\-' ^' s - (g^ DREAMLAND IN HISTORY i4^irr:^v^^pffi S^-:(f -1 kJ \} DREAMLAND IN HISTORY Zbc Stor^ of tbc IHonnan 2)uhc5 BY The Very Rev. H. D. M. SPENCE D.D. DEAN OF GLOUCESTER J1V7V/ ILLUSTRAT/OXS BY HERBERT RAILTON LONDON Wm. ISBISTER Limited 15 & 16 tavistock street covent garden 1891 TO 'Fictoria, (aueen antr CFmjpreis^f, The Dcaji of Gloucester, availing himsel/ of a gracious permission. Dedicates these little studies, on the seven N'ornian Founders of the Royal and Imperial House of England. CONTENTS. Part I. THE NORMAN DUKES. I. ROLLO II. Duke Guillaume Longue-Epee III. Duke Richard I. Sans-Peur . IV. Duke Richard II. Le Bon (" L'Ami des — Duke Richard III. V. Duke Robert Le Magnifique VI. Duke William (the Conqueror) . VII. William the Conqueror, Seventh Duke of Normandy, King of England . VIII. The Vanishing away of the Normans Moines 3 19 31 46 55 64 84 109 Part II. THE STORY OF A NORMAN ABBEY. I. Dreamland — ^The Dead King and the New Work in the Norman Abbey of Glou- cester 125 II. The Inventors of Perpendicular Architec- ture . . . .146 b X COXTENTS. CHAPTER PAGE III. TheBenedictine House of Gloucester . . .164 IV. The Birthday of our Gothic Minsters . . . 1S3 APPENDICES. I. The Great East Windov/ of Gloucester Cathe- dral 205 II. Gloucester and its Abbey 211 III. The Nemesis of the Normans 220 IV. Monastic Life in 1890 224 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. By HERBERT RAILTON. Engraved by L. Chefdeville. Part I. THE NORMAN DUKES. The Choir, Gloucester Cathedral West Front of Rouen Cathedral Bayeux Cathedral . South Transept, Baveux A Street in Rouen The Tomb of Rollo in Rouen Cathedral Old Houses, Bayeux Rue aux Juives, Rouen . Fecamp Abbey Lady Chapel, Fecamp Norman Work in Apse of Abbey, Fecamp Shrine of the Precious Blood, Fecamp The Ambulatory of the Abbey, Fecamp A Bit of Old Fecamp .... Choir of Abbey, Fecamp .... St. Gervais, Falaise ..... Arlette's Fountain, Falaise .... Birthplace of William the Conqueror, Falaise Porte des Cordeliers, Falaise A Street in Falaise ..... The Valley of the Ante, Falaise Duke Robert's Window, Castle of Falaise A Peep of Talbot's Tower, Castle of Falaise St. Pierre, Caen ...... Abbaye aux Dames, Caen .... PAGE Frontispiece. S 1 1 13 15 19 23 25 33 35 37 39 47 51 53 55 56 57 59 60 61 62 65 66 67 XII LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. Castle of Falaise ..... Apse of Church of Ste. Trinite, Falaise Tour du Bec-Hellouin . Gloucester Cathedral from N.E. Abbaye de Bec .... South Transept and Tower, Fecamp Interior of Bayeux Cathedral Entrance to La Vielle Tour, Rouen Norman Work in Les Halles, Rouen St. Gervais, Rouen .... St. Etienne, Caen ..... Gloucester Cathedral from N.W. PAGE 68 69 75 79 81 82 88 95 99 lOI 104 117 Part II. THE STORY OF A NORMAN ABBEY. Gloucester Cathedral ■ '^-S In the North Cloisters . .126 Lavatory in the Cloisters 128 Entrance to Crypt . . . . . . . . -130 Shrine of Edward II 133 College Lane ........... 138 Tower from the Dean's Garden 141 Across the South Transept . . . . . . . .144 Ambulatory showing Shrine of Edward II. . . . .151 The Lady Chapel 153 Gloucester Cathderal from N.W. . . . . . .156 A Peep from the North Transept . . . . . -163 The Deanery . . . . . . . . . . -165 The Deanery from Cloister Garth .166 The Cloisters . . . . . . . . . .168 Gloucester Cathedral from S.E. . . . . . . -171 The Cloisters 175 The Sedilia 186 North Transept with Early English Screen . . . . 1S8 Cathedral from Oxbody Lane . . . . . . -195 Norman Nave . . . . . . . . . . igS Gloucester Cathedral from W. . . . . . . 199 fri> t^mwA :^art fiCft)%in SaKCs THE NORMAN DUKES. ^^,^. CHAPTER OliliO There are two little chapels, the one on the right and the other on the left of the • nave of the great Cathedral of Notre- Dame at Rouen. The chapels are small and dark, with no particular beauty of ^^ ;^ - ^ ,.^ carved pillar or jewelled glass to mark I ■ '. them out for special notice in that stately I • . House of God. Yet round those small and ' . gloomy shrines should centre the chief in- terest which belongs to the fairest city in the broad French provinces and its matchless Cathedral, for beneath the rough stones of the little chapels' floor rests all that earth possesses of two of the greatest men who have ever worn crown and coronet, men who with their children have shaped and moulded the destinies of the two foremost nations of modern times — England and France. Rollo and his son Guillaume Longue-Epee were laid, when their rough, stern life's work was done — the one worn 4 THE NORMAN DUKES. out with years and toil, the other murdered in his golden prime — in the stately minster of their well-loved city, and some two hundred years later were translated from their first resting-place in the sacristy to the little chapels where they still sleep. The effigies which rest on their tombs date from the da3'S of St. Louis. That of Rollo has been repaired and renewed so often that it has probably lost most of its distinguishing characteristics. The effigy of his son William Long-Sword preserves the traditional features dating, no doubt, from a period far more remote than that of St. Louis, and as the stranger from other lands gazes on this remarkable face he feels he is looking on something not unlike what the mighty Norman was in life. Who were these famous Normans who with their strong hands and stronger brains created the England and France we know, but have left behind them, singularly enough, neither name nor nation ? Only the curious student knows now anything of Norman history. Their race, most of their literature, their very name, has disappeared. Even the fair province whence, during their two centuries of romantic Norman history, proceeded those princely Crusaders, those conquerors of England, South Italy, and Sicily, those pro- found scholars and thinkers,* those great architects — the fair province whence all these came men choose to call by new and tasteless names ; \ a strange destiny in truth for this splendid and victorious people ! Almost the only visible trace which this great people have left are a few grand and stately minsters in England, such as Durham and Norwich, Ely and Gloucester, and a number of curious and interesting churches, some especially * Of course, men like Laiifranc and Anselm are reckoned as belonging to Normandy, the country of their adoption, and where their real life-work was done. t Normandy is now known as Manche, Calvados, and Seine Infdrieure, Eure, &c. ROLLO. 7 of great size and beauty, in the old towns in Normandy; splendid monuments which still speak of the great men who planned them, built them, prayed and taught in them. These N'onnans, who were they, after all ? Other Vikings and sea-pirates had left Denmark and Norway and the fiords running up from the wild North Sea, men like Hastings, Guthrun, Ragnar Lodbrok, and many more still remembered or nameless. Their wild raids for many a weary year had been the desolation, not only of England under Saxon rule, but of Western and Northern France, Holland, Flanders, and far away into Central Germany, and even along the coast of the blue Mediterranean. The black Viking keels had ploughed up all the Anglo- Saxon rivers. They were long the terror of the Rhine and the Elbe, the Seine and the Loire. Cities far inland, such as Cologne and Treves, bore for many a year the traces of their fatal prowess. But all these wild children of the North have left little mark behind them save blackened and plundered homesteads, ruined churches and monasteries, and a terrible memory, such as is left by a passing desolating pestilence. One only of this long and terrible procession of death and rapine really has left a name and memory, one of the most illustrious of names and grandest of memories in the world's story — Rollo. The misery of the ninth century was almost inconceivable. There was no great central power to defend the splendid cities, the numerous and wealthy monasteries, the well-tilled farms of Germany and of France. The far-stretching king- dom of Charlemagne had split up into many fragments ; and burning jealousies and intestine feuds occupied the entire attention of the more powerful princes who ruled over the divided empire of the great Charles. From the North, " like 8 THE NORMAN DUKES. a stage procession winding in and out, disappearing and returning, their numbers magnified by their activity," the Northerner plundered, burnt, harried city and village, monastery and farm. From the south-east the Magyar hordes found an easy and profitable prey in the wealthy German cities. How thoroughly these wild tribes did their savage work in one portion of Europe the dry record of a contemporary chronicle tells us better than any rhetoric, " Ungarii vastando venerunt usque Fuldam." The Saracens desolated Spain and the Provencal Lands and swept over the whole of the Mediterranean Sea and its beautiful shores. We read, within the space of a few years, of the burning of Treves, Cologne, Maestricht, Liege, Coblentz, Aix-la-Chapelle, and many another fair city. We hear of the noblest churches, the stateliest monasteries, schools of learning, monuments of art, all given over to the sword and the flames. But the busiest of these plundering bands, as far as we can see through the dim mists of centuries, were the Northmen. So terrible, so far-reaching were their ravages, that into the Gallic liturgies a new supplication was introduced, and was used long after the Danish Raven banners had ceased to be a terror ; so deep rooted in men's hearts was the fear and dread of these terrible foes — " A furore Normannorum libera nos." * But all these fearful scourges came and went, and left nothing behind them save a memory of desolation and ruin. Barely the names of a few of the more famous of these robber sea-kings remain to us. In the year of Grace 911, some century and a half before the decisive fight at Hastings, the name and fame of Rollo emerge out of the mist of confusion which characterizes the scanty annals of that most unhappy ninth century and the opening years of the tenth. Several fairly trustworthy chroniclers — certainly not very friendly to these northern adventurers — relate the coming into power of * Palgrave, i. 451. ROLLO. 9 this strong and mighty sea-king. In the reign of our great Plantagenet King Henry II., an Anglo-Norman trouveur,* Wace, gathered up the written and oral memoirs of Rollo, and in a long and picturesque poem relates the story of his life in the now famous " Roman de Rou." W^e learn that Rollo was driven in early life from his cold north country by home troubles, and as a sea-king wandered and plundered for some thirty or more years over the north and west of France, occasionally visiting England with his black robber-ships. Still in the prime of life, the sea-rover dreamed of found- ing a permanent settlement. He chose the banks of the river Seine and the beautiful and fertile province it waters and the once-flourishing city of Rouen for his new home. It was an impoverished and half-ruined city and a country harried by a long series of cruel raids that Rollo took possession of, and acquired a sort of legal title to, by the terms of a vague treaty he made with the titular King of France, Charles the Simple. Then follows the romantic and marvellous story of the sea-king's life at Rouen. The thirty wild years as a rover by land and sea — thirty years of rapine and of cruel deeds done to well-nigh defenceless cities, villages, and monasteries — would seem a strange preparation for one who was to orga- nize an important nation, who was to weld together men of various races, who was to lay the strong ground-stories of a mighty realm destined in a few short years powerfully to influence the history of the world. Yet this is what Rollo the Viking, the wild Northman freebooter, did in Rouen and Bayeux between a.d. 911 and a.d. 927. The first of the seven mighty Dukes of Normandy must have been more than sixty years old when he began his curious and enduring work. The word "enduring" is used advisedly, for what Rollo did in his new land of the Northmen — a wide extent of * See Note on page iS. C lO THE NORMAN DUKES. country roughly including Normandy and Brittany, and later Maine, as we understand the terms — was permanent. What he began, his six successors went on with and developed — the strong and firm government, the respect for the Christian faith, law, and order, the gradual restoration of the old ruined religious houses, and their great educational and other works ; the curious welding together of Dane and Frenchman, which produced the Norman — all these things were the care of the old freebooter, Rollo the Viking, his children and children's children for six generations. The strange result was, that in less than a century and a half after the grim old Dane was laid in his tomb in the Rouen Minster which he had restored, his Norman land was famous throughout Christendom — famous alike for the splendid gallantry of its knights and nobles, as for the exalted devotion of its ecclesiastics — was famous for its new school of architecture, for its lordly min- sters, its vast monasteries, its flourishing cities ; was — still more remarkable — famous for its matchless schools, and even for the beauty of its " Romance "* literature. For three generations, that is, during the reigns of Rollo, of Guillaume Longue-Epee, and Richard Sans-Peur — the two last were the son and grandson of Rollo — a period of some ninety eventful years, the old Norsk religion in which Thor and Odin were worshipped and the wild banqueting hall of Valhalla looked to as the glorious goal of the unconquered fighting hero — the old Norsk religion struggled with Chris- tianity in the hearts of the great Norman Dukes and their faithful companions in arms. Rollo and his two successors were more than nominal Christians, as we shall see. His son and grandson, Guillaume and Richard, were, at times, even fervent devotees to the Christian faith. But the spirit of the old-loved Paganism * By Romance «e understand the Langitc d'oil. which, by an easy transition, became the " French language " of to-day. ROLLO. I I ^Hir mm ^'^--mmk .--A ;:.

/ -MP, t \^^\ ^ >■) -4 These noble ladies were afterwards the theme of many a lilt in the picturesque and vivid poetry of the Nor- man trouveurs. But their position and their influ- ence in the Courts of Rouen, Bayeux, and Fecamp were owing to the old Pagan spirit which still lived in the hearts of these famous Norman princes; for the marriage tie between them and the great Dukes was no Christian ■ceremony but an an- cient rite, which seems to have been dissolved and taken up again at plea- sure — a marriage rite which was still cherished by these mighty sons of the Northern sea-kings. This curious survi- val of Paganism, which exercised so powerful an influence on the otherwise Christian life of the Norman Dukes, was only really discontinued in the days of William the Conqueror, the son of Robert the Magnificent and Arlette, the daughter of the tanner of Falaise, who sternly discoun- W ;|Qi#^ «aj>- 14 THE NORMAN DUKES. tenanced any relaxation of the sacred Christian marriage law, and whose pure and spotless name and life — a grand example to the dissolute princes of the time — was not the least among the many titles of honour which belong to William, Duke of the Normans and King of the English, who won Harold's crcwn at Hastings. One of the Norman trouveurs thus sings of Espriota, the dearly loved of Guillaume Longue-Epee, and the Danish marriage : — " Icele ama moult e tint chere, Mais a Danesche manere, La voult aveir, non autrement Ce dit I'estorie, qui ne merit." But to return to the first of these Norman chiefs. The story of Rollo's twenty years' reign reads like a fairy tale which tells how the great Free Lance, as some centuries later he would have been termed, in the evening of his wild and stirring life, after his permanent settlement on the banks of the Seine, was changed as though by magic into the thoughtful and wise ruler, as eager for the welfare of the broad province over which he ruled as in old days he had been for its harrowing. He set himself, during the twenty years which yet remained to him of life and power, to restore the dilapidated towns and cities of his beautiful domain. Rouen he literally rebuilt. The foundation of the northern tower of Rouen Cathedral is most probably his work. From Rollo's days, Norman dukes and kings of France in succes- sion have enlarged and beautified the prosperous capital of Normandy. In spite of the chilling neglect which in the France of to-day allows so many of her noble religious monuments to decay, Rouen is still one of the fairest cities in Europe, and possesses some of the grandest churches in Christendom. The work of the Viking Rollo, and his chil- dren, is stfangely preserved in the city he loved so well. J Mill"' U ^ '' / \'Aii^m ///*■- 1 1:5 ■,,=»»r 1?.WI V'^mHr/f , II -1 if "NfrtKSl , ( J ^*i. ■ "^b'vJ^ Legends are still extant which tell of his especial love for jus- tice. One relates how by Rollo's decree a wise custom was estab- lished in Normandy — that who- soever sus- tained or feared to sustain any damage of goods or life was entitled to raise the country by the cry of " Haro," or Ha R o u (RoUo), 1 6 THE NORMAN DUKES. upon hearing which all the lieges were bound to join in pursuit of the offender. Harou — Ha-Rou * — ^justice invoked in Duke Rollo's name, this was called the " Clameur de Haro."t Another legend tells us how one day after the chase Rollo was resting in one of the forests hard by Rouen, and he determined to try the effect of his laws by hanging on the branch of one of the trees which overhung a broad reach of the Seine, where the river expands into a lake or mere, his golden bracelets, the ensign of the sovereign dignity. Three years later he found his bracelets hanging where he had left them. The mere was henceforth named Rou Mare — the Mere or Lake of Rollo. The forest of Roumare, in the environs of Rouen, still preserves by its name the memory of the legend. Similar stories are preserved of our English Alfred, of Theodoric the Ostrogoth, and of other popular heroes famed for their wisdom and justice. In the course of the twenty years which succeeded the permanent settlement of the famous Viking Rollo at Rouen, the original territory which he seized, and through the treaty he concluded with King Charles the Simple acquired some legal right over, was enormously augmented by successful feats of arms. Not only did he acquire permanent possession of the whole of modern Normandy, but Brittany was more or less subject to him, and even the wealthy province of Maine seems to have passed under his rule ; but his singular ability was even more conspicuously shown in other and very dif- ferent works than merely in feats of arms, however successful. Rollo and his immediate descendants showed a curious * This curious and most ancient custom, with some modification, still exists in the Channel Islands, which, after all these centuries, still remains an appanage of the English Crown, a perpetual reminder to our princes of their splendid Norman ancestry. t Palgrave, i. 696 — 698, derives the old English exclamation, " Hurrah," from this traditional. invocation of the name of the Norman chief. ROLLO. 17 power of adapting themselves to the customs and habits of the people among whom they settled. It has been well said that within a hundred years after the settlement at Rouen the children of Rollo and his companions, " though still proud of the Norman name, were content as speakers of the Ro- mance or French tongue to call themselves Frenchmen — though Frenchmen on a far nobler and grander scale than other Frenchmen." It was the same spirit and power of selection and adaptation of what was good and great in stranger peoples which in the days of William the Con- queror enabled them, when once they had settled in England, unconsciously but surely to become Englishmen, but "nobler Englishmen" than Edward the Confessor's subjects, or even than those gallant men who fought under the banner of the "fighting man " with Harold at Hastings. Their adoption of the French or Romance tongue was especially remarkable. Within forty years from the estab- lishment of Rollo at Rouen * the old Danish language struggled for existence. It was in Normandy that the Langue d'oil (Romance) acquired its greatest polish and regularity. The earliest specimens of the French language, in the proper sense of the term, are now surrendered by the French philologists to the Normans. f When Rollo reached his eightieth year — whether, as some say, urged by his fiery chieftains, or feeling his fading strength unequal to the burden of ruling and organizing his now mighty state, harassed by his neighbours, who viewed the growing power and splendid successes of these sea- pirates, as they termed them, with ever-growing jealousy — the old man resigned the active duties of chief ruler to his son, the brilliant son of Popa — Guillaume Longue-Epee. Rollo lived on five years longer to watch and advise. The story of his life relates how, as the great chieftain lay dying, * Freeman, i. 150. t Palgrave, i. 763. D 1 8 THE NORMAN DUKES. terrible memories of what he had done in bygone years, when he had roamed the seas and rivers of Northern Europe as a Pagan Viking, visions of human victims sacrificed at the altars of Odin and Thor disturbed and affrighted him. In the intervals of these awful dreams he showed himself the steadfast friend of the Church of his glorious later life, and died, the Trouveur biographer tells us, a devout Christian, in the odour of sanctity — " Ici trespasse Rous li proz et li vaillanz, Od fin duce e saintissime, e plein de jorz e d'anz." Benoit de Saint Maur, 8342. [Note. — The Romance languages (Romana Rustica) sprang out of the cor- ruption of Latin. In France the Romance was divided into two dialects, the La?2g!/e d 'oc and the Latigue d'oi'l {oc and oil being words signifying "yes " — oil afterwards being corrupted into oy and Qui). The regions in which these dialects were spoken were, roughly, separated by the River Loire. The Langue d'oc, save as a provincial patois, is dead. The Langue d'oil— the dialect of the northern provinces and of the Norman Frenchman, has grown into the French language. The poet of the Langue d'oil was termed a Trouveur. The poet of the Langue d'oc was termed a Trotibadeur . " Thus the names of Trouveur and Trou- badeur are obviously identical. — But, except in name, there was no resemblance between the minstrels of the northern and southerji dialects. The invention of one class was turned to description, that of the other to sentiment ; the first were epic in their form and style, the latter almost always lyric ; one school produced Chaucer, the other Petrarch." — Hallam's Middle Ages, chap, ix., part ii.] CHAPTER II. Duke Guillaume Longue-Epee. The recumbent statue in the Rouen Cathedral (of the time of St. Louis) represents the famous Viking clad in ducal robes. " The sculptor has happily suc- ceeded in embodying the notion conveyed by tradition and history — the once mighty man of war, thoroughly worn out, the sunken lips, the furrowed brow, the strength of fourscore years come to labour and sorrow."* But the work of Rollo — that strange mighty work which created the Norman, and changed and shaped anew the chief nations of the world of tne West — went on under his • Palgrave, ii. 63. Since Palgrave wrote this description of the tomb the restorer's not ahvays skilful hand has sadly interfered with this most interesting effigy of one of the great founders of the proud Norman dynasty. 20 THE NORMAN DUKES. son, after the worn-out warrior-statesman was left to sleep in the minster he had raised in his loved Rouen. The hand of the restorer has spared the effigy of Rollo's son, which perhaps bears the traditional features of the great second Duke. Most probably the thirteenth-century effigy was a faithful copy of a much earlier monument. The figure represents a crowned and armoured soldier, with his hand resting on the golden hilt of that famous long sword from which William takes his name. The tomb is in a little recess of the dark chapel, and the figure represents a warrior fallen asleep in the prime of life and strength. The thirteenth- century sculptor has left on the still youthful face of the hero duke an expression of intense weariness — worn out with the restless anxieties of his busy, work-filled life; utterly tired out with his labours, the Prince seems to have fallen asleep in his harness, with his hand grasping the hilt of the famous long sword so often unsheathed against mistaken patriotism at home and the bitterest jealousy abroad. The son and successor of Rollo was evidently a very gifted man ; like most of the princes of his famous house, he possessed extraordinary vigour. The Trouveur sung of his stroke being that of a giant, his features beautiful, his complexion bright as a maiden's. During his too short reign of fifteen years he exercised absolute power over the broad dominions which acknowledged the Norman sway. He inherited his father's love for justice and law, and among the princes of his line was distinguished for his wise states- manship. Like Rollo, too, he saw that if his Normans were to become a permanent and enduring power in France, they must gradually become Frenchmen. So he encouraged the "Romance" tongue at his Court, and adopted the customs and pomp of the Kings of France and the great French princes — identifying himself and his people in many ways with French interests and feeling. The Duke Guillaume DUKE GUILLAUME LONGUE-EPEE. 21 is not unfrequently painted in Romance history as a saint and martyr. He scarcely deserves these titles, for though just and generous, though generally well loved and admired, he was but a fickle friend at best, not unfrequently changing sides in the ceaseless wars and troubles of that restless and uneasy period. One who well grasped the character of this brilliant and yet impulsive hero writes of him, " that he could never hold fast either to the good or evil, always wrestling with himself and failing, inwardly warned yet disobeying the warning, ardently affectionate yet destitute of fidelity, un- stable in all his ways."* Yet in spite of all this, Duke Guillaume possessed far nobler qualities than any of the contemporary princes of the time who bore rule in France and the neighbouring countries ; and his rule and influence were perhaps the most far-reaching of any of the great French princes of his day. His life work was to weld together in one the Northman and the Frenchman, and while brineine the whole of his broad dominions within the pale of Christian and French civilisation, preserving intact the dauntless courage, the high ambition, the many splendid qualities which were the heritage of the nobler spirits of these old Northmen. The first four Norman Dukes were all subject to strong religious impulses, and each of them did much to restore the ruined churches and monasteries ; but, singularly enough, although they were far more than merely professing Christians, the first three preferred the old Pagan rite of marriage (and each of the three, after publicly marrying with all the solemn rites of the Christian church a Princess of hieh lineaee, eave the love and devotion of a life to another to whom the Prince was united by some old Danish Pagan rite). The legitimate consort of Guillaume Longue-Epee was Liutgarda, a Princess of the powerful Vermandois house, but following his own * Palgrave, ii. 69. 22 THE NORMAN DUKES. wilful way he loved Espriota, a Danish girl, who was the mother of his heir, the noble boy afterwards known in history as Duke Richard the Fearless. There was no excuse for this deliberate choice of evil, for this open disregard of a bond looked upon as sacred by the religion these mighty chieftains accepted and even made real sacrifices for, a religion which they undoubtedly believed in with all their souls. This strange conduct on their part was a relique of the old Pagan faith of their fathers, which, as we have said before, was never thoroughly eradicated until the "Conqueror's" days. Possibly it was a concession they willingly made to the wild Danish Viking spirit which sur- vived in all its fierceness in a strong party among these old Normans, and which for some hundred years after Rollo's settlement at Rouen had its headquarters in the Danish city of Bayeux. Rollo, in a moment of bitterness, is reported to have said that his son Guillaume was better fitted in spirit for a monas- tery than a sovereignty. But the early love for solitude and the monastic life dis- appeared in the stir and excitement of his life as supreme ruler. Profusely splendid in his court and camp, Duke Guillaume was never really generous to the Church. In the old Merovingian days, before the black ships of the Viking Jarls had desolated the beautiful province afterwards known as Normandy, more than sixty monasteries, some of great size and influence, had flourished. All were destroyed in the terrible days of the Northmen's raids. Not a few of these under the Norman Dukes were rebuilt, but many remained a ruin and a name. Of these restored religious houses, the once-splendid Jumieges, not far from Rouen, on the banks of the winding Seine, owed its restoration to the Duke Guillaume. It was not long before the dread day on which the brilliant and powerful Norman chief fell under the assassin's sword. DUKE GUILLAUME LONGUE-EPEE. n Here the Duke, utterly tired out with his life, excitement, and restless toils, perhaps oppressed by some weird presentiment of his coming violent death, asked his friend, the Abbot of restored Jumieges, to receive him as a monk in his quiet, peaceful monastery. In late years Duke Guillaume had oftentimes resorted to Jumieges and its Abbot for rest and repose. But the Abbot ^ - '■., steadily refused, even though the Duke was persistent in his re- quest to be allowed to throw off his armour, and put aside his ducal robes and crown and to assume the coarse serge gown of the Benedictine monks. With a strange insist- ence the Duke argued his right to give up the world. A com- promise was at last effected. His friend the Abbot persuaded him to continue to hold *-■ . " ■ ~ ^'^ the reins of govern- ment ; indeed, who was to succeed the son of Rollo ? Guillaume had but one son, Richard, and Richard was still a child, and the mother was not even the Duke's lawful wife, Liutgarda of Vermandois. Espriota, the mother, too, was the object of the bitter jealousy of Liutgarda. What would become of the boy Richard if the Longue Epee was sheathed for ever and his father a cloistered monk in secluded Jumieges? Perhaps 24 THE NORMAN DUKES. moved by this thought of the defenceless child, Duke Guil- laume agreed still to wear the coronet of Normandy, Brittany, and Maine, still to wear over his coat of mail the insignia of his great office, but he only did so on condition that in secret the Abbot would give him the dark gown and cowl of a Benedictine. Before men Guillaume would still play the part of Duke and Prince, for his boy's sake, but before his God he was the cowled monk. The strange and secret bar- gain was concluded ; frock and cowl were deposited in a chest and placed in his palace at Rouen. The silver key which opened the chest the Duke fastened to a girdle which never left him. With a heavy heart, with the shadow of death pressing on him, he called his three dearest friends round him and presented the child Richard to them, his old com- panions-in-arms. Then these men, who had served Rollo with unswerving loyalty, swore, if Duke Guillaume died in their lifetime, that they would guard the little child as the hereditary chief of the Norman race. Something kept whispering the Monk-Duke, still compara- tively young and in the very prime of life, in the midst of all his magnificence and power, that his days on earth were numbered — the dread shadow of coming death seemed to hover over court and camp. It was never absent. The fourteenth-century sculptor who carved the face on the chapel tomb, no doubt a copy of a far older effigy, has caught the presence of the shadow resting upon the grave, worn face. There was a restless, feverish impatience during that last year to secure the position of the beautiful child of his love> Espriota. So for once putting aside his tastes and inclina- tion for France and France's ways and customs, putting away his great love for " Romane " Rouen, he determined to keep his Pentecostal festival— it was his last, and Guillaume seemed to know it — at the Danish city of Bayeux— Bayeux, the centre of the old Danish life in Normandy, half Pagan still, a city DUKE CUILLAUME LONGUE-EPEK. 25 in the days of the early Norman Dukes where the ways and thoughts of France were unknown, where the very children lisped in Danish syl- lables. To Bayeux Duke Guillaume summoned all the chieftains of Nor- mandy and Brittany, and there he pre- sented to them the boy Richard, and the great assembly swore, when their noble Duke and Chief was taken from them, to be the liegemen of the fair -haired and ruddy-cheeked child. The father promised the boy should be brought up in Danish Bayeux away from the sights and influ- ences of " Romane" Rouen. Time enough, •■ ■ ; he thought, for the ' child prince to learn to love France. As a child he should grow up a Dane among Danes. The old Viking spirit must live again in the Duke of the Normans. The Romance tastes, the ambition to 2 6 THE NORMAN DUKES. be a great prince of France, these thing's were sure to come later ; but there was some danger that the reckless daring, the old spirit of adventure, the splendid vigour, the indomitable determination which with other noble features belonged to the old Northmen, might totally disappear and give place to the more effeminate though perhaps more winning French or " Romance" spirit. In " Romane " Rouen the desire was to shun the barbaric dialect of the sea-kings ; the habits, traditions, memories of the old Scandinavian home were ignored; the beautiful Seine city which RoUo had rebuilt and beautified, aimed at becoming Romane and French : and so well did it succeed in its aims that not only did its Court rival the most splendid of the Courts of the King of France and his great feudatories, but the language of North and Central France, the " Romance," found the principal seat for its cultivation in Rouen, the city of the Danish sea-kings. But Duke Guillaume, with that rare and far-seeing instinct which seems to have been the peculiar heritage of the Norman Dukes of the house of Rollo, saw that if the traditions and memories, the habits and thoughts, and the language and poetry of the great vigorous North were ignored, and then forgotten, his people would be merged among the partly worn-out races of France. That was far from being the destiny which Rollo and Guillaume dreamed of for the Norman. So the father made provision for his boy who was to inherit his broad dominions to be brought up amidst the traditions of his forefathers. The key to the blurred and confused story of the death of Guillaume Longue-Epee must be sought in the bitter and relentless hatred which the great provinces of France cherished towards their new Norman neighbour. He was the son of one of the fierce and dreaded sea-pirates who for long and weary years had laid waste and devastated their DUKE GUILLAUME LOXGUE-EPliE. 27 fairest provinces. The pirates had settled in their midst, and apparently without an effort had become one with themselves — Frenchmen, only nobler and grander Frenchmen. These hated Normans in an incredibly short space of time had made themselves masters of the fairest provinces of France. They had become their rivals, ay, and successful rivals, in all the arts of peace, as they had proved themselves to be in the arts of war. So these long-descended French chiefs and their followers hated the Normans with an inextinguishable hatred ; and for more than fifty years after the death of Duke Guillaume Longue-Epee, the powerful sovereign of the gay and splendid court of Rouen, "Dux Piratarum," the Leader (Duke) of the Pirates, was the common appellation of the Count or Duke of the Normans. Dimly through the haze of centuries we catch sight of the bitter jealous hate crystallising into a definite plot against the life of the Princely Norman Guillaume. The story of shame is blurred and confused, but many of the greatest names in Christendom seem to have been more or less privy to the dark scheme of murder. After the death of the noble Norman Guillaume Longue-Epde, the King of France, Louis d'Outremer, and the still greater Duke of France (Hugh le Gros) professed much indignation against the doers of the deed of blood. But if they were not actually privy to the details of the cruel murder, it is known that they and many others of the great French chieftains earnestly desired the death of the Norman sovereign. They hoped that the death of the brilliant and loved Norman chief would be a fatal blow to the steady unexplained prosperity and the rapidly growing power and influence of the Norman people, which excited so many fears, such burning jealousies. ******* There had been a long-standing feud between Guillaume Longue-Epee of Normandy and Arnoul, Count of Flanders. 28 THE NORMAN DUKES. Count Arnoul wrote to Guillaume Longue-Epee asking- to meet him, and to try in a friendly interview to settle their mutual grievances. He was too infirm, pleaded the Flemish chieftain, to undertake so long a journey as would be required to visit the Norman at his home in Rouen — would Duke Guillaume meet him nearer? He suggested a convenient Irysting-place. A little island on the Somme, not far from Amiens, was the place of meeting. The armed escorts were left on the river bank. The two Princes, accompanied by a few of their most trusted friends, were ferried over to the little green island in the middle of the river. It was a December day, and the interview was cut short bv the settine in of the early winter twilight. The conference had been more than friendly. Count Arnoul professed himself dis- satisfied with his position among the independent princes of France, and offered to accept the Norman Duke as his Protector and Sovereign, covenanting that the broad and fertile Flanders, after his death, should become part of Norman territor}^ These friendly and more than generous overtures won the heart of the unsuspecting Guillaume, who tarried in the little island to the last minute with his new friend, who had sworn eternal friendship to Normandy and had arranged that in no distant future, Flemings and Normans should be one people. When the conference was just over, the Duke of the Normans sent his little group of " fideles," in a large boat, over the river to join the main body of his guards, lie remained talking with Count Arnoul to the last minute on the island — he would cross, last of all, in a little skiff, soon after his friends. The grey December shadows fell deeper and deeper over the dark Somme and the green island. The " fideles " of the Norman and their boat were quickly ferried over, but their loved Duke still tarried. From the banks of the Somme the Normans strained their eyes in the December twilight, to see DUKE GUILLAUME LONGUE-EPEE. 29 what was delaying their master. No thought of treachery seems to have occurred to any one, till, in the half-light of the grey winter afternoon, they heard a cry of distress and anguish, and saw, or fancied they saw, in the dark waters, a human form struggling past. They crossed over again and found their master, Guillaume, bleeding from several savage sword- thrusts, but quite dead, and in the distance they could distinguish the plash of oars up stream, which quickly carried Count Arnoul and the assassins out of their reach. The body of the murdered Duke was ferried over. His appalled and grief-stricken followers, tenderly washing the body of their loved master, found, as they took off the blood- stained garments, the silver key of the chest in the palace at Rouen, fastened to the dead man's girdle. When the chest was opened, the monk's cowl and robe which the Abbot of Jumieges had given him, when he persuaded him to give up his cherished idea of abdicating, was found in it, Guillaume's much-prized treasure. Wrapped in a silken shroud, all that remained of Duke Guillaume was brought back to the Rouen Palace he had left so short a time before in all the pride of manly strength and absolute power over the fairest region of France. But King, and Duke, and Court, and the many Frenchmen who with a fierce hate hated the Norman, reckoned without their host when they dreamed that the Norman Power would be shattered when their famous sovereign Guillaume Longue- Epee was removed. They had no suspicion of the real character and temper of the men they so disliked and feared. Before the sad funeral company had laid the dead son of Normandy in his sleep- ing chamber in the Cathedral, his trusted friends had met to- gether in the beautiful city of their murdered master. These gathered together round Guillaume's coffin. They included old grey-headed companions of Rollo with their sons and 30 THE NORMAN DUKES. grandsons, men who were the ancestors of the future con- querors of South Italy and Sicily, men whose children's chil- dren fought and won on the stricken field of Hastings, men whose descendants became the foremost Crusaders, the fathers of the proudest Houses of the mighty Anglo-Norman King- dom, and in their midst, standing by the coffin of Guillaume, was a little fair-haired boy, with ruddy cheeks, whom they had fetched from Danish Bayeux. One grey-headed chieftain held the ducal coronet on the boy's head, one kissed the little hand, and the others swore eternal allegiance and fidelity to their child-Duke Richard, who in sorrow and perplexity stood gazing on his father's coffin. It was the last great service Guillaume, the son of Rollo, could do his people and the land, this welding together by his coffin the varied interests of his mighty chieftains. In this solemn moment the Norman-Dane and the Norman-French- man forgot their jealousies, their antipathies, the conflicting interests of the old religion and the new, in their stern resolve to avenge their master's death by raising the throne of their master's son higher than the thrones of any of the Princes of France. Well and truly they kept their vow. Backed up by their strong arms and their reckless gallantry, their wisdom in the council chamber and in the field, the child-Duke of Normandy, known in after years as Richard Sans-Peur, in a reign of fifty years raised the provinces of Rollo and Guillaume to the first rank among the powers of the west. ******* These are some of the memories which cluster round the little dark chapel in the aisle of the great Cathedral at Rouen, where the grim stern effigy of the second Norman Duke keeps watch and ward over the mouldering remains of what was once Guillaume Longue-Epee, Rollo' s son. CHAPTER III. Duke Richard I. Sans-Peur. Midway between Di- eppe and Havre a lit- tle river winding under some green wooded hills round a steep, pictu- resque cliff into the sea, forms the harbour of Fecamp, now a famous deep-sea fishery station, and one of the less- known Norman bathing stations of the great French capital. Leading up from the shore and Its groups of those fantastic dwellings which the modern Parisian loves, is a long straggling town with little to interest or to charm. On a sudden, after a vfeary mile of dull quiet houses and duller shops, the stranger as he comes suddenly on an open "place," is arrested by the sight of a mighty minster church. Everything that modern industry could do to disfigure the splendid work of an age, whose high 32 THE NORMAN DUKES. aspirations are now too often forgotten or ignored, has been done here. A huge porch veils successfully the minster's west end. This was the unhappy thought of the eighteenth century, while the state architects of the nineteenth century have so successfully adapted the many graceful buildings which once surrounded the abbey to the civic and other requirements of our time that all trace of their ancient beauty and fitness has now well-nigh disappeared. Still, in spite of the efforts of this dreary, tasteless school of modern builders, there remains with us the time-worn and majestic pile, which, notwithstanding its hideous surroundings, charms us with its grey scarred beauty, and we forget the present and its mistakes when we gaze on this mighty relic of the past. The Abbey in its present form dates generally from the thirteenth century, but its interior and exterior contain many remains of a far older date. For instance, its transepts north and south, were evidently built much as we see them, probably in the days of Duke William, the conqueror of Eng- land ; portions of them even earlier.* As the stranger gazes up at these vast wings of the Abbey he feels he is looking at masonry which the Normans who fought at Hastings had looked on. Within, as the same stranger walks round the ambulatory which fringes the choir and high altar, he is arrested in the north-eastern portion by arches and pillars which remind him of Gloucester and Durham, save that the Norman arches and capitals in the corner of the Fecamp Abbey are rougher and perhaps tell of an older generation than the builders of our great Anglo-Norman minsters. The Norman Abbey was erected on the site of one of the oldest sanctuaries in Christendom. We trace its existence * The older portion dates from about the same time as the old Abbey of West- minster, which gave place to the noble minster of King Henry III. which we know so well. DUKE RICHARD I. SANS-PEUR. Zl S^ -^^ia^^^ far up the stream of time. Tradition sa3'S the first simple sanctuary was raised in the third century by Boso, the mis- sionary of St. Denys. In the fifth century Anseguise, a Prankish chieftain of Clovis, the Merovingian king, while hunting came upon the ruins of a church and altar. The Prankish noble appears to have arranged to rebuild the primi- tive church and to restore the Christian worship there, but death put an end to his project. The old church remained desolate for nearly two hundred years longer, when Waninge, the friend and minister of Bathilda, widow of Clovis II., erected on the old site of Boso, an Abbey, and large conven- tual buildings. This was consecrated with great pomp a.d. 665, in presence of the Merovingian sovereign, Clotaire III. In common with all the religious houses in the north of Prance the great Fecamp abbey and convent was burnt and sacked by the Norsemen — Hasting, the terrible sea pirate, is credited with the deed. Guillaume Longue-Epee, the son of Rollo, built the castle and palace, and restored, though by no means magnificently, the ancient church. His son F 34 THE NORMAN DUKES. and successor, Richard Sans-Peur, determined to replace It with some of its ancient grandeur. Now to what did this secluded spot on the north coast of France owe its reputation for sanctity? The story tells us v;hen Richard Sans-Peur, in the earlier years of his long and eventful reign, was at his favourite palace at Fecamp, where he was born, where long years afterwards he died, and where his remains at the end were laid, it struck him that his lordly castle (its ruined towers are still to be seen in the garden of the Dean of the Abbey) overshadowed the comparatively small and humble House of God. He determined to rebuild it with stately magnificence, and desired that due search should be made among the archives of the Abbey, which were still preserved, for anything bearing upon the past forgotten his- tory. Due search was made, and the following strange story was brought to light and rehearsed before the young Duke. The narrative related how Joseph of Arimathaea, after he received the sacred body of Jesus from the Roman soldiers, with tender care removed the blood which had coagulated about the five wounds, and ever afterwards reverently preserved the sacred relic. On -his deathbed he confided the precious memorial of the great sacrifice to his nephew Isaac, who, on the approach of the troublous times which heralded the last siege and destruction of Jerusalem, fearing lest Joseph of Arimathaea's treasure should fall into the hands of the Pagan Roman, sealed up the coagulated blood in two leaden phials. These he hid in the thick trunk of an ancient fig-tree, which he, to preserve it from the hands of the Romans then pouring into the Holy Land, threw into the sea. The waves carried the precious burden eventually to the north coast of Gaul, and there the fig-tree trunk which held the two little leaden phials was cast up on the shore of the river which, flowing through the valley, now forms Fecamp harbour. DUKE RICHARD I. SANS-PEUR. 35 •■* ^* m-h^'' vm-'M^i- m-^.^- It is uncer- tain whether this strange old legend was the basis of the extra- ordinary sanc- tity which— for several centu- ries previous to the days of Guillaume Longue-Epee, the son of Rollo — evi- dently belong- ed to the {' oratory, the church, and subsequently the religious house of Fecamp ; a tra- ditional sanctity which in- fluenced Guillaume in his selection of Fecamp as a favourite residence. There is no doubt it was a famous sanctuary in the comparatively secure times of the Alerovingian kings, with a story which reached far back to the days when Roman Proconsular officers ruled in Gaul. When the strong arm of the Emperor Charlemagne was removed, and the sacred house of Fecamp, with countless other shrines, was destroyed and sacked by the ruthless Norse- men, the ruin of the house and the devoted self-sacrifice of its inmates were notorious among other similar acts of ruin and self-sacrifice which distinguished that wild and reckless age.. I^^:7(5B^el. j|AtW 36 THE NORMAN DUKES. Richard Sans-Peur — so runs the Norman story — was intensely interested when he heard the marvellous legend which was preserved at his favourite house and birthplace, and caused diligent search to be made for any traces of the old sacred treasure. Beneath the altar of the new church — an altar which his father had erected as near as possible to the altar of the old ruined Merovingian House — Duke Richard found the trunk of the famous fig-tree, and in the fig-tree, securely hidden, the two little leaden phials which held the remains of the Precious Blood. The phials were placed in a stone pillar, hard by the altar of the new and splendid church which the great Norman Duke proceeded to erect. Tp t(P -BP ^V Tp ^ T^S When Richard Sans-Peur lived and built his new and grand abbey round the altar which enshrined the relic of the Precious Blood, the last quarter of the tenth century had still to run its course. We are now in the same quarter of the nineteenth century. Nine hundred eventful years have come and gone, and the mighty Fecamp abbey still towers over the little city grouped around it. Some of those grey- blue walls flecked with lichen of the tenderest green and brown — scarred with the winter storms of nigh a thousand years — some of those strong walls beautified with the dim sweet colouring, are the walls which Richard, Duke of the Normans, grandson of the sea-king Rollo, planned, and which, the story tells us, he helped now and again to build with his own hands. Within the sanctuary the guardian of the holy ancient fane still shows the devout pilgrim or the careless stranger a low white marble shrine built into a massive pillar behind the great altar ; a white shrine sculp- tured with the quaint sweet grace of the Renaissance period, in which the little leaden phials of the old legend still rest, guarding that sacred treasure of the Blood. DUKE RICHARD I. SANS-PEUR. 37 n. Norrr)&J).-Work,-v_-^ During the nine hundred years which have elapsed since Duke Richard rebuilt the ancient pile, the precious relic has doubtless contributed largely to the fame and fortune of the Abbey, which, until the great revolution, ranked among the first of the chief religious foundations of France. We trace it through the centuries. In 1448 the theological faculty of Paris gave an especial sanction to the 38 THE NORMAN DUKES. credibility of the relic. The words of this singular approval were: "Non repugnat pietati fidelium credere quod aliquid de sanguine Christi effuso tempore Passionis remanserit in terris." In 1 710 a formal and official visit of examination was made by the then abbot of the Royal Abbey of the Holy Trinity of Fecamp, de Villeroy, accompanied by several high officials. An account of this official visit and examina- tion was drawn up and certified to by a long list of witnesses. From a recess {inie armoirc) carefully fastened up, hollowed out of the great pillar by the High Altar, which for centuries had been the traditional resting-place of the Relic, they took a little silver-gilt reliquary, shaped like a tower, about four inches long and two inches broad. In this silver tower were two narrow silver bottles, and in these, two little leaden phials, which were filled with a red coloured dust. The phials and their contents, after careful examination, were reverently replaced in the great pillar. In the Terror, 1793, one of the dispossessed monks of the Abbey — one Dom Letellier — before the great Church was pillaged and desecrated, contrived to secrete the famous Relic. When the Abbey became the parish church of Fecamp, the sacred treasure was restored, and again replaced in its old home in the pillar behind the altar. On certain days the traveller will still see a little crowd of worshippers kneeling round the pillar, and receiving back from the officiating priest rosaries and medals, which they had given him to press against the bars of the shrine where the Relic rests.* It is a strange devotion, perhaps, but not quite an unreal one, this realistic form of trusting to the Precious Blood of Jesus. * The writer saw such a group of worshippers as he wandered reverently through the grey old abbey of Duke Richard Sans-Peur and his successors in the summer of the year of Grace, 1885. DUKE RICHARD I. SANS-PEUR. 39 Whence came the marvellous legend of the Relic of Fecamp ? That it existed about the middle of the tenth century is certain ; now was it invented to induce Duke Richard to rebuild the old Abbey with greater magnificence ? There is no question but that for a very long period, probably several hundred years before his time, a sanctuary, held in high estimation, had existed on the spot. We can trace its existence far Merovingian not possibly, in times, owe its same strange The roman- Richard Sans- hood are well the King of advantage of which follow of his fath laume L took posses Duke under bringing up prince, whom a ward of the his own eye ment of the back to the times. Did it those far back sanctity to the old legend ? tic incidents of Peur's boy- known. — How France, taking the confusion ed the murder Duke Guil- gue-Epee, sion of the boy pretence of the young he claimed as Crown, under — his ill-treat- boy, the mar- vellous escape from the palace on the Rock of Laon with Osmond de Centvilles, — the return to Normandy and the consequent hatred on the part of the Normans of King Louis and his people, are incidents well known. This episode in the early years of the third Duke of the Normans evidently increased the bitter hate which seems especially to have existed between the Carlovineian House and the Normans. 40 THE NORMAN DUKES. The various principalities, into which that great country, known in modern times under the name of France and the Low Countries, was divided, principalities which were in some way knit together by a slender bond of obedience to the King w'ho lived at Laon, agreed in one point — hate and jealousy of the Norman race. These intruders for a long period had been the restless and relentless plunderers and devastatorsof" France." Then the wandering freebooters had settled in the northern districts of the country, and in an inconceivably short space of time had adapted themselves to the manners and customs of the race among whom they had intruded, and had laid the foundation of a powerful and inde- pendent state. In the arts of peace as well as of war they had shown themselves superior to the race among whom they had settled. The French people revenged themselves by looking upon their formidable neighbours as pirates. Their hatred was shown in the murder of Guillaume Longue- Epee — a deed the guilt of which was probably shared in by not a few of the great French rulers — and the same jealous hatred was manifested subsequently in the captivity and ill- treatment of his son and heir, the boy Duke Richard Sans- Peur (the Fearless). The long reign of this Richard, a period which extended over more than fifty years, was marked by the gradual consolidation of the Norman power over the north and west of France and far into the interior. With the exception of that great House, afterwards known under the famous name of Capet, which ruled over Paris and, roughly speaking, all the central Provinces, the race of Rollo became, under Richard Sans-Peur, far the most powerful of all the princely families who ruled in France and the Low Countries, including the Royal Carlovingian who reigned nominally the king of all in the great rock fortress of Laon. The Norman Court of Rouen or Fdcamp was often the theme of the trouveur's verses. DUKE RICHARD I. SANS-PEUR. 41 In these we catch sight of this early specimen of a busy, many-coloured mediaeval scene — the many clergy, the trains of young knights, the minstrels, the men-at-arms, — all thronging the Court and endeavouring to win the favour of the wealthy and powerful Duke, better able than other princes of his time to reward and encourage all aspirants after any distinction, whether in peace or war. It was amidst these gay and splendid surroundings of the Court of the third Duke that arose those great baronial families of Normandy afterwards so famous in the wars which led to the subjugation of England. In the history of England during the Middle Ages, the names of many of these great Houses occur again and again in the pages of Froissart and Monstre- let. The ancestors of many of the men who were foremost in the Crusades appear first in the long reign of Richard Sans-Peur and his son. The founders of the Houses of Haute- ville, Montfort, Montgommeri, de Bohun, Seymour, Valence, Mowbray, and of many another renowned noble family, were among the courtiers, the sons, the soldiers of Duke Richard and his son. Some think that it was in this gay and brilliant Court that the feudal system, already existing in a rudimentary shape, first took firm root, and was elaborated into something like its mediaeval form. It is quite certain that in Normandy French literature arose. The Norman trouveurs were subsequently famous above their fellows throughout the countries of the Langue d'Oil.* But it is curious that it is in other d.x\^ foreign nationalities that the Normans and their Dukes, great though they were at home in their own land, worked the greatest and most startling results. "It was Richard's plastic talent," quaintly writes Pal- grave, " which raised those Normans whose vigour, infused into the fainting Anglo-Saxon race, has girdled them round the globe." • See note on page 18. G 42 THE NORMAX DUKES. But the Norman conquest of England, fraught with such mighty consequences on the world's story, was in Richard Sans-Peur's days still in a dim and distant future, although the foundations of the mighty power which rendered the conquest of England possible were in those days of the Dukes being swiftly and securely laid. The immediate work of Richard and his people, however, lay with their neighbours in that great land of France which the Normans had chosen for their home. For a long time a deadly struggle had been going on between Celtic and Teutonic elements for supremacy in France. The kingly house of the Carlovingians, heirs of the Emperor Charlemagne, may be said to have represented the Teutonic element in France ; the Dukes of Paris, the Celtic element. During the long life-and-death struggle between these two races for supremacy, the mighty Norman influence steadily supported the Celtic party ; and during his reign of fifty years Richard Sans-Peur played the part of the loyal and generous son, and later, the brother, of the Dukes of Paris. It is difficult to explain the reason of their devoted preference — perhaps jealousy of the .sovereign lord at Laon, who claimed a supremacy over the haughty Norman chieftain ; possibly the immediate neighbourhood of the Paris Dukes, whose court and customs were taken as the model for the splendid courts at Rouen and Fecamp, influenced Norman opinion; not unlikely the treachery of King Louis d'Outre- mer towards the dead Guillaume Longue-Epee and his sub- sequent faithless behaviour to the little orphaned Duke weighed heavily, too, in the scale. The last Carlovingian sovereigns were by no means i\\e faineant, unworthy princes they have often been represented — certainly not forfeiting, as did the Merovingians who preceded them, their supremacy through their own sloth and misdeeds. The kingly heirs of the mighty Emperor Charles seem to have been vigorous, able men, but they were over- matched; DUKE RICHARD I. SANS-PEUR. 43 and the great Revolution which for ever destroyed the Germanic influence, and gave the hereditary supremacy of the Carlovingians in France to another race, was really in great measure owing to the Norman power, which threw in its lot, heart and soul, with the Dukes of Paris. The race of Rolio may fairly be said to have created modern France. In the days of Richard Sans-Peur, the broad kingdom of the Western Franks became in great measure Celtic. The Romance tongue — the Langue d'oil — rapidly supplanted the Teutonic dialects in all the northern and western provinces. Rouen and Paris were the great centres of the new kingdom. The Normans became more and more French, without losing, however, the old northern spirit of adventure and reckless daring. Nor was it until this strange people had exhausted themselves in their appropriation of South Italy and Sicily, and still more in their marvellous conquest of the great Anglo-Saxon empire, that Rouen and the great Duchy lost its independence. For some one hundred and fifty years or more after the coronation of Hugh Capet of Paris, the mighty Dukes of Normandy ruled as equals with the new Kings of France, and exercised over European politics an equal, if not a superior, influence to the Capetian over-lords whom they had assisted to place on the throne of the Carlovingians. Like his father and grandfather, Duke Richard married, with all Christian rites, a princess of the higher lineage, but, as in the case of Rollo and William Longue-Ep6e, she was his wife but in name. Emma, the sister of Hugh Capet, afterwards King of France, the dear brother in arms and life- long friend of Richard, was chosen from childhood for this strange loveless position. It was a sad and, apparently, unmerited fate, for the Duchess Emma appears to have been endowed with all possible virtues and attractions. Her great beauty was sung by the trouveurs. But the princess died as 44 THE NORMAN DUKES. she had lived — childless, neglected, unloved. The old Pagan instincts led Richard Sans-Peur to prefer an unlawful, un- blessed union, after the manner of his Danish forefathers. Guenora, a Danish girl, according to some traditions of great descent, was the mother of his son and successor, Duke Richard II. The Norman historians relate how, after the death of Emma, Richard Sans-Peur married this Guenora with Christian rites and ceremonies. Several of the sons and nephews and kinsmen of Richard and Guenora became the founders of great and historic Norman houses — Lindsay, Gifford, Tankerville, Gournay, Warrene, Mortimer, and others whose names in after days appeared conspicuous on the roll of the Abbey of the Battle — names written large on many a stirring page of English history. There were several daughters by this Pagan marriage, celebrated for their beauty, who filled some of the highest places among the world-rulers of the day. There was Maud, Countess of Blois and Champagne ; Havisa, Duchess of Brittany; and Emma, the Lady of England so well-known in Anglo-Saxon story, twice the regnant Queen, twice the dowager Queen of England, mother of King Hardicnute, and of King Edward the Confessor. Fifty years of restless, brilliant, busy life prematurely aged the third great Duke. When scarcely past middle age his health declined. Worn out, he gradually failed before he had reached his sixtieth year. Weak and ailing, and suffering no little pain, but with all his great mental powers still as fresh and vigorous as ever, he went to his loved palace and abbey of Fecamp and prepared quietly to die. With all care and forethought he arranged the succession of his son Richard, Guenora' s eldest son. He gathered the Norman nobles round him and received their homage for his son. Richly he endowed his other numerous sons, commending them all to the brotherly DUKE RICHARD I. SANS-PEVR. 45 love and care of his eldest born, and very generously did the young Richard carry out his father's plans. This noble group of boys, as we have seen, became the ancestors of some of the proudest and most illustrious houses in Europe. Outside the south transept of the great abbey-church he loved, Duke Richard had placed a huge stone chest. On the eve of every Lord's day this stone chest was filled with the finest wheat corn. The poor of Fecamp were invited to fill from this chest a little measure of grain, and to this was added a small dole of money. When the end came Duke Richard was found to have left careful directions respecting his burial. The well-known stone chest which had held so often the wheat for the poor was to be his coffin. The coffin was not to be interred in the Fecamp abbey — he said he was not worthy to lie there — but outside, near where the great stone chest had stood. He was to be buried just beneath the Abbey wall, where from the roof, probably through an overhanging gargoyle, the rain of heaven might ever and anon drop upon the earth which covered his last resting-place. " Un sarkeu fist appareillier Lez la meissiere del mustier A mettre empres sa mort sun cors Sur la gutiere de defers." — Roman de Ron. CHAPTER IV. Duke Richard II. le Box (" L'Ami des Moines"). — Duke Richard III. His son scrupulously carried out Richard Sans-Peur's dying- wishes, but after a time built a little chapel opening into the Abbey over his father's grave. This second Richard, the fourth of the Norman Dukes, who reigned some thirty years over the now renowned and mighty Duchy, like his three predecessors was a man of conspicuous ability. The old loyal friendship of his father for the new royal house of Trance (the Capetian) was kept up, and for all the thirty years of Richard's reign, Normandy and its dependent provinces were the bulwarks of the Trench kingdom. In return for this steady friendship and assistance the Kings of Trance of the house of Capet treated the Norman Duke and his people as brothers-in-arms, as belonging to the same nationality as Trenchmen, and no longer as Northern pirates. Yet in spite of their recognition by the royal house, a recognition the father and grandfather of Duke Richard II. had wished for in vain — the Norman having ever longed with a passionate longing to be ranked as one of the polished and brilliant peoples among whom he had settled — Duke Richard and his nobles still kept up the closest connection and friendship with the old DUKE RICHARD 11. LE BOX. 47 northern father- land. The fear- less race, dur- ing- the reign of this great Duke, while being Frenchmen in all that was admir- able and desir- able, remained Norsemen in cou- rage and spirit and love for ad- venture. It was this courage and spirit which had enabled them to seat a new dy- nasty on the throne of France, a dynasty which reigned with an unbroken suc- cession for more than eight cen- turies. Itwas the same dauntless spirit which helped them to conquer the fair- est provinces of Italy and Sicily, which left them victors on the stricken field of Hastings and masters of England. 48 THE A'ORMAiX DUKES. The court of Duke Richard le Bon* was modelled upon the court of the Kings of France; probably it went far beyond its model in its rigid etiquette. The great-grandson of the Viking Rollo, the wild freebooter, surrounded himself with all the state and pomp which we are accustomed to associate with the mighty Plantagenet or Valois kings. He would admit none but " gentlemen " (his chroniclers used this familiar term apparently for the first time) about his sacred person. His father, Richard Sans-Peur, was described in a contemporary chronicle as " Dux Piratarum," and yet chivalry and feudality appear in some measure developed in the days of his heir, Duke Richard le Bon. The courts of Rouen and Fecamp in the first years of the eleventh century evidently present the first examples of the splendid pageantry which was one of the great characteristic features of a later age. Indeed, the curious early aristocratic development of the court and government under Duke Richard II. was one of the principal incentives to a formidable revolt of the peasantry which took place in this reign, a revolt which was crushed with extreme sternness and even cruelty. But the most striking incident in the days of the fourth of these great Dukes was the outcome of the restless spirit of adventure. In old days the ancestors of these Normans had found those ice-bound countries which fringed the Baltic and far- stretching North Seas too narrow and too poor for them and their fast-increasing race. They were hemmed in by stormy seas, and often by ice-bound waters. The spirit of adventure, the desire for gold and beautiful things, the longing for a fairer and brighter home, had led them to southern seas year after year. Their black ships became * Besides the epithet of " le Bon," the chroniclers sometimes style Duke Richard II. " I'Ami des Moines." DUKE RICHARD II. IE BOX. 49 the terror of the peoples who lived along the seaboard of Europe, and even far up the great rivers, into the very heart of England, Germany, and France. In the course of the reign of the fourth Duke, Richard le Bon, the spirit of adventure again seems to have seized the Norman-Frenchman. The fair land they had won in France became too narrow for some of these restless sons of the Vikings, and we hear of two bold attempts to make new settlements in the far south. The first of these — we know little or nothing of the details — seems to have failed. The Norman tried to win his way in the great beautiful peninsula of the west, but the Spanish invasion came to nothing. The Norman ships, with the Norman knights, of the hapless expe- dition, never returned. They made no settlement in Spain, and the attempt seems never to have been renewed. Far different was the result of the other wild and daring attempt at southern conquest. Some ten years before the death of Duke Richard II. (le Bon), a company of Normans, returning from the Holy Land, had fought and beaten back a fleet of .Saracens besieg- ing the South Italian city of Salerno. Gaimar, the Prince of Salerno, struck with their splendid daring, asked them to remain with him, and offered them rich gifts if they would enter his service. The Norman knights refused. "We fight for our religion, not for gold," they said. The Italian prince then begged them to send over from Normandy to his Court any of their brothers-in-arms who cared for fighting the Pagans, promising a rich reward. The response to this invitation was the beginning of those famous Italian wander- ings which surrounded the Norman name, during the eleventh and followingcentury, with the most marvelloushaloofromance. Quickly obeying the first invitation to Salerno, little companies of Norman soldiers and perhaps some adventurers wandered southwards. Their splendid bravery, their skill in negotia- H 50 THE NORMAN DUKES. tion, their marvellous aptitude for government, won for themselves countships, dukedoms, principalities, and king- doms. The whole of the beautiful South of Italy and Sicily, with its fair cities, its boundless wealth, its vineyards and oliveyards, gradually became Norman. One noble family from the Cotentin were distinguished beyond all other knightly adventurers. The castle of Hauteville, in the neighbourhood of Coutances, furnished in the persons of the sons of Tancred, the lord of Hauteville, a group of counts, dukes, and kings who, for some two hundred years, power- fully influenced the fortunes of Southern Europe, and all the storied lands which formed the Mediterranean seaboard. In Southern Italy there was but a little stretch of blue sea which separated them from Sicily, the fairest island in the world — Sicily, the garden of the Mediterranean, with its matchless cities of Palermo and Messina. The pennons of the Hautevilles were not long before they crossed the narrow streak of sea. But in Sicily, the Norman Viking — for the Hauteville, whether called Guiscard, Roger, or Bohemond, strangely resembled his wild, freebooting ancestor — found a doughtier foe, a sterner antagonist than the effeminate Lom- bard or degenerate Greek of Central or Southern Italy. Across the narrow strait, the Norman found the Saracen in possession of and determined to do battle for his charmed Sicilian land. Here the fighting was a reality, and lasted many years, but in the end the Norman skill and bravery triumphed completely, and the crown of Sicily was added to the long and many-coloured roll of Norman triumphs. In the hour of their proudest successes, the greatest of the Hautevilles, Guiscard, Roger, and Bohemond, we learn, even dreamed of winning and wearing the diadem of the Eastern empire, and for a time even that superb prize seemed to be within their reach. But it was not to be. After a century and a half of brilliant rule in Italy and Sicil}', the Sicilian DUKE RICHARD 11. LE BON. 51 branch of the house of Hauteville became virtually extinct.* Only a few years after the death of the last Norman King of S V V' ma^h k^Mmy^ • • sic Sicily, Norman- dy itself became a province of the French monarchy.f while in England, at the same period, the Norman name and influence was a thing of the past. The Normans who fought under the Duke William at Hastings had created another and a greater England, and - . insensibly, in less than one hundred and fifty years, the conquerors had been lost in the conquered. Normandy, the The date of the conquest and annexation of Sicily by the Emperor, Henry VI., was A.D. 1 194. t Philip Augustus, King of Krance, formally annexed Normandy to the Crown of France, ad. 1204, during the reign of Juhn Lackland in England. 52 THE NORMAN DUKES. ancient province, was wrested from King John by Philip, and united to the Crown of France in 1204. Richard le Bon died at Fecamp after an eventful reign of thirty years — during which period the name and power of the Normans had enormously increased. He was laid by his father, Richard Sans-Peur, in the chapel built over the grave under the south transept of the great Fecamp Abbey — the grave on which the rain drippings from the gargoyles of the minster roof might fall continually. In the reign of the Angevin King of England, Henry II. (in the year 1162), in the presence of this " tres illustre et glorieux seigneur," as the contemporary record styles him, the bodies of the two Dukes — Richard Sans-Peur and Richard le Bon — were translated from the tomb dug originally under the dripping gargoyles of the transept to the more honourable resting-place close to the high altar of the Abbey — a resting- place which these Dukes refused to reserve for themselves, deeming themselves unworthy. A great company of prelates, mitred abbots, and nobles were present with King Henry II. when the translation of the Dukes' bodies took place. Some three and a half centuries later, the grave, by the high altar was again officially opened (a.d. 1518), and two lead coffins, slightly injured, were found, containing the re- mains of the two Dukes. New coffins were provided, and the bones of the great Norman princes reverently replaced* again by the high altar. ^ * tF t^S tP '5t" t1> Duke Richard le Bon left three sons. The eldest, Richard, had been acknowledged the heir to the broad Duchy before his father had been laid under the shadow of the roof of the The exact position of the grave which now contains these remains is unknown. It is believed the coffins lie in front of the present high altar of the abbey-church, on the north side. DUKE RICHARD II. LE BOX. 53 rife 14 • lijy ■^■1^^2S?-i ^,/'^S Fecamp Abbey. The second, Robert, received as his por- tion the province of Hiesmois, a beautiful district to the south and west of Caen. The third, Mauger, took holy orders, and eventually became Archbishop of Rouen of infamous memory. The brothers Richard and Robert seem to have fallen out 54 THE NORMAN DUKES. directly after their father's death about the possession of the mighty Castle of Falaise — which was in the heart of the younger brother's portion. We hear of a war, a reconciliation, and then of the sudden death of the young Duke Richard — men said by poison administered by his brother Robert's hand, — at a great feasting at Rouen. The true story will never be known, but the dark shadow of an awful crime seemed ever to brood over and cloud the younger brother's life. Without opposition this Robert became Duke of the Normans — in a little more than a year after his father (Richard le Bon) was laid to sleep in the Fecamp Abbey. The dead Richard was married, or more accurately be- trothed, to a child, Adele, the daughter of King Robert of France. In after years the child-widow married Baudouin de Lisle, Count of Flanders. Her daughter was Matilda, queen of William the Conqueror; hence apparently the reason of the Church being so long opposed to the marriage of William, who was nephew of Richard— William and Matilda being thus within the forbidden degrees. CHAPTER V. Duke Robert Le Magnifiquk. <-^s*. ■^^^^^tT:::::— The Centre of interest *^H^;£_~*j_. in the eventful Nor- Ch, man story is now removed from Rouen and Fecamp to that fortress which still stands in its gloomy state- liness one of the mightiest ruins in Europe — Falaise. It was in this palace fortress 56 THE NORMAN DUKES. ^^<:7 ", S**" .*..^ -^-i that Duke Robert loved to dwell dur- ing his short reign of some six years. It was there, at Falaise, during his brother Duke Rich- ard's lifetime, that the romance of Ro- bert's lifewas acted. Robert, so runs the true story, fell passionately in love with Ar- lette, the young daughter of Ful- bert, a tanner of . the town of Fa- laise. He used to watch his love, men say, from a window in the mighty donjon as she washed clothes with her companions in a fountain just beneath the castle walls. The old scenery of Robert's and Arlette's idyl singularly enough is unchanged, though some eight hundred and fifty summers and winters have passed over the little town and the mighty castle. The huge frowning donjon, seemingly growing out of the precipitous rock, still towers above the little clustered houses as in the days when the banner of the great Duke of Normandy DUKE ROBERT LE MAGNIFIQUE. 57 floated over it. It is the same donjon to look at outwardly, though, within, it is little more than four mighty empty walls. The round-headed Norman window, through which, men say, Robert watched for Arlette, is still there, and a bit of Robert's room. In the valley below the castle the little spring, where Arlette and her girl companions washed clothes, still sparkles in the sun rays which fail to brighten the awful gloom of the fortress above. The very tanyard which belongs to the old story is still within a stone's throw of " Arlette's fountain." The story of the loves of Robert and Arlette, and the birth of their child, afterwards the greatest and most renowned prince in Christendom, William the Conqueror, was dwelt upon by the Trou- . ' veurs. It was evi- .•- '^, ' dently a favourite theme for the min- strelsy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The beauty of the girl is dilated on : her feet rivalled in whiteness the lily and the snow : — (onaicfcr I " Que neifs est pale, et flors deliz." Benoit de Saint More. Nothing could be dreamed of more gra- cious than Arlette's beauty : — " E s'avait la color plus fine Qui flors de rose ne d'es- pine, N^s bien scant, boche et monton 58 THE NORMAN DUKES. Riens n'ont plus avenant fa^on, Ne plus bel col, ne plus beaux braz." (31,250) Bt-noit de Saint Hfore. (Trouveur XII. Si^cle.) Her chamber in the mighty Falaise Donjon was vaulted, says the Trouveur, and adorned with gold and colours. Does he mean tapestried, or literally beautified with colouring and gilding? " Deci qu'en la chambre voutice Ou en maint image peintice A or vermeil et h. colors.'' Bcnoit de Sai)it More. There is no authentic tradition which positively connects the dark crime of fratricide with Duke Robert. There was, after the reconciliation of the brothers, a great banquet at Rouen, in the course of which poison was, it is said, mingled with the wine. The Duke and some of the guests died, and Robert reigned in his brother's stead, and the dark story was hushed and only whispered. Duke Robert's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, some six years later, men said was undertaken out of bitter remorse. The ill-fated journey was arranged, notwithstanding the urgent remonstrances of his best friends and most loyal supporters among the Norman Barons, who looked forward to the chances of their sovereign's death during the long and dangerous pilgrimage. There was an heir certainly, the son of Robert and Arlette. But the heir was a child; and the mother, the tanner of Falaise's daughter, was scorned by the haughty kinsmen of the Duke and the proud descendants of RoUo's companions. But Robert's mind was made up. He would go to Jeru- salem. Was it not hopeless remorse for some awful crime which forbade all rest to the unhappy Duke? Before starting he assembled many of the chief nobles of the Norman Duchy round him at Falaise. To these, announcing his settled purpose of praying at the Holy Sepulchre, he gave his little DUKE ROBERT LE iMAGNIFIQUE. 59 son in solemn wardship. They reluctantly swore fealty to the boy William, then seven or eight years old, and Duke Robert started on his fatal journey to Jerusalem, and neither child nor guardians ever looked on his face again. There were many strange stories told of the Duke's wild con- pilgrimage. His often that of a was sadly un- flung away great reckless prodiga- duct on that long demeanour was man whose mind hin ged. He treasures in his lity. He would cause, for instance, his mules to be shod with silver, and the precious shoes to be fastened only slightly to the hoofs, forbidding his attendant to pick up those cast on the road. Before he reached his goal he sickened with a deadly disorder, 6o THE NORMAN DUKES. some said it was poison, but it is not necessary to imagine a crime here. The sad com- pany reached theHolyCity; the dying Duke prayed as he wished at the sacred places, then hasting away, commenced his journey h omeward. The end came at Nic3ea, and Duke Robert the Magnifi- cent, as his contempora- ries term him, sleeps his last sleep in the C a t h edral there. * *♦*♦** The little boy, Arlette's son, is now the Norman Duke; surrounded by jealous kinsmen, by turbulent ambitious Barons, men. who united in despising and hating his mother, the tanner's daughter. With only a {&\^ faithful friends near DUKE ROBERT LE MAGNIFIQUE. 6r him, William, the future conqueror of England, the greatest sovereign of the age, began his strange and lonely career in his dead father's loved Falaise. We have before us still scarcely changed the scenes amidst which he passed many of his child-days, the little town, the green hills, the curious rocks, dating from the dim far back days when Druids worshipped there ; the rocks which possibly gave the name Falaise {fchen) to the town and castle : the two grey old churches in which the boy worshipped— 62 THE NORMAN DUKES. changed, but only slightly ; and over all towers the grim mighty Donjon, where the boy Duke lived — after eight and a half centuries scarcely a ruin in its massive outer walls. But, though Duke Robert was dead and was sleeping far away in Asian Nicsea, the romantic story of the beautiful Arlette's life was far from being closed. Two years after the death of Duke Robert she married a Norman knight of high repute, Herluin De Conteville. She lived many years with De Conteville as his honoured wife, and in the annals of her son's eventful reign occupied a quiet but distinguished place. She and her husband, among other untold works, built and founded the Abbey at Grestain, the fief of De Conteville, and there tradition says .she and her husband were buried. But Arlette, the mother of the Con- queror, has yet another title to fame. After her marriage with De Conteville she had three children, a girl and two boys. Muriel, the girl, became in af- ter years Countess of Albemarle, and then Countess of Troyes. Without her boys the sad and brilliant story of Harold and the Con- quest would have lost the two most striking figures of the splendid group who gathered round King William ; one of these was Robert, DUKE ROBERT LE MAGNIFJQUE. 63 Count of Mortain, afterwards Earl of Cornwall, the other was Odo, the famous Bishop of Bayeux, so well and terribly known in England as Earl of Kent. These two fought on either side of their brother William, during the long and awful day of Hastings, and to these were given the first and chiefest rewards when the Norman Duke and English King parcelled out to his soldiers, hapless conquered England. CHAPTER VI. Duke William (The Conqueror). Each of the six Norman Dukes has a town of the Duchy connected with his special life story. Rollo gave back its beauty and strength to the fair capital on the broad Seine, where he lived during his last twenty marvellous years. The fortunes of Guillaume Longue-Epee, his famous son, too, are closely connected with Rouen and its neighbourhood. The father and the son both sleep in the noble Minster which still throws its mighty shadow over the city they loved. Richard Sans-Peur and his son, Richard II., chose as their favourite home the time-honoured but deserted harbour and shrine of Holy Fecamp. There the third and fourth Dukes still rest. The memories of the two Richards haunt the grey and mighty Minster, which for ever will be inseparably connected with them. The vast Donjon of Falaise and its beautiful surround- ings are still eloquent with the story of the loves of Duke Robert the Magnificent and Arlette, and their boy, afterwards the Conqueror of England.* The sixth, and most famous of them all, the son of Robert and Arlette, seems to belong in a peculiar manner to the city by the quiet waters of the Orne. When we think of the Conqueror we never associate his mighty name with Rouen or London, Winchester or Glou- cester, where so many years of his fateful life were spent, * The fifth Duke Richard III. is left out here, as his Hfe and reign were prema- turely cut short. His reign lasted scarcely more than one year. DUKE WILLIAM (THE CONQUEROR). 65 where deeds were done by him, and words were spoken, which for centuries have influenced the story of the world ; but our thoughts are at once turned to Caen, where the King Duke and his loved Queen built their abbeys of expiation, and where they were left to sleep after their restless, brilliant life-journey. On a rising ground, just on the city confines, stands the abbey where Queen Matilda rests. Time and the destroyer's hand have been strangely kind to the Abbaye aux Dames. Here, after more than eight centuries, but little changed, her loved church is still the house of prayer and praise ; almost perfect within and without, the Trinite Abbaye remains the matchless specimen of that famous ar- chitecture to which the Norman gave his name. Matilda's Abbey on the hill at Caen possesses an advan- tage unshared by so many of the great churches of France. There is scarcely anything disfiguring or mean in the im- mediate surround- ings. The great hospital buildings. 66 THE NORMAN DUKES. which really adjoin the church, are scarcely seen — while the existence of a splendid and stately home for the sick poor,* occupying the place of the old religious house, and thus surrounding the royal abbey and its tomb, would seem in perfect accord with the mind of the noble foundress, who, with all her faults, loved well the poor and suffering. It stands, does her abbey church, on one side of a large open, solitary "place," with a few mean and squalid houses in the distance filling up one side, and a ruined church dating in part from the eleventh and twelt'th centuries, and some stunted trees on another; the hospital walls closing up the third side, and a great empty partly grass-grown This Hospital, with its broad cloisters and ample gardens, is one of the noblest in France. DUKE WILLIAM (THE CONQUEROR). 67 space in the centre. The whole of the surroundings are unlovely and sad-looking, but all far enough removed not to distract the eye from Matilda's abbey. On a summer evening I have watched the varying sky tints from that poor sad "place" on the hill at Caen, with the noble abbey standing out clear cut and sharply against the pale blue sky ; and then turning round have seen the tall spires of St. Stephen across the town, keeping watch and ward over the still grander church, which for centuries held the grave of Matilda's husband, the mighty Conqueror. What memories are called up by the sight of these two silent witnesses — the two royal tombs ! What thoughts of those brilliant stirring lives whose story was fraught with such vast issues to the peoples of modern Europe ! But the boy whom Duke Robert the Magnificent left in the Castle of Falaise when he set out on his ill-fated pilgrim- "■Wfi. -^^^ J!Wi tjff'rrv 1 w V iM. re ' 'i\f'' k • ;i-f ''ttin ^i---. ■•SMI' >■ ^.m.^^r-y J« B»i// by Queen Matilda 68 THE NORMAN DUKES. age to Jerusalem, had a long and weary life-journey to traverse before he reached his last resting-place at Caen. The Conqueror was scarcely sixty years old when he got his death-hurt galloping over the blazing ruins of Mantes ; but he had lived over fifty years as Duke and King — fifty years of splendour and success, such as fall to the lot of very few even of the most successful sons of men ; fifty full years of splendour and success, but attended all along with labour and sorrow — a labour and sorrow which increased with each step upwards on his road to his lonely greatness.* William's child-days were few and evil. He was not nine years old when Duke Robert died. His guardians kept his mother, Arlette, away from him, fearing lest the jealousy • William the Conqueror was born in the Castle of Falaise. Many of his early years of childhood and boyhood were spent here. ^M-^^kti'^-^^'' ■ - . ~ ■- j>'^ DUKE WILLIAM (THE CONQUEROR). 69 with which the tan- ner's daughter was viewed by the proud Norman Ba- rons would injure the little Prince's cause. Fa- therless and motherless, surrounded by stern grave chief- tains, the joy- less child- hood soon came to an end ; and at an age when a boy is still careless and thoughtless, Duke Wil- liam had learned many 70 THE NORMAN DUKES. of the harsher and graver lessons of life. Very early in the midst of those haughty and turbulent Norman Barons, he displayed the powers of a born ruler of men, as well as the talents of a daring and skilful commander. His athletic vigour was remarkable even in that age of deeds of personal strength and bravery ; men said none could bend Duke William's bow. In all warlike exercises he displayed not only remarkable vigour but singular grace. At the battle of Hastings the greatest of those strong and mighty dukes, the successors of Rollo, was in his full vigour and prime. He was just forty years old when he met the last and perhaps the noblest of the Saxon kings on the hill of Senlac, where the Abbey of the Battle now stands, and his splendid and knightly bearing when, all armed before the battle, he sprang on the noble Spanish horse, the gift of King Alfonso of Spain, excited a cry of astonishment and admiration. In the Roman de Rou, Haimer, the Viscount of Thouars, utters the voice of the mighty Norman host, when at that supreme moment he cried out that "never was such a gallant knight seen under heaven, and that the noble Count of the Normans would become a yet nobler King of the English." The life of the Conqueror may be roughly divided into two divisions — some thirty years as Duke of Normandy, and twenty-one as King of England. The first thirty may be regarded as an education for the last famous period, so momentous to all Englishmen. The thirty stirring years of the Norman period were marked by four great landmarks : the three battle-fields of Val-es-Dunes, a.d. 1047, IMortemer, A.D. 1054, Varaville, a.d. 1058, and the final Conquest of Maine, a.d. 1063. The victory of Val-es-Dunes closes the revolt of his cousin and feudatory, Guy of Burgundy, Lord of Brionne, the Castle on the Risle, near to the then unknown Monastery of Bee, which afterwards, in its famous Prior Lanfranc, exercised DVKE WILLIAM (THE CONQUEROR). ~ I SO vast an influence on William's policy and fortunes. With Guy were leagued those mighty Norman Lords who were jealous of the young Duke, and who aimed at a life of robber independence. With the aid of the King of France the young Duke, then scarcely twenty-one, completely crushed these rebels, in whom the wild untamed spirit of the old Norse Vikings still lived. From the day of Val-es-Dunes William was absolutely master in his own broad duchy. Mortemer, seven years later, was a great and crushing slaughter of the army of the King of France, who, becoming envious of the fast-growing power of the Duke of Normandy, had invaded the territories of William. Varaville was another crushing defeat inflicted by the Normans on the French King, who had renewed his invasion some four years after the battle of Mortemer. This victory, won in a.d. 1058, left William per- haps the most powerful and absolute ruler on the Continent of Europe. Five years later, partly by force of arms, partly by intrigue and negotiation, he became sovereign master of the great and rich province of Maine and of its noble chief city, Le Mans. This great and important province had been tradi- tionally granted to the first conquering Viking Rollo, some hundred and forty years before. But the hold of the North- men on Maine had been shifting and precarious, and of late years little more than a shadowy claim. But Duke William made the shadow a reality, and after a.d. 1063, the flourish- ing and wealthy city of Le Mans was as much a Norman city as Rouen or Bayeux. It is a little hard to pierce through the mists of adulation which shroud the figure of the Conqueror: naturally enough, the chronicler and the trouveur of his own and of his children's age love to paint the great and successful hero in the fairest colours. Yet we know enough of the state of Normandy to know that his rule was something more than imperious and absolute— it was strong, just, and wise. His vast dominions 72 THE NORM AX DUKES. in France were famous throughout Europe for their general peace and prosperity. The universal dismay which was felt when, after his long reign, the sceptre passed, for a time, into the hands of the gay and dissolute Robert, is an index to what the people thought of their great just ruler, harsh though he was and even cruel, in those wild stormy times when life and property were both of them held by so slender a thread. But no trouveur, Norman or English, could paint the ho7ne life of William in colours too golden. In a dissolute age — when morality was held by all classes only too cheaply — as the successor of a line of great chieftains who had all been born out of lawful matrimony, and who, with scarcely an exception, had openly bid defiance to all those laws, written and unwritten, with which the Christianity they professed to revere has endeavoured to purify the family life — as the suc- cessor of those six mighty chieftains, Pagan still in their home life, William, with these examples before him, showed himself throughout his reign as the pattern husband and father. No light stories were ever fairly whispered of the Duke and King, ever faithful to Queen Matilda, whom he seems to have loved with a real, deep love. He set the highest example to all the courts and princes of his time ; and when Matilda died, some four years before his death- hurt at Mantes, we know that all sunshine had passed for ever from his weary, brilliant life. His marriage with Matilda, the beautiful daughter of Baudouin de Lisle, the magnificent Count of Flanders, was no doubt a love marriage. It was a fortunate connection for the Duke of Normandy. The alliance with the powerful and wealthy House of Flanders strengthened him in northern Europe, but it was the nwman, rather than the Princess, who helped William so markedly in his strange, work-filled life. The patient student of history detects here and there in the nUKE WIL/.JAM fTHE COXQUERURJ. 73 beautiful story of her life grave faults and errors, such as the one which a reading between the lines of the dry Doomsday Book record seems to reveal: — how after the Conquest of England, Queen Matilda asked for and received, as part of her English appanage, the broad lands of Brihtric, the great Gloucestershire theign * — Brihtric, whom the story tells us she had once deigned to wish for as her husband — but Brihtric loved elsewhere, and Queen Matilda never forgave the slight shown to the Flemish Princess. After Matilda's death. King William — was it through remorse ? — gave back to the ruined Brihtric some of his confiscated lands. But this unwomanly act — it is not certain she ever did it, it is only a shrewd surmise — and the treachery with which she helped her dearly loved eldest son Robert, when he was in rebellion against his father, are only spots on a very noble pure life. Her Court was, with its brilliancy and splendour, a very model of all knightly virtues and noble chivalry. Her patient love to her great husband, her unwearied devotion to the many hard State problems which harassed her life in Wdliam's frequent absence from turbulent Normandy after the Conquest, her constant care and thought for the poor and suffering, make up many a varied title to honour in Matilda's eventful story. There was some strange bar to the m.arriage with Duke William. The Church disliked the union, and there was a long delay before the Church's blessing on the marriage was obtained ; generally a half fanciful barrier of too near kin- dred has been supposed to have existed, owing to the betrothal of Matilda's mother, the baby Princess Adele, daughter of King Robert of France, to William's uncle, Duke Richard III. of Normandy. * Brihtric belonged to the royal West-Saxon house of Cerdic. He was the son of Algar, Lord of Tewkesbury, and many another Gloucestershire honour, and was hneally descended from King Ethelwulf, the father of King Alfred. 74 THE NORMAN DUKES. This was after all but a shadowy connection, for Richard III. died while Adele was still a child. Adele subsequently married Baudouin of Flanders, and Matilda was the child of this marriage. The historian sometimes asks whether this could have been that grave bar to the marriage of William and Matilda which so long deferred the union, and which, for some years after the marriage, prevented it from receiving the Church's complete sanction.* The long and protracted negotiations in the matter of the marriage with Matilda were conducted, and at last brought to a successful issue, by Lanfranc, a scholar eccle- siastic of Pavia, who had chosen Normandy as his home. After William the Duke, this Lanfranc the scholar-monk of Bec-Hellouin played the most important part in the great drama of the Conquest of England. # * * * # ^ « Some thirty miles from Rouen, to the east of the ruins of the old Donjon of Brionne, so rich in memories of the Normandy of the Dukes and their powerful vassals, rises a long wood-covered hill. The traveller who would visit the scene of the most richly storied shrine in France, after a quiet wandering of about an hour through this silent wood comes suddenly upon a little secluded valley in the midst of which runs a clear winding brook. A lofty graceful tower at once catches his eye, then he notices the ruins of a great wall which has evidently once enclosed a vast group of • Later research seems to suggest that at the time of William's courtship Matilda had a husband still living, a person of some importance in Flanders, Gerbod, advocate (possibly judge) of the great monastery of St. Bertin at St. Omer, and the delay and difficulty was occasioned owing to the necessity of obtaining a formal divorce from Rome. — Freeman, "Norman Conquest," vol. iii. Note o in appendix. (Freeman, in a long and exhaustive discussion, accepts the fact of the previous marriage of Matilda, but disbelieves in the divorce, thus assuming the previous death 6f Gerbod. He maintains that the objection to the marriage was purely a canonical objection on the ground of kindred.) DUKE WILLIAM (THE CONQUEROR). 75 ^ i-il V-'^ \W ■ ru 1 n: I, ^ buildings. The remains of these buildings, now sadly dis- figured and curiously adapted into modern covered sheds and stables, to the eye resembling a vast farm, occupy the centre of the little valley. This is Bec-Hellouin— once the home of Lanfranc and Anselm, the home whence Issued in the eleventh century those most learned and holy men of God, who were raised up to do God's truest work in France and England. It is also the remains of the Monastery, which for some seven hundred years took rank as one of the richest and most famous of the religious houses of Europe, It is now a lovely desolate scene, peopled with glorious memories. Herlwin, the founder of this once famous House of God, was a Norman noble, who, world-weary, built in the days of Duke William the first monastery, by the banks of the little 76 THE NURMAX DUKES. Bee. It was in the beginning but a small unknown society, very poor and very austere. Thither — when Bee was still an insignificant community — betook himself Lanfranc the scholar of Pavia. His early career was a curious one. When still comparatively young, he left his native Italy and settled as a teacher in Avranehes-by-the-Sea, probably attracted by the reputation of the Norman Duchy, a reputation which was then spreading far and wide over Europe. Soon the fame of the brilliant Italian grew, and throughout the Duchy the powers of the great scholar were acknowledged. He seems to have been one of the profoundest Greek students north of the Alps, and his Avranches school was quickly crowded with pupils. But the mere fame of a teacher and scholar seems to have rapidly palled upon Lanfranc. He longed after a yet nobler and higher life. So he forsook Avranches and his school, and hid himself in the woods of the Risle Valley, where he joined the austere society of Herlwin at Bee ; here he could be alone to meditate and to pray ; but his fame and reputation followed him in his seclusion. In time the presence of the scholar drew round the hitherto unknown monastery groups of attentive listeners — and Bee became the Norman centre of religious thought and piety. The choice of the monks fell on him as their Prior, the austere and sainted Herlwin still remaining the Abbot. At first we find Lanfranc under the displeasure of the Duke, apparently owing to some bold utterances of the monk- scholar with reference to the doubt of the legality of the Royal marriage with Matilda of Flanders. Then the Prior Lanfranc appears as the trusted adviser of William and Matilda — as the spiritual guide and director of the Court during all the difficult questions which that marriage stirred up. We see him referring the tangled question to the Pope and his Cardinals, and in person conducting the inquiry at Rome, and bringing the momentous affair upon which the DUKE WILLIAM (THE CONQUEROR). 77 whole life of William hinged, to a happy conclusion ; winning for himself at Rome the reputation of the most profound theologian and scholar in Christendom. From this moment to the end of William's eventful life, Lanfranc of Bee stood by the Norman Duke at Rouen, Fecamp, and Caen ; by the Norman king at Winchester, London, and Gloucester, as the adviser and counsellor. The popular conception of the Norman Conquest views the successful invasion of England as the result of the burning ambition of the brilliant Duke, urged on by the selfish greed of his chieftains. The great battle : the death of the King of England, his brothers, and the noble Saxon theigns; the slow but complete subjugation of England which followed : the almost universal confiscation of the English lands ; the substitution of Norman prelates in the English sees and abbeys ; of Norman barons on the broad lands of the English earls and theigns — are popularly re- garded as a gigantic evil deed,* productive of untold misery. That misery undreamed of, for many a long year after Hast- ings resulted, is alas ! too true ; and no one was more awfully convinced of it than the Conqueror himself, and in his long- drawn-out death-scene he acknowledged it with bitter, un- availing sorrow. But the motives which led to the great invasion were not, as is popularly imagined, simple greed and lust of power. Lanfranc was the adviser and counsellor of the greatest of the great successors of Rollo, and Lanfranc taught William that the subjection of England was a duty the Norman owed to that God who had raised up the Norman race to its proud pre-eminence among the nations. He taught him that the supreme mission of the Norman was to * The beautiful romance of " Harold," by Lord Lytton, and the learned and exhaustive history of Professor Fieeman, whose hero is Harold and not William — though the latter scholar tells the eventful story with striking fairness — have largely contributed to this popular view. 78 THE NORMAN DUKES. purify the great Anglo-Saxon Church and to raise the noble Anglo-Saxon race from the low and comparatively degraded level to which, undoubtedly, Church and race had sunk. All things seemed to call the great Duke to undertake the Holy War, for that was the aspect under which the invasion of England presented itself to Lanfranc and his pupil William. The last king of the old royal house of England was passing away childless. William, the kinsman of the Confessor, had apparently a better title * to the English crown than Harold, the son of Godwine. Lanfranc bade his pupil stretch forth his mailed hand to take the vacant crown, and to do without flinching the great work of reformation which lay before him. This nobler aspect of the Norman conquest should never be lost sight of in the thick clouds of misery and woe that presently overshadowed the hapless Anglo-Saxon people ; but only for a time, for this people, after no long interval, emerged a far stronger and nobler nation than they had ever been before ; even their Norman conquerors were after a season absorbed in the Anglo-Saxon race, and the Norman name and story has now been long forgotten. Bat these Nor- mans did their work of purifying and ennobling, the work Lanfranc meant to do ; possibly a far greater work than the monk statesman ever dreamed of, for William and Lanfranc created the England we know, upon whose empire the sun never sets. The Monk of Bee, who counselled and helped to plan the Norman invasion, possesses a history so pure, a record so white, that to impute motives of mere greed or avarice to his policy would be impossible. In his own land he declined the highest position open to an ecclesiastic — the Archbishopric * Edgar Atheling, the foreigner, was never looked on either in England or in Normandy as a serious claimant of the throne of the House of Cerdic. Duke William claimed the Crown of the Confessor through his kinship to the dead Con- fessor, as well as by the bequest of the late king. DUKE WILLIAM (THE CONQUEROR). 79 ^ ^' -^ J - -^ ^^,0^'Mm ''>:■' /Sjjm'J'*!,-^, /If,, f'A «ymr ;it"ii'lf' .er of Rouen — preferring the quieter station of abbot of the new royal foundation of St. Stephen, at Caen ; and when in later years he accepted the see of Canterbury in the conquered land, he contrived — possibly alone among the Normans in the age of the conquest — -to win the love of the Anglo- Saxon people. How thoroughly he performed his great task of reforming the Anglo-Saxon Church is well known. 8o THE XORMAN DUKES. The gigantic abuses were corrected. The sloth and in- activity into which their great Church had sunl: was changed for a real and earnest zeal ; * schools were every- where founded, real learning and scholarship took the place of ignorance and mere superstition ; not only were the old religious foundations revived with a fresh and vigorous life, but countless new homes for prayer and study, homes of help for the poor and sorrowful and sick, were founded in every part of England. The ruins of many a noble church and monastery, built under the influence of Lanfranc of Bee, in their beautiful and touching decay, are scattered over well-nigh every shire in England ; while such lordly minsters as the cathedrals of Gloucester and Peterborough, of Durham and Canterbury — still standing in well-nigh their ancient grandeur — bear a constant and splendid witness to the mighty work of Lanfranc, the saintly scholar monk and the statesman bishop, the friend and counsellor of the Conqueror. But although the stately abbey of Bee, — the home of Lanfranc, the great reformer of ecclesiastical discipline, and right hand of "the Conqueror " ; -f the home for many years of the yet greater successor of Lanfranc, Anselm of Aosta, the saintly scholar, the father of the dogmatic theology of later times, who, for the sake of justice and truth, braved the wrath of the most terrible of Kings, the Norman Rufus ; the most renowned school, too, for many years in Europe, whither flocked pupils from all Christendom ; — but although the vast monastery of Bee, with its glorious thirteenth century abbey, has disappeared, with the exception of one solitary tower with some ruined walls, and a shapeless mass of horse- in my own Gloucester, for instance, when Lanfranc became Archbishop of Canterbury some six or eight monks occupied the old religious house ; under Serlo the friend of Lanfranc, in the new Abbey, that six became a hundred. t Freeman, '' Norman Conquest," I., p. 217. DUKE WILI.TAM (THE CONQUEROR). 8i ^ ^-^ Z ^ ^± % «^ ^ Abbaye de Bec As it appeared at the end of the seventeenth century. The splendid choir was all that remained, and constituted the abbey church. sheds and barracks,* the other splendid church with which The Abbey Church of Bec, one of the noblest specimens of Gothic architec- ture in the thirteenth century, was rebuilt on the old site and partly with the old materials, in a.d. 1213 — 1264, and finally completed, 1325. In spite of the ravages of time — (the greater part of the nave had fallen in 1592) — and the evil usage of the Huguenots, the choir of the great church still remained, at the time of the sup- pression of 1793, and was one of the noblest in France ; but a few years more of ill- usage were sufficient for its destruction. It became, in common with the monastic buildings clustering round it, a depot for cavalry horses, the church being used at first as a granary. The magnificent stained-glass windows, dating from a.d. 1391, — 1398, quickly disappeared. The lead roof was stripped, the statuary, the rich and precious ornaments, reliquaries, &c., the tapestry and splendid tombs were quickly plundered, sold, and defaced. But still the mighty abbey, roofless and exposed, remained until ad. 1816, when by direction of the Government, this noble building, M 82 THE NORMAN DUKES. ^ J T C7Z tX6JVl ■^^%Wf£^ Lan franc was closely con- nected, the abbey church of St. Etienne (St. Stephen), at Caen, over which Lan- franc ruled as abbot during that eventful time when the conquest of England was planned and carried out, still remains, much of it as in the days when Wil- liam and Lanfranc, duke and abbot, and later as king and archbishop, took counsel together in its holy walls and prayed in its sanctuary. (St. Etienne was not finally completed "'■' • and consecrated by its late abbot, Archbishop Lanfranc, in the f- with its undying memories, was publicly sold for building materials for about /i,400. Stones richly carved, portions of the tracery, &.C., are still said to be often found oosely built into walls and other buildings in the neighbourhood. The Chapter House, erected A.D. 1140 — 1146, a singular and richly-sculptured building showing the transition period between Norman and Pointed architecture, was found to be •' in the way " of the arrangement for the State horse establishment, and in 1815, the government of the day ordered its demolition. The materials of this priceless and beautiful relic were sold for about ^70. There were many tombs in the abbey, some of considerable magnificence and importance ; they are destroyed or lost- DUKE WILLIAM (THE CONQUEROR). 83 presence of William the Conqueror, until a.d. 1086.) The noble abbey has a peculiar interest apart from its close con- nection with Lanfranc. Its erection was the Rome-appointed atoning penance for the canonical irregularity in the marriage of William and Matilda. The Duke and Duchess each vowed to erect a monastery with a stately abbey church attached to It, for religious persons of their respective sexes. We have spoken already of Matilda's enduring work: St. Etienne represented William's. The mighty pile has been well described as, perhaps, the noblest and most perfect work of its own date. It was his own St. Stephen's (St. Etienne) at Caen — the abbey of Lanfranc — that the Conqueror chose — as we shall presently see — for his last home, in preference to Royal Westminster, hallowed by the tomb of his saintly predecessor, or storied Winchester ; in preference to the stately minster of Rouen where Rollo and his son were laid, or sacred Fecamp, where Richard Sans-Peur and Richard le Bon were sleeping in the humble tomb of their choice* — the tomb washed by the rain drops from the roof of the mighty abbey. The remains of the Empress Matilda, daughter of Henry I. of England, interred at Bee, 1 1 67, were discovered in 1S47, and were translated to Rouen Cathedral. The remains of Herlwin, the founder, had been removed in 1792 to the parish church of Bee, where they still rest beneath a curious wooden slab, probably a copy of the original stone covering — in the little Parish church (1889). — Fin de Bee Hcllouin Docitmenta inedita, Brionne, 18S5. • The original burial place of Dukes Richard Sans-Peur and Richard le Bon was directly under the walls of the South Transept in the illustration on page 82. CHAPTER VII. William the Conqueror, Seventh Duke of Normandy, King of England. The drama of the life of the Conqueror — as we have seen — consists of two acts : the first is filled by his reign as Duke of Normandy ; the second by his life as King of England. The first, though it was completely successful, though it closed with Duke William reigning as absolute sovereign over a great province, so powerful, so cultured, so filled with great and renowned men — soldiers, scholars, churchmen— as to be the wonder of Europe ; the first act, brilliant and successful though it was, is quite forgotten, so completely was it over- shadowed by the second, filled by the conquest of England and the immediate results of the conquest. It reads — does the story of this conquest, after eight hundred years — like a faery story, like something unreal, it is all so stranofe and marvellous. It seemed indeed a wild scheme that — a province of France like Normandy* — though it did possess so great a duke as William, so wise a minister as Lanfranc, so many bold and chivalrous barons — that a province of France should plan the conquest of a mighty country like England, far richer, far more powerful, apparently united and at peace within ; under a king, too, no less wise than valiant. Yet William planned, and carried out his plan : one great battle, and the king who m.et him lay dead on the * Under the general name of Normandy, are included Brittany and Maine, which at the period of the Conquest formed part of tlic dominions of the Duke of Normandy. WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 85 Stricken field ; by the dead king lay his brothers, slain too ; his trusted chieftains, they likewise fell on that fatal Hill ot Senlac. Even after the great battle it would have seemed a hopeless task to conquer England ; but William had well gauged the weakness and the strength of the great island kingdom he meant to reign over. At the death of Edward the Confessor England was really divided into three great jealously hostile camps. Roughly the South and West (Wessex) were loyal to Harold and the House of Godwine. The North and centre loved the old Mercian rulers, and while following the standard of their Earls Eadwine and Morkere, looked on Wessex and the pretension of its Earl King Harold with an indifference which shaded into a jealous dislike. The East was largely inhabited by Danish settlers, the result of the repeated invasions and lengthened occupations of the Northmen, who cared but little for Harold, and were really hostile to Saxon customs. Harold who, under happier circumstances, would probably have been a great and successful monarch, was a brave and skilful o-eneral, and when William landed at Pevensey had just engaged and routed in the north a powerful invading army, under Harold Hardrada, King of Norway : the last of the Viking raids, led by the last of the Vikings. The English king hurried from the northern field of battle to the south, to meet the new foe. He was poorly and feebly supported by the Mercian division of the kingdom, and when he encoun- tered William and the Norman host, his army was made up almost entirely of the men of Wessex and the south who had survived the bloody victory over Harold Hardrada. It says much for the military skill of Harold, and for his power in the south, that so few days after the terrible conflict at Stam- ford Bridee in the north, where Harold Hardrada and the flower of his army was slain, he was able to present so bold a front to William and the Normans at Hastings. There is, 86 THE NORMAN DUKES. however, little doubt that the Saxon king was completely outnumbered on that fatal day which decided the course of events for ages. Critics have reproached Harold for exposing himself in the battle, and have urged that the fortunes of conquered England would have been different had the Saxon king survived to oppose the subsequent progress of William ; but Harold probably felt that the only chance of victory for his people lay in his personal presence and prowess in the field. Nor was he wrong in his judgment, for in spite of the fearful odds in favour of the Normans, the victory on that awful day for many hours hung in the balance ; nor was it until late in the afternoon, when the Norman arrow pierced the brain of the last Saxon king, that the English cause was lost. The lover of the eventful story of his native land will ever gaze with intense and melancholy interest upon the low range of hills upon which Battle Abbey is built ; there is no spot in England round which such memories cluster. There — on the [4th October, a.d. 1066, St. Calixtus' Day (Saturday) — William of Normandy, the sixth duke in succession from Rollo, staked his life and the fortunes of his mighty people on the issue of deadly battle. Every detail of that eventful day is known. It was full of romantic scenes of dauntless courage, from the moment when, in the early morning, the minstrel Taillefer rode out before the Norman host, tossinor aloft his great sword, challenging the serried ranks of Saxon foemen, and singing the song of Roland, who fell at Ronces- valles — Devant li Dus alout cantant, De Karlemaine e de Rollant, E d'Oliver e des vassals, Ki morurent en Renchevals, Roman de Rou, 13151, — down to the solemn hour in the dim October twilight, when William the Conqueror commanded his tent to be pitched on WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 89 the bloody ground where the standard of the dead Harold had waved, and which was thickly strewn with the corpses of the bravest of the English and Normans who had fought and fallen round the great English king. Never, perhaps, round a general on the morning of battle had a more gallant array of chieftains been gathered, than clustered round William the morning of Hastings — men whose names have been famous not only in their own stirring times, but are known in history as founders of houses the illustrious in our storied English annals. On either side the Duke rode his two half-brothers — Odo, the famed Bishop of Bayeux, and Robert, Count of Mortain, the sons of William's mother, the beautiful Arlette of Falaise, and of Herlwin of Conteville, whom she married after Duke Robert's death in his distant wanderings — Odo and Robert, who afterwards received such vast estates in every corner of conquered England as their reward. Odo during that awful day fought near his royal brother, and many a gallant Saxon theign fell beneath the terrible club which the warrior prelate thought it no sin to wield. Odo, Bishop of Bayeux, carried no sword or battle-axe ; to shed blood he deemed a sin against the Church canons ; but, with a strange casuistry, he allowed himself to crush head-piece and head with his terrible weapon. With William, too, rode Geoffrey Mowbray,* the architect Bishop of Coutances, and * This prelate performed mass in the Norman camp before the great battle, and subsequently preached at William's Coronation. Ordericus Vitalis relates he received as repayment of his great services at the Conquest no fewer than 280 manors in England. But his life's work is especially interesting from another circumstance. He w-as a great builder, and the noble Cathedral of Coutances is his master-work The first stone of this magnificent minster was laid in A.D. 1030. The dedication took place in A.D. 1056, and was performed in the presence of Duke William, the archbishop, his suffragans, and many of the Norman nobles. Coutances is in the neighbourhood of the Castle of Hauteville. His friendship with that renowned house led him to visit Robert Guiscard (de Hauteville) in South Italy, to beg for help in his great building work. He not only obtained money, but it was in South Italy, and no doubt in Sicily, that he (and his architect) drew inspiration for his marvellous Cathedral. It is in the Pointed style of architecture, and appears closely to appro.\imate to Early English (Pointed). Mr. Dawson Turner, F.R.S, N go THE NORMAN DUKES. Remigius, the almoner of the well-known Fecamp Abbey — the ducal palace and tomb. Remigius —afterwards Bishop of Dorchester, then of Lincoln, who, after years of patient labour died, just when his proud cathedral of Lincoln, on the hill overlooking the old Danish city, was finished ; only three days before the stately consecration ceremony arranged with so much care his death took place, one year before Bishop Mowbray, architect of the Minster of Coutances, died. In that great Norman host which fought the long day through, under the influence of a strange spiritual excitement, beneath the consecrated banner, the gift of Rome and her mighty bishop the world-famous Hildebrand, were men too like in the letterpress of Mr. Cotman's exquisite work, "Antiquities of Normandy," writes — " Of the identity of the Church built by Bishop Geoffery with that now standing, it is impossible to entertain a reasonable doubt." If Mr. Dawson Turner's conclusions respecting the date of the building of the present Cathedral of Coutances are fairly accurate, some considerable modifications will have to be made respecting the dates usually given for the introduction of early Pointed architecture into Northern Europe. For if Mr. Turner and Mr. Cotman's date for the present Cathedral of Coutances be accepted, then it would appear that early Pointed was used as the school of architecture in a great Norman Cathedral before a.d. 1056, and by an able and enterprising prelate who had personally visited and seen the gorgeous Arabian or Saracenic work in South Italy, and most likely too in Sicily, who too had drawn his resources with which to build his Cathedral largely from his country- men who had established themselves and were reigning as Sovereign Princes in those South Italian lands. The same prelate was closely connected with England. He was the intimate friend and one of the advisers of the Conqueror, was by his side at Hastings, and received as his guerdon vast estates in the conquered land. He lived until a.d. 1093 (reign of Rufus). Messrs. Dawson Turner and Cotman, writing in the same great work on Normandy, maintain that the Church of St. Peter, Lisieux, formerly the cathedral, was designed and commenced a.d. 1049 and virtually finished and consecrated before A.D. 1077. This important church too is mainly built in the same Early Pointed style, of which it is a noble specimen ; the style closely resembles what is known among us as Early English. The conclusion drawn by the famous artist and writer above referred to is that the date of the building of the Lisieux and Coutances Churches establishes the fact of the Pointed arch being in use not as an occasional variation, but in the entire construction of churches upon a grand scale, as early as the eleventh century. VioUet le Due and others, however, prefer to date the present great churches of Coutances and Lisieux later. But the historical and other arguments of Messrs. Cotman and Dawson Turner for the earlier date are weighty, and deserve grave consideration. WILLIAM THE COXQUEROR. 91 IMongomerie and Beaumont and Bigod, Bohun, Ferrers, Courtenaye, Percy, Richmonde, Vere, and many others, whose names and houses have been ever since diis fatal field, part of the history of England. There is no doubt but that the Normans vastly exceeded the numbers of Harold's army, sorely weakened as the latter was by the fierce battle of Stamford Bridge. The number of nobles and gentlemen of mark who landed at Pevensey with William are variously stated, in the copies we possess of the Battle Abbey roll, as between 600 and 700. The number of fighting men under William are traditionally placed at 60,000 ; the vessels which brousfht over the Norman host numbered, accordinsf to one account, 696, while another mentions over 3,000 ! The battle seems to have been in a great measure a hand-to hand encounter ; and as all accounts speak of the conspicuous bravery and prowess of Harold and his men, and seeing that only few of these survived the fight, the victory was evidently largely owing to the great preponderance of numbers in William's army (14,000 of whom are said to have fallen). " As a rule, no man of Harold's following who marched to Senlac found his way back from that fatal hill, the nobility, the flower of southern England, was utterly cut off."* ******* The Conqueror's royal tent was pitched that night on the ridge of the hill where Harold's golden banner, blazoned with "the Fighting Man," had fallen at lastf as the shades of the autumn night stole over the scene of carnage ; there too fell Harold the King, Earl Gurth and Leofwine his brothers, and Hacon, his nephew, and with them the bravest of the * Freeman, vol. iii., 501. + L'estendart unt ^ terre mis, Et li Reis Heraut unt occis, E li meillor de ses amis, Li gonfanon ^ or unt pris. Roman de Ron, 13956. 92 THE NORMAN DUKES. Saxon theigns. There, after the battle, with Odo the Bishop and a few of his Norman chiefs, Wihiam enjoyed a grim banquet —and there with the noble dead lying thickly piled up round his tent, the conqueror slept* on the first night of the Conquest. It seems a strange thing to say, but that evening, when William slept amidst the dead on the spot where Harold fell, tliat Evening of splendid Norman victory and saddest English defeat was really the beginning of the noblest portion of the English story — perhaps the greatest story in the world's annals, for from that eveninof the Duke of the Normans became the King of the English, and the chiefs of the Norman Barons became English Lords, and Normandy henceforward was an English province till, a century-and-a-half later, Normandy, the old Home of the seven Dukes, passed with scarcely a struggle into a dependency of the Crown of France. It, as it were, spent itself in its last and crowning achievement. The remaining events so well known in the story of England followed ; step by step the complete subjection of England was proceeded with ; five to six years were, however, needed before rich and powerful England lay at the Con- queror's feet, but no conquest of a great and populous country was perhaps ever so complete. William claimed as his own every acre in the kingdom which once was Edward the Confessor's. After Hastings and the slaughter there of King * On this site where King Harold fell beneath his golden standard of the '' Fighting Man," Duke William pitched his tent on the night of the battle. On the ridge, where the centre of the Saxon army were entrenched, the Conqueror afterwards erected and richly endowed the great Abbey of St. Martin, generally known as the Abbey of the Place of Battle (Battle Abbey). On the spot where Harold lay dead at the foot of his standard the high altar of the Abbey was erected. The Abbey church is gone ; for a long period— as Bulwer Lytton in his beautiful Story wrote— "amidst stagnant water all forlorn, and shattered stood the altar stone." The sacred stone is still there, marking the site of the Conqueror's greatest triumph, but its surroundings are no longer forlorn and desolate. Every- thing there now bears witness to the watchful and reverential care of a devoted and earnest student of the past. )vn.L/AM THE CONQUEROR. 93 and TheiL^iis, there was much stubborn but no serious iinilcd opposition ; step by step the great Norman general and states- man took possession of city and county. First with little difficulty he occupied the southern and central district of the Island. In the West the defence was stubborn and pro- tracted, but the event never for an instant doubtful. Two graver campaigns placed the northern counties completely at his mercy. There again the defence was prolonged and obstinate, but it was the opposition of a partly undisciplined people, without a leader, and the foe they had to meet was the best trained army in Europe, led by a consummate and veteran o-eneral. Once more in the Fen lands where the Danes dwelt thickest, the old Saxon remnant of heroes again gathered together and bade defiance to the Norman invader ; when these, after a hopeless contest, were finally crushed, the Duke of the Normans reigned as absolute King of the Eng- lish. But the work had really been done on the October day when William fought and defeated Harold at Hastings. For nearly twenty-one years after Hastings, the Conqueror ruled over England. He was no mere tyrant, but in the carrying out of his designs his strong will imposed upon the English a new language, a new school of thought, a new mode of warfare, a new social and political system, a new and far more earnest ecclesiastical government; and the stubborn and not-unnatural resistance of the Anglo-Saxon race to all these changes necessitated the sternest, often the harshest government ; the lieutenants of William — men like Odo of Bayeux— carried out too the will of their master with a severity and a cruelty often far in excess of anything he would have sanctioned, had he been cognisant of their acts. The stubborn resistance of the first six years compelled him to act as Conqueror rather than lawful King, and vast con- fiscations marked his slow but irresistible progress from Hastino-s to Exeter, from Exeter to York, from York to 94 THE NORMAN DUKES. Durham. As time passed, partly through the invariable tyrant-sickness which ever affects the absolute sovereign, William grew harsher, more careless of the sufferings of others, perhaps, too, more selfish. The enormous confisca- tions without doubt inflicted untold sufferings, were produc- tive of unspeakable misery to thousands. No political exigency can ever excuse the harrying of the country north of York. No excuse can ever palliate the awful crime which desolated the great district afterwards known as the New Forest, a crime which was committed apparently to enable the King to enjoy to the full his love of hunting. But on the whole the suffering and misery very largely — though of course, not by any means entirely — fell on the higher classes in the conquered race ; as a rule, no peasant was expelled from his cottao-e, no churl from the field he inherited from his father ; there was Vio permanent evil wrought by the Normans on the great masses of Anglo-Saxon society.* There was much bitter oppression, much cruel wrong inflicted by William and especially by his lieutenants, but in proportion as the grade of society descended, so did the hardships diminish. On the other hand, the sword of the Norman — as in the case of all the great Dukes his ancestors — was the sword of justice. No private slaughter, no violence, no robbery was tolerated, even in those stormy times when the Norman ruled " the rich man might travel in England from end to end unhurt with his bosom full of gold, matron and maiden went forth blithely without dread of harm." The decaying Saxon church was really purified and immeasurably invigorated ; earning again flourished and a higher and nobler standard was the rule. The ecclesiastical administration of William and Lanfranc was unquestionably a splendid advance upon that of Edward and Stigand. In time the consummate wisdom with which William and Lanfranc wrought these great * Palgrave, vol. iv., 5-6-7. WILL/AM THE CONQUEROR. 95 changes bore glorious fruit ; and though years of sorrow and suffering had to be liiii «. ft-,, ».^n: Hv} ^ endured, still with strange quickness conqueror and conquered were completely blended together, and the re- sult was the mighty, undivided, unconquerable ..=:^-->.=-^ ^ -- Endand of History, the ^"^■iJ^V:::::^ enduring Empire with all its undreamed- of glories, the Empire upon which the sun Entrance to La Vielle Tour. Sit( of the Old Palace of the Dukes of Normandy. never sets. * * When England was completely conquered, when a perfect 96 THE NORMAN DUKES. network of Norman fortresses, held by Norman knights and barons, covered the country and held it incomplete subjection, when the whole of the fair kingdom of Edward the Confessor lay before the Norman Duke and King as one vast spoil* — this was the state of things after a.d. 107 i — William the Conqueror was the greatest, the richest, and most powerful prince in Christendom. His wealth, largely derived from England, was simply boundless. One who was privileged to look on the great King at the time of his highest pros- perity and grandeur, as he kept three royal feasts, and held his solemn Council at Winchester, Westminster, or Gloucester, when he wore his kingly crown as he presided in regal splendour over his great and powerful court and council, dwells upon his majestic and kingly presence. At this time of his reign, about a.d. 1072 — 1076, King William had reached his highest point in worldly success. He was king of wealthy and populous England in a way no king before him had ever been. The whole land literal I v belonged to him and was held solely by his grant. He was the abso- lute master of the fairest and most powerful province of France. But in the hour of his success, men in whom he had the deepest confidence began to see the awful wrong of the great Conquest. t The Norman Prelates seem to have been spe- cially struck with the terribleness of the Conqueror's work. Some few among his chosen followers refused to share at * "According to common report, 60,000 knights received their fees, or rather their hvings, from the Conqueror. The report is exaggerated as to numbers, but the race of the Anglo-Danish and EngHsh nobility and gentr)', the Earls and the greater Theigns disappeared." — Palgrave, vol. iii., p. 479. t " When William made his first compact at Lillebonne (before the invasion of England), it is possible that he concealed from himself the injustice that he must commit, that he did not contemplate the full extent of slaughter and extermination and robbery, the robbery of a whole nation, which would be needful for the purpose of carrying it through. The wrong was now consummated, the hideous aspect of the Conquest was now ■\my€\W.A.." — Palgrai'e iii., 485. WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 97 all in the spoil, and probably the enormous number of religious foundations in England during the years immediately follow- ing the Conquest point to the same conviction on the part of many of his Anglo-Norman nobles, that a great and fearful sin had been committed, and that some atonement must be made. William, himself in the full tide of his fortunes, with his busy anxious life, probably was little touched by remorse, but in the gloom of later days when his loved Matilda was taken from him, and grave domestic trouble and ill-health darkened his fortunes, all those sad and sorrowful memories came on him with unutterable bitterness. After he lost Matilda (a.d. 1083) men say he never had another hour of brightness. Was it some vaofue foreboding that to him the end of life and work was at hand, which induced the conqueror at the great Christmas Court at Gloucester, a.d. 1085 — 6, to hold that "deep speech" with his Witan, in that ancient chapter- room of the cathedral— little changed save at the eastern end, from those far back days — the " deep speech " which resulted in the vast Record of Domesday, the oldest survey of a king- dom now existing in the world ? The great work was fully carried out and transcribed in the great volumes of Domesday, and deposited in the Royal Treasury at Winchester. It still exists fresh and perfect as when the scribe wrote it. The caligraphy betrays an Italian hand and leads us to conclude that the most was done under the inspection and direction of Archbishop Lanfranc It was used first for the general taxation levied the last year of the eventful reign. Not a hyde, not even a yard of land, not an ox, a cow, or a swine, but was set down in this wonderful record. In the August of a.d. 1086, the Witan of England, and all the landowners who were worth summoning, were gathered together in a great assembly at Salisbury. Here William imposed the oath of fealty upon every landholder without o 98 THE NORMAN DUKES. distinction of tenure — whoever else miglit be their lord, here they all became the king's men — 60,000 were said to have met the king in this famous gathering. This oath of fealty direct to the king was one of the most memorable pieces of legislation in the history of England. It made England for ages an undivided kingdom. This year too was sadly memorable for other reasons. It was a year of blighted crops, of grievous murrain among the cattle, and of sore sickness among the people. Shortly after the great assembly at Salisbury the news of troubles and revolts in Brit- tany, of continued disloyalty on the part of Robert the eldest son of William, determined the Conqueror to proceed at once to his continental dominions. He never returned to England. Months of unsatisfactory petty frontier wars consumed the ne.xt few months. William's indignation was especially excited by the assistance which the King of France gave to the disaffected. Some insulting words he was reported to have spoken reflecting on King William's ever increasing corpulency, determined William to execute a cruel vengeance on the little frontier city of Mantes. The trouveur and chronicler dwell naturally on the circumstances of this brief foray, so memorable in its consequences ; they relate how the corn and the fast ripening vintage were destroyed by the Norman soldiers ; how King William burned Mantes, and how in his wrath, galloping through the burning ruins of the hapless city, he received the fatal internal bruise from the tall iron pommel of his saddle upon which he was jerked as his horse stumbled. Fainting and sick the warrior king was borne from the ruins of Mantes to his Palace of Rouen. Then came on a lingering inflammation, and in spite of all skill and care the Conqueror grew worse. The end was not far off. The palace of the Dukes of Normandy, where the sick man lay, was in the heart of his great ancestral city, close to the river. It is still there, but strangely disfigured. Compara- WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 99 tively few travellers penetrate within the vast half-ruined building of the old ducal palace, now used as a customs ware- house for stores of wine and oil. But the long rows of massive Norman columns supporting the rough stonework of the vast halls are still eloquent with memories of the great duchy. The noise * of the busy city, the heated atmosphere of Rouen— it was summer time — were intolerable to the fevered, dying sufferer. He was removed to the Priory of .St. Part of the Old Palace of the Dukes of Normandy Gervais, on a hill just outside the city, and in that religious House, in sore pain and bitter anguish of mind, he waited for • " Strepitus Rothomagi quae populosa civitas est intolerabilis erat aegrotanti, extra urbem ipse rex praecepit se efferri ad ecclesiam S. Gervasii in colle sitam occidentali." (Ordericus Vitalis) S. Gervais was a Priory of the great Fecamp Abbey. lOO THE NORMAN DUKES. the end. There William lay * for several weary weeks of fever and pain. The priory has disappeared, and the church has been recently rebuilt over a crypt f that is of hoar anti- quity. During that long-drawn-out death-scene, the Conqueror must have often gazed with varied feelings over the glorious picture which lay before him of the city and river of his six great ancestors — none though so great as himself. One thinks of the dying Conqueror never during those sad weeks losing consciousness, J but going over the events of that splendid and successful career of his, and remembering much with bitter sorrow ; and ever and anon from the litde window of his chamber of St. Gervais on the hill mazing at the fair scene bathed in the golden summer sunshine : we can look at it still, little changed since those sad dying eyes gazed at it. The broad winding Seine, in parts like a silver lake set with green woody islets; far away to the south and west the great forests of Rouvray and La Londe dying away into grey misty shadows ; more to the west a still darker wall of forest, still known as in the days of Rollo, Guillaume Longue-Epee, and Richard Sans-Peur as the Rou-mare, where he had so often hunted in the days of his strength ; far to the east the white cliffs of Blosseville, bathed by the river, close in the striking landscape ; all the near foreground filled in now as then by the dark mass of the busy city — the city the Norman Dukes loved so well. The great pile of the cathedral then as now towering over the crowded Rouen houses ; the mighty pile, though changed and built and rebuilt, was there, covering the tombs of Rollo and his son — then as now. Round the bed of the dying King were gathered bishops and abbots, mighty barons, with Rufus and Henry, his sons, watching and waiting for * Ordericus speaks of as much as six wetks. t The crypt which formed part of the St. Gervais' Priory can still be seen. It is probably but little changed since the fourth century. I " In aegritudine sua usque ad horam mortis integrum sensum, et vivacem loquelam habuit." — Ordcriciis Vitalis. WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. lOI -:-. h .i,^'^ A ^ 4 ('i^tr..;.,!?; ; %,^ The Scene of the ^ ■ ^ Conqueror's Death. every word and gesture of the monarch ; the chroniclers and trouveurs — who on the whole were warm friends and admirers of the Conqueror— unite in depicting the awful agony of mind of William during the last days at St. Gervais. There were I02 THE NORMAN DUKES. with him many renowned bisliops and abbots, but he longed for one who was absent — Anselm of Bee. The dying King felt he could have helped him where no other earthly friend could, but Anselm was sick and they never met again. The great state question which agitated him was, the succession to the crown of England. Robert the eldest was in open rebel- lion : who was to be the king of England ? For a long time he shrank from formally bequeathing the splendid inheritance which he had won — he felt now — at the cost of so much unspeakable sorrow to others. He remembered the awful slaughter of Hastings — the terrible harrying of the northern counties ; the thousands of that noble nation he had conquered who had perished by sword and famine or in bitter exile, alas ! at his bidding.* Robert, the eldest son, who would be Duke of Normandy, had forfeited all right to that splendid blood- stained inheritance. At last he was persuaded to write to Lanfranc at Canterbury a letter commending his second son Rufus — ^Rufus, with all his faults, had ever been a faithful son — Lanfranc the archbishop, whom conquerors and conquered alike loved and trusted — Lanfranc might crown Rufus if he pleased : so Wace the trouveur. Rufus hurried from that memorable death-bed with the letter, and in due course Lanfranc crowned him with the blood- stained diadem of England. Then followed a few more restless days and nights, and at the last many noble prisoners t and hostages were freed from their captivity. On the 9th of * " Sic miilta millia pulcerrimae gentis senum juvenumque proh dolor, funestus trucidavi." — Orderic. Vit. See Palgrave iii., 584, Frecma>i iv.,chap. xxi., for other references to the death-scene of William the Conqueror. t It is said that the last prisoner freed by the dying Conqueror was his famous half-brother— Odo, still Bishop of Bayeux, and once Earl of Kent — who had been imprisoned by King William after the discovery of the Earl-Bishop's many intrigues. Odo was believed to be ambitious of the Pope's chair at Rome. He was released, and again became in his nephew Rufus's reign a powerful prelate, but he never regained his old position. This restless, self-seeking man joined Duke Robert of Normandy and the Crusaders, but died, before the Holy Land was reached, at Palermo. WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 103 September, after a restless night, the \\.'nv^ was awakened from a fitful slumber by the sound of the great Cathedral bell. The dying Conqueror asked why it rang. The watchers by the bed-side replied, " It is the hour of prime, and it is ringing to invite the citizens to prayer." The King said he too would pray, and stretching out his hands was heard to say, '■ To my Lady Alary, the Holy Mother of God, I commend myself, that by her prayers she may reconcile me to her dear Son our Lord Jesus Christ ; " and as he prayed, with the Name of Names on his lips, the spirit of William passed away. A strange sad scene followed the death of the great King. The statesmen and powerful ecclesiastics who had been with William in his last days at once hurried to their homes— a general fear lest a period of misrule and lawlessness might be the immediate outcome of the removal of the strong hand which for so many years had ruled the great dominions of Normandy and England. The servants and men-at-arms, taking advan- tage of the general confusion, plundered the royal apartments, stripping even the ro)al corpse and the bed on which it was resting. After a brief delay, the Archbishop of Rouen gave order that the body of the King should be taken to Caen, to be buried in his own minster of St. Stephen (St. Etiennei. But knights and nobles all had hurried from Rouen. There was apparently no one to carry out the last solemn duties to the dead. The Christian charity of an unknown Norman gentle- man, by name Herluin, did what was necessary, and quietly without pomp, partly by river, partly by land, the dead King was borne to his loved city of Caen. There Prince Henry, the Conqueror's third son, and a goodly company of nobles and ecclesiastics, finding their first panic fears unreasonable, met the bier and its few attendants. The sad march through Caen was interrupted by the outbreak of a desolating fire. Many of those following the royal cofiin were obliged to assist the I04 THE NORMAN DUKES. 9- % tT^~",'^'"j fei-T^fc^. f''~*"'^^^lit . (/« //(/i ai^i^y A'/«?- William was buried^ sufferers in the burning city. In all this confusion the stately abbey was reached. Over the coffin of William, the Bishop of Evreux pronounced a fervent discourse on the splendid quali- ties of the dead. But before the " Office " was ended a Norman named Asselin boldly stepped forward and charged WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 105 the dead King with having wrongfully taken from him in past days the site of the great abbey. It was not the time for an unseemly wrangle. Asselin was quickly appeased by the offer of a considerable sum of money. There was yet another fearful incident in the story. Owing to the clumsiness of the workmen, as the body was being lowered into the grave, the coffin broke, and the unwieldy body of the King burst,* thus " tilling the sacred edifice with corruption. The obsequies were hurried through, and thus was William the Conqueror gathered to his fathers with loathing disgust and horror." f But there is a pleasanter memory of the dead Conqueror yet to record, for the brothers, King William Rufus and Prince Henry Beauclerc — afterwards our King Henry I. — were not unmindful of their mighty father, who had been laid to sleep under such gruesome circumstances in the Caen Abbey he loved so well in the heart of his own Norman land. Prince Henry, remembering one special charge of his dying father, spent some of the rich bequests which came to him at once, in founding the stately Abbey of Reading, where masses were continually to be said for the repose of his father's soul; the same Abbey of Reading where, in later years. Prince Henry was laid to sleep himself, after a glorious reign as King of England. King William Rufus took charge of his father's tomb at Caen ; out of the rich treasure + amassed by the Conqueror * " Dum corpus in sarcofagum mitteretur, et violenter, quia vas per impru- dentiam coementariorum breve structum erat, complicaretur, pinquissimus venter crepuit, et intolerabilis foetor circumadstantes personas et reliquum vulgus implevit. fumus turis aliorumque aromatum de turibulis copiose ascendebat, sed teterrimum putorem excludere non praevalebat". — Ordericus Vitalis, 662, C. t Palgrave iii., 590. X The vast wealth of the Conqueror was well known. He was probably the richest prince of his age. In addition to his Norman treasures, the accumula- tions of the Confessor and of Harold became his. The riches of England were notorious. At the first Paschal feast after " Hastings," which King William kept at Fecamp in great state, we read how the wealth of England dazzled all eyes. The robes of state of the King and his chief nobles, rich with gold em- broidery, the cups of gold and silver, and other treasures out of the spoils of Eng- P lo6 THE NORMAN DUKES. the new king took ingots of gold and many precious gems, and gave them to Otto the Goldsmith (Aurifaber), far-re- nowned for his skill in designing and graving. Otto had already been enriched by William the Norman, and appears in the Domesday Record as Otto " Aurifaber or Aurifex," the holder under the king of broad lands in Berkshire. The broken coffin above alluded to, appears to have been carefully enshrined in one of stone, hewn out of a solid mass of rock, and this '-Loculus" was raised on three small columns of white marble. Above this sarcophagus, under the shadow of the High Altar, where reposed the ashes of the mighty Conqueror, rose the splendid golden shrine carved by Otto, the gold-work encrusted with many precious coloured gems. Graven in letters of gold was the following stately epitaph, composed in the Conqueror's honour by Archbishop Thomas of York:— Qui rexit rigidos Norniannos, atque Biitannos Audacter vicit, fortiter obtinuit, Et Cenomannenses virtute coercuit enses Imperiique sui lei;ibi.is applicuit, Ki.x magnus parva jacet hie Gulielmus in iirna Sufticit et magno parva domus domino, 'I'cr septcm gradibus se volverat atque duobus Virginis in gremio Phoebus, et hie obiit. land, made all that France and Normandy had seen, mean by comparison (see Freeman, vol. iv., 92). Not a little of this wealth went to endow Norman religious houses especially favoured by William and Matilda. The treasury of the Con- fessor inherited by Harold had been further enriched by the spoils of King Harold Hardrada, who fell at the battle of Stamford Bridge. Amongst other treasures, this King Harold Hardrada is said to have brought with him, when he invaded England, a vast mass of solid gold brought back after his campaigns in the service of the Emperor of the Hast. One great golden ingot, which could hardly be borne by twelve strong men, is especially mentioned. This ingot, with many another splendid trophy, passed from one conqueror to another, till it formed part of the boundless wealth cf King William the Conqueror. (See Freeman, vol. iii., 342). Palgrave (vol. iv., 18) strikingly pictures the sight which met King William Rulus' eyes, when William Ponte Arche opened the great treasury doors at Winchester to the Red king. •' We can fancy the riches which the depths displayed by the light of the toiches: black silver in money, white silver in bars, gold in ingots, gold in ancient coin ; bezants bearing the impress of the Eastern Emperors, niassive dcenars lie. led with the Cutic characters, vessels rich with enamel and ancient gems, piles WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR. 107 Strange how little part the splendid Island conquest seems to have in this little sonorous and lofty sounding- " Memoir of the Tomb." The Bri/aniios of the first line probably referred only to the inhabitants of " French " Brittany. For many long years the great memory of the dead seems to have preserved the tomb from ill-usage. Though it is hard to believe that some needy man-at-arms, English or French, did not appropriate the gold and gems which blazed in strange magnificence over the ashes of the first Norman king of England ; still, up to the Huguenot wars of the sixteenth century, the hallowed tomb seems to have been preserved on the whole intact ; we read how, in this stormy period, the abbey of St. Stephen was sacked and partly destroyed. In the ruthless havoc the shrine ot the founder was not spared. The stone coffin, or sarcophagus, was broken open, and the bones of the Conqueror were scattered to the winds. The bones, wrote one who had no doubt looked on the scene of sacrilege, seemed to belong to a man of great stature.* One fragment of the thigh-bone f of the great king was saved by the pious care of one of the abbey monks, and sub- sequently this poor solitary fragment of one who in life had wielded, for good and evil, such vast power, was replaced with solemn rites in a new and less gorgeous tomb than the one originally graven and designed by Otto Auritaber. This second interment took place in 1642. The tomb was again disturbed and removed to another part of the church about a hundred years later. In 1793, '" the confusion of the of silken vestments, caftans, robes, and palls stiff with embroidery." Out of this marvellous Winchester treasure-house, WiUiam Rufus gave the gold and gems to Otto Aurifaber (the goldsmith) to fashion the superb canopy for his father's tomb. * " Estoient encore inherentes h. la teste machoires et plusieurs dents, les autres ossements, tant des jambes, cuisses que des bras, fort longs."— M. DE Bras. Quoted by Freeman, iv. 719. t ''Plus long de la largcur de quatre doigts ou environ que ceux d'un bicn grand homme." — M. de Bras. Quoted by AI. Trebutioi (Caen, cap. iii.). Io8 THE NORMAN DUKES. "Terror/' the third tomb of William was again broken into, and the one poor fragment lost for ever. Some years after the Prefet of " Calvados," * placed on the spot in the abbey where the desecrated tomb had been, the large slab of black marble which still marks the resting- place of William the Conqueror— now alas empty — with this inscription — 3Hic scpnltus tst Enbictissimns GULIELMUS (Conqncstor ^ornuiniiiac Pux i\ 3^ngli;u JU.v Jiujnscc Joiiiua CONDITOR OJui rbiit anno ml.v.wbit. * One of the divisions of the great Duchy of the seven Dukes was thus named by the strange " taste " of the French people. CHAPTER VIII. The Vanishing Away of the Normans. There is a well-known story in Bede* told of Edwin, King of Northumbria, circa a.d. 620-630. "Often," said a Saxon Theign to the King, "in the depth of winter whilst feasting with your Theigns, and the fire is blazing on the hearth in the midst of the hall, have you seen a bird, storm-driven, enter at one door and escape at the other; during its passage it was visible, but whence it came or whither it went, you knew not." The Theign applied his simile to the life of man, "who walks the earth for a few years, but what preceded his birth, and what follows after his death is unknown." The simile curiously fits in with the story of the Normans who followed the House of Rollo. They appeared in the first years of the tenth century, and disappeared early in the thirteenth. During those three hundred years their marvellous story fills a very considerable space in the annals of Europe. F.or much of this period they were the most prominent figures in France, England, and Italy. They passed out of sight from all these countries almost at the same time. The Norman name and nationality died out well nigh simultaneously in London, Rouen, and Palermo — the capital cities where they had been paramount — ^just at the beginning of the thirteenth century. 'Bt'de, Hist., lib. 2. c. 13. I lO THE NORMAN DUKES. Who were this marvellous race who played so mighty a part in the world's eventful story ? Other barbaric nations have filled many pages of the history of that dim period which succeeded the fall of the Roman Empire. The Visigoth has written his name large in Spanish story. The Ostrogoth and Lombard figure in the chronicle of changes which befel Italy. The Magyar, from the east and south, has largely influenced Southern Germany and Hun- gary. But the Norman has left a deeper mark on the nations with whom he came in immediate contact than any of these. These too — Visigoth and Ostrogoth, Lombard and Magyar — are names which represent mighty peoples, but the Norman of Normandy and England, South Italy, and Sicily, repre- sents,' as far as we know, no mighty people, only a chieftain of pirates and a handful of followers — ^just a few ships of Vikings. Who were they ? What was the secret of their mighty power ? The early story of the founder and creator of all this Nor- man dominion and power which has come down to us, is com- monplace and utterly unsatisfying. A very few unsympathetic contemporary notices written by men who abhorred the very name of Normans ; * some pages of a dry and rather un- interesting chronicle,! written some eighty or hundred years after the first settlement at Rouen ; and the more brilliant and far more picturesque poems of the Norman Trouveurs,J composed in the reign of the great Anjevin King Henry II., some two-and-a-half centuries after the Viking's death, is all the literature we possess on the subject of the life and history of the famous Rollo ; the founder of the mighty line of Dukes and Kings. • Flodoard, Canon of Rheims, AD. 916-966 ; Richer, a monk of Rheims, down to A.D. 998. t Dudo, Dean of S. Quentin, a.d. 900-996. X Wace, The Roman de Rou ; Benoit dc Saint More, the Trouveur (dit le Tourangeaii). THE VANISHING AWAY OF THE NORMANS. Ill All we learn from these scanty notices is, that Rollo, the son of a Norwegian chieftain, was driven by some bloody family feud to seek his fortune abroad, that he for some forty years roamed the Northern seas, and with varying success, helped by a band of freebooters sometimes large, sometimes few in number, harried many a fair province, now in England, now in France (Gallia) after the fashion of other piratical Vikings like Guthrun and Hasting. In comparatively late life this sea-robber settled in the plundered and devastated north of France, subsequently known as Normandy, and there reigned for some twenty years, dying in extreme old age, having laid the foundation* of a powerful and admir- ably ordered principality of great extent. His mighty work was carried on and splendidly developed by his lineal descendants. The notices of his early career touch upon his savage exploits, how renowned cities like Bayeux and Beauvais were burned, Rollo helping to kindle the flames; how he besieged and took and burned Meaux and Evreux, and harassed Paris. How the beautiful country watered by the Loire and Seine was* ruthlessly harried, Rollo being especially distinguished among the pillagers. Such, the chroniclers seem to say, was the strange preparation of forty 3'ears, for the twenty years' work of the lawgiver, the church builder, the restorer of desolate cities, the founder of a mighty dynasty. We shall probably never know the real story of this man, so great among earth's great ones, who laid the foundation of one of the grandest and most far-reaching powers the world has ever known. His true history will probably never be told ; who he really was, and what were the sources of that mighty dominion and far-reaching influence, which * The date of . the permanent settlement of Rol.'o and his Normans is usually given as a.d. 912. 112 THE NORMAN DUKES. created the England we know, shaped the career of France, and gave to worn-out Italy a new life.* Nor is it in the language of exaggeration that we have painted in such glowing terms the career of the descendants of Rollo and his handful of Vikings, They became, as their great historian loves to paint them, in an incredibly short space of time, " the foremost apostles alike of French Chivalry and of Latin Christianity among the nations of Europe. In the tenth and two following centuries the Normans of France, England, and Italy were the foremost among peoples ; in devotion the most ardent religious reformers, the most fervent worshippers, the most lavish givers to churches and monasteries — in ivar, they were in the front rank, as crusaders and conquerors — in the arts of peace, the children of Rollo learned, improved, adapted everything." At Rouen, at Palermo, in London, they welcomed merit of every race and every language. Art under their auspices produced alike the stern grandeur of Caen and Gloucester, and the brilliant gorgeousness of Palermo and Monreale. In these centuries they were the conquering and ruling race of Europe."!" My simile, from the old Saxon story, of the Bird flying out of the blackness of Night into the brilliant fire-lit hall of the Saxon Theign, when for a brief season it is seen, and then, flying out again, is lost in the dark mystery of night — still holds good. A strange mystery — as we have seen — hangs over the origin of Rollo and his companions — ivho they were, and wJience they came, from ivhoin they derived that master spirit of adventure, conquest, and government — no man knoweth. Then followed the period of their being * The history of the Normans in Italy has yet to be written, and we are hoping for this romantic and little-known story from the pen of that great historian, Freeman, who has already devoted so many well-spent years to investigating the story of other divisions of the Norman family. t See Freeman, vol. i., chap. iv. I have taken the liberty here and there of altering some words, but the thought is all his. THE VANISHING AWAY OF THE NORMANS. I 13 known and seen, wondered at and admired by all the nations of the West. Then the vanishing again from the world of which they had for three centuries been the bravest, the most distinguished, the foremost in war and peace, in letters and in art — for it is no straining after word-painting to affirm that almost simultaneously the Norman disappeared* from London, Rouen, and Palermo^the world-famed scenes of his most splendid and brilliant triumphs. Roughly the dates of this vanishing aivay are as follows : — It has been truly said that the Norman conquest of England introduced new kings and a new nobility into the great sea-girt island. This happened we know in a.d. 1066. In less than 100 years, in a.d. 1154, the date of the accession of Henry II. and the Anjevin dynasty, the purely Norvian period came to an end. In A.D. I 2 15, the reign of John Lackland, England may be said to have won over to herself and her especial interests the N'orman nobles, and in the person of the greatest of the Plantagenets, Edward I., may be said to have won over to her side, her king, a.d. 1272.! But the work had virtually been accomplished years before the last date. Henceforth the real life of England and her peoples was drawn from the truest English sources. The Norman vanished out of sight nearly at the same time from the other two great centres of Norman life and influence. In A.D. 1 194 {Palermo) Sicily was finally conquered by the Emperor Henry VI. In A.D. 1204 (Rouen) N^orniandy was definitely annexed * " The adventurous Normans, who had raised so many trophies in France, England, and Ireland, in Apulia, Sicily, and the East, were lost either in victory or in servitude among the vanquished natives." — (Gibbon, Decline and Fall, chapter Ivi.). t In England itself the Norman has vanished from sight no less than from Apulia and Sicily. — Freeman, chapter iv., which see; compare Gibbon, /)£'t//«t' «w/ Fall, chapter Ivi. Q 114 THE NORMAN DUKES. to the French crown by King Philip Augustus, John Lack- land being king of England. We dwell for a moment on the last thought. After a career lasting three centuries, a career of unsurpassed splen- dour and success, the Nonnans have vanished oui of sight. At first this seems a startling assertion. It is of course indis- putable that this occurred in Palermo, that the Sicilian and Italian Noi'inaiis disappeared as a dominant power after the conquest of the Emperor Henry VI., ad. i 194. It is equally clear that the Frcinli A'ornians became absorbed among the French peoples after the formal annexa- tion of Normandy and the adjacent provinces to the Crown of France by King Philip Augustus, a.d. 1204 ; the old name of the famous ancestral home, Normandy, alone remaining, and in course of time even the name was swept away. But in England, their proudest conquest, has the Norman, too, vanished here ? Yes, vanished as in Sicily, Italy, and France, but in a different way, — not by conquest or by annexation. In England the conquerors and the conquered became blended together in an extraordinarily short space of time; in a few generations the captives may be said to have led captive their conquerors. The change began in Henry I.'s reign, when the purely Norman period of our history was finished, and rapidly proceeded in the days of the great Anjevin Henry II. Very soon Norman England was England once again, while the descendants of the proudest of the Norman invaders were found among the truest and sturdiest of Englishmen. The great historian of the Conquest, in his exhaustive work, well traces this gradual but rapid process of absorption of the Norman element, and in one striking- passage thus sums up the question: " Our task" (viz. that of writing the history of the memorable period of Conquest) "will be done when the foreign (Norman) nobles and the foreign (Norman) king have in truth become our countrymen; THE V.WISHIXr, A WAV OF THE XORMAXS. I 15 when the wergeld of the heroes of Senlac has been paid in full on the battle-field of Lewes, and when the great assembly which welcomed the return of Godwine rises again to life in the Parliaments of Earl Simon (de Montford) and King Edward I."* But although this mighty people, which for three centuries so powerfully influenced the western world, so strangely and completely vanished out of sight, leaving behind them neither race or language, only a great memory enshrined in some rare contemporary chronicles in prose and verse, and in a few scant volumes of modern research, leaving behind only a great memory scarcely known save to a few earnest scholars, yet we have among us, still, some vast monuments of them in stone dating back to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in the form of noble minster churches and abbeys — many, alas, ruins — and a few cathedrals. These sacred buildings, with here and there a ruined castle, are the only visible remains which the brilliant and successful Norman has left behind him. They are with us still — these minster churches, abbeys, and cathedrals — matchless in their scarred beauty, some coloured with pale grey tints, some red with the v/arm red sandstone glow, but all clothed now alike with the soft and tender hue which comes alone from being exposed to the winter storms of many hundred years, and to the ripening power of the sun of well-nigh a thousand summers. There is a strange fitne,ss in these great churches being the memorials of the Norman race, for they were their own peculiar work. They were the first builders of these vast Christian temples in the countries north of the Alps. Before the middle of the eleventh century scarcely a really gixat church existed in these lands. It was one of the Norman achievements, if not to invent, at least to bring to perfection, a noble style of architecture, subsequently known by their * Freeman, vol. iv., page 721. 1 1 "6 THE NORM AX DUKES. name, and then to erect, after their own fashion, in the countries influenced by their race, especially in England, an infinite number of splendid Homes of prayer, many of them of a size hitherto undreamed of in northern Europe. In those days there were no sumptuous and costly civic buildings to design and build. The castle and the church alone required the ingenuity of the architect, " and the castle was built more for strength than for splendour, thus archi- tecture had the church alone, and her adjacent buildings, on which to lavish her skill." * Into their church building work, the Normans threw their whole strength and power. It seems to have gone on side by side with the vigorous determination of some of their noblest spirits to restore life and vigour of action and thought to the decaying and seemingly worn out church of the time. But it was especially in wealthy England, directly after the conquest, that the most notable of these great minsters arose, it was here too that they were built — in many cases with a religious house under the great church's shadow — in the greatest profusion. It is no baseless thought which looks for the motive for much of this lavish expenditure of skill and treasure through- out England and Normandy, in a deep feeling of remorse on the part of many a noble Norman for all the untold sorrow and hopeless misery brought on uncounted families of the Anglo- Saxons; for while it is indisputably true that the lower ranks and orders of the English dwellers in the land suffered, com- paratively speaking, little from the Norman conquest, and in not a few respects were even gainers by the change of over- lords, yet the sufferings and misery of the English theigns and their families were simply unutterable.f * Dean Milman, Latin Cliristiam'ty, book xiv., chap. viii. t " The hideous aspect of the conquest was now unveiled, and all saw it, even they who had profited most by the iniquity in which they and their sovereign were involved." — Palgrave, N^ormandy ajid Engln)id, vol. iii., chap. -x. t'i'' -iTTii .. I I^, i i V-- '-■ V ^jU'^sf^^- H7/// irntaiiis of the old Monastic Buildings under its shadoiv. UIK VAXISHIXG A WAV OF THE XORMANS. I 19 The Conqueror during his loni^-drawn-out death-agony in the priory of St. Gervais on the hill overlooking Rouen, gave sad utterance to what was no doubt a widespread feeling of bitter remorse — when with almost his last breath, he mourned over the many thousands of that most noble English nation he had brought to misery, exile, and death.* That this feeling of remorse was by no means confined to the great King, but was felt at a very early date by others, appears from the example of Wimund — a very famous learned monk of St. Leutfred (Diocese of Evreux), who when pressed by the king to accept a rich English benefice, absolutelv refused to receive any share of the spoils of a nation which had suf- fered such sad wrongs as, alas, he felt England had endured. That this Wimund was a reprcsciitat he Qcc\t.'^\dJ?,i\c of his time, is shown by his subsequent career. Gregory VII. raised him to the Cardinalate, and subsequently bestowed on him the Archbishopric of Aversa. Among laymen who like Wimund openly showed their remorse, may be instanced Gilbert de Hugleville, a kinsman of William, who fought by his sove- reign's side at Hastings, and took part in those campaigns in virhich the hapless Anglo-Saxons vainly attempted after the great battle to stay the invader's progress. This renowned warrior refused to receive lands or lordship in England. He felt that much bitter wrong had been worked, and vast misery occasioned by the successful Norman invasion. f There are, no doubt, examples of other refusals on the part of the Norman conquerors to share in the spoils of conquered England. Ikit the vast majority of the Norman chiefs too willingly consented * Engleterre cunquis a tort, a tort i ont maint hoem mort. — Wace, 14,267. " Sic multa millia pulcerrimae gentis senum juvenumque, proh dolor funestus trucidavi." — Orderic. Vit. 659, c. t Postquam regnum pacatum est, et Giilielmus regnavit, Giilbertiis, Rcije multas in Anglia possessioiies offercnte, Neustriam repetiit, legitimaque simplici- tate pollens, de rapina quidquam possidcre noliiit. Suis contentiis aliena respuit. Orderic. \'it., 6o5 D. (quoted by Freeman. \'ol. iv., chap. .\i.\.) I20 THE NORMAN DUKES. to be enriched at the expense of the vanquished. Many of these, or their immediate descendants in after years, ivcre visited by the spectre of remorse for the cruel wrong done. Hence the vast donations made in the days of the Conqueror and of his immediate successors, b)' the suddenly enriched Nor- mans for pious purposes. For the building of new abbeys and monasteries, for the enlargement or rebuilding on a vaster and a grander scale of stately cathedrals, churches, and minsters, incalculable sums* were entrusted to the new school of vigorous churchmen introduced by Lanfranc and his friends into the fading Anglo-Saxon Church. The vast Norman cathedrals and abbeys were planned and many of them completed in the last quarter of the eleventh and first half of the twelfth centuries, that is to say in the lifetime of the Conqueror's friends and their immediate heirs. For instance, the superb cathedral of St. Cuthbert, at Durham, was largely the work of St. Carileph, who was nominated Bishop of Durham in the great Gloucester Council held by King William, a.d. 1080. Herbert de Losinga, the Bishop of Norwich, counsellor and favourite of Rufus, designed and built much of that glorious cathedral of Norwich. Gloucester, with its grave and massive Norman architecture, was built by Serlo, the friend of Lanfranc. The stately pile of Canterbury was largely the loved work of Lanfranc himself The smaller but beautiful church at Rochester was erected by Gundulph, the Conqueror's friend and architect, the well-known builder of the White Tower of London. The abbey of Tewkesbury, the silver-grey minster set in its green river meadows, retain- ino- still well-nigh its ancient beauty and splendour, was founded only some ten years later than Gloucester, its grander sister on the Severn. * See below, '' Story of a Norman Abbey," chapter iv., where attention is called to the fact that more religious foundations were established under the kings of the Norman dynasty than during the xholc preceding or siibscqueni period pf Engl ish history. THE VANISHING AWAY OF THE NORMANS. 12 1 Winchester, Exeter, Hereford, St. Albans, and many- other mighty sacred piles, of which some are still with us in well-nigh their old fair loveliness ; some with much of the Norman character veiled and hidden by the richer and more elaborate work of another and later age ; some alas in pictur- esque ruin, bear a similar witness to the skill and devotion — a devotion spurred on often by a deep spirit of remorse — of what may be termed the age of the Norman Conquest, It was living under the shadow of one of these stately reliques of a vanished people ; it was daily meditating, teaching, praying among its tall white columns — the same on which the Red King, Lanfranc the minister archbishop, and saintly Anselm must have oftentime gazed ; it was the silent companionship of the mighty building, with its soaring roof gleaming with dusky gold, with its matchless jewelled window, half veiling, half revealing with its sweet pale silver light the white veil of lace-work, carved in stone, tossed by master hands over the stern grave Norman work in choir and transept; it was the silent companionshipof the Glorious House of God in Gloucester, that made me ask myself. Who built these wondrous Homes of Prayer? What inspiration taught these builders to build as men had never built before ? Then, in reply to my silent questioning I wrote my little Norman story of the great Dukes, and how the last Duke became a far greater king. Then I thought out how the Norman people had disappeared, how the very name had vanished, leaving behind only a mighty memory, and a few noble Houses of Prayer — inimitable in their solemn beauty — in one of which my lot was cast. Then I went on to tell part of its eventful story as follows : — R CHAPTER I. Dreamland. — The Dead King and the new work in THE Norman Abbey of Gloucester. { ^ ) What a changed life is mine, from one of the busiest quar- ters of the greatest city in the world to an old Cathedral city — from London to Gloucester ; for ten work- filled years vicar of a great metropoli- tan parish, and now chief custodian of one of those great religious houses, grey with years, perfect in beauty, which form one of the glories of ong 126 A NORMAN ABBEY. our storied England ! But for a vicar of St. Pancras to sit in the seat of the old abbots of Glou- cester involves a changed ' life, not mere- ' ly new sur- <- roundings. It was not an luihappy life by any means, that old restless St. Pancras time. It is all over now, successes and fail- ures, sadnesses and joys, those bright Sundays, those long walks through the Sunday schools, literally miles of scholars. Ah me ! how I have loved them — those schools- — but they belong now to a past storied with happy memories. Then those evenings at the grand church, quaint and charming in its ugliness, but beautiful in its rows and rows of worshippers ; Sunday after Sunday to meet nigh two thousand men and women gathered tOQ^ether in the Even- In the North Cloisters. DREAMLAND. 127 tide to serve God : those bright, sunny, tiring days are over and gone, and St. Pancras, its vast schools, its bright church, its many devoted friends, is now only a memory, but a very happy one. How can the new strange future be made beautiful before God ? useful to the «ieighbours ? That's the problem now before me. ******* I was in the cloisters alone one orolden summer eveningr — the cloister walk of Gloucester, reckoned among cloisters the most lovely in England, scarcely altered, save being more beautiful in its grey decay, from the days when the third Edward reigned in England. I was walking in this still and quiet cloister-walk and I looked up at the cathedral tower, rising over the battle- ments of the Norman nave, and the soaring roof of the Tran- sept, crowning all the lesser pinnacles clustering round in strange beautiful confusion ; the whole massive pile glowing with a pale red in the sunset, and then gradually fading into a silvery bluish-grey. As I looked on the fair sight, I remem- bered a question which a child once put to me, " How long has it taken to build it all ? " We talk of five or ten years as a long time, but men, now long forgotten, were building, planning, altering, adding to, beautifying this minster of ours for five hundred long eventful years. Some of it was designed and finished when Edward the Confessor was king. Earl Harold, son of Godwin, had no doubt walked and prayed in that quiet under church beneath the choir, before the luckless day when he coveted and took a crown instead of his mighty earl's coronet. Norman William, whom we call the Conqueror, lived here much, and doubtless helped to build it. His famous Doomsday Book was planned in the chapter room leading out of this old cloister walk. William Rufus lay sick in the great Benedictine House of Gloucester, when he forced the pastoral staff of Canterbury into the unwilling hand of the holy scholar Anselm 128 A NORMAN ABBEY. .Ai '^^^;i!'^:^^f^;'.r^ s?»r^i' Ap'Ct '^■'- ^.-^'^''t *. ~^ v-*- — Anselin whom he came to hate so bitterly, but who, had the Red King chosen, would have been his friend and counsellor, who would have saved him from that awful death and the unblessed grave which was the Red King's fate. It was in the Benedictine House of Gloucester that the DREAMLAXD— WILLIAM A'C/-TS. I 29 Strange scene round what seemed to be King William Rufus's dying bed took place, that first Sunday in Lent, 1093, when bishops, nobles, and monks stood in the sick man's chamber, and besought him, amongst other deeds of reparation, to nomi- nate an occupant to the arch-see of Canterbury, which had been long vacant, and its great revenues and powers had been seized on by the King. Among the crowd which stood by the King was a Norman monk nam^ed Anselm of Aosta, of the monastery of Bee, of great reputation for piety and learning, for whom the King had frequently expressed great dislike. To the surprise of all pre- sent, King William, raising himself slightly on his bed, told the courtiers that he had chosen Anselm for archbishop. The scene that followed the unexpected announcement was a strange one. The monk Anselm earnestly and pertinaciously refiised the proffered honour. He asserted he was unfit, ineligible; nothing would move him to accept the dignity. The curious scene by the King's bedside lasted a long while; at last a pastoral staff was brought to Rufus. The unwilling monk was hurried to the bed where the King was lying. Anselm clenched his fist, and would not open it to recdve the staff. The bishops who stood by forced the reluctant fingers open, and placing the pastoral staff within them, held the monk's hand firm, and then hurrying him into the adjoining minster, chanted over the new arch- bishop the "Te Deum," and thus Anselm strangely and sorrowfully commenced his great and stormy reign over the Church in England. It was in the same holy House of Gloucester that the wicked William Rufus kept in solemn state his last Christmas festival, A.D. 1099, wearing his crown and kingly robes. Only some six months later the solemn crypt of the cathe- dral, but little changed to-day from what it was in those far- back times, probably furnished to the monk of Gloucester the s I30 A NORMAN ABBEY. 1 < if >T'i IhJ /I "^ m w /^ >1, 1 n 1' ^ v'