BOOKS.

WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR.* [FIRST NOTICE.]

SIR FRANCIS PALGRAVE left, it appears, the fourth volume of his History of England and Normandy, perhaps the greatest single contribution yet made to the authentic anilals of this country, -nearly complete, wanting in fact only that final revision in type -which authors are so exceedingly apt to postpone. His son has therefore published this volume almost untouched, as representing " his father's maturest judgment on the events narrated." The third volume was less perfect, and required piecing to make it intelligible; but the materials had been carefully prepared, and the life of the Conqueror, the most important episode in the whole story, lacked only a few final touches. Mr. Palgrave has therefore published this volume also, adding dates, somewhat too scantily, a few explanatory words, a summary necessary to bridge a short chasm, and two long excerpta written by Sir F. Palgrave himself, but issued originally in a somewhat different form. The result is a volume almost as valuable as if it had been revised by its author, disfigured rather than injured here and there by -patchiness, wanting Only one substantial addition,— a chapter on the authorities in which Sir F. Palgrave be- lieved, more especially on the ballads which he so fre- quently quotes, and to which he obviously attaches such great historical value. No one of course could supply this want except himself, and its loss is only an unavoidable addition to the other losses which every student of history sustained in his decease. We propose to confine this notice to the author's account of the career of William the Conqueror, as being at once the most perfect portion of the work, and the one which will interest most keenly the average reader. There is perhaps no man in all our history whose life is so little understood, William being to most men simply a fierce bold brute, who won Euglaud in a battle, divided the soil among "his barons," enslaved the Anglo-Saxons, made the New Forest, and died from the effects of a horse's stumble. He was really in Sir F. Palgrave's opinion the proto- type of William ILL, differing from him only in a certain pitilessness which was also latent in the character of the great Dutchman, as witness the massacre of Glencoe, which if he did not older he at least never avenged. We confine ourselves of course to the points upon which Sir F. Palgrave disturbs the popular

• impressiOns.

- In the first place, the nickname of the "Bastard," which adhered to William throughout his life, did not arise altogether from the fact that he was born out of wedlock. All the Dukes of • Normandy, from the days of Longsword, grandson of Rollo, were so born, the regular practice being for the Duke to live with a concubine, and then, if he wished his son to succeed, to legitima- tize him by a "mantle marriage," a power reserved by the civil law to every father, and still retained in most European coun- tries. Opinion in Normandy would have dispensed even with this ceremony, the Northnoeu thinking with Asiatics that a man's sons are his sons, be their mother who she may ; but the nobles were disgusted with the caste of Duke Robert's favourite. Arletta was the daughter of Fulbert, of Faluise, a tanner, and though the Normans could forgive lowness of origin, and cared little or nothing about personal immodesty—tradition makes her immodest even beyond her class—they could not overlook the tan- yard. In France then, as in India now, the skinner was an outcast, a wretch whose trade polluted the atmosphere, a man regarded as Englishmen now regard a resurrectionist. Throughout William's life those who wished to wound him most cruelly beat skins iu his sight, and his worst act of ferocity was committed upon the people of Alencon in revenge for that special insult. Next, William did not become " the Conqueror " all in a moment,

.Hisiory o1\England and Normandy. Vols. III and IV. By Sir F. Palgrave. London: MaemtlIaii•

or even develop from a great Baron into a King. From his eleventh year, when his father died, to his forty-first his life was one long training for battle and command. The " race of Rollo," the great Barons who traced back to the Viking's loins, the true nobles of Normandy, few of whom ever came to England, fought him at every turn, and once drove him from his Duchy. Be had to fight them in the Val des Dunes, and then fight his Suze- rain at Mortemer before he could get seated at all, and when that was done he commenced and completed the conquest of Anjou and Maine, married a daughter of the groat Count of Flanders, and hoped for a Royal crown from the hand of the Kaiser, still acknowledged as heir of the Western Empire. He was, when he planned the invasion of England, already the warrior Prince par excellence of Europe, and adventurers flocked readily to his standard. The bulk of his army was, however, drawn flora his own dominions, one province in particular, the Cotentin, of which Cherbourg is the modern port, emigrating almost en masse.

Half the great families of England sprang from the ruined castles which still stud that region, and which were built in Robert and William's reign by men who were simply brigands, captains of bands whose business was plunder and devastation.

Again, Sir F. Palgrave holds that William's title to the throne was as good as that of any competitor. Edward had willed it to him, and the final bequest of the Confessor to Harold was extorted from hint on his death-bed. Harold had no heredi- tary rights, he was but the heir of Godwin, who had been a serf, and the only person who had them, Edgar the Atheliag,

the last descendant of Edmund Ironside, was a child. It is a curious trait in William's character that this boy, his only legi- timate competitor, was the only one whom the Conqueror could

never hate. He regarded him as Napoleon is said to regard the Count de Chambord, seemed to think he had a right to rebel, and spared him again and again, so that he, last of the Saxon line, died at a hundred and three, an honoured noble beneath the Nor- man sway. Harold, in Sir F. Palgrave's opinion, never was really King of the nation in the English sense, but only the greatest Earl with a nominal supremacy, and he went to battle at Hastings, followed only by the troops of his own Earldom, which iacludad Hants, Sussex, Kent, Surrey, Middlesex, Hertford, Barks, and Oxford. The Mercians were not loyal, and the people of the Danelagh, say England north of the Humber, looked to Sweyn of Denmark as their natural and legitimate sovereign. The dis- solution of Harold's army therefore divided England into at least five States, none of which particularly objected to William seizing Harold's earldom, or even becoming in name " Basileus " of Britain. A majority of the nation felt Harold's dethrone- ment as the mere defeat of an usurper, and it is curious that no popular legends ever connected themselves with his name. Indeed Si F. Palgrave evidently believes that he was not killed at Hastings, but was conveyed from the field by his mistress, Editha, and died a one-eyed monk in a cell near the Abbey of St. Jolla at Chest'-r, where he was visited by Henry I., who on his death-bed declared to his attendaut monks that the recluse was Harold. It was this utter division of the national resources, followed by an immense emigration into Scotland, Holstein, Rus- sia, and the East,—Rurik was probably a "Saxon " emigre, which

enabled William to conquer the country earldom by earldom, and it is clear that from the first he,regarded Denmark, and not

England, as the true source of danger. He spared the Saxons, but he tried to extirpate the Danes, and very nearly succeeded.

Swept loudly threatened vengeance, and William sent him gifts, which either he or his agents called " tribute." When at last Sweyn was convinced that he had no tribute to hope, and summoned the pagans of Prussia, men who still worshipped Thor and Freya,.to form an army of invasion, William bought them off by giving • them all the plunder they had taken, and the cause of the " tyranny" of his later years is to be sought in the mighty army which twenty years after the Conquest be brought over from Poitou, Anjou, and Normandy to protect himself against an invasion prepared by Canute, son of Sweyn. That King had collected 1,000 v. ssels, and nothing saved the Normans from a new and more terrible struggle but a domestic revolt which cost Canute his life. Finally, it is the deliberate opinion of Sir F. Palgrave that William did not try to Normanize the Saxon people.

" We must not always confound despotism and injustice. William was not a wild, a cruel, or a bloodthirsty conqueror ; with but a small share of moral principle, he had no love for evil or sin as such. In an age of universal profligacy, more especially among the higher ranks, his continence is a voucher of what we may term his moral feeling. Historical parallels, though frequently very delusive from the efforts made to overstrain either the resemblance or the antithesis of the

respective characters, do nevertheless afford much help to the student ; and, excepting in the violence of his temper, which, however, he could wall restrain when it was his interest so to do, I should say that there was as near a resemblance between him and his third namesake as could well exist between two different individuals, placed so widely apart. It is, I believe, the popular opinion, as expressed by the words of Hume, that it would be difficult to find any revolution more destruc- tive, or attended with a more complete subjugation of the ancient inha- bitants. Unquestionably the cup of bitterness was presented to the English, but it was not deep ; and, amongst the many providences which so singularly and specially mark the destiny of the English nation, it is impossible to doubt but that the effect of the Conquest was in every respect to increase its powers for good, to strengthen the national intellect, and also, if they be blessings, to give the greatest impulse to its worldly prosperity and glory."

" If I had to sum up the character of William as a king in one loose phrase, I should say that as a king, though cruel, he was not unneces- sarily cruel, prudent, cunning, entirely unscrupulous as to the means he used whether to gain or to secure his power,—the sword, the axe. and, if universal rumour could be trusted, the poisoned cup, were all employed without reserve or compunction. Yet, in spite of plunder, cruelty, and devastation, he had more heart than the majority of the statists of a more civilized age ; ho interfered nowhere, except where he needed to interfere. If, according to the popular legend, the English- man was compelled to put out fire and candle at the sound of the curfew ; he was nevertheless, so far as the State was concerned, left quiet within his home. William made no attempt to introduce a new religion, new language, new customs, new laws. He never strove to Normanize the English people."

So complete was the preservation of the English constitution in theory, that the Grand Coutumier of Normandy, the code, as we should now say, claims Edward the Confessor as its author, and after Normandy was conquered by the Capets her barons pleaded the English Magna Charta as the foundation of their franchises. The curfew boll, so often quoted to prove Williams tyranny, was universal throughout mediaeval Europe, all crime being possible in unlighted streets, and the assertion of Hume that William imported the French language is simply without foundation. " The plain answer to this assertion is this, that we have no one ex.onple of any pleadings in the courts of judicature in French, of any deeds or charters drawn in the same language, or any laws composed in that idiom, until the reign of Henry III. What William found he kept : like his predecessors, his laws and charters were written either in English or in Latin, though the latter gradually prevailed. Yet the English continued in con- tinuous use, and the last example of its employment is found also in the very reign of Henry III., when, as before observed, we find the first employment of the French tongue." In fact, William was in the eyes of this historian an unscrupulous but wise and self-restrained despot, capable of any atrocity when resisted, but not naturally cruel, and without either the wish or the policy to trammel his own power by changing England into a mere copy of Normandy. His successors departed from his rules, but he himself described his double character as Norman Duke and English King by this remarkable emblem :—" Look, at William's great seal, by which his will and pleasure, his grace and favour, or his enmity, was announced. Here we find the type of the new dynasty. On the reverse, the Duke of Normandy, mounted on his war steed, grasps the sword of Rollo, defended by shield and mail, his visage concealed by the iron belmet ; but on the obverse, the Rex Anglorum, seated on the throne of justice, wears the crown of Alfred, and presents the sceptre surmounted by the peaceful dove ; and these two repre- sentations are living types, as it were, of the two dynasties." This view may be erroneous, but the student of history is pre- sumptuous who does not parse before Sir F. Palgrave's recorded opinion on a point connected with Norman annals.