SCOTLAND.-Malcolm III., Canmore; Donald VII., the Bane; POPES.-Victor III.; Urban II.; Pascal II. §1. Accession of WILLIAM II. (Rufus).-§ 2. Conspiracies formed against the new sovereign. Quarrels among the Normans.-§ 3. Rebellion of Odo, Bishop of Bayeux.-§ 4. The relative positions of England and the Duchy of Normandy. Quarrels between the king and his brother Robert, Duke of Normandy.-§ 5. Interest of the Norman barons in uniting England and Normandy under the same sovereign. Henry of Normandy. Robert's amiable character.-§ 6. Character of William. A tyrant and a bigot. Death of the learned Lanfranc.§ 7. William seeks a quarrel with Scotland, and defeats King Malcolm.-8. Excessive taxation and general discontent. Conspiracy of the Norman lords.§ 9. Commencement of the Crusades. Peter the Hermit. Godfrey de Bouillon.-§ 10. Robert of Normandy pledges the ducal crown to enable him to join the Crusaders. William's continued exactions.-§ 11. Contests between the Church and State. Quarrel with Archbishop Anselm. Struggle between the throne and the Pope.-§ 12. William shot by an arrow. Dies equally detested by England and the Normans.-§ 13. Various conjectures as to his death. § 1. WHEN the Conqueror lay at the point of death, and was making a disposition of his States, he had nominated his eldest son Robert to the duchy of Normandy, but declined to appoint any of his sons to the throne of England. It was too great a kingdom, he said, to be disposed of like a hereditary fief. At the same time he had given some private counsel to his favourite William; and we are now to judge from what occurred what that counsel must have been. William, strong bodied like his father, red-haired, and hot-tempered, coarse, cruel, and revengeful, knew that he was unpopular with the Norman lords; he therefore concealed the king's death till he had won over Lanfranc, the archbishop, to his cause by a promise of implicit obedience; he then hurried to Winchester, and claimed the royal treasures, which were very large; and when he saw himself in possession of the favour of the Church, and was lord of the castles of Dover, Hastings, and Pevensey, and of sixty thousand pounds weight of silver, besides great store of gold and jewels, he hurriedly summoned a council of the lords spiritual and temporal to give him the semblance of a legitimate election. By fear and favour he gained the object of his ambition, and was crowned at Westminster within three weeks of his father's death (September 26, 1087). § 2. A gleam of hope even at this early period broke in upon the English people. They saw disunion and enmity spreading from day to day among the Normans; they heard of conspiracies among those hated settlers to resist the newlyelected king, and they must have learned how valuable they were still considered by the efforts of both parties to win them over to their cause. William assumed the airs of a kind and just sovereign, who was determined to amend the harsh regulations of his father. He promised the English gentry a relaxation of the game-laws, and the peasantry an amelioration of their lot; but the necessities of his position soon forced him to greater condescensions than these, for he perceived that the growing hostility of the barons could only be checked by the armed assistance of the natives; and in less than a year from the removal of the Conqueror there were English vessels guarding the seas against a new Norman invasion, and thirty thousand armed Englishmen to defend their country if the invaders escaped the ships. The reason of the quarrel among the Normans was this: if Normandy and England were in different hands, the pro A.D. 1087-1089.] REBELLION OF BISHOP ODO. 123 prietors of estates in both countries would be placed in a very awkward position in case of war between them. If a baron owed allegiance to the Duke of Normandy for lands on the Seine, and also to the King of England for lands on the Trent, it was only a choice of evils which estate he was to lose, for both dukes and kings were exceedingly quick in forfeiting their tenants' acres for a breach of covenant, and if the unfortunate warrior joined the royal array, away went his castles and farms in the dukedom; and if he gave in his adhesion to the duke, away went his manors and towns in England. It was therefore of the greatest importance to those doubly landed gentry that the kingdom and the duchy should be in the same hands. William would have been delighted to meet their wishes by taking possession of his brother's heritage, and Robert would have been equally willing to oblige them by taking the English crown. But Robert was a goodnatured, careless, self-indulgent individual, who would make no great personal exertion on any account whatever, and would have been quite contented if his friends and dependents had left him to the easy enjoyment of his hawks and hounds. But the interests of the feudal chiefs were too deep to be altogether dependent on the character of the Norman duke. § 3. Odo, the Bishop of Bayeux, the Conqueror's halfbrother, was still alive and busy. He seized the great castle of Rochester, which, like Pevensey, had gone through the successive transmutations from a Roman camp to a Saxon "keep," and now to a Norman citadel. But William hated his uncle with more than his usual bitterness, and went down at the head of his English levies to punish the rebellious priest. The siege was long and close. Robert never came from his good city of Rouen, as he had promised, for the English boats swarmed upon the sea. There were five hundred knights within the walls, besides their other defenders, and provisions began to fail; water was scanty, and drainage was a science utterly unknown, so pestilence began, and surrender became indispensable. The state of national feeling at this time is proved by the fact that the English objected to mercy being shown to any of the garrison, and especially to Odo; whereas the kindlier sentiments of the Norman besiegers granted them their lives, and a safe departure from the realm. Odo insisted on the defenders being allowed to leave the castle with the honours of war, with their flags flying and their own band playing. But this was too much. "Not for a thousand marks!" cried Rufus, in a rage; and the curious information is given us that the garrison marched out with their standards lowered and the "king's music" shrieking tunes of triumph. There were other marks of discomfiture, for as Odo passed the grim lines of the English soldiers, there were shouts of execration, among which were mingled outcries for ropes to hang the tyrannical bishop. So the first thing we hear of William Rufus is that, to resist the hostility of Normandy, he threw himself on the protection of his English subjects. We shall always find that whenever a king is weakened, either by some fault in his title or by the opposition of his lords, he gains the favour of the commons by attention to their wants and improvement of the laws. § 4. The relative position of kingdom and duchy gives us the key to all the foreign transactions of this unprincipled king. As the Norman nobility found they could not gain their object by making their duke king of England, many of them made the attempt to make the English monarch duke of Normandy. William was always ready either to fight or buy. When he fought, he took some of his English forces over the sea; and when he only bought, he still gained his object by the help of his English friends. For instance, on one occasion when he required to bribe the French king to be neutral, he raised a body of twenty thousand men; and when they were all assembled and ready to embark, he sent to say that on payment of ten shillings a-head they might all go to A.D. 1089–1092.] THE GREAT BURGESS OF ROUEN. 125 their homes. Seven or eight thousand pounds, it is probable, satisfied the King of France, and William pocketed the difference, and saved his subjects' lives. In the midst of the perpetual quarrels of William and Robert, we get glimpses of the younger brother, to whom his father had left nothing but his blessing, and a younger son's portion of five thousand pounds. He was the wisest and best-informed of all William's children, and displayed such depth of learning in the mere fact of being able to read and write, that he was called the Beauclerc, or excellent scholar. But he showed at the same time so much political skill and personal courage, that people began to think the Conqueror's prophecy would come true, and that he would rise to the level of the duke and king. It was abundantly evident that no feelings of pity or gentleness would stand in the way of this accomplished gentleman. On one occasion he had successfully aided his brother Robert in resisting the adherents of William, and in taking prisoner a citizen of Rouen of the name of Conan, whose influence was so powerful that he was called "The great burgess." While the nobles paid the penalty of their disobedience with the forfei ture of some of their possessions, Conan was condemned to imprisonment for life. Henry was displeased with this leniency to a man without armorial bearings or landed estate, and visited the captive with every appearance of friendship. He took him to the top of the tower to show him the beauty of the surrounding landscape; and while the great burgess was gazing on winding river and rising hill, Henry seized him by the waist, and threw him headlong over the battlements. The body of the citizen went crashing down, and the elegant scholar and admirer of natural scenery merely explained to the spectators that a traitor deserved no pardon. § 5. When we remember the interest of the principal nobles in re-uniting the now separated inheritance of the Conqueror, we shall not be surprised at the next step taken by the barons of Normandy and England. This was to ratify |