Part 6

Few battles of the Middle Ages were of importance equal to that of Hastings, and few are better known. Besides the prose accounts of the Latin chroniclers, we have the contemporary elegiacs of Guy of Amiens and Baudri of Bourgueil, the spirited verse of the _Roman de Rou_ of Master Wace, the most detailed narrative but written, unfortunately, a century after the event, and the unique and vivid portrayal of the Bayeux Tapestry. This remarkable monument, which is accessible to all in a variety of editions, consists of a roll of cloth two hundred and thirty feet long and twenty inches in breadth, embroidered in colors with a series of seventy-nine scenes which narrate the history of the Conquest from the departure of Harold on the ill-fated journey which led him to William’s court down to the final discomfiture of the English army on the field of Hastings. The episodes, which are designated by brief titles, are well chosen and are executed with a realism of detail which is of the greatest importance for the life and culture of the age. Preserved in the cathedral and later in the municipal Museum of Bayeux--save for a notable interval in 1804, when Napoleon had it exhibited in Paris to arouse enthusiasm for a new French conquest of England,--the tapestry appears from internal evidence to have been originally executed as an ornament for this cathedral by English workmen at the command of Bishop Odo, half-brother of the Conqueror. There is no basis for the common belief that it was the work of Queen Matilda or her ladies, but efforts to place it one or even two centuries later have proved unavailing against the evidence of armor and costume, and the general opinion of scholars now regards it as belonging to the eleventh century and thus substantially contemporary with the events which it depicts.

The modern literature of the battle is also commensurate with its importance. The classic account is found in the third volume of Freeman’s majestic _History of the Norman Conquest_, where the story is told with a rare combination of minute detail and spirited narrative which reminds us, it has been said, of a battle of the _Iliad_ or a Norse saga. Splendid as this narrative is, its enthusiasm often carries it beyond the evidence of the sources, and in several fundamental points it can no longer be accepted as historically sound. The theory of the palisade upon which Freeman’s conception of the English tactics rested has been destroyed by the trenchant criticism of that profound student of Anglo-Norman history, J. Horace Round, and his whole treatment has been vigorously attacked from the point of view of the scientific study of military history by Wilhelm Spatz and his distinguished master, Hans Delbrück, of Berlin. Unfortunately the Berlin critics are influenced too much by certain theories of military organization; they do not call the English soldier of the period a degenerate, but they consider him, and the Norman knight as well, incapable of the disciplined and united action required by all real strategy, incapable even of forming the shield-wall and executing the feigned flight described by the contemporary chroniclers of the battle. While it is true that mediæval fighting was far more individualistic than that of ancient or modern armies and lacked also the flexible conditions which lie at the basis of modern tactics, there is the best of contemporary evidence for a certain amount of strategical movement at Hastings. On one point, however, the modern military critics have compelled us to modify our ideas of the battles of earlier times, namely, with respect to the numbers engaged. Against the constant tendency to magnify the size of the military forces, a tendency accentuated in the Middle Ages by the complete recklessness of chroniclers when dealing with large figures, modern criticism has pointed out the limitations of battle-space, transportation, and commissariat. The five millions with which Xerxes is said to have invaded Greece are a physical impossibility, for Delbrück has shown that, with this number moving under normal conditions, the rear-guard could not have crossed the Tigris when the first Persians reached Thermopylæ. Similarly the fifty or sixty thousand knights attributed to William the Conqueror shrink to one-tenth the number when brought to face with the official lists of English and Norman knights’ fees. If William’s army did not exceed five or six thousand, that of Harold could not have been much greater and may well have been less; though William’s panegyrist places the number of English at 1,200,000, not more than 12,000 could have stood, in the closest formation, on the hill which they occupied at Hastings. Small skirmishes these, to those who have followed the battles of the Marne, the Aisne, the Vistula, and the San, yet none the less important in the world’s history!

In spite of all the controversy, the main lines of the battle seem fairly clear. The troops of Harold occupied a well-defended hill eight miles inland from Hastings on the London road, the professional guard of housecarles in front, protected by the solid wall of their shields and supported by the thegns and other fully armed troops, the levies of the countryside behind or at the sides, armed with javelins, stone clubs, and farmers’ weapons. They had few archers and no cavalry, but the steep hill was well protected from the assaults of the Norman horse and favored the firm defence which the English tactics dictated. The Norman lines consisted first of archers, then of heavy-armed foot-soldiers, and finally of the mailed horsemen, their centre grouped about William and the standard which he had received from the Pope. After a preliminary attack by the archers and foot, the knights came forward, preceded by the minstrel Taillefer, “a jongleur whom a very brave heart ennobled,” _qui mult bien chantout_, throwing his sword in the air and catching it as he sang--

De Karlemaigne e de Rollant Of Roland and of Charlemagne, E d’Oliver e des vassals Oliver and the vassals all Qui morurent en Rencevals. Who fell in fight at Roncevals.

But the horses recoiled from the hill, pursued by many of the English, and only the sight of William, his head bared of its helmet so as to be seen by his men, rallied the knights again. The mass of the English stood firm behind their shield-wall and their line could be broken only by the ruse of a feigned flight, from which the Normans turned to surround and cut to pieces their pursuers. Even then the housecarles were unmoved, until the arrows of the high-shooting Norman bowmen finally opened up the gaps in their ranks into which William’s horsemen pressed against the battle-axes of the king’s guard. And then, as darkness began to fall, Harold was mortally wounded by an arrow, the guard was cut to pieces, and the remnant fled. “Here Harold was killed and the English turned to flight” is the final heading in the Bayeux Tapestry, while in the margin the spoilers strip the coats of mail from the dead and drive off the horses of the slain knights.

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“A single battle settled the fate of England.” There was still grim work to be done--the humbling of Exeter, the harrying of Northumberland, the subjection of the earls, but these were only local episodes. There was no one but William who could effectively take Harold’s place, and when on Christmas Day he had been crowned at London, he could reduce opposition at his leisure. The chronicle of these later years belongs to English rather than to Norman history.

The results of the Conquest, too, are of chief significance for the conquered. For the Normans the immediate effect was a great opportunity for expansion in every department of life. There was work for the warrior in completing the subjugation of the land, for the organizer and statesman in the new adjustments of central and local government, for the prelate in bringing his new diocese into line with the practice of the church on the Continent, for the monks to found new priories and administer the new lands which their monasteries now received beyond the Channel. The Norman townsman and the Norman merchant followed hard upon the Norman armies, in the Norman colony in London, in the traders of the ports, in the boroughs of the western border. In part, of course, the change was simply the replacing of one set of persons by another, putting a Norman archbishop in place of Stigand at Canterbury, spreading over the map the Montgomeries and Percies, the Mowbrays and the Mortimers and scores of other household names of English history; but it was also a work of readjustment and reorganization which required all the Norman gift for constructive work. A certain _élan_ passes through Norman life and reflects itself in Norman literature, as the Normans become more conscious of the glory of their achievements and the greatness of their new empire. England had become an appendage to Normandy, and men did not yet see that the relation would soon be reversed.

For England, the Norman Conquest determined permanently the orientation of English politics and English culture. Geographically belonging, with the Scandinavian countries, to the outlying lands of Europe, the British Isles had been in serious danger of sharing their remoteness from the general movements of European life and drifting into the back waters of history. The union with Normandy turned England southward and brought it at once into the full current of European affairs--political entanglements, ecclesiastical connections, cultural influences. England became a part of France and thus entered fully into the life of the world to which France belonged. It received the speech of France, the literature of France, and the art of France; its law became in large measure Frankish, its institutions more completely feudal. Yet the connection with France ran through Normandy, and the French influence took on Norman forms. Most of all was this true in the field in which the Norman excelled, that of government: English feudalism was Norman feudalism, in which the barons were weak and the central power strong, and it was the heavy hand of Norman kingship that turned the loose and disintegrating Anglo-Saxon state into the English nation. England was Europeanized only at the price of being Normanized.

From the point of view both of immediate achievement and of ultimate results, the conquest of England was the crowning act of Norman history. Something doubtless was due to good fortune,--to the absence of an English fleet, to the favorable opportunity in French politics, to the mistakes of the English. But the fundamental facts, without which these would have meant nothing, were the strength and discipline of Normandy and the personality of her leader. Diplomat, warrior, leader of men, William was preëminently a statesman, and it was his organizing genius which “turned the defeat of English arms into the making of the English nation.” This talent for political organization was, however, no isolated endowment of the Norman duke, but was shared in large measure by the Norman barons, as is abundantly shown by the history of Norman rule in Italy and Sicily. For William and for his followers the conquest of England only gave a wider field for qualities of state-building which had already shown themselves in Normandy.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

A detailed narrative of the relations between Normandy and England in the eleventh century is given by E. A. Freeman in his _History of the Norman Conquest_ (Oxford, 1870–79), but large portions of this work need to be rewritten in the light of later studies, especially those of Round. There is a brief biography of William the Conqueror by Freeman in the series of “Twelve English Statesmen” (London, 1888), and a fuller one by F. M. Stenton in the “Heroes of the Nations” (1908). For the institutions of Normandy see my articles on “Knight Service in Normandy in the Eleventh Century,” in _English Historical Review_, XXII, pp. 636–49; “The Norman ‘Consuetudines et Iusticie’ of William the Conqueror,” _ibid._ XXIII, pp. 502–08; and “Normandy under William the Conqueror,” in _American Historical Review_, XIV, pp. 453–76 (1909); also L. Valin, _Le duc de Normandie et sa cour, 912–1204_ (Paris, 1910). For church and state, see H. Böhmer, _Kirche und Staat in England und in der Normandie_ (Leipzig, 1899). The dealings of the Norman dukes with their continental neighbors are narrated by A. Fliche, _Le règne de Philippe I^{er} roi de France_ (Paris, 1912); L. Halphen, _Le comté d’Anjou au XI^{e} siècle_ (Paris, 1906); R. Latouche, _Histoire du comté du Maine pendant le X^{e} et le XI^{e} siècle_ (Paris, 1910); F. Lot, _Fidèles ou vassaux_ (Paris, 1904), ch. 6 (on the feudal relations of the Norman dukes and the French kings). There is a good sketch of France in the eleventh century by Luchaire in the _Histoire de France_ of Lavisse, II, part 2; a fuller work on this period is expected from Maurice Prou. For the literature of the battle of Hastings, see Gross, _Sources and Literature_, nos. 707a, 2812, 2998–3000; the most important works are those of Round, Spatz, and Delbrück, _Geschichte der Kriegskunst_, III, pp. 147–62 (1907). The Bayeux Tapestry is most conveniently accessible in the small edition of F. R. Fowke (reprinted, London, 1913); see also Gross, no. 2139, and Ph. Lauer, in _Mélanges Charles Bémont_ (Paris, 1913), pp. 43–58. Freeman discusses the results of the Conquest in his fifth volume; see also Gaston Paris, _L’esprit normand en Angleterre_, in _La poésie du moyen âge_, second series (Paris, 1895), pp. 45–74.

IV

THE NORMAN EMPIRE

The lecture upon Normandy and England sought to place in their Norman perspective the events leading to the Norman Conquest and to show how that decisive triumph of Norman strength and daring was made possible by the development of an exceptional ducal authority in Normandy and Maine and by the personal greatness of William the Conqueror. We now come to follow still further this process of expansion, to the Scotch border, to Ireland, to the Pyrenees, until the empire of the Plantagenet kings became the chief political fact in western Europe. The Norman empire is the outstanding feature of the twelfth century, as the conquest of England was of the eleventh.

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This great imperial state is commonly known, not as the Norman, but as the Angevin, empire, because its rulers, Henry II, Richard, and John, were descended in the male line from the counts of Anjou. The phrase is, however, a misnomer, since it leads one to suppose that the Angevin counts were its creators, which is in no sense the case. The centre of the empire was Normandy, its founders were the Norman dukes. The marriage of the Princess Matilda to Count Geoffrey Plantagenet added Anjou to Normandy rather than Normandy to Anjou, and it was as duke of Normandy that their son Henry II began his political career. The extension of his domains southward by marriage only gave Normandy the central position in his realm, and it was the loss of Normandy under John which led to the empire’s collapse.

Against the application of the term ‘empire’ to the dominion of Henry II more cogent reasons may be urged. It rests, so far as I know, upon no contemporary authority, and even if the phrase could be found by some chance in a writer of the twelfth century, it would carry with it no weight. Western Europe in the Middle Ages knew but one empire, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation--from one point of view neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, as Voltaire long afterward remarked, yet, as revived by Charlemagne and Otto the Great, representing to the mind of the Middle Ages the idea of universal monarchy which they had inherited from ancient Rome. To the men of the twelfth century the emperor was Frederick Barbarossa; he could not be Henry II. Nor will the government of the Norman-Angevin ruler square with the modern definition of an empire as “a state formed by the rule of one state over other states.”[27] His various dominions, if we except Ireland, were not dependencies of England, or Anjou, or Normandy. King in England, duke in Normandy, count in Anjou and Maine, duke again in Aquitaine, Henry ruled each of his dominions as its feudal lord--very much as if the German Emperor to-day combined in himself the titles of king of Prussia and of Bavaria, grand duke of Baden, duke of Brunswick, prince of Waldeck, and so on throughout the members of the German confederation. Such a government is not an empire in the sense of the ancient Roman or the modern British empires, for it has no dependencies. It is an empire only in the broader and looser sense of the word, a great composite state, larger than a mere kingdom and imperial in extent if not in organization.

That Henry’s realm was in extent imperial can easily be seen from the map. It extended from Scotland to the frontier of Spain, as the empire of his contemporary Frederick I extended from the Baltic and the North Sea to central Italy. And if the kingdoms of Germany, Italy, and Burgundy which made up Frederick’s empire covered in the aggregate more territory, the actual authority of the ruler, whether in army, justice, or finance, was decidedly less than in the Anglo-Norman state. Henry had a stronger army, a larger revenue, a more centralized government. Moreover, the Norman empire was less artificial than it seems to us at first sight, accustomed as we are to the associations of the modern map. There was, especially with mediæval methods of communication, nothing anomalous in a state which straddled the English Channel: Normandy was nearer England than was Ireland; it was quite as easy to go from London to Rouen as from London to York. The geographical bonds were also strong between Henry’s continental dominions, for the roads of the twelfth century did not radiate from Paris, but followed mainly the old Roman lines, and from Rouen there was direct and easy connection with LeMans, Tours, Poitiers, and Bordeaux. In the matter of race, too, we must beware of being misled by our modern ideas. The English nation was at most only the vaguest sort of a conception, the French nation did not exist till the fifteenth century, and personal loyalty to the lord of many different lands was a natural expression of the conditions of the age. It is contrary to our prejudices that a single state should be formed out of the hard-headed Norman, the Celtic fisherman of the Breton coast,--the ‘Pêcheur d’Islande’ of a later day,--the Angevin, Tourangeau, Poitevin, the troubadour of Aquitaine, and the Gascon of the far south, with his alien blood and non-Aryan language, already a well-marked type whose swaggering gasconades foreshadow the d’Artagnan of the _Three Musketeers_ and the ‘cadets de Gascogne’ of _Cyrano de Bergerac_. But it was little harder to rule these diverse lands from London or Rouen than from Paris; it was for the time being as easy to make them part of a Norman empire as of a French kingdom. Over the various languages and dialects ran the Latin of law and government and the French of the court and of affairs; while in political matters these countries were, as we shall see, quite capable of united action.

Let us call to mind how the empire of Henry II was formed. At the death of the Conqueror in 1087 the lands which he had brought together and ruled with such good peace were divided between his two eldest sons, Robert receiving Normandy and William the Red, England. Save for William’s regency over Normandy during his brother’s absence on the Crusade, the two countries remained separate during his reign, and were united once more only in 1106 when William’s successor, his younger brother Henry I, after defeating and deposing Robert at Tinchebrai, ruled as duke of Normandy and king of England. This was the inheritance which, after the death of Prince William in the White Ship, Henry sought to hand down to his daughter Matilda, but which passed for the most part to his nephew Stephen of Blois. Stephen, however, never gained a firm hold in England and soon lost Normandy to Matilda’s husband, Count Geoffrey of Anjou, by whom it was conquered and ruled in the name of his son Henry, later Henry II. Crowned duke of Normandy in 1150, Henry succeeded his father as count of Anjou in the following year, and at Stephen’s death in 1154 became king of England. Meanwhile, in 1152, he had contracted a marriage of the greatest political importance with Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine, whose union with the French king Louis VII had just been annulled by the Pope; an alliance which made him master of Poitou, Aquitaine, and Gascony and therewith of two-thirds of France. Apart from certain adjustments in central France, the only addition to these territories made during Henry’s reign was the conquest of eastern Ireland in the years following 1169. Into these Irish campaigns and their consequences for the whole later history of the island we cannot attempt to go. Let me only point out that the leading spirits were Norman, except so far as they were Irish exiles, and that the names which now make their appearance in Irish annals are Norman names--the Lacys and the Clares, the Fitzgeralds and the de Courcys, as Irish before long as the Irish themselves.

Substantially, then, the empire of Henry II remained in extent as he found it at his accession to the English throne at the age of twenty-one; it was not created by him but inherited or annexed by marriage. Accordingly it is not as a conqueror but as a ruler that he can lay claim to greatness. But although Henry attempted little in the way of acquiring new territory, he did much to consolidate his possessions and to extend his European power and influence. His daughters were married to the greatest princes of their time, Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony and Bavaria, King Alphonso VIII of Castile, King William II of Sicily. He made an alliance with the ruler of Provence and planned a marriage with the house of Savoy that would have given him control of the passes into Italy. He took his part in the struggle of Pope and anti-Pope, of Pope and Emperor; he corresponded with the emperor of Constantinople, refused the crown of the kingdom of Jerusalem, and died on the eve of his departure on a crusade. No one could lay claim to greater influence upon the international affairs of his time.

Occupying this international position, Henry must not be viewed, as he generally is, merely as an English king. He was born and educated on the Continent, began to reign on the Continent, and spent a large part of his life in his continental dominions. He ruled more territory outside of England than in, and his continental lands had at least as large a place as England in his policy. It is perhaps too much to say, in modern phrase, that he ‘thought imperially,’ but he certainly did not think nationally; and when his latest biographer speaks of Henry’s continental campaigns as “foreign affairs,”[28] he is thinking insularly, for Normandy, Anjou, Gascony even, were no more foreign than England itself. Henry is not a national figure, either English or French; he is international, if not cosmopolitan. Only from the point of view of later times can we associate him peculiarly with English history, when after the collapse of the Norman empire under his sons, the permanent influence of his work continued to be felt most fully in England.