History of the World/History of the World (Bureau Development, Inc.)(1992).BIN/dp/0050/00502.txt

Text File | 1992-10-11 | 17KB | 275 lines

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$Title{A Child's History Of England
Chapter VIII.  England Under William The First, The Norman Conqueror.}
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$Author{Dickens, Charles}
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$Log{See William the Conqueror*0050201.scf
}
Title:       A Child's History Of England
Author:      Dickens, Charles

Chapter VIII.  England Under William The First, The Norman Conqueror.

     Upon the ground where the brave Harold fell, William the Norman
afterwards founded an abbey, which, under the name of Battle Abbey, was a rich
and splendid place through many a troubled year, though now it is a gray ruin
overgrown with ivy.  But the first work he had to do was to conquer the
English thoroughly; and that, as you know by this time, was hard work for any
man.

     He ravaged several counties; he burned and plundered many towns; he laid
waste scores upon scores of miles of pleasant country; he destroyed
innumerable lives.  At length Stigand, Archbishop of Canterbury, with other
representatives of the clergy and the people, went to his camp, and submitted
to him.  Edgar, the insignificant son of Edmund Ironside, was proclaimed king
by others, but nothing came of it.  He fled to Scotland afterwards, where his
sister, who was young and beautiful, married the Scottish king.  Edgar himself
was not important enough for anybody to care much about him.

     On Christmas Day, William was crowned in Westminster Abbey, under the
title of William the First; but he is best known as William the Conqueror. It
was a strange coronation.  One of the bishops who performed the ceremony asked
the Normans, in French, if they would have Duke William for their king. They
answered, Yes.  Another of the bishops put the same question to the Saxons, in
English.  They, too, answered Yes, with a loud shout.  The noise, being heard
by a guard of Norman horse-soldiers outside, was mistaken for resistance on
the part of the English.  The guard instantly set fire to the neighboring
houses, and a tumult ensued, in the midst of which the king, being left alone
in the abbey with a few priests (and they all being in a terrible fright
together), was hurriedly crowned.  When the crown was placed upon his head, he
swore to govern the English as well as the best of their own monarchs.  I
daresay you think, as I do, that, if we except the Great Alfred, he might
pretty easily have done that.

[See William the Conqueror: He grants a charter to the city of London']

     Numbers of the English nobles had been killed in the last disastrous
battle.  Their estates, and the estates of all the nobles who had fought
against him there, King William seized upon, and gave to his own Norman
knights and nobles.  Many great English families of the present time acquired
their English lands in this way, and are very proud of it.

     But what is got by force must be maintained by force.  These nobles were
obliged to build castles all over England, to defend their new property; and,
do what he would, the king could neither soothe nor quell the nation as he
wished.  He gradually introduced the Norman language and the Norman customs;
yet, for a long time, the great body of the English remained sullen and
revengeful.  On his going over to Normandy, to visit his subjects there, the
oppressions of his half-brother Odo, whom he left in charge of his English
kingdom, drove the people mad.  The men of Kent even invited over, to take
possession of Dover, their old enemy, Count Eustace of Boulogne, who had led
the fray when the Dover man was slain at his own fireside.  The men of
Pereford, aided by the Welsh, and commanded by a chief named Edric the Wild,
drove the Normans out of their country.  Some of those who had been
dispossessed of their lands banded together in the North of England, some in
Scotland, some in the thick woods and marshes; and whensoever they could fall
upon the Normans, or upon the English who had submitted to the Normans, they
fought, despoiled, and murdered, like the desperate outlaws that they were.
Conspiracies were set on foot for a general massacre of the Normans, like the
old massacre of the Danes.  In short, the English were in a murderous mood all
through the kingdom.

     King William, fearing he might lose his conquest, came back and tried to
pacify the London people by soft words.  He then set forth to repress the
country people by stern deeds.  Among the towns which he besieged, and where
he killed and maimed the inhabitants without any distinction, sparing none,
young or old, armed or unarmed, were Oxford, Warwick, Leicester, Nottingham,
Derby, Lincoln, York.  In all these places, and in many others, fire and sword
worked their utmost horrors, and made the land dreadful to behold.  The
streams and rivers were discolored with blood; the sky was blackened with
smoke; the fields were wastes of ashes; the waysides were heaped up with dead.
Such are the fatal results of conquest and ambition!  Although William was a
harsh and angry man, I do not suppose that he deliberately meant to work this
shocking ruin, when he invaded England.  But what he had got by the strong
hand, he could only keep by the strong hand; and in so doing he made England a
great grave.

     Two sons of Harold, by name Edmund and Godwin, came over from Ireland
with some ships against the Normans, but were defeated.  This was scarcely
done, when the outlaws in the woods so harassed York, that the governor sent
to the king for help.  The king despatched a general and a large force to
occupy the town of Durham.  The bishop of that place met the general outside
the town, and warned him not to enter, as he would be in danger there.  The
general cared nothing for the warning, and went in with all his men.  That
night, on every hill within sight of Durham, signal-fires were seen to blaze.
When the morning dawned, the English, who had assembled in great strength,
forced the gates, rushed into the town, and slew the Normans every one.  The
English afterwards besought the Danes to come and help them.  The Danes came
with two hundred and forty ships.  The outlawed nobles joined them; they
captured York, and drove the Normans out of that city.  Then William bribed
the Danes to go away, and took such vengeance on the English, that all the
former fire and sword, smoke and ashes, death and ruin, were nothing compared
with it.  In melancholy songs and doleful stories, it was still sung and told
by cottage-fires, on winter evenings a hundred years afterwards, how, in those
dreadful days of the Normans, there was not, from the River Humber to the
River Tyne, one inhabited village left, nor one cultivated field, - how there
was nothing but a dismal ruin, where the human creatures and the beasts lay
dead together.

     The outlaws had, at this time, what they called a Camp of Refuge, in the
midst of the fens of Cambridgeshire.  Protected by those marshy grounds, which
were difficult of approach, they lay among the reeds and rushes, and were
hidden by the mists that rose up from the watery earth.  Now there also was at
that time, over the sea in Flanders, an Englishman named Hereward, whose
father had died in his absence, and whose property had been given to a Norman.
When he heard of this wrong that had been done him (from such of the exiled
English as chanced to wander into that country), he longed for revenge; and
joining the outlaws in their camp of refuge, became their commander.  He was
so good a soldier, that the Normans supposed him to be aided by enchantment.
William, even after he had made a road three miles in length across the
Cambridgeshire marshes, on purpose to attack this supposed enchanter, thought
it necessary to engage an old lady who pretended to be a sorceress, to come
and do a little enchantment in the royal cause.  For this purpose she was
pushed on before the troops in a wooden tower; but Hereward very soon disposed
of this unfortunate sorceress, by burning her, tower and all.

     The monks of the convent of Ely, near at hand, however, who were fond of
good living, and who found it very uncomfortable to have the country
blockaded, and their supplies of meat and drink cut off, showed the king a
secret way of surprising the camp.  So Hereward was soon defeated.  Whether he
afterwards died quietly, or whether he was killed after killing sixteen of the
men who attacked him (as some old rhymes relate that he did), I cannot say.
His defeat put an end to the Camp of Refuge; and, very soon afterwards, the
king, victorious both in Scotland and in England, quelled the last rebellious
English noble.  He then surrounded himself with Norman lords, enriched by the
property of English nobles; had a great survey made of all the land in
England, which was entered as the property of its new owners, on a roll called
Doomsday Book; obliged the people to put out their fires and candles at a
certain hour every night, on the ringing of a bell which was called The
Curfew; introduced the Norman dresses and manners; made the Normans masters
everywhere, and the English servants; turned out the English bishops, and put
Normans in their places; and showed himself to be the Conqueror indeed.

     But, even with his own Normans, he had a restless life.  They were always
hungering and thirsting for the riches of the English; and the more he gave,
the more they wanted.  His priests were as greedy as his soldiers. We know of
only one Norman who plainly told his master the king, that he had come with
him to England to do his duty as a faithful servant, and that property taken
by force from other men had no charms for him.  His name was Guilbert.  We
should not forget his name; for it is good to remember and to honor honest
men.

     Besides all these troubles, William the Conqueror was troubled by
quarrels among his sons.  He had three living.  Robert, called Curthose,
because of his short legs; William, called Rufus, or the Red, from the color
of his hair; and Henry, fond of learning, and called, in the Norman language,
Beauclerc, or Fine-Scholar.  When Robert grew up, he asked of his father the
government of Normandy, which he had nominally possessed, as a child, under
his mother Matilda.  The king refusing to grant it, Robert became jealous and
discontented; and happening one day, while in this temper, to be ridiculed by
his brothers, who threw water on him from a balcony as he was walking before
the door, he drew his sword, rushed up stairs, and was only prevented by the
king himself from putting them to death.  That same night, he hotly departed
with some followers from his father's court, and endeavored to take the Castle
of Rouen by surprise.  Failing in this, he shut himself up in another castle
in Normandy, which the king besieged, and where Robert one day unhorsed and
nearly killed him without knowing who he was.  His submission when he
discovered his father, and the intercession of the queen and others,
reconciled them, but not soundly; for Robert soon strayed abroad, and went
from court to court with his complaints.  He was a gay, careless, thoughtless
fellow, spending all he got on musicians and dancers; but his mother loved
him, and often, against the king's command, supplied him with money through a
messenger named Samson.  At length the incensed king swore he would tear out
Samson's eyes; and Samson, thinking that his only hope of safety was in
becoming a monk, became one, went on such errands no more, and kept his eyes
in his head.

     All this time, from the turbulent day of his strange coronation, the
Conqueror had been struggling, you see, at any cost of cruelty and bloodshed,
to maintain what he had seized.  All his reign he struggled still, with the
same object ever before him.  He was a stern, bold man, and he succeeded in
it.

     He loved money, and was particular in his eating; but he had only leisure
to indulge one other passion, and that was his love of hunting.  He carried it
to such a height, that he ordered whole villages and towns to be swept away to
make forests for the deer.  Not satisfied with sixty-eight royal forests, he
laid waste an immense district to form another in Hampshire, called the New
Forest.  The many thousands of miserable peasants who saw their little houses
pulled down, and themselves and children turned into the open country without
a shelter, detested him for his merciless addition to their many sufferings;
and when in the twenty-first year of his reign (which proved to be the last),
he went over to Rouen, England was as full of hatred against him as if every
leaf on every tree in all his royal forests had been a curse upon his head.
In the New Forest, his son Richard (for he had four sons) had been gored to
death by a stag; and the people said that this so cruelly made forest would
yet be fatal to others of the Conqueror's race.

     He was engaged in a dispute with the king of France about some territory.
While he stayed at Rouen, negotiating with that king, he kept his bed and took
medicines; being advised by his physicians to do so, on account of having
grown to an unwieldy size.  Word being brought to him that the king of France
made light of this, and joked about it, he swore in a great rage that he
should rue his jests.  He assembled his army, marched into the disputed
territory, burnt - his old way! - the vines, the crops and fruit, and set the
town of Nantes on fire.  But in an evil hour; for, as he rode over the hot
ruins, his horse, setting his hoofs upon some burning embers, started, threw
him forward against the pommel of the saddle, and gave him a mortal hurt.  For
six weeks he lay dying in a monastery near Rouen, and then made his will,
giving England to William, Normandy to Robert, and five thousand pounds to
Henry.  And now his violent deeds lay heavy on his mind. He ordered money to
be given to many English churches and monasteries, and - which was much better
repentance - released his prisoners of state, some of whom had been confined
in his dungeons twenty years

     It was a September morning, and the sun was rising, when the king was
awakened from slumber by the sound of a church-bell.  "What bell is that?" he
faintly asked.  They told him it was the bell of the chapel of Saint Mary. "I
commend my soul," said he, "to Mary!" and died.

     Think of his name, The Conqueror, and then consider how he lay in death!
The moment he was dead, his physicians, priests, and nobles, not knowing what
contest for the throne might now take place, or what might happen in it,
hastened away, each man for himself and his own property; the mercenary
servants of the court began to rob and plunder; the body of the king, in the
indecent strife, was rolled from the bed, and lay alone for hours upon the
ground.  O Conqueror!  of whom so many great names are proud now, of whom so
many great names thought nothing then, it were better to have conquered one
true heart than England!

     By and by the priests came creeping in with prayers and candles; and a
good knight, named Herluin, undertook (which no one else would do) to convey
the body to Caen, in Normandy, in order that it might be buried in St.
Stephen's Church there, which the Conqueror had founded.  But fire, of which
he had made such bad use in his life, seemed to follow him of itself in death.
A great conflagration broke out in the town when the body was placed in the
church; and those present running out to extinguish the flames, it was once
again left alone.

     It was not even buried in peace.  It was about to be let down in its
royal robes into a tomb near the high altar, in presence of a great concourse
of people, when a loud voice in the crowd cried out, "This ground is mine!
Upon it stood my father's house.  This king despoiled me of both ground and
house to build this church.  In the great name of God, I here forbid this body
to be covered with the earth that is my right!" The priests and bishops
present, knowing the speaker's right, and knowing that the king had often
denied him justice, paid him down sixty shillings for the grave.  Even then
the corpse was not at rest.  The tomb was too small, and they tried to force
it in.  It broke, a dreadful smell arose, the people hurried out into the air,
and for the third time it was left alone.

     Where were the Conqueror's three sons, that they were not at their
father's burial?  Robert was lounging among minstrels, dancers, and gamesters
in France or Germany.  Henry was carrying his five thousand pounds safely away
in a convenient chest he had got made.  William the Red was hurrying to
England to lay his hands upon the royal treasure and the crown.