The Norman Conquest (10 page)

During this dangerous time William was not without guardians. Besides the late archbishop, Duke Robert had arranged for a number of leading laymen to aid and protect his son. Alan, count of Brittany, and Gilbert, count of Brionne, both cousins to the late duke, were
supposed to be William’s principal protectors. It soon became apparent, however, that these men could offer their young charge very little protection at all. Count Alan was the first to fall, killed in a siege at the start of October 1040; Count Gilbert followed soon afterwards, assassinated by his rivals while out riding one morning. With his most powerful guardians gone, the violence moved even closer to William. In 1041 his tutor, Turold, was murdered, and then Osbern, his household steward— the latter had his throat cut while he slept at the castle of Le Vaudreuil in the same chamber as the duke himself. Such well-attested atrocities later inspired Orderic Vitalis to put words into William’s own mouth. ‘Many times’, the future Conqueror says on his deathbed, ‘I was smuggled secretly out of the castle at night by my Uncle Walter and taken to the cottages and hiding places of the poor, to save me from discovery by traitors who sought my death.’
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Despite the attention to detail— William
did
have an Uncle Walter on his mother’s side— this wonderfully evocative passage falls some way short of total conviction. Had the men who murdered his guardians really intended William’s death they could clearly have achieved it. Their intention was almost certainly not to do away with the duke but to control him, and by extension control Normandy’s government. What we appear to be witnessing, in other words, is not simply random acts of violence arising from private feuds, but a carefully orchestrated coup. William of Jumièges, writing shortly after these events took place, refused to name the murderers, for the good reason that ‘they are the very men who now surround the duke’. Orderic Vitalis, writing several generations later, could afford to be less cautious, and named one of them as Rodulf of Gacé—; a man who, when we next encounter him, is described as William’s guardian and ‘the leader of the Norman army’.
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It is also apparent from the chroniclers’ accounts that this coup was supported by the king of France. As we have already noted, Henry I had regained the French throne in 1033 thanks in part to the help of Duke Robert, and soon afterwards had returned the favour by formally recognizing William as Robert’s heir. But support for William, it seems, did not necessarily translate into support for the guardians chosen by his father. ‘They scattered the firebrands of Henry, king of the French,’ says William of Jumièges of the plotters, ‘shamelessly inciting him to bring ruin on the country.’

The problem was that, having involved Henry in their successful bid for power, Normandy’s new regents subsequently found it difficult to persuade him to bow out. Not long afterwards, the king demanded the surrender of Tillières, a Norman casde close to the French border— possibly because rebels from his own realm were sheltering inside. The regents agreed, and helped the king besiege the castle until its garrison surrendered. A year or so later, however, for reasons that are altogether unclear, Henry sponsored a rebellion right in the heart of Normandy, supplying soldiers to a viscount who had seized William’s birthplace of Falaise and invading the south of the duchy in support of the rebels. In the event this revolt was defeated; the viscount fled into exile and the king eventually withdrew. Even so, it illustrates how lightly some Norman lords wore their loyalty, and how vulnerable to invaders the duchy had become as a result.

Significantly, these two episodes involving the king of France— tentatively dated by historians to the period 1041–3— seem also to locate an important milestone in the life of the young Duke William. In his account of the siege of Tillières, William of Jumièges describes the duke as a boy and attributes all the decision-making to his regents. By contrast, when Jumièges describes the decision to deal with the viscount who seized Falaise it is presented as William’s own. (‘As soon as the duke heard the plans of this spiteful character, he summoned troops and swiftly laid siege to him.’) William, in other words, seems to have come of age at some point between the two sieges. At this stage, of course, he would still have been quite young, probably no more than fifteen years old; but an early assumption of authority accords well with other evidence. To come of age in the warrior society of eleventh-century Francia meant, above all, to be invested with arms, and the chroniclers agree that in William’s case this happened when he was very young— ‘at the earliest possible age,’ according to the later writer William of Malmesbury, ‘in the hope of restoring peace in the provinces’. Malmesbury also tells us that the duke was invested with arms by the king of France, which would fit well with the collaboration of William’s guardians and Henry I in taking Tillières.
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One writer who made much of the young duke’s assumption of arms was William of Poitiers, whose
Gesta Guillelmi
(‘Deeds of William’) is without doubt our most important source for the
Conqueror’s career. Although he did not start writing it until the 1070s, Poitiers had lived through the earlier events he describes and had served since the 1050s as a chaplain in the duke’s own household. As such he is not only a contemporary witness but also the chronicler who stood closest to the man himself (as a household chaplain he would have heard William’s confession). Like all our sources, Poitiers is not without his problems. The fact that he was writing a history for consumption at the Conqueror’s own court means that we have to allow for a cloying degree of obsequiousness, and take much of what he says about William’s motives with a large pinch of salt. Despite this, however, he remains a uniquely valuable voice, not least because his own career had been so varied. Poitiers took his surname from the place he had studied; but by birth he was a Norman. Moreover, according to Orderic Vitalis, ‘he had been a brave soldier before entering the church, and had fought with warlike weapons for his earthly prince’. Unlike most learned men, therefore, Poitiers knew much of the practicalities of warfare and could empathize with warriors like William in a way that most cloistered monks could not.
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Both his bias and his military experience are apparent when Poitiers describes William’s coming of age:

At last a most joyful day dawned splendidly for all who desired and eagerly awaited peace and justice. Our duke, adult more in his understanding of honourable things and in the strength of his body than in his age, was armed as a knight. The news of this spread fear throughout Francia; Gaul had not another man who was reputed to be such a knight in arms. It was a sight both delightful and terrible to see him hold the reins, girded honourably with his sword, his shield shining, formidable with his helmet and javelin.
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Despite his insistence on the delight and terror that the newly armed adolescent inspired, even Poitiers admits that William faced an uphill struggle trying to govern Normandy, adding ‘there was too much licence everywhere for unlawful deeds’. Years of anarchy had led not only to the unauthorized construction of castles and the proliferation of murderous feuds; it had also led to the duke’s own officials— his counts and viscounts— going their own way. If such men did
not openly rebel, as had been the case at Falaise, nor did they pay much heed to the authority of the young duke and his advisers. Around the time of William’s knighting, the situation was still sufficiently desperate that his government made a belated attempt to introduce the Peace of God into Normandy, effectively admitting that the duke’s own authority was inadequate. The move, however, proved a failure. The bishops of Normandy, who would have been expected to enforce a ban on violence, belonged to the same feuding aristocratic families.
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Nevertheless, there is reason to think that William must have made some progress in combating disorder in the years that followed. According to William of Poitiers, the young duke ‘began to remove completely from his entourage those whom he knew to be incompetent or wicked, and to draw on the counsels of the wisest and best’. By the mid-1040s, the two new names which stand out in particular among the witness-lists to his charters are William fitz Osbern and Roger of Montgomery. On the face of it they were an unlikely pair, one being the son of Osbern, the murdered ducal steward, the other the son of the man who had arranged the murder. In all other respects, however, they were men of a similar stamp to the duke himself—young, ambitious and warlike—and together they would serve him faithfully for the rest of their lives.

This rise to prominence of his friends suggests that William’s personal authority was beginning to grow; that he was, as Poitiers says, selecting his own associates and dismissing those who had appointed themselves during his minority. At the same time, the ducal chaplain tells us, his young master began ‘forcefully demanding the services owed by his own men’. William, in other words, once surrounded by a team he could trust, set about reining in the counts and viscounts who had grown accustomed to ignoring his authority. Inevitably, such behaviour provoked a reaction.
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Towards the end of the year 1046, a new rebellion raised its head. Unlike the successful coup of five years earlier, it was directed squarely at the duke himself with the aim of killing and replacing him. According to the chroniclers, the leader was one of William’s cousins, Guy, who had been raised alongside him in the ducal household, and rewarded with the castle and county of Brionne. The suspicion remains, however, that Guy was little more than a figurehead; as a legitimate grandson of Duke Richard II, he could
be talked up to justify opposition to the bastard William. The real ringleaders, one suspects, were Guy’s known associates, a group of viscounts and nobles based in western Normandy, displeased by the duke’s efforts to curtail their independence.
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Sadly, no contemporary writers go into any great detail about this most dangerous challenge to William’s rule. Over a century later, however, a Norman historian called Wace wrote a dramatic account that fits well with the other known facts and is therefore likely to be true in its essentials. According to Wace, William was staying at Valognes in the far west of Normandy when he was woken one night and warned that his life was in immediate danger. At once the duke leapt on his horse and rode hard across the country, fearfully fording rivers in the dark and taking care to avoid major towns in case he was recognized and captured. Near Bayeux he met a loyal lord whose sons helped him to reach Falaise, over sixty miles from the start of his frantic dash.

But Falaise, as Wace explains, offered only a temporary respite. Realizing that he was powerless against the combined might of the western viscounts, William left Normandy and sought the assistance of the king of France— a fact confirmed by both William of Jumièges and William of Poitiers. Given the events of a few years earlier, this action might seem surprising; it was certainly desperate. William probably appealed to Henry as a vassal to his superior lord; very likely the duke had sworn allegiance to the king, either on the occasion of his knighting, or perhaps at the time of his accession. If so, William was now calling in his side of the bargain, demanding his sovereign’s assistance.
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Henry agreed. Early in 1047, the French king summoned his army and rode to William’s aid. The duke assembled such forces as he could from eastern Normandy, and together they set out into the west to confront the rebels. The rebels, for their part, rose to the challenge, summoning their kinsmen and vassals to create a formidable army of their own, and thus setting the scene for that rarest of medieval military events: a set-piece battle.

The rebels had marched east, crossing the River Orne at various points, and congregated about nine miles south-east of the town of Caen, at a place called Val-ès-Dunes. This topographical detail is provided by Wace, who as a sometime resident of Caen clearly knew the area well, and who once again compensates for the brevity of
more strictly contemporary chroniclers. As Wace explains, it is wide-open country: ‘the plains are long and broad, without great hills or valleys … there are no wooded areas or rocks, but the land slopes down towards the rising sun’.

It was out of the rising sun that the young duke of Normandy and the king of France emerged to meet their enemies. Wace’s blow-by-blow description of the battle itself is the least credible part of his account; his casual mention of ‘common’ troops might be taken to indicate that infantry as well as cavalry were involved, but apart from that we have no idea of the size or composition of the two armies. William of Poitiers, naturally, assures us that the crucial factor in deciding the outcome was the prowess of the duke himself. ‘Rushing in, he spread such terror by his slaughter that his adversaries lost heart and their arms weakened.’ Wace, while allowing that William ‘fought nobly and well’, believed that the result was determined by the defection of one of the leading rebels, Ralph Taisson, on the eve of battle. Whatever the true cause, all writers agree that the combined French and Norman forces eventually gained the upper hand, and the remaining rebels turned and fled. At that point the battle became a rout, and those fugitives that were not cut down by their pursuers drowned as they tried to re-cross the Orne. (According to Wace, the mills downriver came to a standstill, so great was the number of bodies.)
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Count Guy, the revolt’s nominal leader, managed to escape the battlefield and shut himself up in his castle at Brionne. Of his few known accomplices, some were killed in the battle, while others fled to exile in Brittany. The fate of Grimoald of St Plessis, whom Wace names as the lord responsible for the attempt on William’s life at Valognes, provides a particularly good illustration of the importance of the victory, since he had built an unlicensed castle at Le Plessis-Grimoult, the remains of which can still be seen today. Grimoald was captured during the battle and cast into prison, so the assumption is that his castle was destroyed as part of the general pattern described by the chroniclers. ‘Happy battle’, exclaimed William of Jumièges, ‘that in one day ruined so many castles of criminals and houses of evildoers.’ Val-ès-Dunes, said William of Poitiers, was momentous, and deserved to be remembered by future ages, because it ‘threw down many castles with the impelling hand of victory’.
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