Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/308

Rh 292 ENGLAND [HISTORY. Revolt of Here- ward. Wil liam s earl doms. Relations with Scotland. Revolt of tho earls. Execu tion of Wal- theof. revolt under Here ward. That inaccessible district can never have fully submitted ; still the warfare there was a new and distinct outbreak, and not a continuation of the earlier warfare at Exeter, York, and Chester. The abbey of Ely was the centre of resistance, and, in a country which so often formed the last shelter of defeated parties, it was defended for about a year. Earl Eadwine was slain on his way to join the insurgents ; Morkere was in the island at the time of its surrender, and was condemned to a life-long imprisonment. Hereward alone, with a few valiant followers, escaped by sea. He appears to have been afterwards reconciled to William, and even to have served him in his foreign wars. The manner of his death is uncertain. The war at Ely was the last patriotic warfare on the part of the English against William. He was now undis puted master of England ; the nation had learned that the time for national resistance was past, and that local revolts could avail nothing. On the Welsh border he established the great earldoms of Chester, Shrewsbury, and Hereford, whose holders largely extended the power of the English kingdom at the expense of the Britons. Northumberland was entrusted to the care of a succession of earls, first English, then Norman. But on this side the frontiers of the kingdom were not at this time enlarged. But from the very beginning of William s conquest the northern frontier was a source of the deepest anxiety. The banished English, and specially the royal family, found shelter at the court of Malcolm of Scotland, who married Margaret, the sister of Eadgar. Under cover of asserting their rights, Malcolm cruelly ravaged northern England. But in 1072 William himself entered Scotland and received the homage of Malcolm at Abernethy. He had thus succeeded to the empire, as well as to the immediate kingdom, of his West-Saxon predecessors. In the next year he employed English troops on the continent in winning back the revolted county of Maine. In 1074 he could afford to admit Eadgar, the rival king of a moment, to his favour. A revolt which took place in 1075 only showed how firmly William s power was established, and how little disposition there was on the part of the English to rise against him. Two of his own earls rose against him. One, Ralph earl of Norfolk, was an Englishman by birth; but as he came over with William and served with him at Senlac, he must have been banished under Eadward or Harold. His fellow rebel, Roger earl of Hereford, was the son of William s special friend William Fitz-Osbern. These two revolted : but they had to trust mainly to the help of Breton mercenaries or adventurers : Normans and English were leagued against them. The revolt was crushed ; Ralph escaped, Roger, like Morkere, spent the rest of his days in prison. But their fall brought down with them the last Englishman who held a secular post of the first rank under William. This was Waltheof, formerly the leader of the English at York, but who had submitted again and had been received to the king s highest favour. Besides his former earldoms of Northampton and Huntingdon, he had received the earldom of Northumber land. That name now means so much of Bernicia as had not passed to the Scottish kings; that is, the present county so-called. Waltheof seems to have listened to the plans of his brother earls ; but he took no part in their revolt, and he even revealed the conspiracy to William. Yet he was the only one of the three whose life was taken. After a long imprisonment, he was on May 31, 1076, beheaded at Winchester. At no other time in William s long reign did he send a political enemy to the scaffold ; and Waltheof could hardly be called a political enemy. The Norman courtiers and his own Norman wife, the king s niece Judith, seem to have called for his blood. By the English he was looked on as a saint and martyr. The last eleven years of William s reign are far richer in continental than in English events. He was engaged iu wars with his French and Breton neighbours, and with his rebellious eldest son Robert. In England a Danish invasion in 1075, in concert with the revolt of the earls, led to a sack of York, and to nothing further. In 1080 Walcher, Muni bishop of Durham and earl of Northumberland, was killed J?1 S M in a popular tumult. A revolt it could hardly be called ; *| but it was cruelly punished by the king s brother Bishop Odo. After this we do not hear of so much as a tumult. In 1086 an invasion from Denmark was again threatened by the Danish king Cnut. His enterprise was stopped by his death by the hands of his own subjects, which won him, somewhat strangely, the honours of martyrdom and the title of a saint. The next year, 1087, William himself died of Deal I an accidental hurt received while burning the town of wi ll| Mantes in warfare with his neighbour and lord, Philip king of the French. The Conqueror was now gone, but the tale of the Con- Accel quest is not quite over. One act more of the drama / w ] is still to be told before we stop to consider the nature, Kufu 1 the cause, and the results, of this wonderful revolution. Revel By the dying will of William, Normandy passed to his the 1 eldest son Robert ; England he wished to be the portion 11ian! of his second son William. William, surnamed the Red, [ was acknowledged and crowned without opposition. In E the next year (1088) almost the whole of the Norman nobles rebelled on behalf of Robert. The king appealed to his English subjects. By their valour, seconded by the loyalty of the bishops, the Norman revolt was put down, and the crown of the Red King was made safe. This was the last time that Normans and English, as such, met in arms on English soil. The work of the Conquest had been so thoroughly done that it could bear in a certain sense to be undone. The conquest made by the Norman had been so thorough that it was not disturbed even by English victories over Normans. Within twenty-two years after William s landing, his son, the second Norman king, owed his crown to the support of the native English against his own country men. Signs of distinction and jealousy between the two races may be discerned for some time longer ; but the last open warfare between them was when the English defended the throne of William Rufus against his Norman rebels. Such is a short sketch of the leading events of the period Char, which we may call the period of the Norman Conquest. f thl Looking at it simply as an event, it is most important to bear in mind its gradual nature. Nothing can be further from the truth than the notion that England passed at once into the hands of the Normans after a single battle. Still there is a sense in which it is not untrue to say that England was conquered in a single battle. After the fall of Harold, at all events after the northern earls withdrew their forces from the service of Eadgar, the conquest of England was only a question of time, Just as in the days of jEthelred, there was no acknowledged leader ; and throughout that age, under a worthy leader, the English people could do everything ; without such an one, they could do nothing. There was no man who could gather the whole force of the nation around him. There was no man who could stand up as William s rival either in military or in political skill. Hence, after the one great battle, there was no common effort. The West resisted valiantly ; the North resisted valiantly ; but the resistance of each was isolated without any intelligent concert. Help came from Denmark ; but it was no avail when there was no generalship, no common plan, and when the Danish leaders were actually bribed by William. In all these ways the strength of the