Earldoms condition of England was not unlike that of France under Charles the Bald. The great earls, or ealdormen of provinces, were forming a separate order in the State inimical alike to the supremacy of the king and the liberty of their fellow subjects. Cnut The great divided the Kingdom into four great Earldoms or Duchies; under and the same policy was continued by Edward the Confessor, Cnut and in whose reign the whole land seems to have been divided among five Earls, three of them being Earl Godwin and his sons Harold and Tostig. The power and statesmanship of William the Norman prevented the threatened disintegration of the kingdom. Edward the Disputed succession to the Crown. CHAPTER II. THE NORMAN CONQUEST. ON the death of Edward the Confessor (January 5, 1066), the succession to the Crown was disputed. The heir of the house of Cerdic, Edgar the Atheling, grand-nephew of the late king, was not only of tender age, but, as his after-life showed, of feeble character and mediocre intellect. The political exigencies of the Kingdom imperatively demanded an able and resolute man at its head. King Edward on his death-bed had recommended as Earl Harold his successor his brother-in-law, Earl Harold. The earl was the most able general and statesman of the time, already exercising a quasi-Royal authority through his own personal influence and the vast possessions of the Godwin family, and, though lacking the blood of Cerdic in his veins, was allied to the English Royal house by affinity, and by blood to the Danish house which had so lately occupied the throne.1 The Witan, who were at this time assembled in their ordinary mid-winter session, approving of Edward's recommendation, elected Earl Harold King of the English, and he was forthwith anointed and crowned by Aldred, Archbishop of York.2 elected and crowned king. William, Duke of But there was another competitor for the Crown in the person of William, Duke of Normandy, who was cousin to Edward the Confessor through that king's mother, Emma of Normandy, and now claimed the throne under an alleged earlier appointment of his late kinsman. If such appointment or promise had indeed been made, which seems probable, it was superseded by the last expression of King Edward's wishes. Under any circumstance it could merely amount to a recommendation to the Witan. A King of the English had never possessed a Constitutional right to bequeath his Kingdom like a private estate. The right of ship elective. electing a king resided in the Witan alone, acting on behalf of the whole nation. Their choice, it is true, had hitherto, when The king 1 Harold's mother, Gytha, was a sister of Ulf Jarl and first cousin once removed of King Cnut.-Thorpe's Lappenberg, Ang. Sax., pp. 280, 370. 2 Flor. Wigorn., an. 1066. 'Quo [Eadwardo] tumulato, Subregulus Heraldus, Godwini Ducis filius, quem Rex ante suam decessionem regni successorem elegerat, a totius Angliae primatibus ad regale culmen electus, die eodem ab Aldredo Eboracensi Archiepiscopo in Regem est honorificè consecratus." 3 See Freeman, Norm. Conq., ii. 296–304. freely exercised, been restricted to the members of the Royal house; but failing an eligible descendant of Cerdic, the choice. of the nation was unlimited. William, however, professed to be merely asserting his legal The Conright. Having secured the moral and religious support of the quest. Papal benediction, which the Roman See, in its anxiety to reduce the independence of the National English Church, was most ready to bestow, and leading a large army of Normans and other | foreigners, all inured to warfare and eager for booty, William landed in England to decide by the fate of arms between himself and the "usurper Harold. At the decisive battle of Senlac 14 Oct. 1066. the Normans were victorious, Harold, his brothers, and the flower of English thegnhood being left dead on the field. Although on the news of Harold's death, the Londoners at once chose Edgar Atheling for king, disunion and the lack of effective organisation prevented any successful resistance to the onward march of the invaders. William had as yet conquered but a William very small portion of the Kingdom, but such was the panic elected and of the nation, that he was elected king by the Witan, and crowned King of the at Westminster on Christmas Day, 1066, by the same Archbishop English. Aldred who had crowned the unfortunate Harold. In conformity with his original pretensions, he assumed the title of "King of the English," and entered into the usual compact with the nation in the ancient Coronation oath. crowned cally a Con William evidently began with the intention of reigning as the Theoreti appointed heir of Edward and the lawful successor of the English stitutional kings. In that character he was obliged to respect the laws and king. customs of the Kingdom. Theoretically he continued to govern as a Constitutional king, though practically in defiance of everything but his own wishes. The continuity of the English Con- Continuity stitution was not broken by the Norman Conquest. That event of the Conought to be regarded not as a fresh starting-point, but as great turning-point" in the history of the English nation. laws, with a few changes in detail, remained the same; the language of public documents remained the same." The powers of King and Witan remained constitutionally the same under William as under Edgar.2 stitution. race. The infusion of Norman blood has been considered extensive The Norman enough to count as one of the four chief elements of the present English nation; but it was still only an infusion. In the course of little more than a century it became absorbed, as the smaller Celtic and larger Danish elements had been absorbed previously, in the predominant English nationality. The fusion was doubtless facilitated by the common Teutonic descent of the two 1 Will. Pictav., Gesta Willelmi (ed. Maseres), p. 145; Flor. Wigorn., ann. 1066. 2 See Freeman Norm. Conq., 1. 72. Effects of the Feudalism. peoples.1 The Normans were in fact Northmen, who, instead of coming direct from Scandinavia, had sojourned for a century and a half in a French home. While retaining much of the Norse character, they had acquired, during the interval, the language and civilisation of the Romanised Gauls and Franks, developing in the process a brilliant nationality distinct alike from the nationality of their origin and of their new home. The conquerors, moreover, were by no means utter strangers to the people whom they subdued. The vicinity of so remarkable a nation as the Normans had early begun to produce an influence upon the public mind of England, and had to some extent prepared the way for their ultimate supremacy. "Before the Conquest, English princes received their education in Normandy. English sees and English estates were bestowed on Normans. The French of Normandy was familiarly spoken in the palace of Westminster. The court of Rouen seems to have been to the court of Edward the Confessor what the court of Versailles long afterwards was to the court of Charles the Second."2 The immediate changes which the Conquest introduced were undoubtedly great, but they were practical rather than formal. The power of the Crown was vastly increased. As the government became more centralised, local self-government, the essential characteristic of our Teutonic constitution, was for a time depressed; but only to arise again later on, when the nobles and people became united against the tyranny of the Crown. The social aspect of England was enormously changed. The old dynasty had been supplanted by an alien family. The old aristocracy was superseded by a new nobility. The old offices received new names-the ealdorman, or earl, became the comes, the sheriff the vice-comes; and with the new names and alien officials, the old laws, though retained, and even promulgated anew, must have been considerably modified in practical administration.1 The most important result of the Conquest, in its Constitutional aspect, was the assimilation of all the institutions of the country, from the highest to the lowest, to the feudal type. This was a consequence of the immense confiscations of landed estates, which, occurring not all at once, but from time to time, ultimately placed King William in the position 1 Supra, p. 2. 2 Macaulay, Hist. Eng., i. 12 [ed. 1861]. 3 [C. Hannis Taylor, Origin of Engl. Const., ii, cap. i., entitled "The Norman Duchy and its Dukes," and Sir Francis Palgrave's Hist. of Normandy and England, vol. ii., for a sketch of the Great Norman Duchy.-ED.] 4 Freeman, Norm. Conq., i. 4. [Cf. Gneist, Hist. Engl. Const., cap. viii., entitled Property Bases of the Norman Feudal State," and the rich citations of the sources and literature of the period given in the notes to PP. 95, 96.-ED.] of supreme landowner, and established the Feudal System in England.1 establish The steps by which this great change was brought about, Its gradual and the nature of the system of tenure thus established, demand ment. some consideration. lands. At first the Conqueror,2 with an appearance of strict legality, appropriated merely the extensive Royal domains—the folkland, now finally changed into terra regis-and the large forfeited estates of the Godwin family and of all those who had, or were suspected of having, taken up arms against him. Reserving to himself as the demesne of the Crown more than 1400 large manors scattered over various counties, he divided the rest among his companions in arms. Although William affected to regard all Englishmen as more or less tainted with treason and liable to forfeiture of their estates, inasmuch as they had either fought against him or failed to range themselves on his side, yet the bulk of the landowners were at first suffered to retain their possessions. But there is reason to believe that this was The English subject to the condition of accepting a re-grant from the Con- redeem their queror; the more important personages, in return for their adhesion, receiving back their estates as a free gift, the smaller owners on payment of a money consideration. By this means William procured a peaceable acknowledgment of his title over extensive districts into which his arms had not yet penetrated. During the Conqueror's first absence from England a reaction set in after the panic; and the oppression and insolence of the Normans, Odo of Bayeux and William FitzOsbern, who had been left in charge of the Kingdom as justices regent, excited the natives to rebel. One rising was no sooner suppressed than others Insurrections, broke out in different parts of the Kingdom, and the first four followed by years of his reign were occupied by William in acquiring the extensive actual sovereignty of his new dominions. Each insurrection, confiscation. as it occurred, was followed by a confiscation of the estates of those who in the eye of the law were rebels, however patriotic and morally justifiable may have been the motives by which ["Gulielmus i. conquestor dicitur, qui Angliam conquisivit, i.e., acquisivit (acquired by purchase) non quod subigit." Spelman, Glossary. -ED.] " 2 It is perhaps scarcely necessary to remark that the term Conqueror did not in the language of the time of which we are treating imply subjugation, but signified merely one who " had sought and obtained his right." In reality, however, the modern meaning of the term more accurately describes William's practical position, which was, as he himself once expressed it," King by the edge of the sword." 3 The contemporary Peterborough chronicler speaks of all who did homage to William at or soon after his coronation, as buying their land; "And menn guldon him gyld and gislas sealdon, and syddan heora land bohtan" (A.-Sax. Chron., 1066). The Inquisitio Eliensis also confirms this view : Hoc totum tripliciter; scilicet tempore Regis Eaduardi, et quando Rex Willelmus dedit ; et quomodo sit modo.” " |