BY EDWARD A. FREEMAN D.C.L., LL.D. REGIUS PROFESSOR OF MODERN HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN’S SQUARE, LONDON 1913 COPYRIGHT First Edition printed March 1888. Reprinted July 1888, 1890, 1894, 1898, 1903, 1907, 1913...

This small volume, written as the first of a series, is meant to fill quite another place from the Short History of the Norman Conquest , by the same author.  That was a narrative of events reaching over a considerable time.  This is the portrait of a man in his personal character, a man whose life takes up only a part of the time treated of in the other work.  We have now to look on William as one who, though stranger and conqueror, is yet worthily entitled to a place on the list of English sta

The history of England, like the land and its people, has been specially insular, and yet no land has undergone deeper influences from without.  No land has owed more than England to the personal action of men not of native birth.  Britain was truly called another world, in opposition to the world of the European mainland, the world of Rome.  In every age the history of Britain is the history of an island, of an island great enough to form a world of itself.  In speaking of Celts or Teutons in B

If William’s early reign in Normandy was his time of schooling for his later reign in England, his school was a stern one, and his schooling began early.  His nominal reign began at the age of seven years, and his personal influence on events began long before he had reached the usual years of discretion.  And the events of his minority might well harden him, while they could not corrupt him in the way in which so many princes have been corrupted.  His whole position, political and personal, cou

While William was strengthening himself in Normandy, Norman influence in England had risen to its full height.  The king was surrounded by foreign favourites.  The only foreign earl was his nephew Ralph of Mentes, the son of his sister Godgifu.  But three chief bishoprics were held by Normans, Robert of Canterbury, William of London, and Ulf of Dorchester.  William bears a good character, and won the esteem of Englishmen; but the unlearned Ulf is emphatically said to have done “nought bishoplike

If William came back from England looking forward to a future crown, the thought might even then flash across his mind that he was not likely to win that crown without fighting for it.  As yet his business was still to fight for the duchy of Normandy.  But he had now to fight, not to win his duchy, but only to keep it.  For five years he had to strive both against rebellious subjects and against invading enemies, among whom King Henry of Paris is again the foremost.  Whatever motives had led the

The lord of Normandy and Maine could now stop and reckon his chances of becoming lord of England also.  While our authorities enable us to put together a fairly full account of both Norman and English events, they throw no light on the way in which men in either land looked at events in the other.  Yet we might give much to know what William and Harold at this time thought of one another.  Nothing had as yet happened to make the two great rivals either national or personal enemies.  England and

If the time that has been suggested was the real time of Harold’s oath to William, its fulfilment became a practical question in little more than a year.  How the year 1065 passed in Normandy we have no record; in England its later months saw the revolt of Northumberland against Harold’s brother Tostig, and the reconciliation which Harold made between the revolters and the king to the damage of his brother’s interests.  Then came Edward’s sickness, of which he died on January 5, 1066.  He had on

The statesmanship of William had triumphed.  The people of England had chosen their king, and a large part of the world had been won over by the arts of a foreign prince to believe that it was a righteous and holy work to set him on the throne to which the English people had chosen the foremost man among themselves.  No diplomatic success was ever more thorough.  Unluckily we know nothing of the state of feeling in England while William was plotting and pleading beyond the sea.  Nor do we know h

The coronation of William had its effect in a moment.  It made him really king over part of England; it put him into a new position with regard to the rest.  As soon as there was a king, men flocked to swear oaths to him and become his men.  They came from shires where he had no real authority.  It was most likely now, rather than at Berkhampstead, that Edwin and Morkere at last made up their minds to acknowledge some king.  They became William’s men and received again their lands and earldoms a

England was now fully conquered, and William could for a moment sit down quietly to the rule of the kingdom that he had won.  The time that immediately followed is spoken of as a time of comparative quiet, and of less oppression than the times either before or after.  Before and after, warfare, on one side of the sea or the other, was the main business.  Hitherto William has been winning his kingdom in arms.  Afterwards he was more constantly called away to his foreign dominions, and his absence

The years which saw the settlement of England, though not years of constant fighting like the two years between the march to Exeter and the fall of Chester, were not years of perfect peace.  William had to withstand foes on both sides of the sea, to withstand foes in his own household, to undergo his first defeat, to receive his first wound in personal conflict.  Nothing shook his firm hold either on duchy or kingdom; but in his later years his good luck forsook him.  And men did not fail to con

Of two events of these last years of the Conqueror’s reign, events of very different degrees of importance, we have already spoken.  The Welsh expedition of William was the only recorded fighting on British ground, and that lay without the bounds of the kingdom of England.  William now made Normandy his chief dwelling-place, but he was constantly called over to England.  The Welsh campaign proves his presence in England in 1081; he was again in England in 1082, but he went back to Normandy betwe