Chapter VIII - England Under William the First, the Norman Conqueror

by Charles Dickens

　　Upon the ground where the brave Harold fell, William the Normanafterwards founded an abbey, which, under the name of Battle Abbey,was a rich and splendid place through many a troubled year, thoughnow it is a grey ruin overgrown with ivy. But the first work hehad to do, was to conquer the English thoroughly; and that, as youknow by this time, was hard work for any man.

　　He ravaged several counties; he burned and plundered many towns; helaid waste scores upon scores of miles of pleasant country; hedestroyed innumerable lives. At length Stigand, Archbishop ofCanterbury, with other representatives of the clergy and thepeople, went to his camp, and submitted to him. Edgar, theinsignificant son of Edmund Ironside, was proclaimed King byothers, but nothing came of it. He fled to Scotland afterwards,where his sister, who was young and beautiful, married the ScottishKing. Edgar himself was not important enough for anybody to caremuch about him.

　　On Christmas Day, William was crowned in Westminster Abbey, underthe title of William the First; but he is best known as William theConqueror. It was a strange coronation. One of the bishops whoperformed the ceremony asked the Normans, in French, if they wouldhave Duke William for their king? They answered Yes. Another ofthe bishops put the same question to the Saxons, in English. Theytoo answered Yes, with a loud shout. The noise being heard by aguard of Norman horse-soldiers outside, was mistaken for resistanceon the part of the English. The guard instantly set fire to theneighbouring houses, and a tumult ensued; in the midst of which theKing, being left alone in the Abbey, with a few priests (and theyall being in a terrible fright together), was hurriedly crowned.When the crown was placed upon his head, he swore to govern theEnglish as well as the best of their own monarchs. I dare say youthink, as I do, that if we except the Great Alfred, he might prettyeasily have done that.

　　Numbers of the English nobles had been killed in the lastdisastrous battle. Their estates, and the estates of all thenobles who had fought against him there, King William seized upon,and gave to his own Norman knights and nobles. Many great Englishfamilies of the present time acquired their English lands in thisway, and are very proud of it.

　　But what is got by force must be maintained by force. These nobleswere obliged to build castles all over England, to defend their newproperty; and, do what he would, the King could neither soothe norquell the nation as he wished. He gradually introduced the Normanlanguage and the Norman customs; yet, for a long time the greatbody of the English remained sullen and revengeful. On his goingover to Normandy, to visit his subjects there, the oppressions ofhis half-brother Odo, whom he left in charge of his Englishkingdom, drove the people mad. The men of Kent even invited over,to take possession of Dover, their old enemy Count Eustace ofBoulogne, who had led the fray when the Dover man was slain at hisown fireside. The men of Hereford, aided by the Welsh, andcommanded by a chief named Edric the Wild, drove the Normans out oftheir country. Some of those who had been dispossessed of theirlands, banded together in the North of England; some, in Scotland;some, in the thick woods and marshes; and whensoever they couldfall upon the Normans, or upon the English who had submitted to theNormans, they fought, despoiled, and murdered, like the desperateoutlaws that they were. Conspiracies were set on foot for ageneral massacre of the Normans, like the old massacre of theDanes. In short, the English were in a murderous mood all throughthe kingdom.

　　King William, fearing he might lose his conquest, came back, andtried to pacify the London people by soft words. He then set forthto repress the country people by stern deeds. Among the townswhich he besieged, and where he killed and maimed the inhabitantswithout any distinction, sparing none, young or old, armed orunarmed, were Oxford, Warwick, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby,Lincoln, York. In all these places, and in many others, fire andsword worked their utmost horrors, and made the land dreadful tobehold. The streams and rivers were discoloured with blood; thesky was blackened with smoke; the fields were wastes of ashes; thewaysides were heaped up with dead. Such are the fatal results ofconquest and ambition! Although William was a harsh and angry man,I do not suppose that he deliberately meant to work this shockingruin, when he invaded England. But what he had got by the stronghand, he could only keep by the strong hand, and in so doing hemade England a great grave.

　　Two sons of Harold, by name Edmund and Godwin, came over fromIreland, with some ships, against the Normans, but were defeated.This was scarcely done, when the outlaws in the woods so harassedYork, that the Governor sent to the King for help. The Kingdespatched a general and a large force to occupy the town ofDurham. The Bishop of that place met the general outside the town,and warned him not to enter, as he would be in danger there. Thegeneral cared nothing for the warning, and went in with all hismen. That night, on every hill within sight of Durham, signalfires were seen to blaze. When the morning dawned, the English,who had assembled in great strength, forced the gates, rushed intothe town, and slew the Normans every one. The English afterwardsbesought the Danes to come and help them. The Danes came, with twohundred and forty ships. The outlawed nobles joined them; theycaptured York, and drove the Normans out of that city. Then,William bribed the Danes to go away; and took such vengeance on theEnglish, that all the former fire and sword, smoke and ashes, deathand ruin, were nothing compared with it. In melancholy songs, anddoleful stories, it was still sung and told by cottage fires onwinter evenings, a hundred years afterwards, how, in those dreadfuldays of the Normans, there was not, from the River Humber to theRiver Tyne, one inhabited village left, nor one cultivated field -how there was nothing but a dismal ruin, where the human creaturesand the beasts lay dead together.

　　The outlaws had, at this time, what they called a Camp of Refuge,in the midst of the fens of Cambridgeshire. Protected by thosemarshy grounds which were difficult of approach, they lay among thereeds and rushes, and were hidden by the mists that rose up fromthe watery earth. Now, there also was, at that time, over the seain Flanders, an Englishman named Hereward, whose father had died inhis absence, and whose property had been given to a Norman. Whenhe heard of this wrong that had been done him (from such of theexiled English as chanced to wander into that country), he longedfor revenge; and joining the outlaws in their camp of refuge,became their commander. He was so good a soldier, that the Normanssupposed him to be aided by enchantment. William, even after hehad made a road three miles in length across the Cambridgeshiremarshes, on purpose to attack this supposed enchanter, thought itnecessary to engage an old lady, who pretended to be a sorceress,to come and do a little enchantment in the royal cause. For thispurpose she was pushed on before the troops in a wooden tower; butHereward very soon disposed of this unfortunate sorceress, byburning her, tower and all. The monks of the convent of Ely nearat hand, however, who were fond of good living, and who found itvery uncomfortable to have the country blockaded and their suppliesof meat and drink cut off, showed the King a secret way ofsurprising the camp. So Hereward was soon defeated. Whether heafterwards died quietly, or whether he was killed after killingsixteen of the men who attacked him (as some old rhymes relate thathe did), I cannot say. His defeat put an end to the Camp ofRefuge; and, very soon afterwards, the King, victorious both inScotland and in England, quelled the last rebellious English noble.He then surrounded himself with Norman lords, enriched by theproperty of English nobles; had a great survey made of all the landin England, which was entered as the property of its new owners, ona roll called Doomsday Book; obliged the people to put out theirfires and candles at a certain hour every night, on the ringing ofa bell which was called The Curfew; introduced the Norman dressesand manners; made the Normans masters everywhere, and the English,servants; turned out the English bishops, and put Normans in theirplaces; and showed himself to be the Conqueror indeed.

　　But, even with his own Normans, he had a restless life. They werealways hungering and thirsting for the riches of the English; andthe more he gave, the more they wanted. His priests were as greedyas his soldiers. We know of only one Norman who plainly told hismaster, the King, that he had come with him to England to do hisduty as a faithful servant, and that property taken by force fromother men had no charms for him. His name was Guilbert. We shouldnot forget his name, for it is good to remember and to honourhonest men.

　　Besides all these troubles, William the Conqueror was troubled byquarrels among his sons. He had three living. Robert, calledCurthose, because of his short legs; William, called Rufus or theRed, from the colour of his hair; and Henry, fond of learning, andcalled, in the Norman language, Beauclerc, or Fine-Scholar. WhenRobert grew up, he asked of his father the government of Normandy,which he had nominally possessed, as a child, under his mother,Matilda. The King refusing to grant it, Robert became jealous anddiscontented; and happening one day, while in this temper, to beridiculed by his brothers, who threw water on him from a balcony ashe was walking before the door, he drew his sword, rushed up-stairs, and was only prevented by the King himself from puttingthem to death. That same night, he hotly departed with somefollowers from his father's court, and endeavoured to take theCastle of Rouen by surprise. Failing in this, he shut himself upin another Castle in Normandy, which the King besieged, and whereRobert one day unhorsed and nearly killed him without knowing whohe was. His submission when he discovered his father, and theintercession of the queen and others, reconciled them; but notsoundly; for Robert soon strayed abroad, and went from court tocourt with his complaints. He was a gay, careless, thoughtlessfellow, spending all he got on musicians and dancers; but hismother loved him, and often, against the King's command, suppliedhim with money through a messenger named Samson. At length theincensed King swore he would tear out Samson's eyes; and Samson,thinking that his only hope of safety was in becoming a monk,became one, went on such errands no more, and kept his eyes in hishead.

　　All this time, from the turbulent day of his strange coronation,the Conqueror had been struggling, you see, at any cost of crueltyand bloodshed, to maintain what he had seized. All his reign, hestruggled still, with the same object ever before him. He was astern, bold man, and he succeeded in it.

　　He loved money, and was particular in his eating, but he had onlyleisure to indulge one other passion, and that was his love ofhunting. He carried it to such a height that he ordered wholevillages and towns to be swept away to make forests for the deer.Not satisfied with sixty-eight Royal Forests, he laid waste animmense district, to form another in Hampshire, called the NewForest. The many thousands of miserable peasants who saw theirlittle houses pulled down, and themselves and children turned intothe open country without a shelter, detested him for his mercilessaddition to their many sufferings; and when, in the twenty-firstyear of his reign (which proved to be the last), he went over toRouen, England was as full of hatred against him, as if every leafon every tree in all his Royal Forests had been a curse upon hishead. In the New Forest, his son Richard (for he had four sons)had been gored to death by a Stag; and the people said that this socruelly-made Forest would yet be fatal to others of the Conqueror'srace.

　　He was engaged in a dispute with the King of France about someterritory. While he stayed at Rouen, negotiating with that King,he kept his bed and took medicines: being advised by hisphysicians to do so, on account of having grown to an unwieldysize. Word being brought to him that the King of France made lightof this, and joked about it, he swore in a great rage that heshould rue his jests. He assembled his army, marched into thedisputed territory, burnt - his old way! - the vines, the crops,and fruit, and set the town of Mantes on fire. But, in an evilhour; for, as he rode over the hot ruins, his horse, setting hishoofs upon some burning embers, started, threw him forward againstthe pommel of the saddle, and gave him a mortal hurt. For sixweeks he lay dying in a monastery near Rouen, and then made hiswill, giving England to William, Normandy to Robert, and fivethousand pounds to Henry. And now, his violent deeds lay heavy onhis mind. He ordered money to be given to many English churchesand monasteries, and - which was much better repentance - releasedhis prisoners of state, some of whom had been confined in hisdungeons twenty years.

　　It was a September morning, and the sun was rising, when the Kingwas awakened from slumber by the sound of a church bell. 'Whatbell is that?' he faintly asked. They told him it was the bell ofthe chapel of Saint Mary. 'I commend my soul,' said he, 'to Mary!'and died.

　　Think of his name, The Conqueror, and then consider how he lay indeath! The moment he was dead, his physicians, priests, andnobles, not knowing what contest for the throne might now takeplace, or what might happen in it, hastened away, each man forhimself and his own property; the mercenary servants of the courtbegan to rob and plunder; the body of the King, in the indecentstrife, was rolled from the bed, and lay alone, for hours, upon theground. O Conqueror, of whom so many great names are proud now, ofwhom so many great names thought nothing then, it were better tohave conquered one true heart, than England!

　　By-and-by, the priests came creeping in with prayers and candles;and a good knight, named Herluin, undertook (which no one elsewould do) to convey the body to Caen, in Normandy, in order that itmight be buried in St. Stephen's church there, which the Conquerorhad founded. But fire, of which he had made such bad use in hislife, seemed to follow him of itself in death. A greatconflagration broke out in the town when the body was placed in thechurch; and those present running out to extinguish the flames, itwas once again left alone.

　　It was not even buried in peace. It was about to be let down, inits Royal robes, into a tomb near the high altar, in presence of agreat concourse of people, when a loud voice in the crowd criedout, 'This ground is mine! Upon it, stood my father's house. ThisKing despoiled me of both ground and house to build this church.In the great name of God, I here forbid his body to be covered withthe earth that is my right!' The priests and bishops present,knowing the speaker's right, and knowing that the King had oftendenied him justice, paid him down sixty shillings for the grave.Even then, the corpse was not at rest. The tomb was too small, andthey tried to force it in. It broke, a dreadful smell arose, thepeople hurried out into the air, and, for the third time, it wasleft alone.

　　Where were the Conqueror's three sons, that they were not at theirfather's burial? Robert was lounging among minstrels, dancers, andgamesters, in France or Germany. Henry was carrying his fivethousand pounds safely away in a convenient chest he had got made.William the Red was hurrying to England, to lay hands upon theRoyal treasure and the crown.