Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/287

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these was the lord of Wigmore, late the rebel of Worcester, Ralph of Mortemer. Old Walter Giffard too, now Earl of Buckingham in England, had English interests far too precious to allow him to oppose his island sovereign. He held the stronghold of Longueville—the north-eastern Longueville by the Scie, the stream which, small as it is, pours its waters independently into the Channel between Dieppe and Saint Valery-in-Caux. There, from a bottom fenced in by hills on every side, the village, the church where the hand of the modern destroyer has spared only a few fragments of the days of Norman greatness, the priory which has been utterly swept away, all looked up to a hill on the right bank of the stream which art had changed into a stronghold worthy to rank alongside of Arques and Gisors. Girt about with a deep ditch, on the more exposed southern side with a double ditch, the hill was crowned by a shell-keep which still remains, though patched and shattered, and a donjon which has been wholly swept away. In this fortress the aged warrior of Arques and Senlac received, like so many of his neighbours, the troops which William of England had sent to bring the Norman duchy under his power.

The domains of all these lords lay in the lands on the right bank of the Seine, the oldest, but, as I have often remarked, not the truest Normandy. But the Red King also won a valuable ally in quite another part of the duchy. This was Ralph of Conches or of Toesny, with whom we are now most concerned as the husband of the warlike Isabel of Montfort, and, in that character rather than in any other, the enemy of the Countess Heloise and of her husband Count William of Evreux. The rival lords were in fact half-brothers. The old