THE CONQUEST. E N G L A K D 291 churchman Dunstan. In fact the claims of Eadgar do not seem to have been put forward at the time. They begin to be heard of at a later time, when the notion of strict hereditary right was growing. When Harold is blamed at the time, it is not for disregarding the hereditary right of Eadgar, but for breaking his own personal engagement to William. Whatever was the nature of that engagement, its breach was at most a ground of complaint against Harold personally; it could give William no claim as against the people of England. According to English law, Willhm had no shadow of claim. The crown was not here.lit.iry but elective; and he was not elected to it. Nor had he even any hereditary claim; for he was not of the kingly stock of Cerdic. The alleged bequest of Eadward was cancelled by the later bequest in favour of Harold. The whole question was a personal question be tween William and Harold. A single act of homage done by Harold to William when in William s military service could nut bind Harold to refuse the crown which the nation offered him. The engagement to marry William s daughter was undoubtedly broken. To this charge we have Harold s own answer : A King of the English could not marry a foreign wife without the consent of his Witan. ihnsof William then had no claim to the crown on any showing, illiain. either of natural right or of English law. But, by artfully working together a number of points which had no real bearing on the matter, he was able to make out a plausible case in. lands where English law was unknown. His kindred to Eadward, the alleged bequest of Eadward, the alleged perjury of Harold, the alleged wrong done to Archbishop Robert and the other Normans, were able to be worked into a picture which gradually won supporters to William, first in his own duchy, and then beyond its bounds. His own subjects, who at first listened but coldly, were before long stirred to zeal in his cause. Foreign princes encouraged him; to the Roman see above all it was the best of opportunities for winning increased power in England. Pope Alexander II., under the influence of his archdeacon Hildebrand, afterwards the renowned Pope Gregory VII., approved of William s claims. He was thus able to cloke his schemes under the guise of a crusade, and to attack England alike with temporal and spiritual weapons. 1- Th as doubly armed, the Norman duke set forth on his n *in- enterprise against England. Ha had not a single partisan
- ? n | in the country ; but Tostig, the banished Englishman, was
indirectly doing his work. For Tostig William was too slow; he betook himself to Harold Hardrada, the famous king of Norway, and either stirred him up to an attempt on England or joined him in an attempt which he had already planned. Harold of England was thus attacked at once by two enemies, either of whom alone it might be hard to overcome. The Norwegian came first ; he landed in Yorkshire, defeated Eadwine and Morkere at Fulford, and on September 24 received the submission of York. Harold of England on the morrow overthrew the Norwegian invader at Stamfordbridge. Three days later the Normans landed at Pevensey ; the English king marched southward ; the northern earls kept back their forces, seemingly in the hope of a division of the kingdom. On October 14, Harold, at the head of the men of Wessex, East-Anglia, and part of Mercia, met William and his host on the hill of Senlac. After a hard-fought struggle, the Normans by a stratagem made their way on to the hill ; the king was wounded by an arrow and cut down by four Norman knights, and his personal following was slaughtered around him. The first step in the conquest of England was thus taken ; but the work -was far from being done. After the fall of Harold, William had never again to fight a pitched battle ; the land was without a leader, and therefore without union. Local resistance was often valiant ; but it was only local resistance, and the land was conquered bit by bit. On the death of Harold, the Witan in London chose His elec- Eadgar to the vacant throne. But the Mercian earls failed tion M him, as they had failed Harold; and their treason hindered kmg> any general national resistance. Before the end of the year, the newly chosen king and a large body of the chief men of the realm found it expedient to submit to the invader. He had then subdued the shires south of London, whose forces had been utterly cut off at Senlac ; he had crossed the Thames and threatened the city from the north. He was now chosen king and crowned at Westminster on Christmas day. He was thus king by the submission of the chief men, by the rite of coronation, and by the absence of any other claimant. But he was very far from having full possession of the whole kingdom. His actual authority did not go beyond the south-eastern part of the country. His dominions certainly reached from Hampshire to Norfolk. They probably took in Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, and Northamptonshire, with an outlying post in Herefordshire ; but the north, the south-west, and the greater part of central England were still unsubdued. The conquest of these still independent districts -was the Progress result of a series of local campaigns spread over about two of tl)e years, from the beginning of 1068 to the beginning of 1070. COD( l l)e8t In 1067 William visited Normandy, and the oppression of Plate III, his lieutenants, his half-brother Odo, bishop of Bayeux and earl of Kent, and William Fitz-Osbern, earl of Hereford, stirred up revolts in Kent and in Herefordshire. The Kentish revolt took the strange form of an alliance with a foreign prince, Eustace count of Boulogne, who had been himself in William s service in his invasion. In Hereford shire the movement was more strictly national, though its chief, Eadric, surnamed the Wild, who had never submitted to William, did not disdain an alliance with his Welsh neighbours. Eadric in fact held out till a much later time; but the Kentishmen with their foreign allies were subdued before William s return. At the end of the year the king came back, ind with the beginning of the nest year he betook himself to the conquest of what was still unconquered. His first march was towards the west, where Exeter and the whole of western England were still independent. They were first subdued in the spring of 1068. After a revolt in the next year, after two attempts in successive years on the part of Harold s sons, western England was finally subdued in the course of 1069. Northern England, as far as the northern boundary of Yorkshire, was first conquered in the autumn of 1068. An attempt on Durham in January 1069 was defeated. York and the North generally revolted more than once. In September 1069 Swegen of Denmark sent a great fleet to the help of the English, who were under the leadership of Eadgar, Waltheof the son of Siward, earl of Northampton and Huntingdon, and the other northern leaders. But, in the course of the winter of 1069-1070, the whole of northern and central England was finally conquered, Chester being the last point to hold cut. After this time there were local revolts, but no very general resistance of any large part of the country. Early in 1070 William reviewed and dismissed his army at Salisbury. At the Easter feast of the same year, being now full king over all England, he was again solemnly crowned by legates from Rome. A distinction must be carefully drawn between the resistance to William s arms in those districts which had never submitted to his authority and the revolts which happened after his power was fully established. The two are however divided by a very short interval of time. In
the course of the summer of 1070 the fen-laud was in
