BOOKS.
FREEMAN'S NORMAN CONQUEST.* Tins new volume of Mr. Freeman's gives an account of the actual conquest of England. In the last he told us the story of the great battle in which William won for himself the English Crown. But we were warned then, and may see here at length, that the victory of Senlae did not really give the Conqueror rule over the whole land. He had got rid of his chief rival, and by a solemn coronation and the submission of all the native leaders he had gained for himself a colourable right to govern, but he was far from exercising such a sway as alone could satisfy him. The unity of England was not yet complete, and the hold of Edward and Harold on the North had been far too lax to suit a King whose imperious will required strict obedience throughout his dominions. For the present, William's power was even less than Harold's had been. Harold, at the outset of his reign, when discontent appeared among the Northumbrians, had gone among them and won their allegiance by persuasion, while William could not trust himself in any part of his kingdom without an overwhelming force to keep down the disaffected. It was, too, impossible
The History of Me Norman Conquest of England; its Causes and its Results. By Edward A. Freeman, M.A. Vol IV. The Reign of William the Conqueror. Oxford : Clarendon Frees. 1871.
for him to begin his reign in such a way as to win the confidence of those who hesitated to obey him. His first necessity was to find rewards for those who had helped him thus far, and on whom he had to rely for increasing his power,— the Norman nobles and the motley host of adventurers that he had led to victory. The first acts of the new King were acts of confiscation. Then came three years of local warfare, in the course of which William's ruthless energy spread his sway over all England. Even after this frequent revolts bore witness to the desperate hatred of the people to their new lords, and it was not until nearly ten years after the invasion that England lay quiet in the hands of her foreign master.
Naturally the narrative of these scattered and hopeless revolts cannot vie in attractiveness with the story of the strenuous reign of Harold; of his glorious victory at Stamford Bridge, of his scarcely less glorious defeat and tragic death at Battle ; yet this too has its deep interest for those who care to study in detail the method and effects of the Conquest, which more than any other event in English history has changed the conditions and character of our people. Moreover, to the student this volume is even more valuable than the last. The history of the campaign of 1066 has been told by others than Mr. Freeman with spirit and general truth. The additions and corrections which he could make were in matters of detail. But with regard to the settlement of England after the Conquest, even the main lines of the history have been obscured by conflicting theories. The two best known writers, Sir F. Palgrave and M. Augustin Thierry, differ wholly in their accounts :— " If we look at one picture [says Mr. Freeman], we may be led to think that the rights of Englishmen were as strictly regarded, that the laws of England were as strictly administered, during the reign of William as they could have been during the reign of a native King. If we look at another picture, we may be led to think that all right and law was trampled under foot, and that the rule of William was a rule of simple brigandage. Neither of these pictures represents the real truth of the case."
If we bad to choose between these extreme views, we should say that the general impression left by Thierry is nearer the truth than that left by Sir F. Palgrave. The latter discovered that the formal changes in law and custom introduced by the Conquest had been grossly exaggerated, and it is one of his many services to history that he cleared away on this point much venerable rubbish. Unfortunately he was not content with this, and he erred when he went on to make light of the changes which the Conquest wrought in the position of the native English. Mr. Freeman shows from the records of the great Survey how many Englishmen were turned out of their lands to make room for foreigners ; how many more lost rank, and were compelled to hold of foreign lords what had been freely theirs. The " waste" houses which Domesday notes in almost every town, the utter desolation of the Northern counties, bore witness to the rule of a strange tyrant, whose only trust was in his sword and in the terror inspired by his power and ruthless- ness. It is, then, impossible to accept Sir F. Palgrave's rose- coloured view of the Conquest, and equally impossible to be satis- fied with a work so full of exaggeration and mistakes as Thierry's, especially as in dealing with a later period it becomes utterly misleading.
Thus the work that Mr. Freeman has done was needed, and he has done it with the thoroughness which he has led us to expect from him. His mastery of his materials is indeed astonishing. One may differ from his conclusions, but it would be difficult indeed to convict him of mistakes or omissions. The care with which he has worked is especially evident in his treatment of Domesday. By studying the personal history of the landowners there men- tioned, he has thrown a flood of new light on the way in which the old proprietors were dispossessed or were compelled to enter into fresh relations with their conquerors. It would require a longer quotation than we can give to show fairly Mr. Freeman's method of dealing with this subject, but the following passage may give some imperfect notion of it :—
"In many other shires we find a large class of King's Thegns, bearing English names and holding small estates which themselves or their fathers had held in the time of King Edward. A long list of such is found in the neigbonring district of Wiltshire. But in Berkshire the list is indeed short. One Englishman alone holds a single hide of land which he had himself held under King Ead ward. This scan, Ead ward by name, is most likely the same who occurs as the predecessor of several Norman owners, a case no doubt where the Conqueror's clemency had allowed the former owner of a great estate to keep some small
portion for his mere maintenance A few others occur who held land which in Eadward's days had belonged to other Englishmen, and of which it is mostly impossible to say whether it had passed by con- fiscation, by purchase, or by inheritance Still more to be noticed, as illustrating the boasted clemency of William, are the cases in which a string of women appear as keeping, under the title of alms from King William, the lands which they had held in fall property under King Eadward."
There is one point in which Mr. Freeman's inferences from Domesday seem to us very doubtful. Where other means of information are wanting, he regards the number of waste houses in a town as evidence how far it resisted William. Exeter, with its vigorous opposition to the Conqueror and its comparatively small loss, shows that this is not a safe test. Here, as often elsewhere, Mr. Freeman, we think, credits William with too distinct and uniform a policy, and attributes too much to his personal will. No doubt he was crafty, far-seeing, tenacious, but many of his acts bear the stamp more of passion than of policy.. His cruelty at Alencon showed how far anger could carry him, and we cannot doubt that his ravaging of Northumbria was due to passionate vindictiveness. If really adopted considerately, as Mr. Freeman's phrase of "merciless policy" implies, the plan does little credit to William's resources as a ruler. The poorest politi- cian would see that it was a losing game to turn a fair province. into a waste wilderness.
Again, while William kept his armies in better discipline than other generals of the time, there must have been a vast amount of harrying and destruction which he did not command. The burning of the houses by Westminster Abbey on the day of his. coronation must have been only the first of many such acts of ravage perpetrated by his rude soldiery against his will. If we- do not bear this constantly in mind, we are likely to underrate the suffering caused by the Conquest ; to fancy that William's sternness did as much good (by enforcing the law) as harm to his English subjects. It may have done so in the later years of his. reign, but for a long time the people must have suffered as much from rampant lawlessness as from legalized oppression. Mr.. Freeman is of course fully aware of this, and insists on it at times, but his narrative is too generally coloured by the opposite view.
The period of the Conquest was almost as eventful to the Church of England as to the State. The energy with which church building was carried on—so great as to have left us no important specimens of earlier date–was but an index of a mighty movement that was stirring up the whole Church. The removal of bishops' sees into the larger towns, the endeavour to- prevent marriage among the clergy, the enforcement of stricter rules upon monks, showed that the Church was striving to make itself more efficient, and we may add, more powerful. Of course the impulse did not come from William alone, or even chiefly. Rome,. where Hildebrand was supreme equally as Archdeacon and as Pope, was the centre of the great wave of religious feeling which was ro11- ing over Europe. But it made no little difference to England that her new King was linked with the reforming party ; and to Wil- liam was mainly due one of the most characteristic changes of the time, the separation of the lay and clerical Courts. All ecclesias- tical causes were now to be judged by the bishop according to the Canons, not as hitherto by the hundred court and according to common law. Mr. Freeman brings out very clearly this and other changes in his valuable chapter on the "Ecclesias- tical Settlement of England."
It is perhaps ungracious, while so many points of interest remain. untouched, to devote the rest of our space to complaint, but we can- not help noticing Mr. Freeman's excessive pleasure in pointing out blunders in other writers. This is evidently the form which the instinct of sport takes in him. In his notice of the wasting of the New Forest he tells us how "what had once been neces- sary warfare with savage enemies, changed into a mere sport, in which pleasure is sought in the wanton infliction of suffering and death." Similar but milder language might describe the change which has come upon Mr. Freeman's mind with regard to the objects of his chase. No doubt "it might often be a duty" to expose the mistakes of historians whose reputation was likely to strengthen old errors or introduce new ones. It was needful to counteract the fascination of Thierry by exposing his blunders, though we could wish that those had been omitted which were corrected in the last revision of the work. But it is the sports- man who holds up to us in triumph such a mistake as this :— " Duke Robert Wiscard, who by writers in distant lands has been strangely mistaken for an English king." A note gives the necessary information that this bag was made on the moors of "the Polish historian Dlugoss."
We fear we are infected, for we cannot resist the temptation of noting a mistake which would have pleased Mr. Freeman had he found it in one of his pet objects of aversion. We read on p. 125, "The course taken, from Dieppe to Winchelsea, was longer than the course of the great fleet from the mouth of the Dive to
Pevensey." As any one may see in a moment, the first-mentioned passage is much the shorter, and since the fleet did not sail from the Dive, but from the Somme, it is evident that Mr. Freeman has been guilty of a slip of the pen.
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