He went as an English king, to assert the rights of the English crown, to avenge wrongs done to the English land; and on such an errand Englishmen followed him gladly.Eadric, the defender of Herefordshire, had made his peace with the King, and he now held a place of high honour in his army.But if William met with any armed resistance on his Scottish expedition, it did not amount to a pitched battle.He passed through Lothian into Scotland; he crossed Forth and drew near to Tay, and there, by the round tower of Abernethy, the King of Scots swore oaths and gave hostages and became the man of the King of the English.William might now call himself, like his West-Saxon predecessors, BRETWALDA and BASILEUS of the isle of Britain.This was the highest point of his fortune.
Duke of the Normans, King of the English, he was undisputed lord from the march of Anjou to the narrow sea between Caithness and Orkney.
The exact terms of the treaty between William's royal vassal and his overlord are unknown.But one of them was clearly the removal of Edgar from Scotland.Before long he was on the continent.William had not yet learned that Edgar was less dangerous in Britain than in any other part of the world, and that he was safest of all in William's own court.Homage done and hostages received, the Lord of all Britain returned to his immediate kingdom.His march is connected with many legendary stories.In real history it is marked by the foundation of the castle of Durham, and by the Conqueror's confirmation of the privileges of the palatine bishops.If all the earls of England had been like the earls of Chester, and all the bishops like the bishops of Durham, England would assuredly have split up, like Germany, into a loose federation of temporal and spiritual princes.This it was William's special work to hinder;but he doubtless saw that the exceptional privileges of one or two favoured lordships, standing in marked contrast to the rest, would not really interfere with his great plan of union.And William would hardly have confirmed the sees of London or Winchester in the privileges which he allowed to the distant see of Durham.He now also made a grant of earldoms, the object of which is less clear than that of most of his actions.It is not easy to say why Gospatric was deprived of his earldom.His former acts of hostility to William had been covered by his pardon and reappointment in 1069;and since then he had acted as a loyal, if perhaps an indiscreet, guardian of the land.Two greater earldoms than his had become vacant by the revolt, the death, the imprisonment, of Edwin and Morkere.But these William had no intention of filling.He would not have in his realm anything so dangerous as an earl of the Mercian's or the Northumbrians in the old sense, whether English or Norman.But the defence of the northern frontier needed an earl to rule Northumberland in the later sense, the land north of the Tyne.
And after the fate of Robert of Comines, William could not as yet put a Norman earl in so perilous a post.But the Englishman whom he chose was open to the same charges as the deposed Gospatric.For he was Waltheof the son of Siward, the hero of the storm of York in 1069.Already Earl of Northampton and Huntingdon, he was at this time high in the King's personal favour, perhaps already the husband of the King's niece.One side of William's policy comes out here.
Union was sometimes helped by division.There were men whom William loved to make great, but whom he had no mind to make dangerous.He gave them vast estates, but estates for the most part scattered over different parts of the kingdom.It was only in the border earldoms and in Cornwall that he allowed anything at all near to the lordship of a whole shire to be put in the hands of a single man.One Norman and one Englishman held two earldoms together; but they were earldoms far apart.Roger of Montgomery held the earldoms of Shrewsbury and Sussex, and Waltheof to his midland earldom of Northampton and Huntingdon now added the rule of distant Northumberland.The men who had fought most stoutly against William were the men whom he most willingly received to favour.Eadric and Hereward were honoured; Waltheof was honoured more highly.He ranked along with the greatest Normans; his position was perhaps higher than any but the King's born kinsmen.But the whole tale of Waltheof is a problem that touches the character of the king under whom he rose and fell.Lifted up higher than any other man among the conquered, he was the one man whom William put to death on a political charge.It is hard to see the reasons for either his rise or his fall.It was doubtless mainly his end which won him the abiding reverence of his countrymen.His valour and his piety are loudly praised.But his valour we know only from his one personal exploit at York; his piety was consistent with a base murder.In other matters, he seems amiable, irresolute, and of a scrupulous conscience, and Northumbrian morality perhaps saw no great crime in a murder committed under the traditions of a Northumbrian deadly feud.Long before Waltheof was born, his grandfather Earl Ealdred had been killed by a certain Carl.The sons of Carl had fought by his side at York; but, notwithstanding this comradeship, the first act of Waltheof's rule in Northumberland was to send men to slay them beyond the bounds of his earldom.A crime that was perhaps admired in Northumberland and unheard of elsewhere did not lose him either the favour of the King or the friendship of his neighbour Bishop Walcher, a reforming prelate with whom Waltheof acted in concert.And when he was chosen as the single exception to William's merciful rule, it was not for this undoubted crime, but on charges of which, even if guilty, he might well have been forgiven.
