The Reign of William Rufus and the Accession of Henry the First, Volume 1

INTRODUCTION.

THE reign of the second Norman king is a period of English history which may well claim a more special and minute examination than could be given to it when it took its place merely as one of the later stages in the history of the Norman Conquest, after the great work of the Conquest itself was done. There is indeed a point of view in which the first years of the reign of William the Red may be looked on as something more than one of the later stages of the Conquest. They may be looked on, almost at pleasure, either as the last stage of the Conquest or as the reversal of the Conquest. We may give either name to a struggle in which a Norman king, the son of the Norman Conqueror, was established on the English throne by warfare which, simply as warfare, was a distinct victory won by Englishmen over Normans on English soil. The truest aspect of that warfare was that the Norman Conquest of England was completed by English hands. But, in so saying, we must understand by the Norman Conquest of England all that is implied in that name to its fullest extent. When Englishmen, by armed support of a Norman king, accepted the fact of the Norman Conquest, they in some measure changed its nature. In the act of completing the Conquest, they in some sort undid it. If we hold that the end of the Conquest came in the days of Rufus, in the days of Rufus also came the beginnings of the later effects of the Conquest. The reign of William the Red, the administration of Randolf Flambard, was, above all others, the time when the feudal side, so to speak, of the Conquest put on a systematic shape. The King and his minister put into regular working, if they did not write down in a regular code, those usages which under the Conqueror were still merely tendencies irregularly at work, but which, at the accession of Henry the First, had already grown into abuses which needed redress. But, on the other hand, it was equally the time when the anti-feudal tendencies of the Conquest, the causes and the effects of the great law of Salisbury, showed how firmly they had taken root. The reign of Rufus laid down the two principles, that, in the kingdom of England, no man should be stronger than the king, but that the king should hold his strength only by making himself the head of the state and of the people. As a stage then in the history of the Conquest and its results, as a stage in the general constitutional history of England, the thirteen years of the reign of Rufus form a period of the highest interest and importance.