A Literary History of the English People Part 9

[126] Sermon for the 25th of August, on the martyrdom of St.

Bartholomew, pp. 454 ff. The portrait of the saint is as minutely drawn: "he has fair and curling locks, is white of body, and has deep eyes and moderate nose," &c.

[127] Skeat, "aelfric's Lives of Saints," 1881.

[128] "The Blickling Homilies," Sermons X. and XI.

[129] _Ibid._, Sermon XVII.

BOOK II.

_THE FRENCH INVASION._

CHAPTER I.

_BATTLE._

I.

Germanic England gave itself a king for the last time at the death of Edward the Confessor. Harold, son of G.o.dwin, was elected to succeed him.

A momentous crisis, the greatest in English history, was drawing near.

An awful problem had to be solved. Divided, helpless, uncertain, England could no longer remain what she had been for six hundred years. She stood vacillating, drawn by contrary attractions to opposite centres, half-way between the North, that had last populated the land, and the South, that had taught and christianised the nation. On both sides fresh invaders threaten her; which will be the winner? Should the North triumph, England will be bound for centuries to the Germanic nations, whose growth will be tardy, and whose literary development will be slow, so slow indeed that men still alive to-day may have seen with their own eyes the great poet of the race, Goethe, who died in 1832. Should the South carry the day, the growth will be speedy and the preparation rapid. Like France, Italy, and Spain, England will have at the Renaissance a complete literature of her own, and be able to produce a Shakespeare, as Italy produced an Ariosto, Spain a Cervantes, and France a Montaigne, a Ronsard and a Rabelais.

The problem was solved in the autumn of 1066. On the morrow of Harold's election, the armies of the North and South a.s.sembled, and the last of the invasions began.

The Scandinavians took the sea again. They were led by Harold Hardrada, son of Sigurd, a true romance hero, who had fought in many wars, and once defended by his sword the throne of the eastern emperors.[130] To the South another fleet collected, commanded by William of Normandy; he, too, an extraordinary man, b.a.s.t.a.r.d of that Robert, known in legend as Robert the Devil who had long since started on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem from which he never returned. The Norman of Scandinavia and the Normans of France were about to play a match of which England was the stake.

The Scandinavians were the first to land. Hardrada entered York, and for a moment it seemed as if victory would belong to the people of the North. But Harold of England rushed to meet them, and crushed them at Stamford-bridge; his brother, the rebel Tosti, fell on the field of battle, and Hardrada died of an arrow-wound in the throat. All was over with Scandinavia; there remained the Normans of France.

Who were these Normans? Very different from those of the other army, they no longer had anything Scandinavian or Germanic about them; and thus they stood a chance of furnis.h.i.+ng the Anglo-Saxons with the graft they needed. Had it not been for this, their invasion would have carried no more important result than that of the Danes in the ninth century; but the consequences were to be very different. The fusion between Rollo's pirates, and the already dense population of the rich province called after them Normandy, had been long accomplished. It was less a fusion than an absorption, for the natives were much more numerous than the settlers. From the time of the second duke, French had again become the language of the ma.s.s of the inhabitants. They are Christians; they have French manners, chivalrous tastes, castles, convents, and schools; and the blood that flows in their veins is mostly French. Thus it is that they can set forth in the eleventh century for the conquest of England as representatives of the South, of Latin civilisation, of Romance letters, and of the religion of Rome. William comes blessed by the Pope, with a banner borne before him, the gift of Alexander II., wearing a hair of St. Peter's in a ring, having secured by a vow the favour of one of France's patrons, that same St. Martin of Tours, whose church Clovis had enriched, and whose cape Hugues Capet had worn: whence his surname.

No Beowulf, no northern hero is sung of in William's army; but there resound the verses of the most ancient masterpiece of French literature, at that time the most recent. According to the poet Wace, well informed, since his father took part in the expedition, the minstrel Taillefer rode before the soldiers, singing "of Charlemagne, and of Roland, and Oliver, and the va.s.sals who fell at Roncevaux."[131]

The army, moreover, was not exclusively composed of men from Normandy.[132] It was divided into three parts; to the left the Bretons and Poictevins; the Normans in the centre; and to the right the French, properly so called. No doubt was possible; William's army was a French army; all contemporary writers describe it as such, and both parties give it that name. In the "Domesday Book," written by order of William, his people are termed "Franci"; on the Bayeux tapestry, embroidered soon after the Conquest, at the place where the battle is represented, the inscription runs: "Hic Franci pugnant" (Here fight the French). Crowned king of England, William continues to call his followers "Frenchmen."[133] The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, on the other side, describe the invaders sometimes as Normans and sometimes as Frenchmen, "Frenciscan." "And the French had possession of the place of carnage,"

says the Worcester annalist, after giving an account of the battle of Hastings; and he bestows the appellation of Normans upon the men of Harold Hardrada. A similar view is taken farther north. Formerly, we read in a saga, the same tongue was spoken in England and Norway, but not after the coming of William of Normandy, "because he was French."[134]

As to Duke William, he led his army of Frenchmen in French fas.h.i.+on, that is to say gaily. His state of mind is characterised not by any overflow of warlike joy or fury, but by good humour. Like the heroes of the Celtic poems, like the inhabitants of Gaul in all ages, he is prompt at repartee (_argute loqui_). He stumbles in stepping off the s.h.i.+p, which is considered by all as a bad omen: "It is a most fatal omen," we read in an ancient Scandinavian poem, "if thou stumble on thy feet when marching to battle, for evil fairies stand on either side of thee, wis.h.i.+ng to see thee wounded."[135] It means nothing, said the duke to his followers, save that I take possession of the land. At the moment of battle he puts his hauberk on the wrong way: another bad omen. Not at all, he declares, it is a sign I shall turn out different; "King I shall be, who duke was":

Le nom qui ert de d.u.c.h.ee Verreiz de due en rei torne; Reis serai qui duc ai este.[136]

He challenges Harold to single combat, as the Gauls did their adversaries, according to Diodorus Siculus; and as Francis I. will do later when at feud with Charles V. He was to die in an expedition undertaken out of revenge for an epigram of the king of France, and to make good his retort.

The evening of the 14th of October, 1066, saw the fate of England decided. The issue of the battle was doubtful. William, by a series of ingenious ideas, secured the victory. His foes were the victims of his cleverness; they were "ingenio circ.u.mventi, ingenio victi."[137] He ordered his soldiers to simulate a flight; he made his archers shoot upwards, so that the arrows falling down among the Saxons wrought great havoc. One of them put out Harold's eye; the English chief fell by his standard, and soon after the battle was over, the most memorable ever won by an army of Frenchmen.

The duke had vowed to erect on the field of the fight an abbey to St.

Martin of Tours. He kept his word, but the building never bore among men the name of the saint; it received and has retained to this day the appellation of "Battle." Its ruins, preserved with pious care, overlook the dales where the host of the Conqueror gathered for the attack. Far off through the hills, then covered by the yellowing leaves of the forest of Anderida, glistens, between earth and sky, the grey sea that brought over the Norman fleet eighteen centuries ago. Heaps of stones, overgrown with ivy, mark the place where Harold fell, the last king of English blood who ever sat upon the throne of Great Britain. It is a secluded spot; large cedars, alders, and a tree with white foliage form a curtain, and shut off from the outer world the scene of the terrible tragedy. A solemn silence reigns; nothing is visible through the branches, save the square tower of the church of Battle, and the only sound that floats upwards is that of the old clock striking the hours.

Ivy and climbing roses cling to the grey stones and fall in light cl.u.s.ters along the low walls of the crypt; the roses shed their leaves, and the soft autumn breeze scatters the white petals on the gra.s.s, amidst fragments to which is attached one of the greatest memories in the history of humanity.

The consequences of "the Battle" were indeed immense, far more important than those of Agincourt or Austerlitz: a whole nation was transformed and became a new one. The vanquished Anglo-Saxons no more knew how to defend themselves and unite against the French than they had formerly known how to unite against the Danes. To the momentary enthusiasm that had gathered around Harold many energetic supporters succeeded a gloomy dejection. Real life exhibited the same contrasts as literature. Stirred by sudden impulses, the natives vainly struggled to free themselves, incapable even in this pressing danger of combined and vigorous action; then they mournfully submitted to fate. The only contemporary interpreter of their feelings known to us, the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, bewails the Conquest, but is more struck by the ravages it occasions than by the change of domination it brings about. "And Bishop Odo and Earl William [Fitz-Osbern]," he says, "remained here and wrought castles widely throughout the nation, and oppressed the poor people, and ever after that it greatly grew in evil. May the end be good when G.o.d will."

So much for the material disaster, now for the coming of the foreigner: "And then came to meet him Archbishop Ealdred [of York], and Eadgar child and Earl Eadwine, and Earl Morkere, and all the best men of London, and then, from necessity, submitted when the greatest harm had been done, and it was very imprudent that it was not done earlier, as G.o.d would not better it for our sins."[138]

People with a mind so full of elegiac sentiments fall an easy prey to men who know how to _will_. Before dying William had taken everything, even a part of Wales; he was king of England, and had so completely changed the fortunes of his new country that its inhabitants, so used to invasions, were never again to see rise, from that day to this, the smoke of an enemy's camp.

II.

From the outset William seems to have desired and foreseen it.

Practical, clear-minded, of firm will, imbued with the notion of State, he possessed in the highest degree the qualities his new subjects most lacked. He knew neither doubts nor vain hesitations; he was an optimist, always sure of success: not with the cert.i.tude of the blind who walk confidently to the river, but with the a.s.surance of clear-sighted people, who leave the G.o.ddess Fortune so little to do, it were a miracle if she did less for them. His lucid and persistent will is never at fault. In the most critical moment of the battle a fatal report is circulated that the duke has been killed; he instantly tears off his helmet and shows himself with uncovered face, crying: "I am alive! here I stand, and by G.o.d I shall conquer!"[139]

All his life, he conforms his actions to his theories; having come as the heir of the Anglo-Saxon princes, he behaves as such. He visits his estate, rectifies its boundaries, protects its approaches, and, in spite of the immensity of the work, takes a minute inventory of it.[140]

This inventory is the Domesday, a unique monument, such that no nation in Europe possesses the like. On the coins, he so exactly imitates the type adopted by his predecessors that it is hard to distinguish the pennies of William from those of Edward. Before the end of his reign, he was the master or conqueror of all, and had made his authority felt and accepted by all, even by his brother Bishop Odo, whom he arrested with his own hands, and caused to be imprisoned "as Earl of Kent," he said, with his usual readiness of word, to avoid a quarrel with the Church.

And so it was that, in spite of their terrible sufferings, the vanquished were unable to repress a certain sentiment which predisposed them to a fusion with the victor, namely admiration. Never had they seen energy, power, or knowledge like unto that. The judgment of the Anglo-Saxon chronicler on William may be considered as being the judgment of the nation itself concerning its new masters: "That King William about whom we speak was a very wise man, and very powerful, more dignified and strong than any of his predecessors were. He was mild to the good men who loved G.o.d, and over all measure severe to the men who gainsayed his will.... So also was he a very rigid and cruel man, so that no one durst do anything against his will.... He spared not his own brother named Odo.... Among other things is not to be forgotten the good peace that he made in this land, so that a man who had any confidence in himself might go over his realm with his bosom full of gold unhurt." The land of the Britons, "Brytland" or Wales, was in his power, Scotland likewise; he would have had Ireland besides had he reigned two years longer. It is true he greatly oppressed the people, built castles, and made terrible game-laws: "As greatly did he love the tall deer as if he were their father. He also ordained concerning the hares that they should go free."[141] Even in the manner of presenting grievances we detect that special kind of popularity which attaches itself to the tyranny of great men. The England of the Anglo-Saxons had been defeated, but brilliant destinies were in store for the country; the master was hated but not despised.

These great destinies were realised. The qualities of which William gave the example were rare in England, but common in France; they were those of his race and country, those of his lieutenants; they naturally reappear in many of his successors. These are, as a rule, energetic and headstrong men, who never hesitate, who believe in themselves, are always ready to run all hazards, and to attempt the impossible, with the firm conviction that they will succeed; they are never weary of fighting and taking; the moment never comes when they can enjoy their conquests in peace; in good as in evil they never stop half-way; those who incline to tyranny become, like Stephen, the most atrocious tyrants[142]; those who incline to the manners and customs of chivalry carry them, like Richard Coeur de Lion, as far as possible, and forget that they have a kingdom to rule. The most intelligent become, like Henry II., incomparable statesmen; those who have a taste for art give themselves up to it with such pa.s.sion that they jeopardise, like Henry III., even their crown, and care for nothing but their masons and painters. They are equally ready for sword and word fights, and they offer both to all comers. They constantly risk their lives; out of twelve Norman or Angevin princes six die a violent death.

All their enterprises are conceived on a gigantic scale. They carry war into Scotland, into Ireland, into Wales, into France, into Gascony, later on into the Holy Land and into Spain. The Conqueror was on his way to Paris when he received, by accident, being at Mantes, fifteen leagues from the capital, a wound of which he died. These qualities are in the blood. A Frenchman, Henry of Burgundy, seizes on the county of "Porto"

in 1095, out of which his successors make the kingdom of "Portugal"; a Norman, Robert Guiscard, conquers Sicily, takes Naples, forces his alliance upon the Pope, overawes Venice, and the same year beats the two emperors; his son Bohemond establishes himself as reigning prince in Antioch in 1099, and fighting with great composure and equanimity against Turk and Christian, establishes out of hand a little kingdom which lasted two centuries. They find in England miserable churches; they erect new ones, "of a style unknown till then," writes William of Malmesbury,[143] which count among the grandest ever built. The splendid naves of St. Albans, Westminster, Canterbury, Winchester, York, Salisbury, rise heavenwards; the towers of Ely reach to the skies; the west front of Lincoln, adorned with marvellous carvings, rears itself on the hill above the town; Peterborough opens its wide bays, deep as the portals of French churches; Durham, a heavy and ma.s.sive pile built by knight-bishops, overlooks the valley of the Wear, and seems a divine fortress, a castle erected for G.o.d. The donjons of the conquerors, Rochester, London, Norwich, Lincoln, are enormous, square and thick, so high and so solid that the idea of taking these giant structures could never occur to the native dreamers, who wait "till the end shall be good when G.o.d pleases"!

The masters of the land are ever ready for everything, and find time for everything: if their religious edifices are considered, it seems as though they had cared for nothing else; if we read the accounts of their wars, it appears as if they were ever on their way to military expeditions, and never left the field of battle. Open the innumerable ma.n.u.scripts which contain the monuments of their literature: these works can be meant, it seems, but for men of leisure, who have interminable days to spend in lengthy pastimes; they make their Benoits de Sainte-More give them an account of their origins in chronicles of 43,000 lines. This literature is ample, superabundant, with numberless branches and endless ramifications; they have not even one literature only; they have three: a French, a Latin, and later an English one.

Their matchless strength and their indomitable will further one particular cause: the infusion of French and Latin ideas in the Anglo-Saxon people, and the connection of England with the civilisations of the South. The task was arduous: Augustine, Alfred, Dunstan, kings and saints, had attempted it and failed; the Normans tried and succeeded. They were ever successful.

Powerful means were at their disposal, and they knew how to make the best of them. Firstly, the chiefs of the nation are French; their wives are mostly French too: Stephen, Henry II., John, Henry III., Edward I., Edward II., Richard II., all marry Frenchwomen. The Bohuns (from whom came the Herefords, Ess.e.xes, Northamptons), the Beauchamps (Warwick), the Mowbrays (Nottingham, Norfolk), the BiG.o.ds (Norfolk), the Nevilles (Westmoreland, Warwick), the Montgomerys (Shrewsbury, Pembroke, Arundel), the Beaumonts and the Montforts (Leicester), are Frenchmen.

People of less importance married to English women--"matrimonia quoque c.u.m subditis jungunt"[144]--rear families which for many years remain French.

During a long period, the centre of the thoughts and interests of the kings of England, French by origin, education, manners, and language, is in France. William the Conqueror bequeaths Normandy to his eldest son, and England to his younger. Not one of them is buried at Westminster before 1272; they sleep their last sleep most of them at Caen or Fontevrault[145]; out of the thirty-five years of his reign, Henry II.

spends more than twenty-one in France, and less than fourteen in England.[146] Before his accession Richard Coeur-de-Lion only came to England twice in twenty years. They successively make war on France, not from hatred or scorn, not because they wish to destroy her, but because they wish to be kings of France themselves. They admire and wish to possess her; their ideal, whether moral, literary, administrative, or religious, is above all a French ideal. They are knights, and introduce into England the fas.h.i.+on of tournaments, "conflictus gallici," says Matthew Paris. They wish to have a University, and they copy for Oxford the regulations of Paris. Henry III. quarrels with his barons, and whom does he select for an arbiter but his former enemy, Louis IX., king of France, the victor of Taillebourg? They organise in England a religious hierarchy, so similar to that of France that the prelates of one country receive constantly and without difficulty promotion in the other. John of Poictiers, born in Kent, treasurer of York, becomes bishop of Poictiers and archbishop of Lyons, while still retaining the living of Eynesford in Kent; John of Salisbury, secretary of the archbishop of Canterbury, becomes bishop of Chartres; Ralph de Sarr, born in Thanet, becomes dean of Reims[147]; others are appointed bishops of Palermo, Messina, and Syracuse.

Impetuous as are these princes, ready at every instant to run all risks and play fast and loose, even when, like William I., old and ill, one precious quality of their temper diminishes the danger of their rashness. They undertake, as though for a wager, superhuman tasks, but once undertaken they proceed to the fulfilling of them with a lucid and practical mind. It is this practical bent of their mind, combined with their venturesome disposition, that has made of them so remarkable a race, and enabled them to transform the one over which they had now extended their rule.

Be the question a question of ideas or a question of facts, they behave in the same manner. They perceive the importance both of ideas and of those who wield them, and act accordingly; they negotiate with the Pope, with St. Martin of Tours, even with G.o.d; they promise nothing for nothing; however exalted the power with which they treat, what they agree to must be bargains, Norman bargains.

The bull "Laudabiliter," by which the English Pope Nicholas Breakspeare (Adrian IV.) gives Ireland to Henry II., is a formal bargain; the king buys, the Pope sells; the price is minutely discussed beforehand, and set down in the agreement.[148] But the most remarkable view suggested to them by this practical turn of their mind consisted in the value they chose to set, even at that distant time, on "public opinion," if we may use the expression, and on literature as a means of action.

This was a stroke of genius; William endeavoured, and his successors imitated him, to do for the past what he was doing for the present: to unify. For this, the new dynasty wanted the a.s.sistance of poets, and it called upon them. William had persistently given himself out to be not only the successor, but the rightful heir of Edward the Confessor, and of the native kings. During several centuries the poets who wrote in the French tongue, the Latin chroniclers, the English rhymers, as though obedient to a word of command, blended all the origins together in their books; French, Danes, Saxons, Britons, Trojans even, according to them, formed one sole race; all these men had found in England a common country, and their united glories were the general heritage of posterity. With a persistency which lasted from century to century, they displaced the national point of view, and ended by establis.h.i.+ng, with every one's a.s.sent, the theory that the const.i.tution and unity of a nation are a question not of blood but of place; consanguinity matters little; the important point is to be compatriots. All the inhabitants of the same country are one people: the Saxons of England and the French of England are nothing but Englishmen.

All the heroes who shone in the British Isle are now indiscriminately sung by the poets, who celebrate Brutus, Arthur, Hengist, Horsa, c.n.u.t, Edward, and William in impartial strains. They venerate in the same manner all saints of whatever blood who have won heaven by the practice of virtue on English ground. Here again the king, continuing the wise policy of his ancestors, sets the example. On Easter Day, 1158, Henry II. and his wife Alienor of Aquitaine enter the cathedral of Worcester, wearing their crowns, and present themselves before the tomb of the holy protector of the town. They remove their crowns, place them on his tomb, and swear never to wear them again. The saint was not a French one, but Wulfstan, the last Anglo-Saxon bishop, one who held the see at the time of the Conquest.[149]

The word of command has been given; the clerks know it. Here is a poem of the thirteenth century, on Edward the Confessor; it is composed in the French tongue by a Norman monk of Westminster Abbey, and dedicated to Alienor of Provence, wife of Henry III. In it we read: "In this world there is, we dare to say, neither country, nor kingdom, nor empire where so many good kings and saints have lived as in the isle of the English ... holy martyrs and confessors, many of whom died for G.o.d; others were very strong and brave as Arthur, Edmond, and c.n.u.t."[150]