Page:The reign of William Rufus and the accession of Henry the First.djvu/345

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Duke and King. What personal share Roger took in the struggle is not recorded; but some at least of his monks, like the monks of Ely in the days of Hereward, welcomed the small body of followers who still clave to Henry, and at whose head he now took up his last position of defence in the island sanctuary.

Here Henry was besieged by his two brothers, Duke and King. Yet we hear of nothing which can in strictness be called a siege. The Mount stands in the mouth of a bay within a bay. At high water it is strictly an island; at low water it is surrounded by a vast wilderness of sand—those treacherous sands from which thirty years before Harold had rescued the soldiers of the elder William, and which stretch back as far as the rocks of Cancale on the Breton shore. In this sense the bay of Saint Michael may be counted to stretch from Cancale to the opposite point on the Norman coast, where the land begins to bend inwards to form the narrower bay. This last may be counted to stretch from the mouth of the border stream of Coesnon below Pontorson to Genetz lying on the coast nearly due west from Avranches. The Mount itself and its satellite the smaller rock of Tombelaine lie nearly in a straight line between these two points. Alternately inaccessible by land and by water, accessible by land at any time only by certain known routes at different points, the Mount would seem to be incapable of direct attack by any weapons known in the eleventh century. On the other hand, it would be easy to cut it off from all communication with the outer world by the occupation of the needful points onsuccessit Rogerius Cadomensis, non electione monachorum, sed vi terrenæ potestatis."]