elected Upon his death (1053) the earldom of the West Saxons passed to his son Harold, who for twelve years stood forth as the real master of the realm. When the death of the childless Eadward had removed the last obstacle from his path, the mighty Harold son of Godwine was elected by the witan to the vacant throne. king. But it was impossible even for Harold to bind together the broken power of the kingdom with the great earldoms of Mercia and Northumbria in the hands of his two jealous rivals, Eadwine and Morkere, whose treacherous policy really opened the way to the Norman conquest. With the fall of Harold and with the triumph of William the royal power passed into the hands of one of the wisest and sternest of statesmen. By his inflexible policy the tendency to disrup- National tion was checked, the four great earldoms were abolished, tion comand a real national unity at last grew up as the old provincial pleted jealousies were gradually crushed out beneath the yoke of the Norman foreign kings. Under the heel of the stranger the English nation finally awoke to a full sense of its oneness. itself than at breaking up England to win a mere fief in it." Green, Hist. Eng. People, vol. i. p. 105; Stubbs, Const. Hist., vol. i. pp. 202, 203. Mr. Freeman opposes this view (see Norm. Conq., vol. ii. p. 32) as to the tendency to separation. 1 "But the policy of Leofric, followed out by the lukewarm patriotism of Edwin and Morcar, opened the way to the Norman conquest by disabling the right arm of Harold."- Stubbs, 2 "When Harold, imitating the Ca- consolida through the conquest. BOOK II. THE NORMAN CONQUEST. The king dom of the West Franks. the empire the Great. CHAPTER I. THE NORMAN DUCHY AND ITS DUKES. I. THE imperial realm which Charles the Great had built up, and whose division he had more than once in contemplation, passed unbroken at his death into the nerveless hands of Lewis the Pious, the only son who survived him. During the irresolute reign of Lewis the dismemberment of the empire really began; but it was not until the third year after his death that the work of partition was finally accomplished. The death of Lewis in 840 was the signal for the final struggle between his three sons, Lothar, Lewis, and Charles. Lothar at once assumed the imperial title, and Lewis and Partition of Charles combined against him. The war which ensued was of Charles terminated in 843 by the famous Treaty of Verdun,1 by whose terms the empire was divided into three kingdoms, the eastern, the western, and a narrow debatable land between the two, known as Lotharingia. In the partition Charles received all of Gaul west of the Scheldt, the Meuse, the Saone, and Rhone, an area of territory which roughly corresponds in geographical extent with that now embraced Inroads of within the limits of modern France.2 The kingdom of the West Franks which thus passed to Charles, afterwards called the Bald, had been for a long time subject to the ravages of Scandinavian pirates, who had dared, even in the days of the great Charles himself, to scourge the coasts of the empire. As the awe inspired by his great name passed away, and as the divided realm grew more and more incapable of united the North men. 38. 1 Sime, Hist. of Germany, pp. 37, 2 See G. W. Kitchin's article on France, Enc. Brit., 9th ed. vol. ix. p. 534. wark invader. resistance, the inroads of the Northmen grew more serious and more frequent. As early as 841 Rouen had fallen into the hands of the pirates, and thus the whole Seine valley as far up as Paris was laid open to their assaults. In 861 Charles the Bald invested a brave adventurer, Robert the Strong, with a large district of country between Paris and the sea, which was intended to stand as the bulwark of Gaul The bulagainst the invader.1 Of this march or border territory Paris War of Gaul became the heart, and the descendants of Robert, as dukes against the of the French, grew famous as its defenders. In the terrible siege which the pirates in 885-886 laid to Paris, Odo (or Eudes), the son of Robert, maintained such a heroic and successful defence that, upon the deposition of Charles the Fat in 887, he was elected king of the French,-"Rex Francorum."2 With this event began that prolonged strug- Hundred gle between the descendants of Robert at Paris and the de- years' struggle bescendants of Charles at Laôn, which, at the end of a hun- tween Paris dred years, terminated in the final overthrow of the Caroling kings. Through the results of that struggle the Duke of the French grew into a king, and his duchy into a kingdom. 3 and Laôn. ish settle 2. Early in the tenth century, while the great struggle be- The Dantween Paris and Laôn was still in its infancy, the inroads of ment at the Northmen passed from a stage of mere piratical incur- Rouen, sion to one of conquest and settlement. But of the many Scandinavian colonies which were then planted in Gaul, one only was destined to preserve a distinctive character, and to leave its impress upon the history of Europe. This was the planted by Danish colony planted in 911 by Rolf or Rollo at Rouen.4 Rolf in 911 At this moment, when the history of Rolf clearly emerges from the legends which surround it, Duke Robert of Paris. stands as the vassal of Charles the Simple, who then repre 1 "At last a new power was formed (861), chiefly with the object of defend ing Gaul from their attack. A large district was granted in fief by Charles the Bald to Robert the Strong, as a march or border territory, to be defended against the invading Northmen and the rebellious Breton." Freeman, Norm. Cong., vol. i. p. 106. 2 Ibid., p. 106. For the history of this period of struggle, see Sir Francis Palgrave's 4 "This settlement, the kernel of the Origin of the Norman duchy. sented the royal house at Laôn. It was with King Charles that Rolf made the Peace of Clair-on-Epte in 912; and it was from King Charles that Rolf received the grant of the district of country on both sides of the Seine which he held already by the sword.1 Rolf was admitted to baptism together with his followers; and he became the vassal of King Charles, whose natural daughter was given him in marriage. Thus the history of the Norman duchy begins. The original grant to Rolf did not embrace, however, all of the later Normandy. The Teutonic district of Bayeux 2 was not won until a few years before Rolf's death; and it was not until the reign of his successor, William Longsword (927-943), that the limits of the duchy were extended by the acquisition of the districts of Avranches, and Coutances.3 The troubled reign of William, which is involved in great confusion, and which ended with his murder on an island in the Somme in 943, was followed by that of his son Richard the Fearless, in whose time we hear of the first direct collision between Normandy and England. At the end of the important reign of Richard the Fearless, which lasted for more than fifty years (943-996) the duchy passed to his son, Richard the Good, who, as uncle of Eadward the Confessor and as grandfather of William the Conqueror, is closely connected with the causes which led directly to the Norman conquest. Richard the Good, before his death in 1026, settled the duchy upon his eldest son Richard, and the county of Hiesmes on his second son Robert.5 Upon the death of Richard in 1028 the duchy itself passed to his brother, Robert the Devil, the father of William the Bastard, who Bastard in first saw the light in 1027 or 1028 at Falaise, in Teutonic First collision be tween Normandy and England. Birth of William the 1027 or 1028. Bayeux.6 1 But "the grant to Rolf was made 2 As to the history of the Saxons of 8 Freeman, Norm. Conq., vol. i. pp. 118-123. As to the disputes between Æthelred and the Norman dukes, see Wil liam of Malmesbury, ii. 165, 166; William of Jumièges, v. 4; Palgrave, Normandy and England, vol. iii. p. 103; Freeman, Norm. Cong., vol. i. p. 193, and Appendix EE. 5 Will. Gem., v. 17; Norm. Cong., vol. i. p. 312. 6 In the Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de Normandie (1837, vol. xi. p. 179) M. Deville has attempted to fix the exact date in June or July, 1027. character of man and ture. 3. During the centuries of Roman dominion in Gaul which Origin and precede the conquest of Clovis, the subject nation thoroughly feudalism assimilated the language, the laws, the political institutions, in Gaul. of the conquering race. That wonderful system of law whose history has been so long, so unbroken, and so authentic, and which next to the Christian religion has been the most fruitful source of the rules which have governed actual conduct throughout Western Europe,1 Rome imposed with a stern hand upon all the subjects of her empire.2 Even the Christian church, which firmly established itself in Gaul in the early days of Roman dominion, moulded its whole ecclesiastical organization on the political divisions of the civil power. Upon the social and political substructure which thus The Rogrew up in Gaul, and which by the end of the fifth century Christian had become thoroughly Roman and Christian, was superim- substrucposed, as a whole, the scheme of Teutonic life which the Frank conquerors of Gaul brought with them in their blood and bone from the fatherland. The old theory that the Frankish conquests in Gaul were accomplished by independent principes each fighting with a powerful comitatus at his back, and that the lands so conquered were immediately parcelled out among the comites upon terms of military service and special fidelity, seems to have passed out of view.4 The sounder conclusion now is, that such "conquests were the work of Real charthe nations moving in entire order; the comitatus was not Frank conthe bond of cohesion; the leudes were not comites; all the quests. people were bound to be faithful to the king; the gift of an estate by the king involved no defined obligation of service; all the nation was alike bound to military service; the only comites were the antrustions, and these were few in number; the basis of the Merovingian polity was not the relation of lord and vassal, but that of the subject to the sovereign." 5 1 Sir Henry Maine, Early Hist. of Inst., P. 9. 2 "The barbarous conquerors of Gaul and Italy were guided by notions very different from those of Rome, who had imposed her own laws upon all subjects of her empire." — Hallam, M. A., vol. i. p. 153. 8 Cf. Kitchin's "France" in Enc. Brit., 9th ed. vol. ix. p. 528. 4 This old theory, which seems to rest upon the authority of Montes- This is the view of Waitz (Deutsche acter of the |