Completion of the Conquest-Apportionment of the Soil and Offices-Discontent of the Normans-Doomsday Book-Quarrels in the Royal House. William's WILLIAM the Conqueror was crowned at Westminster on Christmas Day, 1066. Nominally his right to be king was derived from his election by the Witenagemot, in reality he reigned as the victor of Hastings; but in all his legal documents Harold's rule was ignored, and William was spoken of as the successor of Edward the Confessor. This twofold right of election and conquest received a sinister illustration on the coronation day. Within the abbey the ceremony was performed as heretofore, and the consent of the congregation was demanded as usual; but without it stood a guard of Norman soldiers, who, taking the acclamations of the congregation as the roar of an outbreak, set fire to the neighbouring buildings, and the day ended in destruction and massacre. The advantages of the election and coronation were immense. Henceforward William was a full king, and any movement against him would, in the eyes of the law, be not legitimate warfare but treasonable rebellion. The conquest of the country was, however, far from complete. At Hastings William had overthrown the standing army of Harold and the forces of the southern and south-eastern shires; but he Partial had yet to fight against the Mercians, the Northumbrians, nature of the and the men of the south-west. What Edwin and Morcar Conquest. might do was uncertain; but within a few weeks they presented themselves before William and accepted him as king, so that William's position William at the beginning of 1067 was not unlike that of Edward the Elder before the conquest of the Danelaw. William accepted this, and, leaving the earls undisturbed, contented himself with apportioning among his followers the lands of the house of Godwin and of those who had fought against him at Hastings. In March 1067 he paid a visit to Normandy. In his absence the general management of visits Nor- English affairs was entrusted to his half-brother Odo of Bayeux, who in Norman eyes was a man 'worthy as well of love as of respect,' and to the king's great friend William Fitz-Osbern, who as long as he lived was always called on for service when anything specially difficult required to be done. However, in the Conqueror's absence the insolence of the Norman adventurers seems to have goaded the English to revolt; and in Herefordshire they rose under Eadric the Wild, and in Kent with the help of Eustace of Boulogne. The mandy. First Eng risings were unconnected; and as William had taken with lish Risings. him Edgar Atheling, Edwin, Morcar, Waltheof, Stigand, and the abbot of Glastonbury, there was no one to weld them into a national movement, and consequently they were easily put down. However, on William's return he resumed the work of systematically conquering the island. His first attention was given to Exeter, where Gytha, the widow of Godwin, and her grandchildren, the sons of Harold, had taken refuge. Exeter seems to have had some idea of becoming a free city; but William would hear of no half-allegiance, and after a siege of eighteen days Harold's family made their escape and Exeter capitulated. The same year Edwin and Morcar and Edgar Atheling escaped from the court, and a revolt was organised under the nominal leadership of Edgar. As the rebels expected aid of Swegen Danish In. Estrithson, king of Denmark, the danger was formidable, terference. and William marched north in person. His advance was slow but sure, for, repeating the tactics of Edward the Elder, he seized town after town in the midlands, and secured each by the erection of a Norman keep, strong, well-provisioned, and holding such a building. powerful garrison that no insurgents would dare to leave their lands at its mercy. Among others, Warwick and Nottingham were so treated. At the news of his approach, Edwin and Morcar lost heart and submitted, and Edgar fled to Scotland; so William contented himself with erecting a castle at York, of which William Malet was made governor, and then, marching southwards, he erected castles at Lincoln, Stamford, and Cambridge. As he had already erected fortresses at Hastings, Dover, Winchester, London, Norwich, Exeter, and Bristol, the permanency of the conquest in the south was now fully Castle provided for, and two attempts of the sons of Harold to raise the west came to nothing.. The north, however, was still unsubdued; and in 1069 the men of Durham murdered Robert of Comines, who had rashly accepted William's offer of the earldom of Northumbria (meaning the district between the Tees and the Tweed), and encouraged by this the men of York rose. Again William marched to York, and erected Revolt of another castle on the opposite side of the Ouse. In the the North. autumn, however, a great Danish fleet entered the Humber; and the English under Waltheof having joined them, the wooden castles of York were both burnt to the ground, and the garrisons captured or slain-an action in which Waltheof gained great renown by his personal courage and strength. A third time William made his way north; and now, impatient of the obstinacy of the men of Yorkshire, he harried the arable country between the Humber and the Tees, so as to interpose a wilderness between him and his northern antagonists. Convinced of the hopelessness of the struggle, Waltheof then made his submission, while the inaction of the Danish fleet was secured by a payment of money. The north being now 'pacified,' William crossed the hills into Cheshire and subdued Chester, the last English town to maintain its independence. Meanwhile, Edgar Atheling had taken refuge with Malcolm, king of Scots, but did little for his cause besides repeatedly crossing the Tweed and plundering the northern counties, so that what little had been left by the mercy or weakness of William fell a prey to the rapacity of Malcolm. So great was the ruin of the north, that it is doubtful if that district, always less fertile than the south, ever recovered either its material prosperity or its relative civilisation till after the great revival of manufacturing industry during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Revolt of Hereward and of Morcar. The fall of Chester in 1069 marks the completion of the actual conquest; but in the same year the men of the Fens rose under Hereward the Wake, who found a stronghold in the Isle of Ely. In 1071 Edwin and Morcar again took heart to revolt; but Edwin was killed, probably by his own men, during an attempt to make his way to Scotland, and Morcar joined Hereward. Their insurrection, however, was short-lived. William made his headquarters at Cambridge, and attacked Ely both by land and water. Hereward seems to have escaped; Morcar was captured and imprisoned for life. Hereward, however, soon made his peace, and like Waltheof was admitted to favour. The insurrection at Ely was the last attempt of Englishmen, as Englishmen, to maintain their independence. William's Grants of Land. After these insurrections were over, William directed his attention to the three great objects of his general policy: (1) To secure his hold over the country, (2) to reward his Norman followers, (3) to keep the Norman nobles from becoming too powerful. The first he had already in a great measure accomplished by castle-building in the south and ravaging in the north; but he also secured his position by grants of land held from himself, which made every Norman landlord a representative of the Norman ruling class in his own district, while in all but a comparatively few cases in each county the English landowners sank into the undertenants of the Norman lords. Also, all English freeholders were forced to receive back their lands by the king's special grant, so that there was not a rood of English land from the Land's End to the Tweed the title to which was not based upon the king's grant. These grants were made on condition that the holder served the king with a certain number of knights (debitum servitium), apparently calculated at five or some multiple of five, who could be called on to serve with the king's person for forty days in each year, in which the coming and going were not counted. Knight service. It was, however, a most difficult matter to prevent the great nobles themselves becoming a source of danger to the royal power-capable on Danger from the one hand of defying the authority of the king, on the the Nobles. other of destroying every vestige of liberty in the people. This was what happened in Germany and in France, and it is due to the genius of William the Conqueror that it did not happen in England. He had himself been duke of Normandy, and he was determined that no one in England should have similar power under him. Accordingly, in rewarding his followers with titles and lands he followed a well thoughtout plan. To very few was given the title of earl, and if a man were earl of two shires they were never adjoining. Of land he had plenty to dispose, for he not only forfeited the property of all who had fought at Hastings, but each subsequent outbreak was followed by wholesale confiscation, while what remained of the old folkland was henceforth regarded as the estate of the king. The greater part of these vast territories were distributed to his followers; but care was of Property. taken that if a man had many manors they should lie in different parts of the country. For instance, William's half-brother, Robert, count of Mortain and earl of Cornwall, had seven hundred and ninety-three manors; but they were situated in twenty counties. Moreover, the power of the sheriff, the king's representative in each county, was carefully preserved, so that it was no easy matter for such Distribution a noble to concentrate his military forces and prevent his followers being crushed in detail by the royal officers. Earldoms. Strictly speaking, only three exceptions were made: the bishopric of Durham, the earldom of Kent, and the earldom of Chester. In these the whole land of the county was held by the earl. There were no tenants-in-chief of the king, but all landholders, except the clergy, held mediately from the earl. The bishopric of Durham was designed to guard against invasion from Scotland; and as the bishop was unable to found a legal family, at every vacancy the king could secure an occupant for the see well disposed towards himself. Similarly, the earldom of Kent was given to Odo of Bayeux, who was likewise an ecclesiastic; and after his death no successor was appointed. The earldom of Chester, granted to Hugh of Avranches, was the only palatine earldom in lay hands; but the positions of Robert of Montgomery, earl of Shrewsbury, and of William Fitz-Osbern, earl of Hereford, were not very dissimilar, so that the three great earls of the Welsh border were the most powerful subjects of the king. Fortunately, their energies were usually absorbed in fighting with their turbulent neighbours, the Welsh. Again, in regard to the building of castles, William, with very few exceptions, kept all castles in his own hands; he named the governor or constable and paid the garrison, so that, unlike the con- Garrisoning tinental castles, which were the strongholds of disaffection of Castles. and robbery, under William the Conqueror each castle was a guarantee for the quiet both of the English and Normans of its neighbourhood. Just as William placed Normans at the head of the landholders, he set Normans, or at any rate men of foreign birth, at the head of the church. As abbeys and bishoprics were vacated by death or deposition, Foreign foreigners took the place of Englishmen. In 1070, Stigand, Bishops. whose position as archbishop had always been dubious, was set aside; William gave the office to his friend and adviser Lanfranc, abbot of St. Stephen's abbey at Caen, and about the same time Lanfranc. Thomas of Bayeux, one of the most learned men of his time, became archbishop of York. Lanfranc was a real statesman, and the changes which he made in the English church were on the whole beneficial. He raised its spiritual condition by frequent councils, encouraged learning, revived the discipline of the monks, and also followed the most advanced thought of his time by forbidding for the future the marriage of the clergy. These changes all tended to make the clergy a distinct body; and as William the Conqueror deprived the bishop of his right to sit with the earl as president of the shire-moot, and |