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The History of England From the Norman Conquest to the Death of John
William Rufus And Anselm
by Adams, George Burton
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In following the history of Malcolm of Scotland we have passed by events
of greater importance which make the year 1093 a turning-point in the
reign of William Rufus. The appointment of Anselm to the archbishopric of
Canterbury divides the reign into two natural divisions. In the first
period William secures his hold on power, develops his tyrannous
administrative system and his financial extortions, begins his policy of
conquest in Normandy, forces Scotland to recognize his supremacy, and
rounds off his kingdom towards the north-west. The second period is more
simple in character, but its events are of greater importance. Apart from
the abortive rebellion of Robert of Mowbray, which has already been
narrated, William's authority is unquestioned. Flambard's machine appears
to run smoothly. Monks record their groans and give voice to their
horror, but the peace of the state is not disturbed, nor are precautions
necessary against any foreign enemy. Two series of events fill up the
history of the period, both of great and lasting interest. One is the
long quarrel between the king and the archbishop, which involve the
whole question of the relation between Church and State in the feudal
age; and the other is the king's effort to gain possession of Normandy,
the introductory chapter of a long history.
Early in Lent, 1093, or a little earlier, King William fell sick at a
royal manor near to Gloucester, and was carried in haste into that city.
There he lay during the rest of Lent, so ill that his death was expected
at any moment, and it was even reported that he had died. Brought face to
face with death, the terrors of the world to come seized hold of him. The
medieval sinner who outraged the moral sentiment of his time, as William
did, was sustained by no philosophical doubt of the existence of God or
belief in the evolutionary origin of ethics. His life was a reckless
defiance or a careless disregard of an almighty power, whose
determination and ability to punish him, if not bought off, he did not
question. The torments of a physical hell were vividly portrayed on all
occasions, and accepted by the highest as well as the lowest as an
essential part of the divine revelation. William was no exception to this
rule. He became even more shockingly defiant of God after his recovery
than he had been before. God, he declared to the Bishop of Rochester,
should never have in him a good man because of the evil which He had done
him. And God let him have what he wished, adds the pious historian,
according to the idea of good which he had formed. And yet, if he had
been allowed time for a death-bed repentance at the end of his life, he
would have yielded undoubtedly to the same vague terrors, and have made a
hasty bid for safety with gifts and promises. At any rate now, when the
nobles and bishops who came to visit him suggested that it was time for
him to make atonement for his evil deeds, he eagerly seized upon the
chance. He promised to reform his life, to protect the churches, and not
put them up any more for sale, to annul bad laws, and to decree good
ones; and bishops were sent to lay these promises on the altar. Some of
his good resolutions could only be carried out by virtue of a royal writ,
and an order was drawn up and sealed, commanding the release of
prisoners, the remission of debts due the crown, and the forgiving of
offences. Great was the rejoicing at these signs of reformation, and
prayers were, everywhere offered for so good a king, but when he had once
recovered, his promises were as quickly forgotten as the very similar
ones which he had made in the crisis of the rebellion of loss. William
probably still believed, when he found himself restored to health, that
nobody can keep all his promises, as he had answered when Lanfranc
remonstrated with him on the violation of his coronation pledges. Before
his recovery, however, he took one step in the way of reformation from
which he did not draw back. He appointed a new Archbishop of Canterbury.
It was the fear of death alone which wrung this concession from the king,
and it shows a clear consciousness on his part of the guilt of retaining
the archbishopric in his hands. Only a few weeks earlier, at the meeting
of the Christmas court, when the members had petitioned that he would be
graciously pleased to allow prayers to be offered that he might be led to
see the wrong which he was doing, he had answered with contempt, "Pray as
much as you like; I shall do what I please. Nobody's praying is going to
change my mind." Now, however, he was praying himself, and anxious to get
rid of this guilt. The man whom all England with one voice declared to be
the ideal archbishop was at hand, and the king besought him most
earnestly to accept the appointment, and so to aid him in his endeavour
to save his soul.
This man was Anselm, now abbot of the famous monastery of Bec, where
Lanfranc had been at one time prior. Born sixty years before, at Aosta,
in the kingdom of Burgundy, in the later Piedmont, he had crossed into
France, like Lanfranc, led by the desire of learning and the religious
life. Finally he had become a monk at Bec, and had devoted himself to
study and to theological writing. Only with great reluctance, and always
imperfectly, did he attend to the administrative duties which fell to him
as he was made first prior and then abbot of the monastery. His cast of
mind was wholly metaphysical, his spirit entirely of the cloister and the
school. The monastic life, free from the responsibilities of office,
exactly suited him, and he was made for it. When all England was
importuning him to accept the primacy, he shrank back from it with a
reluctance which was wholly genuine, and an obstinacy which belonged also
to his nature. He felt himself unfitted for the place, and he foresaw the
result. He likened his future relation with the king to that of a weak
old sheep yoked with an untamed bull. In all this he was perfectly right.
That harmony which had existed between Lanfranc and the Conqueror,
because each understood the other's position and rights and was
interested in his work, was never for a moment possible between Anselm
and William Rufus; and this was only partly due to the character of the
king. So wholly did the archbishop belong to another world than the
king's that he never appreciated the double position in which his office
placed him. One side of it only, the ecclesiastical, with its duties and
rights and all their logical consequences, he clearly saw. At the
beginning of his primacy, he seemed to understand, and he certainly
accepted, the feudal relationship in which he was placed to the king, but
the natural results of this position he never admitted. His mind was too
completely taken up with the other side of things; and with his fixedness
of purpose, almost obstinacy of character, and the king's wilfulness,
conflict was inevitable.
It was only with great difficulty that Anselm was brought to accept the
appointment. Being in England on a visit to Hugh, Earl of Chester, he had
been brought to the king's bedside when he fell sick, as the man best
able to give him the most certain spiritual comfort; and when William had
been persuaded of his guilt in keeping the primacy so long vacant, Anselm
was dragged protesting to the presence of the sick man, and his fingers
were partially forced open to receive the pastoral staff which William
extended to him. Then he was carried off, still protesting, to a church
near by, where the religious ceremonies usual on the appointment of a
bishop were performed. Still Anselm refused to yield to this friendly
violence. He returned immediately to the king, predicted his recovery,
and declared that he had not accepted the primacy, and did not accept it,
in spite of all that had been done. For some reason, however, William
adhered to this much of his reformation. He gave order for the immediate
transfer to his appointee of all that pertained to the archbishopric, and
sent to Normandy for the consent of the secular and ecclesiastical
superiors of Anselm, the duke and the Archbishop of Rouen, and of the
monks of his abbey. At length Anselm yielded, not because his judgment
had been changed as to the wisdom of the appointment, but sacrificing
himself rather, in the monastic spirit, to the call of Heaven.
It was near the end of September, however, before the new archbishop was
enthroned. Several matters had first to be arranged to the satisfaction
of Anselm, and among these were three conditions which he presented to be
agreed to by the king. William was probably ready to agree without
hesitation that he would take the archbishop as his guide and director in
religious matters, and equally ready to pay no attention to the promise
afterward. A more difficult condition was, that all the lands which had
belonged to the church of Canterbury at Lanfranc's death should be
restored, including, evidently, certain lands which William had granted
to his own men. This condition would show that the king had treated the
archbishopric as a forfeited fief, and that its lands had been alienated
on terms unfavourable to the Church. William hesitated long on this
condition, and tried to persuade Anselm to waive it; but the letters of
the future archbishop show that his conscience was deeply engaged and
would not permit him to agree to anything that would impoverish his see,
and the king must have yielded in the end. The third condition was, that
Anselm should be allowed to continue in the obedience of Pope Urban II,
whom he had already acknowledged in Normandy. This must also have been a
disagreeable condition to the king. The divided state of Christendom,
into which it had been thrown by the conflict between the pope and the
emperor on the question of investitures, was favourable to that
autocratic control of the Church which William Rufus desired to maintain.
He had no wish to decide between the rival popes, nor was he willing to
modify his father's rule that no pope should be recognized by the English
Church without the king's consent. We are not told that in this
particular he made anything more than a vague promise to do what he ought
to do, but very likely Anselm may have regarded this point more as a
warning to the king of his own future action than as a necessary
condition of his acceptance of the archbishopric.
All these preliminaries being settled in some form satisfactory to
Anselm, he yielded to the universal desire, and was enthroned on
September 25. The rejoicing of this day at Canterbury was not allowed to
go on, however, without interruption by the king. Ranulf Flambard
appeared in person and served a writ on the new archbishop, summoning him
to answer in some suit in the king's court. The assurance of Anselm's
friend and biographer, Eadmer, that this action concerned a matter wholly
within the province of the Church, we can hardly accept as conclusive
evidence of the fact; but Anselm was certainly right in regarding such an
act on this day as foreboding greater troubles to come. On December 4,
Anselm was consecrated at an assembly of almost all the bishops of
England, including Thomas, Archbishop of York. The occasion is noteworthy
because the Archbishop of York interrupted the proceedings to object to
the term "metropolitan of all Britain," applied to the church of
Canterbury, calling attention to the fact that the church of York was
known to be metropolitan also. The term primate was at once substituted
for that of metropolitan, since the archbishops of Canterbury did not
claim the right to exercise an administrative authority within the see of
York.
It is interesting to notice, in view of the conflict on investitures
which was before long to begin in England, and which had already been for
years so bitterly fought upon the continent, that all these events
happened without the slightest questioning on the part of any one of the
king's sole right to dispose of the highest see of the realm as he
pleased. There was no suggestion of the right of election, no objection
to lay investiture, no protest from any one. Anselm accepted investiture
with the staff from the hand of the king without remark. He acknowledged
his feudal relation to him, swore fealty to him as a vassal,15 and was
ready to perform his obligations of feudal service, at least upon his own
interpretation of their extent. A little later, in 1095, after the first
serious conflict between himself and the king, when the papal legate in
England took of him his oath of fealty to the pope, the oath contained the
usual Norman clause reserving his fealty to the king. A clause in the
bishop's oath to the pope so unusual as this could not have passed in
that age without notice. It occasioned instant criticism from strict
ecclesiastics on the continent, and it must have been consciously inserted
by Anselm and consciously accepted by the legate. Such facts as these,
combined with the uncompromising character of Anselm, are more striking
evidence of the absolutism of the Norman monarchy than anything which
occurred in the political world during this period.
Within a few days after his consecration, Anselm set out from Canterbury
to attend the Christmas meeting of the king's court at Gloucester. There
he was well received by the king, but the most important business before
the court was destined to lead to the first breach between them. Robert
of Normandy had grown tired of his brother's long delay in keeping the
promises which he had made in the treaty of Caen. Now there appeared at
Gloucester a formal embassy from him, authorized to declare William
forsworn and faithless, and to renounce all peace and agreement with him
unless he held to the treaty or exculpated himself in due form. There
could be no hesitation about an answer to this demand. It is more than
likely that William himself, within a short time, would have sought for
some excuse to begin again his conquest of Normandy, if Robert had not
furnished him this one. War was at once resolved upon, and preparations
made for an immediate campaign. The most important preliminary question,
both for William and for England, was that of money, and on this question
the scruples of Anselm and the will of the king first came into
collision. Voluntary aids, donations of money for the special
undertakings or necessities of the king, were a feature of William's
financial management, though their voluntary character seems often to
have been more a matter of theory than of reality. If the sum offered was
not so large as the king expected, he refused to accept it and withdrew
his favour from the delinquent until he received the amount he thought
proper. Anselm was persuaded by his friends to conform to this custom,
and hoping that he might in this way secure the favour and support of the
king in his ecclesiastical plans, he offered him five hundred pounds of
silver. At first William was pleased with the gift and accepted it, but
his counsellors advised him that it was too small, and Anselm was
informed that it would not be received. The archbishop's attempt to
persuade William to take the money only called out an angry answer. "Keep
your own to yourself," the king said, "I have enough of mine;" and Anselm
went away rejoicing that now evil-minded men would have no occasion to
say that he had bought his office, and he promised the money to the poor.
The archbishop was acting here entirely within his legal rights, but it
was not an auspicious beginning of his pontificate. Within a few weeks
the prelates and nobles of England were summoned to meet again--at
Hastings, from which port the king intended to cross to Normandy. The
weather was for some weeks unfavourable, and during the delay the church
of the new abbey of Battle was dedicated; Robert Bloet, who had been
appointed Bishop of Lincoln while the king was in fear of death, was
consecrated, though Anselm himself had not as yet received his pallium
from the pope; and Herbert Losinga, Bishop of Thetford, who had bought
his bishopric from the king and afterwards, apparently in repentance, had
personally sought the confirmation of the pope, was suspended from his
office because he had left the realm without the permission of the king
and had sought from the unacknowledged Pope Urban the bishopric which the
king asserted his full right to confer. He afterwards recovered William's
favour and removed his see to Norwich. At Hastings, in a personal
interview with the king, Anselm sought permission to hold a synod of the
kingdom, which had not up to this time been allowed during the reign, and
remonstrated with him in the plainest language for keeping so many
monasteries without abbots while he used their revenues for wars and
other secular purposes. In both respects William bluntly refused to
change his conduct, and when Anselm sought through the bishops the
restoration of his favour, refused that also "because," he said, "I do
not know why I should grant it." When it was explained to Anselm that
this was a formula of the king's which meant that his favour was to be
bought, he refused on grounds of policy as well as of principle to
increase, or even to renew, his former offer. This seemed like a final
breach with the king. William's anger was great when he heard of Anselm's
decision. He declared that he would hate him constantly more and more,
and never would hold him for his spiritual father or a bishop. "Let him
go home as soon as he likes," he cried, "he need not wait any longer to
give his blessings to my crossing over" and Anselm departed at once from
Hastings.
On March 19, 1094, William at last crossed to Normandy. The campaign
which followed was without decisive results. He was no nearer the
conquest of the duchy at the end than at the beginning. Indeed, we can
hardly say that the campaign had an end. It died away by degrees, but no
formal peace was made, and the duchy came finally into the hands of
William, not by conquest, but by other means. On William's landing an
attempt was made to renew the peace at an interview between him and
Robert, but without avail. Then those who had signed the treaty of Caen
as guarantors, twelve barons for Robert and twelve for William, were
called upon to say who was acting in violation of the treaty. They
decided, apparently without disagreement, against William, but he refused
to be bound by their verdict. The war which followed was a typical feudal
war, the siege of castles, the capture of men and towns. Robert called in
once more his suzerain, Philip of France, to his aid, and captured two
important castles, that of Argentan towards the south, and that of La
Houlme in the north-west. William then took a step which illustrates
again the extent of his power and his arbitrary use of it. He ordered a
levy of ten thousand men from England to be sent him in Normandy, and
when they had assembled at Hastings, Ranulf Flambard, by the king's
orders we are told, took from them the ten shillings which each man had
been furnished for his expenses, and sent them home. Robert and Philip
were now marching against William at Eu, and it was probably by the
liberal use of this money that "the king of France was turned back by
craft and all the expedition dispersed." About the same time William sent
for his brother Henry to join him. Henry had reappeared in western
Normandy not long before, and had begun the reconstruction of his power
there. Invited by the inhabitants of Domfront to protect them against
Robert of Bellême, he had made that place a starting-point from which he
had recovered a considerable part of his earlier possessions. Now William
sent ships to bring him by sea to Eu, probably wishing to use his
military skill against their common enemy. For some reason, however, the
ships departed from their course, and on the last day of October he
landed at Southampton, where he stayed some weeks. On December 28,
William also returned to England, and in the spring, Henry was sent back
to Normandy with supplies of money to keep up the war against Robert.
The year 1094 had been a hard one for both England and Normandy. The
duchy had suffered more from the private wars which prevailed everywhere,
and which the duke made no effort to check, than from the invasion of
William. England in general had had peace, under the strong hand of the
king, but so heavy had been the burden of the taxation which the war in
Normandy had entailed that agriculture declined, we are told, and famine
and pestilence followed. In the west the Welsh had risen against the
Norman lords, and had invaded and laid waste parts of the English border
counties. In Scotland William's ally, Duncan, had been murdered, and his
uncle, Donald, who represented the Scottish national party, had been made
king in his place. William found difficulties enough in England to occupy
him for some time, particularly when, as was told above, the refusal of
Robert of Mowbray to appear at court in March revealed the plans of the
barons for another insurrection.
Before he could attempt to deal with any of these difficulties, however,
another question, more troublesome still, was forced upon the king. A few
weeks after his landing Anselm came to him and asked leave to go to Rome
to get his pallium from the pope. "From which pope?" asked the king.
Anselm had already given warning of the answer which he must make, and at
once replied, "From Urban." Here was joined an inevitable issue between
the king and the archbishop; inevitable, not because of the character of
the question but because of the character of the two men. No conflict
need have arisen upon this question. When Anselm had remonstrated with
the king on the eve of his Norman expedition, about the vacant abbeys
that were in his hands, William in anger had replied that Lanfranc would
never have dared to use such language to his father. We may be sure for
one thing, that Lanfranc would have dared to oppose the first William
with all his might, if he had thought the reason sufficient, but also
that his more practical mind would never have allowed him to regard this
question as important enough to warrant the evils that would follow in
the train of an open quarrel between king and primate. During the last
years of Lanfranc's life, at least from 1084, no pope had been formally
recognized in England. To Anselm's mind, however, the question was one of
vital importance, where delay would be the sacrifice of principle to
expediency. On the other hand, it seems clear to us, looking back on
these events, that William, from the strength of his position in England,
could have safely overlooked Anselm's personal recognition of Urban, and
could have tacitly allowed him even to get his pallium from the pope
without surrendering anything of his own practical control of the Church.
William, however, refused to take this course. Perhaps he had come to see
that a conflict with Anselm could not be avoided, and chose not to allow
him any, even merely formal, advantages. The student of this crisis is
tempted to believe, from the facts of this case, from the king's taking
away "the staff" from the Bishop of Thetford, if the words used refer to
anything more than a confiscation of his fief, and especially from his
steady refusal to allow the meeting of a national council, that William
had conceived the idea of an independent Church under his supreme control
in all that pertained to its government, and that he was determined to be
rid of an Archbishop of Canterbury, who would never consent to such a
plan.
Of the dispute which followed we have a single interesting and detailed
account, written by Eadmer who was in personal attendance on Anselm
through it all, but it is the account of a devoted partisan of the
archbishop which, it is clear, we cannot trust for legal distinctions,
and which is not entirely consistent with itself. According to this
narrative, William asserted that Anselm's request, as amounting to an
official recognition of one of the two popes, was an attack upon his
sovereignty as king. This Anselm denied,--he could not well appreciate
the point,--and he affirmed that he could at the same time be true to the
pope whom he had recognized and to the king whose man he was. This was
perfectly true from Anselm's point of view, but the other was equally
true from William's. The fundamental assumptions of the two men were
irreconcilable. The position of the bishop in a powerful feudal monarchy
was an impossible one without some such practical compromise of tacit
concessions from both sides, as existed between Lanfranc and William I.
Anselm desired that this question, whether he could not at the same time
preserve his fidelity to both pope and king, be submitted to the decision
of the king's court, and that body was summoned to meet at Rockingham
castle at an early date. The details of the case we cannot follow. The
king appears to have been desirous of getting a condemnation of Anselm
which would have at least the practical effect of vacating the
archbishopric, but he met with failure in his purpose, whatever it was,
and this it seems less from the resistance of the bishops to his will
than from the explicit refusal of the lay barons to regard Anselm as no
longer archbishop. The outcome of the case makes it clear that there was
in Anselm's position no technical violation of his feudal obligations to
the king. At last the actual decision of the question was postponed to a
meeting to be held on the octave of Whitsuntide, but in the meantime the
king had put into operation another plan which had been devised for
accomplishing his wish. He secretly despatched two clerks of his chapel
to Italy, hoping, so at least Anselm's biographer believed, to obtain, as
the price of his recognition of Urban, the deposition of Anselm by the
authority of the pope for whom he was contending. The opportunity was
eagerly embraced at Rome. A skilful and not over-scrupulous diplomatist,
Walter, Cardinal-Bishop of Albano, was immediately sent back to England
with the messengers of Rufus, doubtless with instructions to get as much
as possible from the king without yielding the real principle involved in
Anselm's case. In the main point Walter was entirely successful. The man
of violent temper is not often fitted for the personal conflicts of
diplomacy; at least in the strife with the papal legate the king came off
second best. It is more to be wondered at that a man of so acute a mind
as William of St. Calais, who was now one of the king's most intimate
advisers, did not demand better guarantees.
Cardinal Walter carefully abstained at first from any communication with
Anselm. He passed through Canterbury without the archbishop's knowledge;
he seemed to acquiesce in the king's view of the case. William believed
that everything was going as he wished, and public proclamation was made
that Urban was to be obeyed throughout his dominions. But when he pressed
for a deposition of Anselm, he found that this had not been included in
the bargain; nor could he gain, either from the legate or from Anselm,
the privilege of bestowing the pallium himself. He was obliged to yield
in everything which he had most desired; to reconcile himself publicly
with the archbishop, and to content himself with certain not unimportant
concessions, which the cardinal wisely yielded, but which brought upon
him the censure of the extreme Church party. Anselm promised to observe
faithfully the laws and customs of the kingdom; at this time also was
sworn his oath of fidelity to the pope, with the clause reserving his
fealty to the king; and Cardinal Walter formally agreed that legates
should be sent to England only with the consent of the king. But in the
most important points which concerned the conflict with the archbishop
the king had been defeated. Urban was officially recognized as pope, and
the legate entered Canterbury in solemn procession, bearing the pallium,
and placed it on the altar of the cathedral, from which Anselm took it as
if he had received it from the hands of the pope.
Inferences of a constitutional sort are hardly warranted by the character
of our evidence regarding this quarrel, but the facts which we know seem
to imply that even so powerful and arbitrary a king as William Rufus
could not carry out a matter on which his heart was so set as this
without some pretence of legal right to support him, at least in the case
of so high a subject as the Archbishop of Canterbury; and that the barons
of the kingdom, with the law on their side, were able to hold the king's
will in check. Certainly the different attitude of the barons in the
quarrel of 1097, where Anselm was clearly in the wrong, is very
suggestive.
Already before the close of this business the disobedience of Robert of
Mowbray had revealed to the king the plot against him, and a considerable
part of the summer of 1095 was occupied in the reduction of the
strongholds of the Earl of Northumberland. In October the king invaded
Wales in person, but found it impossible to reach the enemy, and retired
before the coming on of winter. In this year died the aged Wulfstan,
Bishop of Worcester, the last of the English bishops who survived the
Conquest. His bishopric fell into the hands of Flambard, and furnishes us
one of the best examples we have of his treatment of these fiefs. On the
first day of the next year died also William of St. Calais, Bishop of
Durham, who had once more fallen under the king's displeasure for some
reason, and who had been compelled to come up to the Christmas court,
though too ill to travel. He left incomplete his new cathedral of Durham,
which he had begun on a splendid scale soon after his return from exile
early in the reign, beginning also a new period in Norman architecture of
lighter and better-proportioned forms, with no sacrifice of the
impression of solid strength.
This year of 1096, which thus began for England with the death of one of
the ablest of her prelates, is the date of the beginning for Europe as a
whole of one of the most profound movements of medieval times. The
crusades had long been in preparation, but it was the resolution and
eloquence of Pope Urban which turned into a definite channel the strong
ascetic feeling and rapidly growing chivalric passion of the west, and
opened this great era. The Council of Clermont, at which had occurred
Urban's famous appeal and the enthusiastic vow of the crusaders, had been
held in November, 1095, and the impulse had spread rapidly to all parts
of France. The English nation had no share in this first crusade, and but
little in the movement as a whole; but its history was from the beginning
greatly influenced by it. Robert of Normandy was a man of exactly the
type to be swept away by such a wave of enthusiasm, and not to feel the
strength of the motives which should have kept him at home. His duty as
sovereign of Normandy, to recover the castles held by his brother, and to
protect his subjects from internal war, were to him as nothing when
compared with his duty to protect pious pilgrims to the tomb of Christ,
and to deliver the Holy Land from the rule of the infidel. William Rufus,
on the other hand, was a man to whom the motives of the crusader would
never appeal, but who stood ready to turn to his own advantage every
opportunity which the folly of his brother might offer. Robert's most
pressing need in such an undertaking was for money, and so much more
important did this enterprise seem to him than his own proper business
that he stood ready to deliver the duchy into the hands of his brother,
with whom he was even then in form at war for its possession, if he could
in that way obtain the necessary resources for his crusade. William was
as eager to get the duchy as Robert was to get the money, and a bargain
was soon struck between them. William carried over to Normandy 10,000
marks--the mark was two-thirds of a pound--and received from Robert, as a
pledge for the payment of the loan, the possession of the duchy for a
period of at least three years, and for how much longer we cannot now
determine with certainty, but for a period which was probably intended to
cover Robert's absence. The duke then set off at once on his crusade,
satisfied with the consciousness that he was following the plain path of
duty. With him went his uncle, Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, to die in Sicily in
the next winter.
William had bought the possession of Normandy at a bargain, but he did
not propose to pay for it at his own cost. The money which he had spent,
and probably more than that, he recovered by an extraordinary tax in
England, which excited the bitter complaints of the ecclesiastical
writers. If we may trust our interpretation of the scanty accounts which
have reached us, this money was raised in two ways, by a general land-tax
and by additional personal payments from the king's own vassals. By grant
of the barons of England a Danegeld of four shillings on the hide, double
the usual tax, was collected, and this even from the domain lands of the
Church, which it was asserted, though with doubtful truth, had always
been exempt. The clergy paid this tax, but entered formal protest against
it, probably in order to prevent, if possible, the establishment of a
precedent against their liberties. The additional payment suggested by
some of the chroniclers is to be seen in detail in the case of Anselm,
who regarded this as a reasonable demand on the part of the king, and
who, besides passing over to the treasury what he collected from his men,
made on advice a personal payment of 200 marks, which he borrowed from
the Canterbury monks on the security of one of his domain manors. Not
all the churches were so fortunate as to have the ready money in the
treasury, and in many cases ornaments and sacred utensils were
sacrificed, while the lay lords undoubtedly recovered their payments by
like personal auxilia from their men, until the second tax really
rested like the first upon the land. The whole formed a burden likely to
cripple seriously the primitive agriculture of the time, as we are told
that it did.
Having taken possession of Normandy, William returned to England at
Easter in 1097. The Welsh had been making trouble again, and the king
once more marched against them in person; but a country like Wales was
easily defended against a feudal army, and the expedition accomplished
little and suffered much, especially in the loss of horses. William
returned probably in no very amiable mood, and at once sent off a letter
to Anselm complaining that the contingent of knights which he had sent to
meet his obligation of service in the campaign was badly furnished and
not fit for its duties, and ordered him to be ready to do him right
according to the sentence of the king's court whenever he should bring
suit against him. To this letter Anselm paid no attention, and he
resolved to let the suit against him go by default, on the ground that
everything was determined in the court by the will of the king, and that
he could get no justice there. In taking this position, the archbishop
was putting himself in the wrong, for the king was acting clearly within
his legal rights; but this fact Anselm probably did not understand. He
could not enter into the king's position nor his own in relation to him,
but he might have remembered that two years before, for once at least,
the king had failed to carry through his will in his court.
The case came on for trial at the Whitsuntide court at Windsor, but
before anything was determined Anselm sent by certain barons to ask the
king's leave to go to Rome, which was at once refused. This action was
evidently not intended by Anselm as an appeal of the case to Rome, nor
was it so understood by the king; but for some reason the suits against
him were now dropped. Anselm's desire to visit Rome apparently arose from
the general condition of things in the kingdom, from his inability to
hold synods, to get important ecclesiastical offices filled, or to reform
the evils of government and morals which prevailed under William. In
other words, he found himself nominally primate of England and
metropolitan of the great province of Canterbury, but in reality with
neither power nor influence. Such a condition of things was intolerable
to a man of Anselm's conscientiousness, and he had evidently been for
some time coming to the conclusion that he must personally seek the
advice of the head of the Church as to his conduct in such a difficult
situation. He had now definitely made up his mind, and as the Bishop of
Winchester told him at this time, he was not easy to be moved from a
thing he had once undertaken. He repeated his request in August, and
again in October of the same year. On the last occasion William lost his
temper and threatened him with another suit in the court for his
vexatious refusal to abide by the king's decision. Anselm insisted on his
right to go. William pointed out to him, that if he was determined to go,
the result would be the confiscation of the archbishopric,--that is, of
the barony. Anselm was not moved by this. Then the bishops attempted to
show him the error of his ways, but there was so little in common between
their somewhat worldly position as good vassals of the king, and his
entire other-worldliness, that nothing was gained in this way. Finally,
William informed him that if he chose he might go, on the conditions
which had been explained to him,--that is, of the loss of all that he
held of the king. This was permission enough for Anselm, and he at once
departed, having given his blessing to the king.
No case could be more typical than this of the irreconcilable conflict
between Church and State in that age, irreconcilable except by mutual
concessions and compromise, and the willingness of either to stand partly
in the position of the other. If we look at the matter from the political
side, regarding the bishop as a public officer, as a baron in a feudally
organized state, the king was entirely right in this case, and fully
justified in what he did. Looking at the Church as a religious
institution, charged with a spiritual mission and the work of moral
reformation, we must consider Anselm's conduct justified, as the only
means by which he could hope to obtain freedom of action. Both were in a
very real sense right in this quarrel, and both were wrong. Not often
during the feudal period did this latent contradiction of rights come to
so open and plain an issue as this. That it did so here was due in part
to the character of the king, but in the main to the character of the
archbishop. Whether Lanfranc could have continued to rule the Church in
harmony with William Rufus is an interesting question, but one which we
cannot answer. He certainly would not have put himself legally in the
wrong, as Anselm did, and he would have considered carefully whether the
good to be gained for the cause of the Church from a quarrel with the
king would outweigh the evil. Anselm, however, was a man of the
idealistic type of mind, who believed that if he accepted as the
conditions of his work the evils with which he was surrounded, and
consented to use the tools that he found ready to his hand, he had made,
as another reformer of somewhat the same type once said of the
constitution of the United States in the matter of slavery, "a covenant
with death and an agreement with hell."
Anselm left England early in November, 1097, not to return during the
lifetime of William. If he had hoped, through the intervention of the
pope, to weaken the hold of the king on the Church of England, and to be
put in a position where he could carry out the reforms on which his heart
was set, he was doomed to disappointment. After a stay of some months at
Lyons, with his friend Archbishop Hugh, he went on to Rome, where he was
treated with great ceremonial honour by the pope, but where he learned
that the type of lofty and uncompromising independence which he himself
represented was as rare in the capital of the Christian world as he had
found it among the bishops of England. There, however, he learned a
stricter doctrine on the subject of lay investitures, of appointments to
ecclesiastical office by kings and princes, than he had yet held, so that
when he finally returned to England he brought with him the germs of
another bitter controversy with a king, with whom but for this he might
have lived in peace.
In the same month with Anselm, William also crossed to Normandy, but
about very different business. Hardly had he obtained possession of the
duchy when he began to push the claims of the duke to bordering lands, to
the French Vexin, and to the county of Maine, claims about which his
brother had never seriously concerned himself and which, in one case,
even his father had allowed to slumber for years. Robert had, indeed,
asserted his claim to Maine after the death of his father, and had been
accepted by the county; but a revolt had followed in 1190, the Norman
rule had been thrown off, and after a few months Elias of La Fleche, a
baron of Maine and a descendant of the old counts, had made himself
count. He was a man of character and ability, and the peace which he
established was practically undisturbed by Robert; but the second William
had no mind to give up anything to which he could lay a claim. He
demanded of the French king the surrender of the Vexin, and warned Elias,
who had taken the cross, that the holy errand of the crusade would not
protect his lands during his absence. War followed in both cases,
simultaneous wars, full of the usual incidents, of the besieging of
castles, the burning of towns, the laying waste of the open country; wars
in which the ruin of his peasantry was almost the only way of coercing
the lord. William's operations were almost all successful, but he died
without accomplishing all that he had hoped for in either direction. In
the Vexin he captured a series of castles, which brought him almost to
Paris; in Maine he captured Le Mans, lost it again, and finally recovered
its possession, but the southern part of the county and the castles of
Elias there he never secured.
In the year 1098 Magnus, king of Norway, had appeared for a moment with a
hostile fleet off the island of Anglesey. Some reason not certainly known
had brought him round Scotland, perhaps to make an attack on Ireland. He
was the grandson of the King Harold of Norway, who had invaded England on
the eve of the Norman Conquest and perished in the battle of Stamford
Bridge, and he had with him, it is said, a son of Harold of England: to
him the idea of a new invasion of England would not seem strange. At any
rate, after taking possession of the Isle of Man, he came to the help of
the Welsh against the earls, Hugh of Chester and Hugh of Shrewsbury, who
were beginning the conquest of Anglesey. The incident is noteworthy
because, in the brief fighting which occurred, the Earl of Shrewsbury was
slain. His death opened the way for the succession of his brother, Robert
of Bellême, to the great English possessions of their father in Wales,
Shropshire, and Surrey, to which he soon added by inheritance the large
holdings of Roger of Bully in Yorkshire and elsewhere. These
inheritances, when added to the lands, almost a principality in
themselves, which he possessed in southern Normandy and just over the
border in France, made him the most powerful vassal of the English king.
In character he had inherited far more from his tyrannous and cruel
mother, Mabel, daughter of William Talvas of Bellême, than from his more
high-minded father, Roger of Montgomery, the companion of the Conqueror.
As a vassal he was utterly untrustworthy, and he had become too powerful
for his own safety or for that of the king.
Some minor events of these years should be recounted. In 1097 William had
sent Edgar the atheling to Scotland with an army, King Donald had been
overthrown, and Edgar's nephew, himself named Edgar, with the support of
the English king, had been made king. In 1099 Ranulf Flambard received
the reward of his faithful services, and was made Bishop of Durham, in
some respects the most desirable bishopric in England. Greater prospects
still of power and dominion were opened to William a few months before
his death, by the proposition of the Duke of Aquitaine to pledge him his
great duchy for a sum of money to pay the expenses of a crusade. To add
to the lands he already ruled those between the Loire and the Garonne
would be almost to create a new monarchy in France and to threaten more
dangerously at this moment the future of the Capetian kingdom than did
two generations later the actual union of these territories and more
under the king of England.
But William was now rapidly approaching the term of his life. The
monastic chronicles, written within a generation or two later, record
many visions and portents of the time foreshadowing the doom which was
approaching, but these are to us less records of actual facts than
evidences of the impression which the character and government of the
king had made, especially upon the members of the Church. On August 2,
1100, William rode out to hunt in the New Forest, as was his frequent
custom. In some way, how we do not know, but probably by accident, he was
himself shot with an arrow by one of his company, and died almost
instantly. Men believed, not merely that he was justly cut off in his
sins with no opportunity for the final offices of the Church, but that
his violent death was an instance, the third already, of the doom which
followed his father's house because of the evil that was done in the
making of the Forest. The king's body was brought to Winchester, where it
was buried in the old minster, but without the ordinary funeral rites.
One of his companions that day, Walter Tirel, a French baron who had been
attracted to the service of the king by the prospect of rich reward which
it offered, was thought to have been responsible for his death, and he
fled in haste and escaped to his home; but he afterwards solemnly
declared, when there would have been no danger to himself in confession,
that it was not his arrow that slew the king, and whose it was will never
be known.
Footnotes
[15] Eadmer, Hist. Nov., p. 41.
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