Third Millennium Library
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Third Millennium Library |
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WILLIAM THE CONQUEOR 1027-1087 A.D.
Contemporary Monarchs EMP. OF GERM. Henry IV K. OF SCOTLAND Malcolm III. 1093 K. OF FRANCE. Philip I Ks.
OF SPAIN Sancho II 1072 - Alphonso VI
POPES Alexander II 1073 - Gregory VII 1085 - Victor III 1087
2.-The Early Years of William
I—INTRODUCTION
The history of England, like the land and its people, has been specially
insular, and yet no land has undergone deeper influences from without. No
land has owed more than England to the personal action of men not of native
birth. Britain was truly called another world, in opposition to the world
of the European mainland, the world of Rome. In every age the history of
Britain is the history of an island, of an island great enough to form a world
of itself. In speaking of Celts or Teutons in Britain, we are speaking,
not simply of Celts and Teutons, but of Celts and Teutons parted from their
kinsfolk on the mainland, and brought under the common influences of an island
world. The land has seen several settlements from outside, but the
settlers have always been brought under the spell of their insular
position. Whenever settlement has not meant displacement, the new comers
have been assimilated by the existing people of the land. When it has
meant displacement, they have still become islanders, marked off from those
whom they left behind by characteristics which were the direct result of
settlement in an island world.
The history of Britain then, and specially the history of England, has
been largely a history of elements absorbed and assimilated from without.
But each of those elements has done somewhat to modify the mass into which it
was absorbed. The English land and nation are not as they might have been
if they had never in later times absorbed the Fleming, the French Huguenot, the
German Palatine. Still less are they as they might have been, if they had
not in earlier times absorbed the greater elements of the Dane and the
Norman. Both were assimilated; but both modified the character and
destiny of the people into whose substance they were absorbed. The
conquerors from Normandy were silently and peacefully lost in the greater mass
of the English people; still we can never be as if the Norman had never come
among us. We ever bear about us the signs of his presence. Our
colonists have carried those signs with them into distant lands, to remind men
that settlers in America and Australia came from a land which the Norman once
entered as a conqueror. But that those signs of his presence hold the
place which they do hold in our mixed political being, that, badges of conquest
as they are, no one feels them to be badges of conquest—all this comes of
the fact that, if the Norman came as a conqueror, he came as a conqueror of a
special, perhaps almost of an unique kind. The Norman Conquest of England
has, in its nature and in its results, no exact parallel in history. And
that it has no exact parallel in history is largely owing to the character and
position of the man who wrought it. That the history of England for the
last eight hundred years has been what it has been has largely come of the
personal character of a single man. That we are what we are to this day
largely comes of the fact that there was a moment when our national destiny
might be said to hang on the will of a single man, and that that man was
William, surnamed at different stages of his life and memory, the Bastard, the
Conqueror, and the Great.
With perfect fitness then does William the Norman, William the Norman
Conqueror of England, take his place in a series of English statesmen.
That so it should be is characteristic of English history. Our history
has been largely wrought for us by men who have come in from without, sometimes
as conquerors, sometimes as the opposite of conquerors; but in whatever
character they came, they had to put on the character of Englishmen, and to
make their work an English work. From whatever land they came, on
whatever mission they came, as statesmen they were English. William, the
greatest of his class, is still but a member of a class. Along with him
we must reckon a crowd of kings, bishops, and high officials in many ages of
our history. Theodore of Tarsus and Cnut of Denmark, Lanfranc of Pavia
and Anselm of Aosta, Randolf Flambard and Roger of Salisbury, Henry of Anjou
and Simon of Montfort, are all written on a list of which William is but the
foremost. The largest number come in William’s own generation and
in the generations just before and after it. But the breed of
England’s adopted children and rulers never died out. The name of
William the Deliverer stands, if not beside that of his namesake the Conqueror,
yet surely alongside of the lawgiver from Anjou. And we count among the
later worthies of England not a few men sprung from other lands, who did and
are doing their work among us, and who, as statesmen at least, must count as
English. As we look along the whole line, even among the conquering kings
and their immediate instruments, their work never takes the shape of the
rooting up of the earlier institutions of the land. Those institutions
are modified, sometimes silently by the mere growth of events, sometimes
formally and of set purpose. Old institutions get new names; new
institutions are set up alongside of them. But the old ones are never
swept away; they sometimes die out; they are never abolished. This comes
largely of the absorbing and assimilating power of the island world. But
it comes no less of personal character and personal circumstances, and
pre-eminently of the personal character of the Norman Conqueror and of the
circumstances in which he found himself.
Our special business now is with the personal acts and character of
William, and above all with his acts and character as an English
statesman. But the English reign of William followed on his earlier
Norman reign, and its character was largely the result of his earlier Norman
reign. A man of the highest natural gifts, he had gone through such a
schooling from his childhood upwards as falls to the lot of few princes.
Before he undertook the conquest of England, he had in some sort to work the
conquest of Normandy. Of the ordinary work of a sovereign in a warlike
age, the defence of his own land, the annexation of other lands, William had
his full share. With the land of his overlord he had dealings of the most
opposite kinds. He had to call in the help of the French king to put down
rebellion in the Norman duchy, and he had to drive back more than one invasion
of the French king at the head of an united Norman people. He added
Domfront and Maine to his dominions, and the conquest of Maine, the work as much
of statesmanship as of warfare, was the rehearsal of the conquest of
England. There, under circumstances strangely like those of England, he
learned his trade as conqueror, he learned to practise on a narrower field the
same arts which he afterwards practised on a wider. But after all,
William’s own duchy was his special school; it was his life in his own
duchy which specially helped to make him what he was. Surrounded by
trials and difficulties almost from his cradle, he early learned the art of enduring
trials and overcoming difficulties; he learned how to deal with men; he learned
when to smite and when to spare; and it is not a little to his honour that, in
the long course of such a reign as his, he almost always showed himself far
more ready to spare than to smite.
Before then we can look at William as an English statesman, we must
first look on him in the land in which he learned the art of
statesmanship. We must see how one who started with all the disadvantages
which are implied in his earlier surname of the Bastard came to win and to
deserve his later surnames of the Conqueror and the Great.
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