William Rufus

FEW of us feel much interest in the reign of the fierce and vicious son of the Norman conqueror of England. We remember his strange death by the arrow of Walter Tyrrel, in that New Forest which he had made ready for his pleasure at the cost of so many ruined homesteads. We know that he was hated in life and abandoned in death, and we turn to some brighter theme. And yet to any one who cares to study the origin of our institutions, his reign is full of interest ; for in it that feudal system was formed under which England was governed for centuries. The Red King made no written code, but he shaped the nation. Mr. Freeman¹ makes this important period more real to us than ever before. We feel now that we know the man, with all his strange ability and shocking vice. The general effect is no more striking than the picture of him in the Norman Conquest, but here we have the details before us from which to make up our own opinion ; and that opinion is somewhat more favorable to the political genius of William Rufus than Mr. Freeman is ready to grant.

There was no courtly dignity about the Red King. In bodily form he resembled his father. “ He was a man of no great stature, of a thick, square frame, with a projecting stomach. His bodily strength was great. His speech was stammering, especially when he was stirred to anger. He lacked the power of speech which had belonged to his father, and had descended to his elder brother; his pent-up wrath or merriment, or whatever the momentary passion might be, broke out in short, sharp sentences, often showing some readiness of wit, but no continued flow of speech. He had the yellow hair of his race, and the ruddiness of his countenance gave him the surname which has stuck to him so closely.” His character was a curious compound of savage impulse and sound judgment, of foxy cunning and profound statesmanship, of bravery and cruelty, of falseness and chivalry, of filial reverence and contempt for everything that man holds dear. He united the political genius of his race with its vices in their most detestable shape. Passionate and vicious were all his house, but in him excesses took a form so hideously repulsive that even his callous contemporaries shrank from him. It is hard for a modern writer fairly to weigh virtues against such a frightful accompaniment of crime; the work of Rufus is the harder to judge because he avoided new legislation, and one can judge his course only by comparing the English kingdom which he left to Henry with that which he had received from his father, the Conqueror. During the dozen years thus spanned a novel system of government arose. A form of feudalism, not only new to England, but unknown anywhere else, had been created, without the approval of the people, and against the vehement opposition of the nobility and the church; a system which held its own for hundreds of years, until a new form of civilization grew up, in which the old organization was no longer necessary.

One of the most marked characteristics of the English people was their determined opposition to any new burden. They never asked for a new reform. The freedom of their forefathers was ever their demand. The main stress of the anger which the new institutions of the Red King aroused naturally fell upon their introducer, and it was intensified by his capricious violence and hardness of heart. The monkish historians from whom we get our account of him bitterly resented the burden of institutions, the value of which they acknowledged in later reigns. And thus the Red King gets the blame for the faults of a system, the benefits of which are credited to his successors. But it appears plainly enough, from Mr. Freeman’s story, that both fairly belong to him. He had a difficult political problem before him, one which his father had not solved. The Conqueror’s irresistible personal influence had kept the kingdom quiet. He had understood the situation, and had introduced forces which were certain to modify its constitution profoundly ; but he had adopted no broad plan, and their operation was as yet uncertain. Under the Red King these forces were combined in a novel form of feudalism, which Henry I. kept in essence unchanged. That cold and crafty king profited at once by the insight and the errors of his brother William, whom he succeeded. He kept the system, but by alleviating its hardships and giving it regularity, and above all by making a good many promises, which he took little pains to perform, he succeeded in keeping its advantages, while the odium of it was thrown upon his brother. And as by that time the detested novelty had worn off, and the advantages to the community were more evident, he was greeted as the lion of justice for carrying out the far-reaching schemes of the detested Red King. These schemes may very probably have originated in the subtle brain of the unscrupulous justiciar, Randolf Flambard, who was certainly responsible for many of the abuses in their execution ; but the king, by whose command and under whose direct supervision they were carried out, must be regarded as the real author. To give the credit to his Norman lawyers, and impute to the king the blame, as some historians have done, is surely unreasonable. Mr. Freeman is too fairminded a historian for this ; but he does not appear to appreciate sufficiently the merit of these vast designs, or to give his hero due credit for the power displayed in them. He is too much influenced by the judgment of William’s contemporaries, who were not likely to appreciate any new feudal constitution, and hated as much as they feared the king.

William Rufus came to the throne with no better claim, to say the least, than his older or his younger brother. He was not personally popular ; the old constitution gave him too little power, and his position involved him at once in a contest for supremacy with his turbulent nobility on the one hand, and the church on the other. And yet, during his reign of thirteen years, no rebel force dared meet him in the field on English soil; he conquered Wales, colonized Carlisle, and won Normandy. He was a vigorous and daring soldier. He was hunting in the New Forest when he heard the unexpected news of the capture of Le Mans. “ Let us go beyond the sea,” he said ; and without a moment’s delay put spurs to his horse for Southampton. There was nothing there but an old and crazy ship; the sky was lowering, the wind was contrary, the waves were high. “ I never heard of a king being drowned. Make haste,” he said to those who urged delay; and the next morning he had reached the haven of Toucques, and his messengers were out gathering a force before which the enemy fled in despair. Like all his race, he loved the din of battle, and swung his battle-axe in the thickest of the fight. Like them, he could unhesitatingly doom the vanquished to mutilation or death. Yet he had a fitful generosity and aspiration, which made him take up the new doctrines of chivalry with enthusiasm. At times he would release his prisoners on parole, and even set them free without a ransom ; and he seems never to have abused women. With all his faults, he never did anything so atrocious as did the admired Henry when he blinded his own grandchildren.

Mr. Freeman dwells with deserved emphasis upon the importance of his hero’s appeal to the loyalty of his people, at the very beginning of his reign. It was the foundation of his power. He was a despot because the people liked to obey him. They did not care for his vices. They knew that they were well off under his firm rule, and that was enough for them.

It was this popular support that enabled him to feudalize England. When he came to the throne, much was still unsettled. William the Conqueror had not sought to impose any new code upon England. The people were too conservative to bear it. He had begun by making no more changes than were necessary to reward his followers. Afterwards, as he found his power insecure, he had placed nearly all the great offices in Norman hands, and brought the sheriffs, through whom the local administration was conducted, directly under his control. The wager of battle, and some legislation establishing separate ecclesiastical courts and attaching the peasantry more closely to the soil, is traced to him. One other thing he did: he made extensive re-grants of the English estates in a manner which, later on, the astute lawyers of the Red King held to establish feudal obligations. We may be sure, however, that the Conqueror did not wish to introduce into England anything like the feudalism of France, which crushed the poor, annihilated trade, and allowed the king to act only through great vassals, whose power was so extensive as to make the sovereign’s control little more than nominal.

William the Conqueror left England quiet, but agitated by strong passions, and assuredly not feudal. The Saxon and the Norman had not yet coalesced. They were governed by different laws. The Englishman recognized in the foreigner a superior and irresistible force, but he hated him none the less. The Norman repaid the hatred with scorn. His ordinary imprecation was, “ May I become an Englishman ! ” and he strengthened his denials by the phrase, “ Do you take me for an Englishman ? ” Had William been followed by a weak king, like his son Robert or his grandson Stephen, there would have been immediate anarchy, in which the fruits of the Conquest might have been lost. His oldest son, Robert, a feeble ruler, was little known in England, and the claim of primogeniture was far from conclusive. Henry, the youngest son, was English born, and better liked, but he was far away. William Rufus, with his usual energy, had crossed to England, received the assent of the Witan, and been crowned king before his brothers thought of doing anything. His Norman nobles soon resented his firm control, and rose in rebellion under the lead of Odo of Bayeux, in behalf of Robert. But the Red King had already grasped the principle by which his race kept what looked like despotic power, — that of meeting the approval of the English people by identifying himself with the national feeling.

Foreigner though he was, he appealed to them without a moment’s hesitation, and they rallied round him in irresistible force. For the second and last time the Saxon and the Norman met in battle, and now the conflict was finally settled by the triumph of the Saxon under the Norman king. There were later quarrels ; there was anarchy under Stephen and John ; there was constant bickering between the great Norman houses until their fiery strains died out; but there was no more fighting between the Saxon and the Norman after the overwhelming success of the English king. No attempt was made in behalf of the Saxon Atheling, and the rest of the reign of Rufus was accepted by his English subjects without any opposition, except the quickly crushed rebellion of Robert of Beléme. When he wanted troops he had only to call his “ young men ” around him, and they came from far and near. Thus the fundamental question of a new government, its basis, was settled by the Red King in a way that seems natural enough to us, but which was far from being so then. Most probably William took this bold step with the approval of his minister Lanfranc, but he was too headstrong for us to doubt that the act was entirely his own.

A more complicated question was as to the form which his government should assume. Odo’s rebellion showed how largely the power of the Conqueror had been due to his mere personal influence. It was plain that there must be a closer organization, and above all a larger revenue ; for it was an age when money was very powerful, and the Red King’s system was based on it to a degree formerly almost unknown. He was ambitious, and when he died he had possession not only of his own island, but of Normandy and other fair French provinces. The best of his foreign victories were the bloodless triumphs of wealth. The Norman duke, the French king, even the Pope, bent before that golden hoard at Winchester. Without his great revenue he probably could not have kept England quiet, much less have made her a great power. This he did, and he did it in the face of the bitter opposition with which the English always met a new tax. The way in which he accomplished it was by the introduction of a new form of feudalism, whose design deserves examination.

Feudalism was not unknown in England before the Conquest, but it was alien to Saxon instincts, and had attained but slight development. It was an institution of Frankish origin. It differed from the early political customs of the Normans and the Saxons in that it was founded on land, and was not a relation of tribesmen to their chief, but of tenants to their landlord. Each feudal tenant was thereby a soldier in an army to which he must furnish armed men in proportion to the extent of his farm, at the command of his landlord ; and that lord himself held of an overlord, who was his military commander; and so on everywhere, in an order of which the king was the head. This organization had the defects and advantages of a martial as contrasted with a civil government. As an organization for the government of a half - civilized people of mixed blood, it was probably unsurpassed. Every man was a soldier with a fixed status, independent of race, in a national army. On the other hand, in the early forms of feudalism, the king’s power reached the lower class so indirectly that he was not able to save it from oppression ; and even the nobility often defied his power, knowing that the weightier force was theirs. On its civil side the king’s power was very weak. It extended directly only to his private estates ; and the law was too much localized everywhere. Each noble laid the taxes and held the court in his own estate. Every hill was crowned with a castle, which was little better than a robber stronghold, where each petty lordling was separated from his tenantry, whom his position tempted him to abuse.

The Normans, with their power of rapid assimilation, had quickly adopted this feudal system from their French enemies, and their kings had experienced its defects. The problem of how to keep its strength and avoid its weakness was the one which they had to meet on their settlement in England ; and especially it was desirable to combine the better organization of the lower classes in England with the firmer feudal union of the upper class which prevailed on the Continent.

As it was worked out by the Red King, the yeoman was protected and the power of the nobility limited in many ways, both civil and military. The great estates were not in compact masses, but were usually scattered through several counties. Castle-building was strictly forbidden except on the Welsh and Scotch borders, where it was necessary for military defense. The lord lived as his tenants lived, and felt the value of their goodwill, and grew one in feeling with them. The judicial power of the local courts could not be taken away, but it was slowly sapped by extending the jurisdiction of the king’s courts, under pretense, sometimes very far-fetched, of the king’s power of equitable relief, or of the relief and protection of the king’s revenue. Thus the royal courts were soon preferred, on account of the ability which the king’s appointments secured. The power of the lords to lay taxes was generally limited to fixed and moderate rents, which they collected of their tenants, to certain dues for markets, ferries, and the like, and to feudal assistances and relief. The only general tax was the Danegeld, a tax levied on land by the king, which had its origin in an occasional assistance to meet a Danish inroad, but which became a regular yearly levy under the Norman kings. From this, and from the revenue of the king’s own estates, nearly the whole revenue of the government was derived, until William Rufus introduced reliefs and other feudal sources of revenue. By these causes, and by the protection given to the villein and the commercial classes, the power of the nobles was brought within reasonable limits. The king had an extensive civil as well as military authority, and kept a firm hold over the church, which had already become a great landed power. And thus William Rufus was able to summon his Witan year after year, with the certainty that no one would venture to oppose his will.

The element of the feudal system which was more especially due to the Red King was the extension of military tenures, with the new features of wardship and relief. He maintained that, inasmuch as the great estates were held directly of him on the condition of military service, it must follow that when the tenant died, leaving only minor or female heirs, unable to render this military service, the condition of the grant was broken, and the estate reverted to its royal grantor, who should enjoy its revenues until the boy came of age or the girl married. The king held as owner, not guardian, and the revenues went into the royal coffers. The heir had to pay a relief before he could take his father’s place, — something between a succession duty and a reward paid for a new grant; and so had the man whom the heiress should marry. Similarly, the estate of a bishop or abbot was held by the king while the office was vacant, and a relief demanded from the new appointee. These new regulations brought the king a great revenue, but there were many abuses in their collection, and they met with much opposition.

There was, however, much to be said in their favor, if imposed with moderation and regularity. The relief was a succession tax like the Roman vicessimo hereditatem ; and many political economists consider this the best of all taxes, because it does not diminish the reward of labor, but falls upon unearned wealth, and tends to restrain the overgrowth of great fortunes. In England, at that time, there were special reasons for its imposition. There was no rich middle class to tax, and no considerable foreign commerce upon which to levy duties. Any increase of the local trade dues, if it had been possible, would have been very unwise. Forced loans were still more objectionable. It would have been, poor policy to increase the land tax, the Danegeld, which fell directly upon the small farmer. The burden of wardship and relief, however, fell directly on the large landholders, where it could best be borne, and whom it was difficult to reach in any other way ; and though some part of it was transferred to the small tenant, the greater portion of it was not. The yeoman was no worse off for having his rent go to the king, while his lord’s heir was a minor, or the bishopric was unfilled. Indeed, the king’s custom of granting long leases at a low rent for a bonus was directly for the benefit of the farmer. The great lords, it is true, claimed the same feudal privileges of wardship and relief of the lesser nobility, who held of them, and also asked assistance of their tenants to meet the burdens laid upon them. Still, rents were generally low and unalterable. If we compare the Red King’s plan with the method in vogue on the Continent, there can be no question as to its superiority ; for abroad the burden fell almost exclusively on the poor, and crushed them in hopeless destitution, while the English peasantry prospered, and the towns grew in wealth, under William and his brother, in spite of wet seasons and bad crops.

The system had other advantages, quite as important in the keen eyes of the Red King. It required no new legislation, but was legally inferred from some doubtful grants of the Conqueror ; and it fell at any one time only upon a few scattered and masterless estates, so that there could be no concerted opposition. It very sensibly diminished the power of the great nobles and of the high dignitaries of the church, both of whom were still too masterful. It was from the church, indeed, that the most strenuous opposition came ; but it was the church organization, not religion, which suffered. No priest lost his living, no parish flock was untended, while the king was appropriating the rich income of the benefices. Had the system been justly administered, there would have been little injury from it. Unfortunately, this was not the case. The king’s plans were good, but it was hard for him to let a chance to make money go by. Unreasonable sums were demanded instead of a fixed rate, and heiresses and abbacies were sold to the highest bidder. Thus there was much occasional hardship and wrong, but the principle was so vital that William’s successors were compelled to continue it in a more regular form ; for a revenue had to be raised, and this was the best way to get it, until the advent of the rich middle class brought in a new form of civilization. We talk of the modern worship of the dollar, but money brought far greater prizes in those days of chivalry, when heiresses and high preferment and even rich kingdoms were bought and sold, and the worst crimes were openly committed to obtain it. In the absence of safe dividend - paying investments, men spent their money more lavishly, but there was less public spirit than now. William Rufus was actually blamed for building London Bridge, Westminster Hall, and the Tower. But no one was surprised at Henry’s leaving that last fatal hunting party the moment he heard of his brother’s death, to ride full speed to Winchester, where the treasure lay.

We have dwelt upon the fiscal side of the administration of William Rufus because it has received such exaggerated blame. Free from grave faults it was not, but it had important merits, which we have to put ourselves in his place to recognize. The Red King showed in other ways the same far-sighted ability. It is hardly possible to doubt that, like his father and brother, he desired to improve the condition of the lower classes. The servile laws, which seem to us so near slavery, were a necessary safeguard, in those lawless times, both to the laborer himself, who was placed under a lord whose interest it was to protect him, and to society, which needed to have its labor supply made certain and its morality and conservatism strengthened by the force of public opinion in an immovable population, — a force which was the main reliance of the community, in those days of inefficient legislation and feeble police supervision.

Under the Red King trade was safe, without any increase in the burdens that embarrassed it. He granted no monopolies. He favored the hated Jews, and when Earl Robert of Mowbray seized the goods of some Norwegian merchants, the king made them whole again and punished the earl. Evidently, he appreciated the advantages of commerce. He had not reached the modern view of it. He believed, no doubt, in fixing prices by statute, and in regulating supply. But we must remember that the great law of supply and demand did not work then with any trustworthy certainty. The scarcity of money, the poorness of roads, the dangers of travel, the difficulty of obtaining intelligence, and the almost total absence of modern commercial facilities made business an entirely different thing from what it is to-day ; and government interference was expected and obeyed, both in fixing prices and in regulating the movement of labor. The Englishman did not desire competitive fluctuations. His ideal was a steady market, with moderate profits, at the same prices that his fathers paid, and this the government regulation helped powerfully to secure. Enforced as the laws were in England, they gave the peasant and the merchant a better chance than he had anywhere else in the world, and he prospered accordingly.

In the difficulties with the church, it was not so much the Red King’s plans as his way of executing them that we must blame. He had good reason to dread the spread of the Pope’s power. The sending of Peter-pence to Rome was a great evil in those days, when the want of currency often reduced trade to barter. Even before the Conquest, the monasteries and other religious foundations had obtained a dangerously large portion of the fertile land of the kingdom ; and as society grew more orderly and prosperous, the Pope sought to strengthen his own power as well, and to exercise over the English church a control until then unknown, not so much from the ambition of the pontiff as from the nature of his system.

Twice under the reign of Rufus did bishops claim the right of appeal to the corrupt court of Rome ; and although neither Stephen nor Anselm cared to press it after having escaped from the king’s clutches, it would have been very poor statesmanship for an English king to acknowledge such a claim, or to allow the church lands to escape the duties of feudal service. But, as usual, the Red King’s course was rapacious and violent. He not only kept sees vacant for years in order to enjoy the revenue, but he carried his irreligion to the point of blasphemy. He was not an atheist. He abused the Deity as a personal enemy. “ God shall never see me a good man,” he once said. “ I have suffered too much from him.” And again, “ He knows nothing about crimes, or else he weighs them in unjust balances.” At another time he offered to join Judaism, if it should prove the victor in a public contest, which was really held, though of course with indecisive results. Compared with this childish blasphemer, the saintly prelate Anselm appears in such sharp contrast that it is hard not to forget on which side England’s needs really lay. “ Treat me as a man,” said Anselm, in a speech which Mr. Freeman does not quote, “ and I give myself and all I have to your service. But if you treat me as your slave, you shall have neither me nor mine.” Anselm’s great work, the Cur Deus Homo, played a great part in the religious movement of the age, and helped to bring in the purer view of the Atonement, that Christ died to satisfy the divine justice, and so make possible the pardon of man without a violation of eternal law, in place of the primitive theory, that it was a ransom paid for man to Satan, who found out too late that his supposed victim had a divinity that could not be confined in hell. Mr. Freeman does not mention these religious controversies, probably because Rufus cared nothing for them ; but the persecution of Roscelin by the king, when he fled to England under banishment for denying the reality of abstractions, should not have been omitted.

There were other hardships in the Red King’s reign besides the religious and financial ones. His guard of troops was generally quartered upon the people, and this caused much suffering, as it did in other reigns. Then the king, like all of his blood, was passionately fond of hunting, and extended his forests with little regard to popular outcry. The farmers complained not only on account of their eviction from fertile land, but because of the destruction of crops by the game which it cost a man’s life to destroy. In modern eyes this protection of forests and encouragement of manly out-door sport seems hardly criminal, but the farmers did not think so then, and when the weakness of Stephen’s reign gave an opportunity there was at once an enormous slaughter of game.

If we compare the progress of this Norman empire with similar triumphs elsewhere of imperfectly civilized but highly gifted races, we shall find in the reign of the Red King the two principal evils by which those races have been arrested in their march. One is the tendency to overburden the conquered people with taxation ; to draw away their life-blood in order to make the administration strong, and supply the natural desire of the victors for luxury. It was this over-taxation that ruined the Italian farmers under the Roman Empire, until population fell off to a point at which the foreigner had to be called in to recruit her armies, and at last, when the misery had grown so intolerable that even anarchy had lost its terrors, to rule the sacred city. The same evil, in a much more oppressive form, accompanied the march of the Turkish Empire in later times, and we may well believe that it was one of the most important causes of the decay of the great empires that preceded Rome. The same danger threatened England under the Normans, but the sturdy independence of the people and the political ability of her rulers averted the misery in which the yeomanry of the Continent were plunged.

One other evil has usually accompanied a conquering race, — the tendency to vicious excesses. It is not that luxury in itself is enfeebling. We know, by the statistics of modern times, that in itself it is strengthening, not enervating. But the absence of accustomed occupations and modes of working off surplus excitement, the loss of old ideals of living, and the elevation to new spheres of life where the old habits of self-control seem out of place, and public opinion loses its restraining force, all tend fatally to criminal laxity. The outspoken Latin historians describe plainly enough the frightful immorality of Rome. Modern travelers hint at it in the harem of the Ottoman. More than once the same hideous bestiality has soiled the English throne which flaunted itself under the Red King. The taint did not spread, however, in that healthy race, and with a new king a purer régime came in. If we cannot acquit William of degrading vice, we can at least credit him with his true powers. Brutal as he was, he was not a mere beast, but, like all of that strange bastard brood, he mingled with his vices a statesmanship and power which may fairly be called genius.