highest authority for the reigns of William Rufus and Henry I., and it forms Sir Francis Palgrave's principal guide through a large part of his fourth volume. Eadmer, in many respects, reads like a precursor of the biographers of Thomas of Canterbury a couple of generations later. But there is an important difference between them. Anselm forms the principal figure in Eadmer's picture, but he does not completely overshadow everything else. Eadmer, in short, still writes history and not hagiography. For Eadmer, with all his reverence for his master, was not dealing with the life of a recent martyr or of a canonised saint at all. Anselm did not find a place in the Calendar till a much later age.

Among the purely Norman writers we have, first, William of Poitiers, the Conqueror's chaplain, whose narrative must have been written very soon after the event. His 'Gesta 'Guillelmi' was not continued-probably the writer did not live -through the whole of William's reign, and our imperfect extant copies break off at a much earlier point. He gives a vast number of details which of course are of the highest importance, but he must be used with caution, as he is the mere laureate and flatterer of his patron. Against Godwine, Harold, and the English people generally, he is rabidly bitter. Yet even he is far from denying Harold's merits either as a ruler or as a captain. His style and manner, his apostrophes, his violent invectives and extravagant panegyrics, remind us somewhat of our old acquaintance Dudo of St. Quintin.* William of Jumièges follows in the same line, though, as he is really an historian of Normandy and not a mere panegyrist of William, he is not quite so lengthy nor quite so savage. metrical chronicles of Geoffrey Gaimar, Robert Wace, and Benedict of Saint More, come later. We do not think that their metrical form tells against them; that is to say, they are as credible as prose chroniclers of their own date, only that date is not contemporary. Wace especially seems a very honest writer, who had taken great pains to procure correct information, and who often mentions when he has failed to do so. Probably he preserves many local and personal traditions which the more ambitious Latin writers passed by. All these writers have a further value as examples of old French verse. French prose was not yet; it began in the next century with Villehardouin and Joinville. The Latin poet, Guy, Bishop of Amiens, author of the Carmen de Bello Hastingensi,' is chiefly valuable as preserving some curious details of William's siege of London.

See Ed. Review, vol. cix. p. 495.

The

Now along with these written Norman chroniclers, perhaps at the very head of them, we cannot help placing our chronicle in stitchwork, the Bayeux Tapestry. That it is a genuine production, wrought within a very few years of the Conquest, is proved to our mind, if by no other evidence, by the great number of small details, of names of persons not easily to be identified, which make some portions of it difficult or impossible to explain. It matters little whether the tapestry was wrought, according to the tradition, by Queen Matilda, or whether, as Dr. Lingard more probably maintains, it was made by order of Bishop Odo as an ornament of his Cathedral of Bayeux. The really important matter to be established is its contemporary date. This is a matter on which we have only internal evidence to go by, but it seems to us that the internal evidence for the contemporary date of the Tapestry is something quite unanswerable.

Besides the purely English and the purely Norman writers, there are two historians of great celebrity who may be looked on as in some measure combining both characters. These are Orderic, otherwise Vitalis, monk of St. Evroul, Utica, or Ouche, in Normandy, and the still better known name of William of Malmesbury.

Orderic is one of Sir Francis Palgrave's favourite authorities, and, we think, with good reason. His work is absolutely impossible to read through, on account of his constant digressions and goings backwards and forwards; but, when we have picked out the parts which really relate to Norman and English history, we shall find them highly valuable and very far from uninteresting. He is honest, and apparently well-informed, and he deals largely in detail and personal incident. No contemporary writer gives us so clear a picture of the real life of the time. Sir Francis takes Orderic under his special protection; he does not, indeed, refer to him by book or page any more than to any of his fellows; but he often mentions him and sometimes quotes him, and he gallantly defends him against Lord Hailes, who called him an ignorant and blundering monk.' Of the man himself and his life we know nothing but the little that we learn from his own history, but that little is very important. Orderic was a native of England, but he came, not indeed of the blood of the conquerors, but of that of the more peaceful settlers who followed in their wake. He was the son of a married priest of Orleans, Odelirius by name, who came in the train of Roger of Montgomery and was settled by him on a benefice at Shrewsbury. Orderic himself was born in 1075; he was baptised by the priest Orderic and educated by another

priest Siward*, both whose names betoken their English or Danish birth. Of what race his mother was he does not tell us. At the age of ten years he was sent over to Normandy to become a monk at St. Evroul, where he spent the rest of his days, with the exception of occasional visits to England on the affairs of his monastery, or to collect information for his history. William of Malmesbury was a very different sort of writer, and one who, in exact opposition to Orderic, has gained far greater fame than he deserves. Because he writes somewhat better Latin than his fellows, because he makes a certain show of criticism and impartiality, he has been read and quoted and believed in, to the prejudice of writers who are, in every essential quality, his betters. But it is obvious at first sight that William of Malmesbury's way of writing history is utterly confused and disorderly, that he never gives a date or tells anything in its natural order, that his digressions are as frequent as those of Orderic, and incomparably more trifling and irrelevant. His classical affectation makes him, to our taste, far less clear and pleasant to read than the straightforward diction of Florence. Some passages read like bits of popular ballads, which they very probably are, strangely clothed in the garb of William's grandiloquent Latin. But William of Malmesbury has graver faults than these. Uniting, as he tells us, the blood of both races; being, that is, most likely, the son of a Norman father and an English mother, he is bound to profess a sort of impartiality between the two. But his feelings are wholly Norman, his impartiality is all a blind, he is the mere flatterer of Henry I. and his son, a flatterer, not so barefaced, but quite as servile, as William of Poitiers is to the Conqueror. Both of William and of Orderic we shall have to speak again, when we come to consider the effects of the Conquest, on the nature of which these several ways of looking on things throw such remarkable light.

Of later writers we need not speak. They are useful only in the incidental way of which we have already spoken. It is one of Thierry's greatest faults that he constantly relies with as much confidence on Bromton, or even on Knighton,

* Ord. Vit. ap. Duchesne, p. 548 A. Siward is 'nobilis Presbyter.' Elsewhere (p. 579 D) he says that the church of which his father was incumbent was built 'priscis temporibus a Siwardo consanguineo.' This is not very clear; prisca tempora' may mean generally the time before the Conquest, and it is not plain to whom Siward was cousin. Possibly Orderic's mother was a kinswoman of Siward's, which would at once supply a direct English element in Orderic himself.

as on the contemporary sources. Sir Francis Palgrave's way of not citing authorities hinders us from testing him with the same minuteness. We fancy, however, that we have sometimes seen traces of it in him also. But when Sir Francis, as we venture to think, goes astray, it is not commonly from relying on writers of this class. It is most commonly from failing to exercise due criticism between writers nearer the time. He does, however, sometimes seem to rely on mere tradition in a way which rather amazes us. For instance, he accepts the story which gives the countryman who brought the body of William Rufus to Winchester the strange name of Purkis,' and which affirms that generations of Purkises, his descendants, have ever since remained on the same spot, practising the same humble craft. The pedigree is, of course, quite possible, though we should want some strong evidence for it. But who can believe that any man

was called Purkis' in the eleventh century? We find nothing of the sort even in Bromton and Knighton.

Our last, and one of the highest of our authorities, is the great Domesday Survey. We now look, and surely with reason, on the compilation of this record as a remarkable monument of the Conqueror's administrative sagacity. Thierry, of course, tries to depreciate it, as he does everything else that is Norman. With regard to its compilation at the time, few things are more instructive than to remark the extraordinary indignation which the minute inquiries required by the Survey called forth at the time. It is a shame to say what he thought it no shame to do,' says the English Chronicler, and on this point the feelings of Norman and English occupants would probably be much the same. But to us, at all events, the record is invaluable; nothing else could give us so complete a picture of the state of the country at the time, especially of what formed so great a feature of William's reign, the extensive transfer of landed property from English to Norman owners. Perplexing, again, as are many of the names by which different classes of men are described in the Survey, they still give us information as to these matters which no other means could supply. It is no small matter, in a period so surrounded with controversy, we can at once lay our hand on the great legal record of the conquerors, and on the still living expression of the embittered popular feeling of the conquered.

Such are our materials. Let us now try, first of all, to realise, from the accounts of those who had looked on him, and lived in his household,' a true picture of the personal character and position of the Conqueror himself.

If we look upon greatness as something separable from goodness, as something not necessarily antagonistic to, but still altogether distinct from moral excellence, we cannot hesitate to place William the Bastard in the very first rank of the world's greatest men. And, judging him by the standard of those of his own age, and, above all, by that of his own family, we shall be very far from placing him among the worst of men. He was a man whom no man could have loved, but he was one whom most certainly no man could despise. As we read the wonderful portrait of him given in the Chronicle, we see that the feeling which he inspired, even among the vanquished, was not exactly hatred, but a sort of fearful awe, such a feeling as might be excited by the presence of a being of another nature. The difference is at once realised when we compare the feelings with which men looked upon the Conqueror from the feelings with which men looked upon his successor. The feeling towards William Rufus, among all classes save those who were the companions of his wickedness, was one of simple loathing. He is perhaps the only recorded. ruler of a Christian Kingdom whose eternal damnation was assumed by all men as a matter of course. He, the greatest of sinners, died under no ecclesiastical censure; but he became the object of a popular excommunication, exactly answering to the popular canonisations of Waltheof and Simon of Montfort. It seems not to have come into any man's mind that prayers, masses, or alms for such a soul could be otherwise than fruitless. Respect for his royal office procured him a restingplace in holy ground, but, in all save the place of his interment, he was buried with the burial of an ass. But his father, after all his crimes and oppressions, fares very differently. The Chronicler judicially sums up what was good and what was evil in him, he exhorts men to follow the good and to avoid the evil, and sends him out of the world with a charitable prayer for the repose of his soul. Yet William Rufus gave many signs of high ability, and signs, too, of natural tendencies which might have been developed into virtues of a kindlier sort than the stern greatness of the Conqueror. It was not till his father and his guide Lanfranc were gone, that he ran riot in wickedness of every kind. His political sagacity and his soldier-like daring never forsook him, but used as they were, with no settled aim and for no honourable purpose, they became in him vices rather than virtues. But in the Conqueror we cannot but admire, throughout his career, the highest embodiment of the fixed purpose and the unbending will. No man, perhaps, ever overcame so many enemies or passed triumphantly through

VOL. CXXI. NO. CCXLVII.