1070.] THE NOBLES AND THE PEOPLE. 195 here he built the castle of Richmond, whose keep still crowns the high hill round which the Swale has its winding course; where the streets with Norman names still attest the presence of the conquering race; and in which romantic town the charters of the dukes of Brittany, extending over two centuries, are still preserved as the origin of municipal rights and privileges. But Alain of Brittany, once in possession, would have an interest, which no sternness of his imperious lord could control, in gathering around him peaceful cultivators and confiding handicraftsmen. William de Percy, who found that his eighty manors yielded only a tenth of the rent which they produced in the time of the Confessor, would discover some surer means of obtaining rent than by fire and sword. Gilbert de Lacy, who dispossessed all the ancient free proprietors of a great district round Blackburn and Rochdale, and was the sole lord of many servile tenants, would, nevertheless, limit his exactions by some regard to his own interests. Robert d'Omfreville, who, upon the grant of the forest of Riddesdale, swore upon the sword of William that he would clear the country of wolves, and of all the men who were hostile to the conquest, would discover that if his domain were to be of any value, he must be somewhat more merciful than to confound the unquiet men with the wolves as equal enemies. A little while after the very period in which Ordericus has described the devastation of the north, which he calls "the lasting disgrace" of William, he says, speaking, we may believe, of the more settled districts, "the cultivators of the soil renewed their labours in some sort of security;" and he adds, that the English and Normans had begun to intermarry. It is thus that, in spite of wars and revolutions, of tyrannies and confiscations, the eternal laws of Providence in time assert their predominance over the transient efforts of man. The property of England had, in a great degree, changed its masters; but the population of England, wasted as it was, was still there. If the old proprietors were dispossessed, there were still the tenants and the serfs. There were no vast hordes of the Norman peasants crowding over from their own pleasant seats, to thrust out the children of the soil from eating the bread of their laborious poverty. We indeed find mention of the arrival from Gaul of men and their wives, with household accompaniments, such as are recorded in an old ballad: "William de Coningsby And his dogge Hardigras." Wonde But we doubt whether Thierry does not exaggerate such instances 'as Coningsby and his wife Tiffany, and Noel and his wife Celestria, when he says, "From the time that the conquest began to prosper, not young soldiers and old warlike chiefs alone, but whole families, men, women, and children, emigrated from every remote district of Gaul to seek their fortunes in England." Had there been any extensive colonisation of this nature, so that the Norman should have dispossessed the Saxon population, as the Saxon had dispossessed the British, the great body of the English nation, in succeeding generations, would have been Norman. "The whole cloth thereof," to use Fuller's words, would have been Norman, instead of that cloth being "guarded (fringed) here and there with some great ones of foreign extraction." The 196 THE MARCH TO CHESTER. [1070. dominant race were men in armour, who kept their followers for knightservice, but who left to their tenants the inglorious duties of the seed-time and harvest. The church lands were still the undisturbed possessions of the cathedrals and abbeys, though the bishops and abbots might be changed. The ancient churls would still cluster round these tolerant masters and instructors, who, to do them no more than justice, were of higher natures than to be instruments of unprofitable oppression. Trodden down, vilified, despised as was the Saxon race, it had lost the unity of a Nation, but there still was a People. The rough work of conquest is nearly over. The north is devastated. But the submission of the wretched inhabitants of the north provokes the resentment of Malcolm, king of Scotland, and he becomes their enemy. At the head of an army he crosses the Tyne, and completes the work of devastation. He was, no doubt, fancying that he was asserting the right of Edgar to the crown, and that the pretensions of the Atheling would one day be acknowledged, for he sought Edgar's sister, Margaret, in marriage; and from this alliance came what has been called "The Union of the Races," when Henry I. married Matilda, the daughter of Malcolm and Margaret. From the desolated Yorkshire, William, in the March of 1070, led his army to Chester. Ordericus has given a vivid description of this march: "With unwearied vigour he made his way through roads never before travelled by horses; across lofty mountains and deep valleys, rivers and rapid streams, and dangerous quagmires in the hollows of the hills. Pursuing their track they were often distressed by torrents of rain, sometimes mingled with hail. At times they were reduced to feed on the flesh of horses which perished in the bogs." Where William marched through a desert, there is now the densest population in the world; and not a river that rushes through these beautiful valleys is without the mill-wheel on its banks; and from the hollows of the hills rises a cloud which tells of industry producing national wealth, compared with which all the plunder of Saxon England would be as dust in the balance. At length the king, contending with a mutinous soldiery, who were suffering cold and hunger, and the attacks of hostile marauders, reached Chester, and put down the insurrectionary spirit in Mercia. At Easter the king is again at Winchester. The Church has had his care. The Saxon prelates he holds unworthy; and the Pope has sent him three legates to assist in the work of purification. Stigand, the archbishop, who had supported Godwin and crowned Harold, was deposed. Other prelates were set aside "for criminal life, and ignorance of pastoral duties." Norman monks took possession of the monasteries, and expelled the Saxon clergy. The Norman lords had their ecclesiastical friends and favourites. Ivo Taillebois ruined the Saxon abbot Ulfketul by his accusations; and the abbey of Croyland was given to Ingulphus, who had been secretary to the Conqueror. He was an Englishman; and we are therefore not surprised to find that, although bred in Normandy, he behaved with a brotherly kindness to his ejected predecessor. "Seeing that this venerable person was worthy of all favour and filial love, and was distinguished for his most holy piety, I had him placed in his ancient stall; nor did I, so long as he lived, consider myself as being fully the husband, but always as a sort of bride-man or steward of the monastery.” The Norman bishops and abbots, who gradually 1070.] NORMAN CLERGY-CROYLAND. 197 dispossessed the Saxon, were for the most part of loftier and more cultivated minds than the men of war who elevated them to wealth and power. Many who came into vast possessions, employed them in raising magnificent buildings, upon which we still gaze with admiration. They stood between the conqueror and the people, to mitigate their oppression, and to save the property of the Church, which was essentially public property-the inheritance of the lowliest-from the grasp of private rapacity. Ambitious and luxurious as some might be, others were humble and self-denying. One of the most learned of the Norman monks, Guitmond, was offered an English bishopric by William; he replied, "I look upon England as altogether one vast heap of booty, and I am as afraid to touch it and its treasures, as if it were a burning fire."* They were not all as Ordericus has described " some churchmen, who, to appearance, were religious, but constantly followed the court, and became abject flatterers;" and whom, in their elevation, he compares to wolves devouring their flocks. These had a natural fellowship with the adventurers of the laity, whom the same honest Norman depicts as "ignorant upstarts, driven almost mad by their sudden elevation." Such a bloated tyrant was Hugh d'Avranches, constable of Chester, who "set no bounds either to his generosity or his rapacity "—" who wasted his own domains ". and "indulged in gluttony to such a degree as to become so fat that he could scarcely walk." Another of this class was Ivo Taillebois, whom the people of the fens "supplicated as their lord on their bended knees;" and who, at his good pleasure, "tortured and harassed, worried and annoyed, incarcerated and tormented them." This mirror of chivalry "would follow the various animals of the people of Croyland in the marshes with his dogs; drive them to a great distance, drown them in the lakes, mutilate some in the tail, others in the ear; while often by breaking the feet and the legs of the beasts of burden, he would render them utterly useless." § Still it would be unjust to believe that such specimens of the "Norman gentleman constituted the majority of those who had dispossessed the "Saxon barbarian." Ingulphus gives us a very different picture of a Norman, who thought that life had higher duties than to take lance in hand against grumbling churls, and destroy the property of those who had still something to call their own. There was a real agricultural improver in those days, living in the same district where Ivo Taillebois amused himself with laming cattle and hunting swine. Richard de Rulos inclosed the waste marshes of Deeping; shut out the overflowings of the Welland by a great embankment; built within the embankment numerous cottages; and made in the meadow land, which had previously been impassable bogs, quite a pleasure-garden of fertile fields. || The example of this good and sensible Norman changed the character of the great fen district, and the people of Multon, and Weston, and Spalding, "in imitation of those at Deeping, by a common enactment agreed to among them, divided among themselves, man by man, their marshes." ¶ Such were the healing influences that very speedily mitigated the evils of the Conquest. Such is the course of most political revolutions. If the spirit of a people be not wholly trodden out-if their arts and their industry have not wholly perished-if knowledge and religion still throw a gleam over the darkness-if the memory of the * Ordericus Vitalis. + Ibid. + Ingulphus 198 THE CAMP OF REFUGE. [1072. past inspire hope and endurance-tyranny is only a passing storm which purifies whilst it destroys. Ingulphus was installed as abbot of Croyland in 1076. Four years before, that region of waste waters encompassing patches of fertility, had been the scene of the last struggle of Saxon nationality. Hereward, as the good monk wrote some twenty years later, had left a fame for undaunted prowess, "as we still hear sung in our streets." He had been exiled under the displeasure of his father, Leofric, the lord of Born, and had fought in foreign lands. After the conquest, his patrimonial possessions had been seized on the death of his father, and his mother was turned out to starve by a foreign minion of the Conqueror. He came to England, collected a band of the friends of his youth, and drove the intruders from his inheritance. Ingulphus presents to us a singular picture of the times, in describing how Hereward, not being a belted knight, repaired to his uncle, the exiled abbot of Peterborough, and there, after solitary watchfulness and prayer in the church from sunset to sunrise, made offering of a sword which the abbot blessed; and laying that sword upon his neck, devoted him to the duties of knighthood. This, the writer says, was the custom of the English; but that the Normans despised this mode of consecration, and held the soldier thus hallowed by the Church to be still a plebeian. According to them, the king, or the lord, must make a knight. But the Saxon knight bore himself as bravely as the noblest of those who had won their spurs in the Norman ranks. He raised the standard of revolt, and drove the foreign abbot and his monks from Peterborough. Ivo Taillebois, the lord of Hoyland, led a great force against Hereward; but he was repulsed again and again. The fame of the Saxon's exploits went through the land, and fugitives gathered from every quarter to his "Camp of Refuge." William had become jealous of Earls Edwin and Morcar, and had commenced a persecution which threatened their personal safety. Morcar fled to the camp of Hereward. Edwin endeavoured to escape to Scotland; but his flight was interrupted through treachery, and he was slain, leading a few followers, as he attempted to ford a swollen river. The head of the young earl was carried to William, who appeared indignant at the death of one who was mourned, not only by English, but by Normans; and he banished those by whom Edwin had been betrayed. With Morcar came to Hereward many an ejected chief, and many a deprived churchman. The isle of Ely, which was the chief seat of Hereward's force, was a surer protection, for a time, against the Norman cavalry than the defiles of Yorkshire, through which William had led his army in the pursuit of the rebellious Northumbrians. But the king, who had at first despised the insurgents of the fens, saw that this was no trifling outbreak which an Ivo Taillebois could put down. William possessed the highest talent for war -that talent which regulates the movements of an army by the most comprehensive view of the physical character of a district, and knows when to fight, and when to employ means more effectual than fighting. The king collected a large naval force in the Wash, and blockaded every arm of the sea that was an inlet to the fens. Wherever a road led into that district, he closed all access by his troops. The camp of Hereward was entrenched in the midst of waters, in some places stagnant and thick with reeds, in others rapid; but in all places dangerous for the passage of horse or foot. He 1072.] THE LAST NATIONAL STRUGGLE. 199 commenced the building of a great causeway; but at every pile they drove, Hereward came suddenly upon the labourers, and the work made no progress. The Normans said that Hereward was in league with the powers of darkness and William, to satisfy his followers, called a sorceress to his own aid, and she ascended a wooden tower to be the guardian of the causeway. The Saxons opposed no rival conjurations, but burnt the tower with its witch. Three months did William blockade the Camp of Refuge. At last he found a way more practicable than his bridges. The monks of Ely began to feel the approaching scarcity of the wheaten bread and fresh meat to which they had been accustomed; and they made terms with the king for the discovery of a passage from the fens to the camp. The Norman troops entered the Isle, occupied the monastery, and finally stormed the entrenchments. Resistance was at an end. Morcar became a captive, and the king kept him imprisoned for years. Hereward threw himself into the marshes, and escaping to his own estate, long kept up a partizan warfare. He at length submitted, when a longer struggle was hopeless. The metrical Chronicle of Geoffroy Gaymer recites how he fell fighting, without helm or hauberk, against fifteen Normans. Ingulphus, a more trustworthy historian, says, that having "made peace with the king, and obtained his patrimonial estate, he ended his days in tranquillity, and was very recently, by his especial choice, buried in our monastery by the side of his wife." |