THE NORMAN CONQUERORS AND THEIR SUCCESSORS 



Duke William's Fleet. 



It is to be feared that all the wrongs that William suffered or 

 imagined, and his stirring call to his subjects to avenge the national 

 honour and to punish the perjured Harold, had very little effect until 

 he made a special point of the spoil that would fall to the expedition. 

 Then it was a different matter. It was an added spur to the adventurers 

 that he was hiring from outside and it made his own people enthusiastic 

 at once, for although they had been settled in Normandy for a century 

 and had absorbed many French ways and ideas, they were not far 

 removed from the Norse pirates who had sired them. The Bishop of 

 Bayeux sent forty ships in exchange for a promise of high office in the 

 government — a promise which was later to cost England dear — and his 

 reverend brother of Le Mans another thirty. Some ships were hired, 

 others seized, but the greater number had to be built, and these appear 

 to have been light vessels which were designed to stand the crossing and 

 little more. The flagship was the Mora, which was a present to 

 William from his wife Matilda, and was a fine ship of her type. As a 

 reward for her dutiful behaviour Matilda was given the County of Kent 

 after the Conquest. The total number of ships in the invading fleet is 

 very vague, but the generally accepted estimate is that there were 

 nearly a thousand transports and four hundred men-of-war, and that the 

 expedition consisted of some 60,000 troops. This is reasonable enough, 

 for in such circumstances it would not be difficult to get forty men into a 

 ship of the type which these presumably were. If one may judge by the 

 Bayeux tapestry, woven by women who naturally had no technical know- 

 ledge and have to receive allowances accordingly, these ships are an 

 adaptation of the Viking type, just as one would expect them to be. 

 The Norman Invasion. 



William collected his fleet and army at the mouth of the little river 

 Dives, near Trouville, and there he was detained by a succession of 

 contrary winds while the last of Harold's fleet dispersed. When finally 

 an opportunity came to sail, a number of ships were lost on the passage 

 up the French coast, until finally it was decided to put into Saint Valery 

 en Caux, near Dieppe. Here there was more delay and the expedition 

 was in really serious danger of going to pieces, when the conditions 

 improved with a startling suddenness of which William took full 

 advantage in playing on the superstitions of his followers. The fleet 

 sailed at sundown, but by dawn William in the Mora found himself 

 alone without a single one of the fleet in sight. He therefore 

 anchored and awaited the arrival of the rest of the ships, the major 

 portion of whom had joined him by noon. His army disembarked at 

 Pevensey without opposition, but the portion that had not joined him 

 got too far to the eastward and as soon as they landed they were cut 

 to pieces by the inhabitants of Romney, who had their town burned for 

 their gallantry when the Conqueror had time to attend to them. How 

 the invaders were forced into action on Harold's terms at Senlac, behind 

 Hastings, and how the battle was finally won and the country subjugated 

 are matters of land rather than sea history. 



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