usurper and William to be the lawful claimant of the English Crown. It would even seem that it declared the English King and all his followers to be cut off from the communion of the faithful.[924] William was sent forth as an avenger, to chastise the wrong and perjury of his faithless vassal. But he was also sent forth as a missionary, to guide the erring English into the true path, to teach them due obedience to Christ’s Vicar, and to secure a more punctual payment of the temporal dues of his Apostle.[925] The cause of the invasion was blessed, and precious gifts were sent as the [Sidenote: His gifts to William.] visible exponents of the blessing. A costly ring was sent containing a relic holier, it may be, than any on which Harold had sworn, a hair of the Prince of the Apostles.[926] [Sidenote: The consecrated banner.] And with the ring came a consecrated banner, to hallow the cause of fraud and usurpation.[927] Every help that the [Sidenote: Perversion of the religious sentiment against England.] religious arts of the age could give was bestowed on the man who craved a blessing on the removal of his neighbour’s landmark. Every terror that those religious arts kept in store for the blasphemer and the heretic was hurled against the King whose axe was lifted only to defend his own rights and the rights of his people. The [Sidenote: A Crusade preached against England.] name had not yet been heard; but in truth it was now that the first Crusade was preached, and it was preached by the voice of Rome against the liberties of England.

[Sidenote: Complete success of William’s diplomacy.]

The diplomacy of William and Lanfranc had thus completely triumphed. The great fabric of deception by which their subtle wits had cheated both themselves and others was now brought to perfection. The cause of William was accepted by the voice of his own Duchy; it was accepted by the public voice of Europe; it was hallowed by the judgement of the common Father of Christendom. At whatever stage in William’s negotiations the final answer from Alexander came, there can be no doubt that, from that moment, his own preparations were more vigorously pressed on, and that recruits pressed more eagerly to his standard. His own hopes and the hopes of his followers now rose higher. It was now not only booty and lands and lordships, English Earldoms for Norman knights and English Bishopricks for Norman priests, that William could offer to those who followed him. To every man, from whatever quarter of the earth, who came to serve under the consecrated banner he could now offer the blessing of the Roman Pontiff and every spiritual gift that the Pontiff’s hand could bestow. Never surely did the world see a more perfect triumph of unrighteous craft than when the invasion of England was undertaken in the name of religion.

[Sidenote: Summary.]

The first part then of William’s work was done. We must now return to our own island, threatened as she was by the Norman Duke from the South, threatened, as we shall presently see her, by an enemy hardly less terrible from the quarter whence her older enemies had come. It was the fate of England in this memorable year to be exposed to two invasions at the same moment, and against two invasions at the same moment the heart and arm of Harold himself could not prevail.

Chapter XIV

THE NORWEGIAN INVASION AND THE CAMPAIGN OF STAMFORDBRIDGE.[928]

[Sidenote: Course of events before the actual invasion of William.]

The clouds were thus gathering in the direction of Normandy, but it was not from Normandy that the first storm was to break upon England. Or rather it was Normandy which sent forth those first few drops which were the forerunners of the tempest to come. The first drop of English blood that was shed, the first rood of English ground that was harried, during this memorable year, was the work of men, not indeed fighting under William’s banner, but acting at least with William’s connivance, perhaps under his direct commission. But that first scene of the drama was the mere prelude to two acts as stirring and wonderful as any to be found in the whole range of history. Of the two enemies of England, the first was last and the last was first, and the more haste was emphatically not the better speed. The fortune of William changed a mighty rival into an useful pioneer, and changed an invasion which might have destroyed him into a mere diversion in his favour. While the wary Norman was, as ever, biding his time, another more impetuous enemy was to make his venture and to fail in it. Before we come to the fall of Harold of England, we have yet to see him raised to the highest pitch of his glory. Before we tell of the voyage of William and of the campaign of Hastings, we have to tell of the voyage of Harold Hardrada and of the campaign of Stamfordbridge.

§ 1. The First Expedition of Tostig. May, 1066.

[Sidenote: Harold of England in full possession of his Kingdom. Easter, 1066.]

We left King Harold of England undisputed master of his whole Kingdom. He had won over the malecontents of Northumberland; he had held his Easter Feast and Gemót at Westminster; and the hearts of England and of the world had been stirred and affrighted by the awful token which shone over them in the heavens. It was about the beginning of May, perhaps before the warning star had ceased blazing, that the misfortunes of this terrible [Sidenote: May, 1066.] year began. The first blow came from the traitor Tostig. [Sidenote: Tostig lands in Wight.] He came from beyond sea—that is, as we have seen, from Normandy with the licence of William—and, at the head of his ships manned with Flemish or Norman adventurers, he sailed first to the Isle of Wight. The inhabitants, willingly or unwillingly—far more probably the latter—supplied him with money and provisions.[929] He then sailed along the [Sidenote: His ravages in Sussex and Kent.] South Saxon and Kentish coast, the coast along which, fourteen years before, he had sailed with his father in his glorious return. He thus passed on as far as Sandwich, marking his course, wherever he went, by ceaseless and wanton ravage; he did harm everywhere where he might.[930] [Sidenote: Great preparations of Harold. May–September.] But King Harold was now making ready for the great struggle. No view of his position can be more false than that which describes him as making light of the danger from Normandy, and as making no preparation for defence except with a view to the expected invasion from Norway.[931] The truth is exactly opposite. The King was busily engaged in preparations for the defence of his Kingdom against the Norman before there was any reason to look forward to any sort of danger from the Northman. To Harold at least his great rival’s purpose was known from the beginning. He was already, as his panegyrist tells us, labouring by land and by sea for the defence of his country.[932] He was gathering such a land-force and such a sea-force as no King [Sidenote: He hastens from London to Sandwich.] had ever before gathered in this land.[933] He was still in London[934]—that is probably at Westminster—when he heard the news of his brother’s appearance at Sandwich. He therefore hastened his preparations, and leaving London, probably under the command of Leofwine, as Earl of the neighbouring shires, he himself hastened to Sandwich. [Sidenote: Tostig sails from Sandwich,] But before the King reached Sandwich, Tostig had sailed from thence, taking with him a body of the sailors of that haven, some by their own consent and some by force.[935] It is only among professional sailors, who might be tempted by promises of pay and plunder, that the rebel Earl seems to have found any English followers. The cruise of Tostig along these shores must have struck him as a sad contrast to those days of hope when the whole population of the maritime shires came flocking to the coast ready to live and die with Earl Godwine.[936] With his force thus increased to [Sidenote: and ravages Lindesey.] sixty ships, Tostig sailed northwards; he then entered the Humber and ravaged the coast of Lindesey in the Earldom of his enemy Eadwine.[937] Here he acted like Swend himself, or like the earlier destroyers of the days of Ælfred. He burned [Sidenote: He is driven from Lindesey by Eadwine and Morkere,] towns and slew many good men. The two Northern Earls were not wanting to their duty on this occasion. Indeed their interest and their duty too exactly coincided to allow of any remissness. They had no chance of finding their own profit in treason, like the traitors of an earlier time. Eadwine and Morkere hastened to the suffering districts with the levies of the country, and drove away Tostig and his plunderers.[938] The sailors who had followed him, willingly and unwillingly, from Sandwich, now forsook him.[939] The one class saw no further chance of pay or plunder; the others were doubtless glad of the opportunity to escape [Sidenote: and takes refuge in Scotland.] from a service which they disliked. Tostig, with twelve small vessels,[940] now sailed for Scotland and sought shelter with his sworn brother King Malcolm. The tie of brotherhood had not preserved Northumberland from ravage while Tostig was still discharging his duty as an English Earl;[941] but his position of hostility to his country now earned him a hearty welcome at the Scottish court. Malcolm received his brother, and supplied his force with provisions; and Tostig remained under his protection during the whole summer.

§ 2. Tostig’s applications to Swend and Harold Hardrada.

[Sidenote: Saga of Harold Hardrada.]

We have now reached a most fascinating, and at the same time a most difficult, part of our story. We are landed in the famous and magnificent Saga of Harold Hardrada. The tale, as it appears in Norwegian legendary history, is so complete, and it is told with such thoroughly poetic spirit, that it goes deeply against the grain to have to suggest that nearly every detail must be mythical. It is painful to have to turn from the glowing strains of the Norwegian prose epic to the meagre entries of our own Chronicles, and to pronounce that all that is not distinctly confirmed by English testimony is, to say the least, untrustworthy. A void is left which history cannot fill, and which it is forbidden to the historian to fill up from the resources of his own imagination. My only course will be to follow the story in the Saga, so far as it is recommended either by intrinsic probability or by its conformity to our own annals, and at the same time to point out those particulars in which authentic evidence shows that the details must be fabulous.

[Sidenote: War between Harold and Swend.]

The renowned Norwegian King was just now enjoying, or, what to his mind it more likely seemed, suffering under, an unusual state of quiet. The greater part of his reign had been spent in a constant struggle with Swend of Denmark. The details of their warfare do not concern English history. Yet an English historian must feel a certain satisfaction in recording the gallantry and perseverance with which a man so closely connected with England as Swend was had, for a long series of years, withstood, and at last [Sidenote: Peace between them. 1064.] successfully withstood, so formidable an enemy. Two years earlier than the time which we have now reached, a peace had been concluded between the two Kings on perfectly equal terms.[942] Now the war had been wholly defensive on the part of Swend, while Harold had been seeking to annex Denmark to his own dominions. It was therefore a distinct triumph on the part of the prudent Danish King, when Harold acknowledged his title and engaged to cease from all further attacks on his Kingdom. Harold thus had his hands free; disputes with his own subjects, arising out of the harshness of his government, were constantly occurring,[943] but they did not seriously weaken his power. The whole force of Norway, under the most valiant and adventurous of her Kings, a force practised rather than weakened by the long war with Denmark, stood ready for some new enterprise, and such an enterprise was before long suggested by the banished English Earl.

[Sidenote: Contradictions between the English, Norman, and Norwegian accounts.]

That Harold Hardrada invaded England in partnership with Tostig is certain; but the circumstances of their agreement are involved in much difficulty and contradiction. The authentic English narrative says nothing of any personal application to Harold on the part of Tostig before they met on the Scottish coast. And it is by no means easy to make the alleged voyages of Tostig to Denmark and Norway fit in with the English chronology. Indeed the English account might rather suggest that Harold Hardrada had planned his invasion of England quite independently of Tostig, and that the junction of their forces happened quite incidentally, after the Norwegian King had already set sail. On the other hand, the voyage of Tostig to Norway is asserted in the Norman version, and it is the very soul of the Norwegian Saga. I shall discuss the details of these different versions elsewhere.[944] It is perhaps not absolutely impossible to reconcile Tostig’s voyage with the English narrative, but it can be done only by wholly giving up the chronology, and perhaps some other details, of the Saga. The English account at least shows that, if Tostig made any application to Harold at all, it must have been made after he had taken shelter in Scotland, and it would suggest that it was made by messengers rather than personally. With these cautions, I tell the tale as I find it in the Saga, warning the reader that I do not pledge myself to a single detail.

[Sidenote: Norwegian account. Tostig asks help of Swend of Denmark, which is refused.]

The Norwegian story makes Tostig, on his banishment, which, it must be remembered, is placed after his brother’s election to the Kingdom,[945] take the course so familiar to banished Englishmen a few years earlier.[946] He goes first to Flanders, and thence to Denmark, by way of Friesland.[947] His object was to get help from his cousin King Swend to enable him to recover his Earldom. The prudent King offered him an Earldom in Denmark instead. For this Tostig had no mind; he wished to recover Northumberland at all hazards. If Swend would not give him forces for that purpose, he was ready to go a step further. He proposed to Swend to revive his old claim to the Crown of England, and to undertake the conquest of the country. He, Tostig, would help him in such an enterprise with all the force that he could command. Swend could not fail to succeed in an attempt which had been so successfully accomplished by his uncle Cnut. But the Danish King had learned to distrust his own power for such an achievement, and he had seen enough of the world to put little faith in an exile’s estimate of his own influence in the country from which he has been driven. Cnut was a great man and a lucky man; he, Swend, laid no claim to either the greatness or the good luck of his uncle. Cnut had inherited Denmark;[948] he had won Norway without striking a blow; but in order to win England he had to strike many blows and to put his life in great jeopardy. Swend, on the other hand, found it a hard matter to keep Denmark safe from the attacks of the Norwegian King. He would therefore stay at home and would not run any desperate risks. Tostig left him with an expression of contempt for his lack of enterprise and his neglect of the interests of a kinsman. Swend might have answered that Harold of England was a kinsman no less than his brother, and that the gratitude which he himself undoubtedly owed to the memory of Godwine passed much more naturally to the head of the family than to one engaged in treason against his house and country.

[Sidenote: Tostig goes on to Norway, and asks help of Harold Hardrada.]

From Denmark Tostig, so the story says, went on to Norway to seek help from its King Harold Hardrada. He found him in Viken, the south-eastern corner of the Norwegian Kingdom. He opened his errand to Harold in the [Sidenote: His first proposal: Help to recover his Earldom.] same order in which he had opened it to Swend. That is to say, he at first simply asked for help to recover his Earldom. [Sidenote: Harold’s refusal.] This proposal found as little favour from Harold as it had found from Swend. The Northmen, so said their King, would have no mind for a war in England under an English leader; common report said that the English were not men in whom it was safe to put much trust.[949] The massacre of Saint Brice, the deposition of Harthacnut, the refusal to hearken to the claims which Magnus had founded on his agreement with Harthacnut, may all have passed across the mind of Harold Hardrada. He had little mind for an undertaking which promised so much danger, and [Sidenote: Tostig’s second proposal; Harold to be King over all England, and Tostig Under-king over Northumberland.] so little profit in case of success. Tostig had therefore to tempt him by the same bait which he had before offered to Swend. Let the King of the Northmen enter England, not merely to restore an English Earl, but to place the Imperial Crown of Britain upon his own head. Let Harold be King over the whole land; Tostig would ask only to be Under-king of half England, no doubt of its northern half. He would become King Harold’s man, and would serve him faithfully all the days of his life.[950] He then set himself to answer the objections to the enterprise which had been raised by the Norwegian King. Tostig seems really to have believed that, after all that happened, he still reigned in the hearts of his faithful Thegns in Northumberland. [Sidenote: Arguments of Tostig.] The expedition, he argued, would be one of a widely different nature from the expedition of Magnus against England or the expeditions of Harold himself against Denmark. The main obstacle to success in those undertakings would not be present in that which Tostig now counselled. Why was the agreement between Harthacnut and Magnus set aside? Why did not Magnus venture to make good his claims on England against Eadward? Why had Magnus overcome Denmark with ease, while Harold himself had failed in the same attempt? Success or failure in such attempts depended wholly on the disposition of the chiefs and the people of the invaded land. Magnus had succeeded in Denmark, because the chief men of Denmark were on his side: Harold had failed, because the whole Danish nation had been against him.[951] So Magnus had shrunk from asserting his claims against Eadward, because Eadward was the King whom the whole people of England had chosen to reign over them. But now the state of things was changed. He, Tostig, deemed himself the equal of his brother in all but his kingly title. He would support the cause of Harold of Norway, and his support—so the exile said, and perhaps thought—would bring with it the allegiance of all the chief men of the land. Harold Hardrada, so all men allowed, was the first warrior of northern lands; he had spent fifteen years in an attempt to seize on Denmark; would he refuse to seize on England, now that England lay ready for him, only waiting for him to take possession?

[Sidenote: Harold determines to invade England.]

The arguments of Tostig, we are told, gradually carried conviction to the mind of Harold. The proposed expedition was novel and distant; it bade fair to be successful, and, if successful, it would bring unbounded glory. As such, it had every attraction for a prince, who now, at the age of fifty, had lost nothing of the spirit of his Wiking youth. The expedition was determined on, and it was ordered to [Sidenote: No mention of the consultation of any Thing by Harold Hardrada.] take place in the course of the summer. It may be merely the omission of our Saga-maker, but it is worth noting that we hear nothing of the consultation of any Thing or other Assembly by Harold Hardrada. In England it came within the constitutional functions of the Witan to approve or to forbid any interference in the concerns of another country. Twice had it been proposed in an English Gemót to take a part in the wars of Swend and Magnus, and twice had the majority of the Assembly rejected the proposal.[952] Even in Normandy, whether as a matter of constitutional right or of personal prudence, William had thought it needful to consult an Assembly of his Duchy before he determined on the invasion of England.[953] But in Norway we find no mention of any power which had to decide upon such questions, except the arbitrary will of King Harold himself. There can be no doubt that Harold reigned in Norway as the despot which his surname implies, and the utmost that his panegyrist can say for him is that his heavy hand pressed equally upon all.[954] But the proposed scheme was at least freely discussed by the [Sidenote: Different opinions in Norway: estimate of the English Housecarls.] public opinion of Norway. Some deemed that the valour and good luck of Harold the son of Sigurd must be successful in every land and over every enemy. Others shrank from an encounter with Harold the son of Godwine and with the resources of the land over which he reigned. England was a land perilous to attack; it was a land fertile in warriors; there, above all, were the Thingmen, the Housecarls, men ever strong in battle, men ever ready of heart and hand, men any one of whom was a match for two of the choicest warriors of Norway.[955] This is indeed a speaking witness to the efficiency of the force which had been called into being by the wisdom of Cnut, and which had lost nothing in strength or in reputation under the government of Harold. The fame of the conqueror of Gruffydd had no doubt been sounded throughout the North, and men shrank from the prospect of meeting a chief and an army so ready to adapt themselves to every requirement which the accidents of war might suggest. Whether the details of the story are true or false, this traditional estimate of the English Housecarls must at least be genuine. Nothing however is described as taking place to hinder the expedition, or to cause any relaxation in the levies and preparations of Harold Hardrada. Tostig, it is added, sailed in the spring to Flanders, to collect forces both from that country and from England. We here at once see the confusion of the Norwegian chronology. If we can suppose these visits of Tostig to Swend and Harold to be true in their main outlines, they are at least altogether moved from their right place.

§ 3. The Invasion of Harold Hardrada. September, 1066.

[Sidenote: Great preparations of Harold of England. May–September.]

It is not clear how far the danger which threatened him from the North was known to King Harold of England. It is certain that the appearance of the Norwegian fleet was unlooked for at the actual moment of its coming.[956] But this need not imply that no hint whatever of the great preparations of Harold of Norway had reached England. It is certain that the attention of the King of the English was at that moment altogether concentrated on his preparations to withstand a nearer and really more formidable enemy. The fleet, the news of whose approach had driven away Tostig from Sandwich, was part of a vast system of preparation for the defence of southern England. The probability is that, when England was thus threatened by two enemies at once, the King, together with his brothers, undertook the immediate defence of Wessex and [Sidenote: The North probably left to its own Earls.] East-Anglia, and that he entrusted the defence of the North to its own Earls. Harold himself could not be everywhere at once; if he had to choose between one part of his Kingdom and another, his first duty clearly was to that part which was more specially his own, more immediately under his personal government. It might surely seem safe to leave Northumberland and Mercia to the defence of their own Earls, the men who, of all men in the island, were the most concerned to keep Tostig out of it. Eadwine might pass in Mercia almost for an hereditary prince; Morkere was the special choice of the Northumbrian people. To trust them to fight for their own was surely no mark of neglect on the King’s part, but rather a sign of the confidence which he placed in his loyal and affectionate [Sidenote: The King’s measures for the defence of southern England.] brothers-in-law. At all events, King Harold was doing all that mortal man could do for the defence of southern England. For he knew well that William Bastard, King Eadward’s kinsman, sought to come and win this land.[957] And he knew better than any other man in England with what a foe he had to deal in him, and how the strongest efforts of every man in the land were needed to keep the [Sidenote: Difficulty of the defence, arising from the nature of the Fyrd.] land from being won by the Norman. No story better illustrates the difficulties which in those days attended the general who had not merely to fight a battle, but to plan a campaign, and a defensive campaign above all. Harold had no standing army except the Housecarls; still, as having the Housecarls, he was so far better off than Æthelred, who had no standing army at all. But the efficiency of the Housecarls was almost wholly confined to the day of battle. Face to face with an enemy, each of them might be equal to two other men; but neither the numbers nor the nature of the force made them at all fit to guard the whole coast of Wessex and East-Anglia. For that purpose Harold had of course to trust to the landfyrd, the militia of the shires. What the nature of this force was we have often seen before. Harold, or Eadmund, or any other chief in whom men had confidence, could easily raise an army of this kind, an army patriotic and brave after its own fashion, an army perfectly ready to fight a battle, but which, after either winning or losing a battle, insisted on going home again. We have seen that, after all the battles of Eadmund, with one exception,[958] his army disbanded, and he had to gather a fresh army to fight the next battle. Harold had a still more difficult task before him. He had to gather his militia, and to keep them under arms for an indefinite time, without fighting any battle, and when the main object of their being in arms was to hinder any battle from being fought. We do not read of any earlier King even attempting such a scheme of general defence. Harold got together such a fleet and army[959] as no King had ever got together before, and he kept them together during four months of inaction. The fleet cruised in the Channel; the land-force was placed at various fitting posts along [Sidenote: Harold in the Isle of Wight.] the coast. The King first sailed to the Isle of Wight, and then spent the summer in simply waiting for the approach of William. No kind of service could have been so irksome for an unprofessional, and seemingly unpaid, force. There was absolutely nothing to do but to watch; the excitement of battle, the attraction of plunder, all the usual motives for which men left their homes and families and private affairs, were denied to men who had simply to guard the shores of their own island. Then they were to be fed, not, as in a hostile country, at the expense of the neighbourhood in which each division was quartered, but by some means which to the imperfect finance and imperfect commissariat of that age must have been difficult indeed. It is no small proof of Harold’s skill and forethought, and of the influence which he must have had over the nation generally, that he was able to keep and feed a greater army for a greater time than any King had ever done before him. There is certainly no other record of such a host being kept so long under arms without either fighting or plundering. At last, at the end of [Sidenote: The army disbanded. September 8.] four months, the strain was too great to be any longer borne. Food for so great a multitude was no longer forthcoming. If the crop was early, it may have already suffered from the absence of so many of those who were accustomed to gather it in. If the crop was late, men were probably eagerly clamouring to go home and reap each man his own field. At all events, early in September, it was found impossible to keep them together any longer.[960] The authority and influence of Harold broke down before the [Sidenote: Harold returns to London with the fleet.] stronger force of necessity. The army was disbanded; the King rode back to London, for which haven the fleet also was ordered to make. Many of the ships were unluckily lost or damaged on the voyage.[961] The English account would seem to imply that they returned without having [Sidenote: Question of naval operations against the Normans.] seen any actual service at all. But some expressions of the Chronicles, and some remarkable entries in the Norman Survey, might be taken to imply that some naval engagement between English and Norman ships did take place at some stage or other of this wonderful year. If so, it is hard to find any later stage of the war to which such an event will so well fit in as to the days when Harold’s fleet was cruising in the Channel.[962]

No vexation can be conceived greater than Harold’s must have been at seeing his whole labour thus thrown away. He must have turned away from the coast with a heavy heart, with a feeling that the land now lay open to the stranger. The King had most assuredly not failed his people, and we cannot fairly say that the people had failed their King. The force of circumstances had been too strong for King and people alike. A few weeks more of endurance, and the Norman fleet might have never reached the English shore. But those few weeks more of endurance were seemingly too much to ask of human nature. The south coast of England was left undefended. It does not indeed follow that every fort and every watch-tower was left absolutely without guardians. We shall find that such was not the case. But there was no longer any force by land or by sea which could offer any effectual resistance to the landing of the Norman invader.

[Sidenote: Harold in London.]

Harold had ridden to London, a fact which again marks the growing importance of the city. I have already[963] pointed out how marked was the influence of the events of Harold’s reign on the process which gradually made London, what we may now almost begin to call it, the capital of the Kingdom. So far as Harold, during his reign of little stillness, could be said to have any special dwelling-place, that special dwelling-place seems to have been Westminster. But it was hardly in search of repose that he now came thither. Threatened as he was by two enemies, London was a central point from which he could march northwards or southwards, as his presence might be called for in either quarter. The wealth and loyalty of its citizens made the city an excellent point for the collecting and provisioning of armies. And, as a port lying far inland, it was a point no less suited to be the centre of operations which were to take in land and sea alike. But Harold’s sojourn in London now was not a [Sidenote: Harold Hardrada sets sail.] long one. Before he had left the southern coast, his namesake of Norway was afloat. Whether his voyage took place at the instigation of Tostig or not, there is no doubt either as to the fact of the voyage or as to the greatness of the preparations which had been made for it. Harold Hardrada is said to have called out a levy of half the fighting men of his Kingdom.[964] His fleet is variously reckoned at two hundred, three hundred, five hundred, and even a thousand ships,[965] and the numbers of the host were increased at almost every point where the fleet touched. He set sail from the Solen Isles at the mouth of Sogne [Sidenote: He designs to reign in England.] Fiord, near Bergen on the west coast of Norway. It would seem that he had resolved to transfer the seat of his government to the land which he looked forward to conquer.[966] His expedition bore the character, if not of a national, at least of a domestic migration. Harold Hardrada, like the Merwings in Gaul,[967] allowed himself a kind of open polygamy, which he may possibly have learned in the Mussulman lands which he had visited as [Sidenote: His wives and children.] a warrior and as a pilgrim. Besides his Queen, the Russian princess Elizabeth, who was neither dead nor divorced, one Thora, the daughter of Thorberg, is also spoken of as his wife.[968] Elizabeth was the mother of his daughters Mary and Ingigerd; Thora was the mother of his sons Magnus and Olaf. Thora was left in Norway with her son Magnus, who received the title of King.[969] [Sidenote: Comparison with Cnut.] In this Harold might seem to follow the precedent set by Cnut with regard to Ælfgifu of Northampton and her son Swend.[970] Norway was again to be ruled by an Under-king subordinate to a Northern Emperor reigning in England. The rest of his family, Queen Elizabeth and her daughters, and Olaf the son of Thora, accompanied Harold in the fleet, no doubt to receive establishments in [Sidenote: Harold’s treasures.] the realm which was to be won. Among other treasures, he is said to have brought with him a vast mass of solid gold, part of the plunder or the reward of his campaigns in the Imperial service. This huge ingot, which twelve strong youths could hardly carry, passed from one conqueror to another till it formed part of the boundless wealth of William the Bastard.[971]

[Sidenote: Greatness of the expedition.]

Such a fleet had not for years gone forth from any Scandinavian haven. Cnut had kept the Northern world in comparative peace beneath his Imperial sceptre. Since his death, the strength of the Scandinavian powers had been frittered away in the endless bickerings between Denmark and Norway. But now, as in the days of Swend and Olaf, a royal fleet, manned with the whole strength of a kingdom, sailed forth once more to bring the Isle of Britain into subjection to a Northern master. The fleet was commanded by a warrior whose fame was spread from Africa to Iceland. It sailed forth to attack a realm which was no longer under the rule of an Æthelred, but under that of a King whose renown in arms, within his own narrower [Sidenote: Chances of the two invaders.] sphere, sounded as high as that of Hardrada himself. And in the far distance, beyond the defender of the land, lay its other assailant. We can hardly believe either that the preparations of the King of the Northmen were utterly unknown at Rouen,[972] or that the preparations of the Duke of the Normans were utterly unknown at Trondhjem. William must have set sail, hardly knowing which of the two Harolds he would meet on the South-Saxon hills, and Harold Hardrada must have set sail, hardly knowing whether he would find the shores of Northumberland guarded by the axes of England or the lances of Normandy. [Sidenote: The expedition of Harold the last Scandinavian attack on England.] It was the last and greatest of those great enterprises of the Scandinavian powers under which England had suffered for so many ages. The Raven of Denmark was yet to float more than once over the stream of Humber, and the [Sidenote: 1069–1071.] Land-waster itself was to float over the shores of Anglesey.[973] [Sidenote: 1098.] But the ensign once so terrible to Englishmen had then become an ensign of promised deliverance; under the yoke of utter strangers the old foe was felt to be a brother. But now the Land-waster of Norway came, for the last time, purely and avowedly on its old errand of devastation and conquest.

King Harold of Norway set forth for England to reign there, but he came to reign without the good-will of a single native partizan, save one traitor whom the land had cast forth for his evil deeds. The last of his class, the last royal Wiking, who knew no home so dear as the wave, no enjoyment so keen as the delights of battle by sea and land, he came to stake his crown and life on the most terrible of chances. The legends of his nation set him and his followers before us as setting forth on their great venture in no joyous or hopeful mood. The shadow of its doom seemed already to spread itself over the mightiest fleet that Northern King had ever gathered in [Sidenote: Omens on the voyage.] a Northern haven. Dreams and omens of no cheering kind weighed upon the mind both of the King and of his followers. The sway of Saint Olaf and of Cnut had not wiped out all traces of old heathendom, and strange beliefs in weird and superhuman powers still lingered, then and long after, among the Scandinavian people. Men told in after days of the dream that came to Gyrd,[974] the King’s comrade, as he lay in the King’s ship; how he stood in the ship and saw on an island a woman of dæmon birth,[975] vast and fearful; how ravens and ernes sat on the stern of every ship, and how the woman sang gloomy songs of the King who was lured to the west, to leave many bones behind him to glut the ravenous fowls. They told how Thord saw the host of England marching to the shore; how another dæmon-woman rode before them on a wolf, how she fed her strange steed with the bleeding carcases of men, and how, as fast as his dripping jaws swallowed one body, she had ever another ready to throw into his open mouth. And, clearer warning than all, King Harold himself saw in a dream his martyred brother, who told him that his doom was near, and that he too would become the food of the steed that bore the fearful witch-wife. Tales like these are no doubt, in their details at least, the creation of after times; but they show well the spirit, at once bold and gloomy, enterprising and meditative, of the race with which England was now for the last time to struggle for her being.

[Sidenote: Harold Hardrada lands in Shetland and Orkney &c. 1014–1064.]

The first part of the British Islands where the Norwegian fleet landed was the Isles of Shetland and Orkney. These, it must be remembered, together with the northern districts of the mainland, now formed a powerful Scandinavian [Sidenote: Thorfinn Earl of Orkney, &c. 1014–1064.] state. Its Earl, Thorfinn, had, in a reign of fifty years, greatly extended the power of his Earldom.[976] Succeeding, like William, in his childhood, he and his state had grown up as it were together. He had withstood various attacks from the Scottish Kings; he had, some say served, some say warred, in England;[977] he had won the friendship, perhaps submitted to the superiority, of Magnus and Harold of Norway; he had made the pilgrimage to Rome, and had founded the great church of Orkney, which in after times received the name of the martyred Earl Magnus. This prince had died about two years before this time, leaving two young sons, Paul[978] and Erling, in possession of the Earldom. Their mother, Ingebiorg, had remarried with Malcolm of Scotland. The Celtic and the Scandinavian portions of Northern Britain were thus just now on unusually good terms, and Scotland and Orkney alike combined to swell the fleet of Harold Hardrada. Paul and Erling accompanied the prince who, both as King of the Northmen and as future Emperor of Britain, doubtless looked on himself as doubly their overlord.[979] Harold left his wife and daughters in Orkney, and [Sidenote: Harold Hardrada in the Tyne. September.] sailed southward to the mouth of the Tyne. There, it would seem, was made the second great muster of his fleet. There he was joined by his one partizan among the natives of [Sidenote: He is joined by Tostig, and by contingents from Orkney, Scotland, and Ireland.] the realm which he hoped to conquer. Thither came the traitor Tostig, whether Harold had indeed set forth at his bidding, or whether Tostig now for the first time in his Scottish shelter heard of his approach, and hastened to join himself to any enemy of England. With him came whatever force he had either before brought from Flanders or had since collected in Scotland. There he did homage to the invader whom he was leading against his brother and his country, and he sailed on with the Norwegian King as his man.[980] [Sidenote: Policy of Malcolm of Scotland.] Whether Malcolm of Scotland joined the force of Harold in person does not appear for certain, but of the presence of a Scottish contingent in the fleet, whether distinct from the followers of Tostig or not, there seems to be no doubt.[981] The sworn brotherhood of Malcolm and Tostig was now fully acknowledged, but it is hard to see what motive of sound policy could have led Malcolm to give help to Harold the son of Sigurd against Harold the son of Godwine. Whoever might prove successful among the three princes who were contending for the English Crown, the victorious candidate was sure to claim the Empire of Æthelstan and Eadgar in all its fulness. A foreign conqueror too was far more likely than a native Englishman to press his rights as Father and Lord in a strict and perhaps exaggerated shape. But the pleasure of fishing in troubled waters, the hope of gaining some momentary advantage at the expense of England, seems to have been enough. Malcolm, the King who owed his crown to English help, appeared for the second time as an enemy of England. An Irish potentate, no doubt of Danish descent, also joined the muster;[982] Iceland too, the great Norwegian colony, sent help to the mother country; the presence of Godred the son of Harold, a chief of that island, and the future conqueror of Man and Dublin,[983] shows that the remotest North sent forth what was doubtless far from the least formidable contingent of the host of Hardrada. That host was thus swelled by reinforcements from the whole north-west of Europe. Norway, Scotland, Orkney, Ireland, Iceland, all sent forth their sons to the great enterprise of the last and greatest of the Wikings. No such mingled host had threatened the shores of England since wolves and ernes and ravens held their mighty banquet on the day of Brunanburh.

[Sidenote: The fleet sails along the Yorkshire coast.]

The fleet now again sailed southward. Its course was swift,[984] but not so swift as to forbid the work of plunder on the way. The coast was utterly defenceless. A land under the guardianship of Eadwine and Morkere was in a very different case from a land under the guardianship of Harold of England. The fleet had entered the Tyne unawares, and the shores of Yorkshire were not lined with warriors, as the shores of Wessex had been but a month before. The invaders landed and harried where they listed. [Sidenote: Cleveland ravaged.] The coast of Cleveland was ravaged, and the district submitted without resistance.[985] At Scarborough a better spirit was shown; some valiant man was doubtless in local command.[986] [Sidenote: Resistance of Scarborough, and burning of the town.] When the Northmen landed, the men of the town, neglected by their Earl, dared, in the spirit of Brihtnoth or Ulfcytel, to meet the invaders in arms. But Harold, according to the legend, easily found means of bringing them to submission and to destruction. The elder town of Scarborough lies on the slope of heights which lead gradually up to a bold peninsular cliff, dashed on three sides by the waves of the German Ocean. Above the town rises the mutilated minster. Above the minster again, the peninsula itself is crowned by the defences of an ancient castle, whose shattered Norman keep remains as a relic of the age next following that with which we are now dealing. On these heights the Northmen raised a vast pile of wood, and set fire to it. They then hurled the burning timbers down upon the town; house after house caught fire; the town now surrendered, but it was none the less given up to [Sidenote: Resistance of Holderness.] slaughter and plunder. The whole coast now submitted; the men of Holderness, like the men of Scarborough, ventured, bravely but unsuccessfully, on local resistance. Of naval operations on the English side we hear nothing. Somewhat later in our narrative we shall find that northern [Sidenote: The Northumbrian fleet retreats into the Wharf.] England was not wholly unprovided with ships; but when we hear of them, it is, strange as it appears, in the inland waters of the Wharf.[987] The naval force of Northumberland was probably quite inadequate to contend with so fearful an enemy; the fleet had most likely retired before the invaders as they doubled Ravenspur and entered the great [Sidenote: The Norwegian fleet sails up the Humber.] estuary of the Humber. Unopposed, it would seem, either by land or by water, Harold and his host directed their course straight upon the capital of Northumberland. They passed by the desolate flat where the genius of the great Edward was one day to call into being the great haven of Kingston-upon-Hull. They passed by the pathless forest where the bounty of the next invader of England was to [Sidenote: They disembark at Riccall.] lay the foundations of the great minster of Selby. At last they cast anchor at a spot on the left bank of the Ouse, not far from the village of Riccall.[988] They were now at a distance by land of about nine miles from York, but the windings of the river make the distance by water considerably greater. This may have been among the motives which led them to choose their halting-place at this particular point. Another obvious motive was to watch the entrance to the Wharf, the stream in which the English fleet had sought shelter, and which empties itself into the Ouse a little way above Riccall. It is not easy to judge of the exact condition of the landing-place at the time. There can be no doubt that the bed of the river, and its whole aspect, has been greatly changed since it has been affected by locks, dykes, and the drainage of the land on its banks. But it is clear that Riccall was a good central position. A fleet moored there could at once bar the ascent of the Ouse and the descent of its tributary; and it was at the same time near enough to give help, if help were needed, in the main operations against the capital. At Riccall, then, the vast fleet of the Northmen was left. Filling up the river, as it must have done, for a long distance, it formed an unwonted and terrible object in waters where no invading fleet had been seen for fifty years. A detachment, under the command of Olaf the son of the Norwegian King, of the two Earls of Orkney, and [Sidenote: Harold and Tostig march on York.] of the Bishop of those islands, was left to guard the ships, while the main body, under Harold and Tostig, prepared for their decisive march on York.

The two Earls were at last roused from their inaction, when the great city of Northern England was thus directly placed in jeopardy.[989] Even Æthelred had thought it needful to do something when a Danish host came too [Sidenote: Eadwine and Morkere march to meet them.] near to his Imperial resting-place at Winchester.[990] So [Sidenote: Eadwine and Morkere, who had left Cleveland and Scarborough] and Holderness to their fate, deemed themselves at last called upon to strike a blow in defence of York. They had by this time collected a large army, consisting, it would seem, mainly of the general levy or militia of the district. Among these a large body of priests had not scrupled to obey the summons to arms.[991] It may be doubted whether this is simply a sign of the warlike habits of the Northumbrian people in general, or whether it points to a special feeling of the special exigency of the case. At the head of this force, the two English Earls set forth from York, while the Norwegian army advanced to meet them from the point where they had left their ships at Riccall. The course of both armies led them along the slight ridge which forms the line of communication between York and Selby, a narrow path between the river and its marshy banks on one side, and the flat, and still to some extent marshy, ground on the [Sidenote: BATTLE of FULFORD. Wednesday, September 20.] other. On the spot known as Gate Fulford,[992] about two miles from the city, the armies met. Harold Hardrada, pressing on no doubt with all the vehemence of his nature, had reached the place from Riccall before the English had accomplished the shorter march from York. He was therefore able to make ready his line of battle before they drew near to attack.[993] The present village stands on a low elevation, sloping gently to the river on the left hand and to the marshy flat to the right. This doubtless was the site occupied by the [Sidenote: Arrangements of the Norwegian army.] invading army. The royal post was by the river; there the line of the shield-wall was thickest; there was pitched the Land-waster, the significant name of Harold’s royal standard. And there stood the King himself, his giant form towering alike over friends and enemies. The right wing stretched across the rising ground as far as a ditch, beyond which lay the marsh, which is described as broad and deep.[994] Here the line was weakest, and here, whether by accident or by design, the English made their first attack. The fight was a hard one; the Angles and Danes of Northumberland were no contemptible enemies for any man, and reckless, and even traitorous, as was the whole conduct of the brother Earls, they showed no lack of the courage of [Sidenote: Vigorous charge of the English on the Norwegian right.] the mere soldier. The charge of the Northumbrians on the Norwegian right was vigorous and, for a while, successful. The enemy gave way, and the banner of Earl Morkere pressed on valiantly.[995] But it was only where the line was least strong that the English could make any impression; and the chances of war presently [Sidenote: Decisive charge of the Norwegian right under Harold.] changed. For now King Harold of Norway caused the charge to be sounded, and he himself led on the left wing, with the Land-waster borne beside him. He charged at once on the troops which were already beginning to boast of their victory; before his two-handed sword all went [Sidenote: Defeat and flight of the English.] down; the Northmen pressed on around their King; the English gave way before their onslaught. They still for a while resisted, but presently they turned and fled. The slaughter was fearful, but the Norwegian sword was not the only enemy. In that wild flight and wild pursuit, men were hurled into the river, the ditch, and the marsh; here corpses were borne down the stream; there the ditch was so filled with the slain that the pursuers, so their poets say, could march as on solid ground over their carcases.[996] The Norwegians had possession of the place of slaughter, and the remnant of the English were driven to find shelter within the walls of York.[997]

[Sidenote: Surrender of York. Sunday, September 24.]

The battle of Fulford was fought on Wednesday. Its immediate result was the surrender of York. On Sunday, it would seem, the city capitulated.[998] A local Gemót or [Sidenote: Harold Hardrada received as King, and the Northumbrians agree to follow him against southern England.] Thing was held, in which it was agreed to make peace with Harold of Norway, and to receive him as King of the English, or at least as King of the Northumbrians. His new subjects even agreed to join him, as their fathers had agreed to join Swend, in his further warfare against the south of England.[999] Provisions were supplied to the army; hostages were given to the Norwegian King, and, what [Sidenote: Hostages exchanged.] would hardly have been expected, we read, on trustworthy authority, that Harold in return gave an equal number of hostages to the men of York.[1000] What follows will show that this treasonable engagement by no means represented the real wishes of the Northumbrian people; there is still less reason to think that it represented the real wishes of Eadwine and Morkere. But it surely implies a lack of zeal and courage for a great city to surrender on the fourth day, especially as we read nothing of any actual assault on the walls. Such was at least not the conduct of the citizens of London and Exeter sixty years before. No doubt both the city and the surrounding country were greatly weakened by the slaughter at Fulford; still, with stout hearts and strong walls, it might surely have been possible to prolong resistance beyond the space of four days. On the other hand, the conduct of Harold Hardrada seems milder and more politic than might have been looked for from the character either of himself or of his English companion. But we may be sure that, in this mild treatment of York, we see the counsel of Harold and not of Tostig. The banished Earl was seeking revenge; the invading King was seeking a Crown; and he must have known the policy of winning subjects by fair means rather than by force whenever fair means would avail for the purpose.

§ 4. The March of Harold and the Battle of Stamfordbridge.

The hostages, one hundred and fifty in number, which were now given to the Norwegian King were to secure [Sidenote: Hostages from the shire to be delivered at Stamfordbridge.] the fidelity of the city of York only. Hostages from the whole shire were to be given at some future day, and the place for their delivery was appointed to be at Stamfordbridge.[1001] The spot which bears this name, a name which [Sidenote: Notice of Stamfordbridge and Aldby.] the events of those few days were to make illustrious, lies about eight miles north-east of the city. As its name implies, the main feature of the place is the bridge over the Derwent, a tributary of the Ouse, which joins the main stream at a considerable distance below Riccall. The site has been conjectured to be the Roman Derventio, but it is perhaps a more lucky guess which places that site, a site so hallowed in the early religious history of Northumberland, within the modern park of Aldby. There stood a royal house of the Northumbrian Kings, the apparent site of which, or of some of its outposts, a mound surrounded by a fosse, still looks down on a picturesque point of the course of the river. There it was that the faithful Lilla gave his life for the Northumbrian Bretwalda, and there Eanfled, the Bretwalda’s first-born, was the first of Northumbrian race to be received into the fold of Christ.[1002] This spot lies at a distance of less than three miles above Stamfordbridge, on the right bank of the river, at a point where another bridge now at least [Sidenote: Cause of the movement from York.] spans the stream. If Aldby, the ancient dwelling-place of the Northumbrian Kings, remained, as is highly probable, a dwelling-place of the Northumbrian Earls, some light is perhaps thrown on what otherwise seems the incomprehensible movement of the Northmen from York to Stamfordbridge.[1003] We instinctively ask why such a comparatively distant spot, one especially which removed the army still further from their naval station at Riccall, should have been chosen for the delivery of the hostages. Why should Harold leave York so far out of his immediate grasp, when one would have thought that the hostages might just as easily have been delivered in York itself? The probable cause is to be found in the necessity of finding new quarters and a new place of subsistence for the army. The Northmen had doubtless by this time consumed all that was supplied by the hanks of the Ouse; they were not to be indulged with the sack of York; the provisions furnished by the city could hardly maintain them till the coming of the hostages, whose collection from all parts of the shire would necessarily be a work of time. But if there was a royal house in the neighbourhood of Stamfordbridge, we at once see a motive to direct the choice of the invaders to that neighbourhood. Such a position would afford manifest advantages in the way of quarters and provisions. Its occupation would also present a sentimental attraction. The first-fruits of victory would already seem to be enjoyed by Tostig as he sat again as master in the halls of his brother. And Harold Hardrada might feel himself already Lord of the Isle of Britain, as he placed himself in the seat of the King who seemed to have left his Kingdom open to his arms.

[Sidenote: Description of the site.]

The spot which, by reason of this almost accidental movement, became the scene of one of the great events of our history, though not one of those spots which nature seems to have marked out as the almost necessary place of some memorable deed, is one which is far from being void of interest. The great tale of which it became the theatre [Sidenote: Origin of the name.] is legibly written on its natural features. The name of the place is a history in itself.[1004] The stones are still to be seen from which the spot drew its first name of Stamford. That name is shared with it by not a few other places, a name which reminds us of days when the primitive stepping-stones, supplied either by art or by nature, supplied the earliest means of crossing a deep or rapid river. Those stones, at a later day, became the supports of the wooden bridge which one deed of that memorable week was to make immortal. The wooden bridge has, in modern times, given way to a successor of stone, and other changes have greatly modified the condition of the stream and the general aspect of the place. But the main features are still there, as when the Norwegian host pitched their camp upon its banks. The modern bridge stands on a different site from the early structure of wood, but the position of the true Stamfordbridge is still to be seen. Its memory is preserved at once by local tradition and by the clearer evidence of the course of the roads converging on either side. The ground on each side of the Derwent forms at this point a nearly flat plain, but a plain placed at some elevation above the stream. In the distance the bold outline of the Yorkshire Wolds forms a prominent object, but the country nearer to the river is not marked in any special way. The Derwent itself, a reedy and somewhat sluggish stream, winds between the higher levels on each side, its immediate banks forming those alluvial flats which are locally known as ings. But at Stamfordbridge itself the higher ground slopes gently to the river on both sides. This higher ground, on the left bank of the stream, bears the historical name of the Battle Flats. On the other side, the ground, in an approach from York, is nearly flat, with a slight rise, as far as Gate Helmsley, a village a mile or more west of the river. From this point the road gradually descends to Stamfordbridge. An army therefore advancing from York would be able to make the greater part of its march unperceived by the enemy. An army encamped on the lower ground immediately on each side of the Derwent might easily, if somewhat careless guard were kept, remain unconscious of the enemy’s approach till they had begun the descent from Helmsley.[1005]

The events which followed lead us to believe that the [Sidenote: Arrangement of the Norwegian army.] Northmen, in the full consciousness and pride of victory, were encamped on both sides of the stream, probably in no very certain order or discipline. If a neighbouring royal dwelling-place at Aldby formed one of the motives for the choice of the position, it is possible that the head-quarters of the Norwegian King were placed at that point. At any rate, the bridge itself and the ground immediately right of the river were kept by an advanced detachment. It would seem that the whole of the army which had received the submission of York, and which was expecting the submission of all Northumberland, retired from the banks of the Ouse to the banks of the Derwent. The ships still remained in the larger river, seemingly at their original landing-place at Riccall, still guarded by Olaf and the Earls of Orkney. Meanwhile Harold himself, with Tostig and the main strength of the army, awaited the coming of the hostages at Stamfordbridge.

[Sidenote: The news of the Norwegian landing brought to Harold of England.]

They waited for what they were never to receive. One day more of endurance, and York might have been saved from the humiliation of her ignominious treaty with the invader. The news of the approach of the Northern fleet had been carried with all speed to King Harold of England.[1006] Placed between two enemies, the King’s position was indeed a difficult one. His preparations for the defence of the South had been brought to nothing by events over which he had no control. To march to the defence of the North was to leave the South unguarded. But it was impossible for him to leave the North to a guardianship which was plainly inadequate. Eadwine and Morkere had failed to save Cleveland; they had failed to support the gallant local resistance of Scarborough and Holderness. The huge host of Hardrada, gathered from so many lands, was one with which the force of Northumberland alone could never grapple. The occasion called for the presence of the King [Sidenote: He determines on an instant march to the North.] and for the whole force of the Kingdom. The more immediate danger dictated the more immediate duty. Duke William had not yet landed; he had not even sailed; a thousand accidents might hinder him from ever landing or ever sailing. But King Harold of Norway was already in the land; he was ravaging and burning at pleasure; whole districts of Northumberland, deserted by their immediate rulers, were submitting to him. The call northwards was at the moment the stronger; a swift march, a speedy victory, and Harold of England might again be in London or in Sussex before the southern invader could have crossed the sea. The King chose his plan, and the plan that he chose he carried out with all the tremendous energy of his character. He gave orders for an immediate march to the [Sidenote: Legend of Harold’s sickness and recovery through the prayers of Eadward.] North. According to a legend which probably contains some groundwork of truth, the King was at this moment suffering from severe bodily sickness.[1007] But his strong heart rose above the weaknesses of the flesh, and he hid his sufferings from all men. By day he in no way relaxed in the labours imposed by the duty of gathering together and marshalling his army.[1008] The sleepless night was spent in prayers and sighs, as Harold implored the help of the relic whose sworn votary he was, the Holy Rood of his own Waltham.[1009] His endurance in the cause of his country was rewarded, so the story runs, by supernatural help and comfort. The deceased King, the holy Eadward, did not, in his now happier state, forget the Kingdom which had been his in his mortal days, nor yet the King to whom he had made fast his Kingdom. In the visions of the night he appeared to the Abbot Æthelsige,[1010] and bade him bear his message to King Harold. Let Harold, he said, be strong and of a good courage, and go forth to battle with the enemies of England. He himself by his prayers would guide and defend his people, and would direct their righteous warfare to certain victory. If the King should doubt of his mission, let him know that he, Eadward, knew well by how great an effort he had that day gathered up his strength for the duties of his calling. The holy man delayed not to discharge the errand of his departed master. He sought the King; he told him the message of his predecessor; and Harold, recovered from his sickness,[1011] and made more hopeful by the cheering words of Eadward, applied himself with redoubled energy to the work that was before him.

[Sidenote: Value of the legend as illustrating English estimate of Eadward and Harold.]

This tale, legendary as it is, is worth recording; for it is evidently of genuine English growth, and it shows how the English people contrived to unite reverence for the deceased saint with admiration for the living hero. The men who believed that a saint, and above all that Eadward, interfered on behalf of Harold clearly did not hold Harold for an usurper or a perjurer, or for a man who had failed in his duty to Eadward when living. Harold was under the ban of Rome, but Englishmen did not therefore hold him to be unworthy of the divine favour, just as in after times the same ban availed not to hinder Simon of Montfort from receiving worship or from working miracles. As for the historical value of the tale, Harold may possibly have been delayed by illness at this critical moment, but he hardly needed visions and prodigies to urge him to the discharge of [Sidenote: Harold begins his march.] his kingly duties. With all the speed that human energy could supply, he set forth upon that great northern march which must rank among the greatest exploits of its kind that history records. Not a moment was to be lost, if Northumberland and England were to be saved. Those whose memories could go back for fifty years might deem that the spirit of Ironside himself was once more leading the hosts of England to battle. At the head of his Housecarls, those terrible Thingmen whose name carried awe beyond the sea, the King of the English set forth from his southern capital. A subordinate command was held by Bondig the Staller, and we cannot doubt that Gyrth and Leofwine were found now, as a few weeks later, side by [Sidenote: Gathering in recruits from various districts.] side with their royal brother.[1012] On their march they pressed into their service the forces of the districts through which they passed.[1013] Volunteers, even from distant shires, hastened to join the muster. But, save its chiefs, two men alone in the host are known to us in their personal being, and even of them we cannot record the names. A Thegn of Essex, a benefactor of King Eadward’s church at Westminster, is recorded in the Norman Survey as having gone to the battle at York with Harold.[1014] Another aged Thegn of Worcestershire, a tenant of the church of Evesham and uncle of its Abbot Ælfwine, is also handed down to us, in the dry formulæ of the Survey, as having followed his King on the great march and as having given his life for Harold and for England.[1015] Such men doubtless did not stand alone; the whole strength of southern and central England took part in that great campaign, and we may be sure that Harold entered Northumberland at the head of a force equal or superior to that of the Northern invader. The English army, ranged in seven divisions,[1016] marched on along the great Roman road from London to York. The still abiding traces of the ancient conquerors of the land made, it would seem, communication between distant parts of the island easier and speedier then than they became in somewhat later times.[1017] News of the rout of Fulford and of the danger of York would doubtless still further quicken the speed of the march. In the doubtless proverbial, but marked and emphatic, language of the Chroniclers, King Harold and his army rested not day or night.[1018] They passed the Northumbrian frontier; the King had no time to diverge or tarry at his own lordship of Coningsburgh, where the famous castle of a later age has usurped the site once occupied by the house of Harold.[1019] They marched on through the great province which was now the seat of war; and on the Sunday evening, on the very day of the capitulation of York, the English army reached the last stage of the ordinary route between the two great cities of southern [Sidenote: The English reach Tadcaster. Sunday, September 24.] and northern England. This was at Tadcaster, the Roman Calcaria, a town on the Wharf, best known from its neighbourhood to the later battle-field of Towton. It was in the Wharf, it will be remembered, that the English ships had sought shelter when the Northern armada sailed up the Ouse. It is a broad and rapid stream, still navigable as high as Tadcaster for the small craft of the river, whose local name of keels suggests the memory of the first vessels which landed our fathers in the Isle of Britain.[1020] We can hardly doubt that it was equally accessible to such light war-ships as an Earl of the Northumbrians would be likely to keep in his service. At Tadcaster then King Harold found and reviewed the English fleet,[1021] doubtless with an eye to possible future operations against the ships at Riccall, which the events of the morrow rendered needless. The army [Sidenote: Harold passes through York. Monday, September 25.] then marched on by the last stage of the Roman way, locally known as the High Street. At last, on Monday morning, King Harold of England entered his northern capital, the city which, only the day before, had bowed in ignominious homage to Harold of Norway. He was received with joy; provincial jealousies were lulled for a moment in the actual presence of the enemy, and the Danes and Angles of York pressed eagerly to welcome the West-Saxon deliverer.[1022] But the King had other work before him than either to repose after that terrible march or to enjoy the congratulations of a rescued people. He had to make sure that they were rescued; while an enemy was in the land, Harold knew but one duty, to press on to the place where the enemy might be found. He had to save the land from further desolation; he had to smite before the expected hostages could be gathered together; he had to smite, once and for ever, the enemy who lay before him, that he might turn and meet the yet more fearful enemy to whom his southern shores lay open. He pressed on through[1023] the rejoicing city, he pressed on to the Norwegian camp; and he reaped the reward of his energy and his labours in the glorious fight of Stamfordbridge.

[Sidenote: BATTLE OF STAMFORDBRIDGE. Monday, September 25, 1066.]

Of the details of that awful day we have no authentic [Sidenote: The Norwegian Saga.] record. We have indeed a glorious description, conceived in the highest spirit of the warlike poetry of the North, but it is a description which, when critically examined, proves to be hardly more worthy of belief than a battle-piece in the Iliad.[1024] The tale is one of the most familiar in our early history. We have all heard how the Northmen, rejoicing in their supposed victory, were going forth, light-hearted and careless, unprotected by defensive harness, to take full possession of their conquest. That very morning King Harold of Norway was to hold his court, and to assemble his new subjects, within the walls of York. He was there formally to assume the government, to dispose of offices, and to proclaim laws for his new realm. [Sidenote: Approach of the English army.] On his march a cloud of dust is seen in the distance; presently shields and arms glistening like ice[1025] are to be seen beneath it. It is the host of King Harold of England. The heart of Tostig fails him; let them hasten back to their ships, let them gather their comrades, and put on their coats of mail. Not so the hero of Norway. Messengers on swift horses are sent to summon the party who are left by the ships, and meanwhile Harold Hardrada marshals his army for the fight. The shield-wall is formed in the shape of a complete circle, with the Land-waster waving in its centre. A dense wood of spears bristles in front of the circle, to receive the charge of the English horsemen. King Harold of Norway rides round his host; his black horse stumbles, and he falls; but his ready wit wards off the evil omen; a fall is lucky for a traveller. But the eye of his rival is upon him; King Harold of England sees his fall. “Who,” he asks, “is the tall man who fell from his horse, the man with the blue kirtle and the goodly helm?” “It is King Harold of Norway.” “A tall man and a goodly is he, but methinks his luck [Sidenote: Meeting of the two Harolds.] has left him.” Then follows the yet more striking scene where the two Kings, alike in name and in might, meet face to face before the battle. Twenty of the Thingmen, clothed horse and man in armour, ride forth to the host of the Northmen. One of them bears to Earl Tostig the greeting and message of his brother King Harold. Let him return to his allegiance, and he shall again have the Earldom of Northumberland; nay he shall have a third of the Kingdom to rule together with the King. “What then,” asks Tostig, “shall be given to King Harold of Norway?” “Seven feet of ground,” is the famous answer, “or as much more as he is taller than other men.”[1026] “Go then,” says Tostig, “and tell King Harold of England to make him ready for the battle. Never shall men say in Norway that Earl Tostig brought King Harold Sigurdsson hither to England, and then went over to his foes.” The horsemen ride back to the host of England, and Harold Hardrada asks who is the man who spoke so well. Tostig answers that it was King Harold of England. “Why then,” asks Hardrada, “was it not told me? he should never have gone back to tell of our men’s slaughter.” Tostig, with some traces still left in his soul of the days when he went forth with an honest heart to curb the freebooters of Northumberland, answers that he could never be the murderer of the brother who came to offer him friendship and dominion. “If one of us must die, let him slay me rather than that I should slay him.” To this sentiment the Norwegian King vouchsafes no answer, but he turns to his comrades with the remark that “the King of the English was but a small man, but that he stood well in his stirrups.”

[Sidenote: Mythical character of the story.]

If this famous dialogue is plainly mythical, the glowing narrative of the fight itself is so still more plainly. [Sidenote: Misconception of the details of the battle.] The main strength of the English is conceived to lie in their horsemen; they charge in vain against the Norwegian circle, the dense shield-wall and the bristling spears. One assault after another is beaten off; at last the Northmen, proud of their resistance, become eager for more active success. They break the line to pursue the English; as soon as the shield-wall is broken, the English horsemen turn and overwhelm them with javelins and arrows. King Harold of Norway stands at first by his standard; the inspiration of the scald comes upon him; he sings of the fight to be won by the hand and the sword of the warrior, though his breast be unguarded by the corslet. When the shield-wall is broken, the Berserker rage seizes him, and he leaves, like Eadmund, his post by the standard; with his huge two-handed sword he bursts upon the ranks of the English; helmet and coat of mail give way before that terrible weapon; the English are well nigh driven to flight by his single arm; but an arrow pierces his throat; the mighty form falls to the ground, and his chosen comrades die around him. The battle pauses awhile; each side alike rests, as it were, to do honour to the fall of one so mighty. Tostig takes the royal post by the Land-waster; Harold of England again employs the momentary lull once more to offer peace to his brother and quarter to the surviving Northmen. A fierce cry from the Norwegian ranks is the answer; as one man they will die rather than receive quarter from the English. The war-shout is raised, the fight begins again, and the second act is closed by the fall of Tostig.[1027] The reinforcement now arrives from the ships. They come in full harness; their chief is Eystein Orre, the personal favourite of the King and the promised husband of his daughter Mary. He is the hero of the third act of the fight, the Storm of Orre, as it was called in Northern song. He and his men come up wearied with the swift march from the ships; still they begin the third struggle, the most terrible of all. Eystein takes the post by the Land-waster, which had been held by Harold and Tostig; the fight is waged more fiercely than ever; the English are well nigh driven to flight. At last the Berserker rage seizes on the Northmen; they throw away their coats of mail; some are slain by the English, some fall of sheer weariness and die without a wound. Still the fight is kept up till night-fall; by that time the chief men of Norway have fallen, and the remnant of the host escapes under the cover of the darkness.

[Sidenote: Meagreness of the genuine accounts.]

Such is the magnificent legend which has been commonly accepted as the history of this famous battle. I shall elsewhere examine the whole story in detail; it is enough to say here that the geography of the campaign is, in the Saga, wholly misconceived, and that a story which represents horsemen as the chief strength of an English army in the eleventh century is at once shown to be a tale of later date. And it is disappointing that, for so detailed and glowing a tale, we have so little of authentic history to substitute. Still, from such accounts as we have, combined with our knowledge of what an English army of that age really was, we can form a fair general idea of the day which beheld the last triumph of Harold the son of Godwine, the last triumph of pure and unmixed Teutonic England.

[Sidenote: Sudden advance of the English.]

King Harold then marched through York, and found a portion at least of the Norwegian host on the right bank of the Derwent, wholly unprepared for his attack. It is quite possible that they may have been, as the story represents them, going to a peaceful meeting at York. Anyhow, the invaders, rejoicing in the victory of Fulford, in the capitulation of York, in the promised submission of all Northumberland, had no idea of the suddenness of [Sidenote: Loyalty of the country.] the blow which was coming upon them. The speed and secrecy with which Harold was able to accomplish this memorable march not only bears witness to his own skill and energy, but also speaks well for the discipline of his army and for the general loyalty of the country. Fast as Harold may have pressed on, individual spies or deserters, had there been any such, could always have outstripped him, and could have borne the news of his approach to the enemy. But no such treason marred his well-conceived and well-executed scheme. He came on the Northmen unawares;[1028] the men who deemed that all Northumberland, perhaps that all England, was their own, suddenly found themselves in the thick of a new Brunanburh, a happier Assandun. A leader, the peer of Æthelstan and Eadmund, commanded a band of tried and chosen warriors such as Æthelstan and Eadmund never knew. Eadwine and Morkere, with their hurried levies, had doubtless done their best; but the invaders had now to deal with a very different enemy. King Harold of England was upon them; they were face to face with his personal following, with those terrible Thingmen, each one of whom, men said, was a match for any other two. But Harold Hardrada and his varied host showed no lack of gallantry; the victory was won only by the hard fighting of a whole day.[1029] The English, invisible, [Sidenote: The battle begins on the right side of the Derwent.] it would seem, till they reached the low brow of Helmsley, came at once upon that portion of the Norwegian army, utterly unprepared and seemingly not fully armed,[1030] which found itself on the right, the York side, of the Derwent. They were of course unable to bear up successfully against so sudden and terrible an attack. But the resistance which they made no doubt gave time for their comrades on the other bank, with their King at their head, to form in the full array of the shield-wall. This division, on account of the slight slope down to the river, would even have a certain advantage of ground over the English. The fight then began by the sudden attack of the English on the detachment to the right of the river. Yielding, but not flying,[1031] the unprepared and half-armed Northmen were driven across the stream. English minstrels, fragments of whose songs crop out in the narrative of colder annalists, again told how the living crossed the river over the bodies of their slain comrades which choked its stream.[1032] The bridge defended by a single Northman. [Sidenote: And now an act of daring devotion placed a nameless Northman.] whose deed is recorded not by his countrymen but by his enemies, on a level with Horatius on the bridge of Rome and with Wulfstan on the bridge of Maldon.[1033] Alone for a while he kept the pass against the whole English army; forty men fell beneath his axe;[1034] an arrow was shot at him in vain;[1035] at last an Englishman found means to creep under the bridge and pierced him through beneath his [Sidenote: The English cross the bridge, and the main fight begins.] corselet.[1036] The hindrance offered by this valiant enemy being removed, the English host, their King at their head, passed the bridge, and now the fiercest fighting of the day began. Details are lacking, but it needs no special flight of the imagination to see the slight slope above the present village, where a newly-built church has lately risen, covered by the bristling ring of the Northmen, the fortress of shields, so often sung of alike in English and in Scandinavian minstrelsy. We may picture to ourselves how the axes of England rang on that firm array of bucklers; how step by step, inch by inch, up the slopes, on to the Battle-flats, the Housecarls of King Harold [Sidenote: Obstinacy of the fighting on both sides.] clave their way. We may see how, step by step, inch by inch, dealing blow for blow even in falling back, Northman and Scot and Fleming[1037] gave way before the irresistible charge of the renowned Thingmen. We may see the golden Dragon, the ensign of Cuthred and Ælfred, glitter on high over this its latest field of triumph. We may hear the shouts of “Holy Rood” and “God Almighty” sound for the last time as an English host pressed on to victory. We may see two kingly forms towering high over either host; we may, if we will, bring the two Harolds face to face, and hear the two-handed axe of England clashing against the two-handed sword of Norway. We may see the banished Englishman defiant to the last, striking the last blow against the land which had reared him and the brother who had striven to save [Sidenote: Complete victory of the English.] him from his doom. We may call up before our eyes the final moment of triumph, when for the last time Englishmen on their own soil had possession of the place of slaughter,[1038] and when the Land-waster of Norway was lowered before the victorious Standard of the Fighting Man. At least we know that the long struggle of that day was crowned by complete victory on the side of England. The leaders of the invading host lay each man ready for all that England had to give him, his [Sidenote: Death of Harold Hardrada,] seven feet of English ground. There Harold of Norway, the last of the ancient Sea-Kings, yielded up that fiery soul which had braved death in so many forms and in so many lands. The warrior of Africa, the pilgrim of Jerusalem, had at last met his fate in an obscure corner of Britain, whose name but for him might have been [Sidenote: of Tostig,] unknown to history. There Tostig the son of Godwine, an exile and a traitor, ended in crime and sorrow a life which had begun with promises not less bright than that [Sidenote: of the Irish King.] of his royal brother. There died the nameless prince whom the excitement of battle or the hope of plunder had led from the land which had once sheltered the English King in his days of exile. The whole strength of the Northern army was broken; a few only escaped by flight, and found [Sidenote: Escape of Godred.] means to reach the ships at Riccall.[1039] Among these was the Wiking who had come from the remotest North to win his share in the plunder of conquered England. Godred survived when Harold and Tostig fell; but he returned not to his Iceland home; he found a nearer shelter with his namesake the son of Sihtric. He fled to the Isle where he was himself to reign as a conqueror, and to make his Kingdom of Man the centre of victorious warfare against [Sidenote: Utter destruction of the Norwegian army.] Dublin and all Leinster.[1040] But the great mass of the vast host of Hardrada lay dead on the banks of the Derwent.[1041] Beside those who fell beneath the English axes, many were drowned in the river; others died, we know not how, by fire.[1042] Only a few of that great host could have found even that small allowance of English earth which was to be granted to their leader. We need not believe the tale which told how the heads of Tostig and Harold of Norway were brought, as savage trophies of victory, into the presence [Sidenote: The body of Tostig found and buried at York.] of the English King.[1043] We know on better authority that the body of his fallen brother was sought for and found among the slain by a distinctive mark of his body.[1044] The wounds dealt by the Danish axe were deep and ghastly; a head cloven to the chin with the full strength of the two arms of an English Housecarl would show but few features by which Gytha or Judith could have recognized the slain. The giant form of Hardrada doubtless needed no mark to distinguish him from lesser men. We know not where he found his promised allotment;[1045] but the tie of kindred pleaded for Tostig, and the body of the banished Earl of the Northumbrians found a grave within the walls, no doubt within the primatial minster, of the city where he had ruled so sternly.[1046] But no funeral rites fell to the lot of the meaner dead of the invading army. The bones of the slain remained on the ground for many years,[1047] bearing witness, in the days of England’s bondage, how hard fought had been the last victorious fight of her last [Sidenote: Heavy loss of the English.] native King. For in truth the vanquished invaders had sold their lives dearly. The English host was far from coming forth scatheless from that awful struggle. Many a faithful Housecarl, many a noble Thegn,[1048] had given his life for England and for her chosen King. But the victory was a victory as decisive as any to be found in the whole history of human warfare. Harold had swept from the earth an enemy compared with whom Ælfgar and Gruffydd might seem but as the puppets of a moment. He stood victorious after a day of slaughter, compared with which the hardest struggles of his Welsh campaigns might seem but as the mimic warfare which men wage against the stag and the wild boar.[1049]

[Sidenote: Harold’s mild dealings with Olaf and the remnant of the Northmen.]

But the conqueror of Stamfordbridge, during the few days of life and kingship which still were his, had to show himself in a light yet nobler than that of a conqueror. That mild and conciliatory spirit, which was as marked in the character of Harold as his valour and energy, was now, as ever, extended to enemies who could no longer resist. He had shown forbearance to domestic traitors; he had shown it to rebellious vassals; he had now to show it to men who had borne their share in an unprovoked invasion. The Norwegian ships still lay in the Ouse. After the utter defeat of the land army, naval operations were hardly needed against them; the fleet which had been arrayed at Tadcaster was not called into action, but the King of the English sent to Olaf and the Orkney Earls, and offered them peace.[1050] “They came up to our King,”[1051] seemingly to his court at York; they gave hostages and swore oaths that they would for ever keep peace and friendship with this land. In four and twenty ships, the remnant of the host of Hardrada sailed away from the shores of Northumberland. Since the day of Stamfordbridge the kindred nations of Scandinavia, bound to us by so many ties, have never appeared on English ground in any guise but that of friends and deliverers.[1052]

[Sidenote: Harold at York.]

This negotiation may have occupied the two or three days immediately following the battle. Urgently as Harold’s presence was needed in the southern part of his Kingdom, he could not refuse a few days for the needful rest of himself and his host. His presence too was needed for the settlement of the troubled affairs of Northumberland, and even for the mere celebration of his triumph. His victory was saddened by the fate of his brother; it was purchased by the blood of many of his valiant comrades; his mind must have been weighed down by the thoughts of the toils and dangers which were yet in [Sidenote: The Feast of Victory.] store for him elsewhere. Still the victor could not shrink from the accustomed celebration of so great a victory. The [Sidenote: News brought of the landing of William. [Thursday, September 28.] October 1?] King was at the banquet,[1053] when a messenger appeared, who had sped, with a pace fleeter even than that of his own march, from the distant coast of Sussex.[1054] One blow had been warded off, but another blow still more terrible had fallen. Three days after the fight of Stamfordbridge, William Duke of the Normans, once the peaceful guest of Eadward, had once again, but in quite another guise, made good his landing on the shores of England.