X.

THE CONQUEROR AND HIS POLICY.-Green.

[Although the great victory at Senlac did not put William in possession of the whole country, it, nevertheless, decided the fate of England. He advanced upon the capital and, two months after the battle, was elected and crowned as king. Even then he was in real possession of only a third of the kingdom. But he met, henceforth, with no general, organized resistance. Revolts here and there were easily crushed, and gradually his authority was extended over the whole land. In three years the Conquest was complete. It was not a conquest in the ordinary sense. It was not the complete subjugation of one people by another people. The Norman duke had taken the place of the English king, and he had taken it by force; but he presented himself to the conquered nation as its legitimate ruler. The ultimate results of the change were almost incalculable, but the immediate results were few. The old laws and customs were preserved, and the continuity of English history remained unbroken.]

Ir is to the stern discipline of our foreign kings that we owe not merely English wealth and English freedom, but England herself. And of these foreign masters the greatest was William of Normandy. In William the wild impulses of the Northman's blood mingled strangely with the cool temper of the modern statesman. As he was the last, so he was the most terrible outcome of the northern race. The very spirit of the sea-robbers, from whom he sprang, seemed embodied in his gigantic form, his enormous strength, his savage countenance, his desperate bravery, the fury of his wrath, the ruthlessness of his revenge. "No knight under heaven," his enemies owned, "was William's peer." Boy as he was at Val-ès-dunes, horse and man went down before his lance. All the fierce gayety of his nature broke out in the warfare of his youth. No man could bend William's bow. His mace crashed its way through a ring of English warriors to the foot of the standard. He rose to his greatest height at moments when other men despaired. His voice rang out as a trumpet when his soldiers fled before the English charge

at Senlac, and his rally turned the flight into a means of victóry. In his winter march on Chester he strode at the head of his fainting troops, and helped with his own hand to clear a road through the snow-drifts. And with the Northman's daring broke out the Northman's pitilessness. When the townsmen of Alençon hung raw hides along their walls, in scorn of the "tanner's" grandson, William tore out his prisoners' eyes, hewed off their hands and feet, and flung them into the town. Hundreds of Hampshire men were driven from their homes to make him a hunting-ground, and his harrying of Northumbria left Northern England a desolate waste. Of men's love or hate he recked little. His grim look, his pride, his silence, his wild outbursts of passion, left William lonely even in his court. His subjects trembled as he passed. "Stark man he was," writes the English chronicler," and great awe men had of him." His very wrath was solitary. "To no man spake he, and no man dared speak to him," when the news reached him of Harold's seizure of the throne. It was only when he passed from his palace to the loneliness of the woods that the king's temper unbent. “He loved the wild deer as though he had been their father."

It was the genius of William which lifted him out of this mere Northman into a great general and a great statesman. The wary strategy of his French campaigns, the organization of his attack upon England, the victory of Senlac, the quick resource, the steady perseverance which achieved the Conquest, showed the wide range of his generalship. His political ability had shown itself from the first moment of his accession to the ducal throne. William had the instinct of government. He had hardly reached manhood when Normandy lay peaceful at his feet. Revolt was crushed; discord was trampled under foot. The Duke "could never love a robber," be he baron or knave. The sternness of his temper stamped itself throughout upon his rule. "Stark he was to men that withstood him," says the chronicler of his English system

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of government; so harsh and cruel was he that none dared withstand his will. Earls that did aught against his bidding he cast into bondage. If a man would live and hold his lands, need it were he followed the king's will." Stern as such a rule was, it gave rest to the land. Even amid the sufferings which necessarily sprang from the circumstances of the Conquest itself, from the erection of castles or the inclosure of forests or the exactions which built up William's hoard at Winchester, Englishmen were unable to forget "the good peace he made in the land, so that a man might fare over his realm with a bosom full of gold." Strange touches, too, of a humanity far in advance of his age contrasted with this general temper of the Conqueror's government. One of the strongest traits in his character was an aversion to shed blood by process of law; he formally abolished the punishment of death, and only a single execution stains the annals of his reign. An edict yet more honorable to his humanity put an end to the slave-trade which had, till then, been carried on at the port of Bristol. The contrast between the ruthlessness and pitifulness of his public acts sprang, indeed, from a contrast within his temper itself. The pitiless warrior, the stern and awful king, was a tender and faithful husband, an affectionate father. The lonely silence of his bearing broke into gracious converse with pure and sacred souls like Anselm. If William was "stark" to rebel and baron, men noted that he was "mild to those that loved God."

But the greatness of the Conqueror was seen in more than the order and peace which he imposed upon the land. Fortune had given him one of the greatest opportunities ever offered to a king of stamping his own genius on the destinies of a people; and it is the way in which he seized on this opportunity which has set William among the foremost statesmen of the world. The struggle which ended in the fens of Ely had wholly changed his position. He no longer held the land merely as its national and elected king. To his elective

right he added the right of conquest. It is the way in which William grasped and employed this double power that marks the originality of his political genius, for the system of government which he devised was, in fact, the result of this double origin of his rule. It represented neither the purely feudal system of the Continent nor the system of the older English royalty; more truly, perhaps, it may be said to have represented both. As the conqueror of England, William developed the military organization of feudalism so far as was necessary for the secure possession of his conquests. The ground was already prepared for such an organization. We have watched the beginnings of English feudalism in the warriors, the "companions" or "thegns" who were personally attached to the king's war-band and received estates from the folkland in reward for their personal services. In later times this feudal distribution of estates had greatly increased, as the bulk of the nobles followed the king's example, and bound their tenants to themselves by a similar process of subinfeudation. The pure freeholders, on the other hand, the class which formed the basis of the original English society, had been gradually reduced in number, partly through imitation of the class above them, but more through the pressure of the Danish wars and the social disturbances consequent upon them which forced these freemen to seek protection among the thegns at the cost of their independence. Even before the reign of William, therefore, feudalism was superseding the older freedom in England as it had already superseded it in Germany and France. But the tendency was quickened and intensified by the Conquest. The desperate and universal resistance of the country forced William to hold by the sword what the sword had won; and an army strong enough to crush at any moment a national revolt, was needful for the preservation of his throne. Such an army could only be maintained by a vast confiscation of the soil, and the failure of the English risings cleared the ground for

its establishment. The greater part of the higher nobility fell in battle or fled into exile, while the lower thegnhood either forfeited the whole of their lands or redeemed a portion by the surrender of the rest. We see the completeness of the confiscation in the vast estates which William was enabled to grant to his more powerful followers. Two hundred manors in Kent, with more than an equal number elsewhere, rewarded the services of his brother Odo, and grants almost as large fell to William's counselors, Fitz-Osborn and Montgomery, or to barons like the Mowbrays and the Clares. But the poorest soldier of fortune found his part in the spoil. The meanest Norman rose to wealth and power in this new dominion of his lord. Great or small, each manor thus granted was granted on condition of its holder's service at the king's call; a whole army was by this means encamped upon the soil, and William's summons could at any hour gather an overwhelming force around his standard.

Such a force, however, effective as it was against the conquered English, was hardly less formidable to the crown itself. When once it was established, William found himself fronted in his new realm by a feudal baronage, by the men he had so hardly bent to his will in Normandy, and who were as impatient of law, as jealous of the royal power, as eager for an unbridled military and judicial independence within their own manors here as there. The political genius of the Conqueror was shown in his appreciation of this danger and in the skill with which he met it. Large as the estates

he granted were, they were scattered over the country in such a way as to render union between the great landholders, or the hereditary attachment of great areas of population to any one separate lord, equally impossible. A yet wiser measure struck at the very root of feudalism. When the larger holdings were divided by their owners into smaller sub-tenancies, the under-tenants were bound by the same conditions of service to their lord as he to the Crown. "Hear,