The years which saw the settlement of England, though not years of constant fighting like the two years between the march to Exeter and the fall of Chester, were not years of perfect peace.William had to withstand foes on both sides of the sea, to withstand foes in his own household, to undergo his first defeat, to receive his first wound in personal conflict.Nothing shook his firm hold either on duchy or kingdom; but in his later years his good luck forsook him.
And men did not fail to connect this change in his future with a change in himself, above all with one deed of blood which stands out as utterly unlike all his other recorded acts.
But the amount of warfare which William had to go through in these later years was small compared with the great struggles of his earlier days.There is no tale to tell like the war of Val-es-dunes, like the French invasions of Normandy, like the campaigns that won England.One event only of the earlier time is repeated almost as exactly as an event can be repeated.William had won Maine once; he had now to win it again, and less thoroughly.As Conqueror his work is done; a single expedition into Wales is the only campaign of this part of his life that led to any increase of territory.
When William sat down to the settlement of his kingdom after the fall of Chester, he was in the strictest sense full king over all England.For the moment the whole land obeyed him; at no later moment did any large part of the land fail to obey him.All opposition was now revolt.Men were no longer keeping out an invader; when they rose, they rose against a power which, however wrongfully, was the established government of the land.Two such movements took place.One was a real revolt of Englishmen against foreign rule.The other was a rebellion of William's own earls in their own interests, in which English feeling went with the King.
Both were short sharp struggles which stand out boldly in the tale.
More important in the general story, though less striking in detail, are the relations of William to the other powers in and near the isle of Britain.With the crown of the West-Saxon kings, he had taken up their claims to supremacy over the whole island, and probably beyond it.And even without such claims, border warfare with his Welsh and Scottish neighbours could not be avoided.
Counting from the completion of the real conquest of England in 1070, there were in William's reign three distinct sources of disturbance.There were revolts within the kingdom of England.
There was border warfare in Britain.There were revolts in William's continental dominions.And we may add actual foreign warfare or threats of foreign warfare, affecting William, sometimes in his Norman, sometimes in his English character.
With the affairs of Wales William had little personally to do.In this he is unlike those who came immediately before and after him.
In the lives of Harold and of William Rufus personal warfare against the Welsh forms an important part.William the Great commonly left this kind of work to the earls of the frontier, to Hugh of Chester, Roger of Shrewsbury, and to his early friend William of Hereford, so long as that fierce warrior's life lasted.These earls were ever at war with the Welsh princes, and they extended the English kingdom at their cost.Once only did the King take a personal share in the work, when he entered South Wales, in 1081.We hear vaguely of his subduing the land and founding castles; we see more distinctly that he released many subjects who were in British bondage, and that he went on a religious pilgrimage to Saint David's.This last journey is in some accounts connected with schemes for the conquest of Ireland.And in one most remarkable passage of the English Chronicle, the writer for once speculates as to what might have happened but did not.Had William lived two years longer, he would have won Ireland by his wisdom without weapons.And if William had won Ireland either by wisdom or by weapons, he would assuredly have known better how to deal with it than most of those who have come after him.If any man could have joined together the lands which God has put asunder, surely it was he.This mysterious saying must have a reference to some definite act or plan of which we have no other record.And some slight approach to the process of winning Ireland without weapons does appear in the ecclesiastical intercourse between England and Ireland which now begins.Both the native Irish princes and the Danes of the east coast begin to treat Lanfranc as their metropolitan, and to send bishops to him for consecration.The name of the King of the English is never mentioned in the letters which passed between the English primate and the kings and bishops of Ireland.It may be that William was biding his time for some act of special wisdom; but our speculations cannot go any further than those of the Peterborough Chronicler.
