Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 17.djvu/590

Rh 544 NORMANDY land. a monastic house. The duke s own foundation of St Ste phen s at Caen was among the foremost. In short, during the reign of William Normandy was looked on as an eccle siastical paradise. It is certain that in no part of Europe was law, temporal and ecclesiastical, more strictly enforced. Wars. This time was also a time of wars, during which the borders of the duchy were enlarged. For a short time the friendship with France went on. William repaid the king s help at Val-es-dunes by help in his wars with Geoffrey of Anjou. This led to a long rivalry between Anjou and Xormandy, which largely took the shape of a struggle for the county of Maine, which lay between the two. As early as 1048 William extended his frontier in that direction ; in 1063 he obtained possession of Le Mans and the whole county. Meanwhile he had two wars with France. Henry encouraged Norman rebels, and twice, in 1054 and 1058, he invaded Normandy, each time to suffer defeat. At the time of the invasion of England Normandy was strength ened by the weakness of its neighbours. The crown of France had passed to the minor Philip, and Anjou was divided and torn in pieces by civil disputes. The duchy, under its great duke, was at the very height of its power, prosperity, and renown when the duke of the Normans won himself a higher title. Position The conquest of England by William had no direct effect of Nor- on th e internal condition of Normandy ; but it altogether after the cnan g e d the position of the duchy as a European power. Conquest Save for three short intervals, it never was again a wholly of Eng- distinct power with a prince to itself. So far its position may be said to have been lowered ; but, on the other hand, it became part of a power far greater than the single duchy of Normandy had ever been. For a while England in some sort followed Normandy ; the common sovereign of the two lands could use the strength of England for Nor man purposes. Then, under the Angevin house, Normandy and England alike became parts of one of those motley dominions, like that of Burgundy under the Valois dukes or of Austria in yet later times, in which a crowd of sepa rate states are brought together without any tie but that of a common ruler. The result was that Normandy, after handing on to England its tradition of enmity towards France, itself fell back into its old union Avith France. And it must not be forgotten that Normandy after the Conquest of England was in itself much less strong than Normandy before the Conquest of England. A great part of the goodness, so to speak, of the land had crossed the sea into the conquered kingdom. The rule of King William in his duchy was on the whole less prosperous than that of Duke William had been. His later years were clouded by revolts and occasional defeats. Maine revolted in 1073, and one stage of the revolt is memorable, because William had to strive, not with a rival prince, but with a commonwealth. Le Mans set up the first commune north of the Loire. But city and county were won back, largely by the work of Englishmen, whom the Conqueror, after overthrowing their own freedom, used to put down freedom elsewhere. In 1076 he was defeated in an attempt on Dol by the forces of Britanny and France. The next year followed the revolt of his own son Robert, and a border warfare on the frontier of Mortagne. In 1083 a single castle in Maine, that of Sainte-Susanne, suc cessfully withstood him for three years. In 1087 the old dispute with France about the Vexin again arose, and cost William his life at Mantes. But, though this is a different picture from the uninterrupted success of the earlier part of his reign, there is no reason to think that the general peace and prosperity of the duchy was at all disturbed. The fighting was wholly on the borders, and it must have done much less damage to the country at large than the two French invasions of the earlier period. With the death of the Conqueror the most flourishing Anarchy state in western Europe became the most wretched. after William s successor Robert was incapable of government. William s The land fell back into the same kind of anarchy which had been during William s minority. It was torn in pieces by private wars. More remarkable was the attempt of the city of Rouen to claim the position of a separate commonwealth, as Le Mans had done some years before. Some parts of the duchy were saved from anarchy by dis memberments which transferred them to other rulers. Robert sold the Cotentin to his brother Henry, by whom it was lost and recovered more than once. His other brother, King William of England, in two invasions occupied a large part of the country. Maine revolted again, but the commune of Le Mans was not restored ; independent counts ruled once more. At last in 1097 Robert went with the crusade, and mortgaged the whole duchy to William, who occupied the country and restored some kind of order. He recovered and lost Maine more than once in warfare with its count, Helias. The death of William Rufus in 1100 again separated Normandy, England, and Maine. Robert came back to Normandy, but his misgovernment again raised up enemies against him. Henry invaded Normandy, and by the battle of Tinchebrai in 1106 the kingdom and the duchy were again united. It seems that Henry scrupled to take the title of duke while Robert lived, and he lived a captive in England till a year before the death of Henry himself in 1135. But Henry was none the less the ruler of Normandy, and he made the Normans pledge themselves to the succession of his children. It was now no longer the duke of the Normans who Underthe reigned in England, but the king of the English who Norman reigned in Normandy. England, deeply influenced and changed as she had been by the Norman Conquest, had now, under the English-born Henry, recovered her position as a power. Men at the time looked on Normandy as conquered by England, and saw in Henry s victory on Norman ground the reversal of his father s victory on English ground forty years before. And there was a sense in which this was true, even though Henry s foreign policy was directed far more to Norman than to English objects. England as a power was far greater than Normandy, and it was growing less and less Norman. It was as king of the English that the sovereign of Normandy appeared to the world at large. And under his rule the advantage which an island has over a continental dominion was plainly shown. The two great Norman rulers of the day, Henry of England and Roger of Sicily, each kept his island king dom in perfect peace, and used his continental territory as a battle-ground. Henry s Norman rule was for many years disturbed by the claims of his nephew William, the son of Robert, whose side was taken both by several foreign princes and by a rebellious party in the duchy. Another cause of dispute was found in the affairs of another nephew, Theo bald count of Chartres, son of Henry s sister Adela. Out of these questions several wars arose between Henry and Lewis VI. of France (1109-1137), supported commonly by the successive counts of Flanders, among whom William, the son of Robert, himself appears, as he held that county for a short time before his death (1127-1128). But there were intervals of peace. The treaty of Gisors in 1113 reads almost as if Lewis, in ceding to Normandy the border land of Belleme, ceded with it all rights of superiority over the duchy. Yet in 1120 Henry found it convenient to make his son William, who had in 1115 received the hom age of the Normans as his successor, himself do homage to the French overlord. William died almost directly after wards in the White Ship, and in 1126 Henry procured the assent of his nobles to the succession of his daughter Matilda as lady of England and Normandy. She was