Two hours from Cherbourg, as the motor flies, lies the old town of Caen, founded by William the Conqueror.

A curious peace reigns in this old fortress, with the drawbridge down, and the moat a bower of trees and flowers: the peace of consummated action; the returns are all in, and you may receive them according to your humor, for the burning questions of other days have faded into dreamy generalities.

Were all those wild centuries of struggle and warfare vain? Or is the old Greek battle-cry, “Now let us go forward, whether we shall give glory to other men, or other men to us,” the normal note of primitive manhood? Were Rollo the Norseman and William the Norman, following the war-gods fiercer than they, commissioned by fate to lead great armies across the great waters, and, sailing under sealed orders, to found two great nations and one great language? Or are all things vanity?

Perhaps, after receiving the children’s children of his loyal subjects, who may have crossed a certain wide ocean unknown to him to attend the great Court of History that William the Norman holds at Caen, the Shades of the Conqueror growing more familiar might conduct the musing cortÉge into the beautiful abbey near-by, which he built in expiation of the love-match he made in defiance of the church.

I wonder here if the old king might not laughingly recall the story of his first meeting with Lanfranc.

Like other forceful men, William married upon his own responsibility. Accordingly, the Pope not only excommunicated him, but laid various bans upon his realm. Such bans were once marvelously inconvenient, to say the least. William fought the church valiantly for six years. It may have been then that he got his measure of the uses and abuses of that institution, which, in the long run, proved most valuable to England. Among others, Lanfranc, Prior of Bec, became a target for William’s displeasure and was ordered to leave his monastery. Lanfranc started forth forlornly enough on a lame horse. Thus caparisoned, he met the furious Duke William. Lanfranc had but one weapon at his command—tact. He approached the great duke, saying, “I am obeying your command as quickly as I can. I will obey faster if you will give me a better horse.” William was blessed with humor. He impressed Lanfranc into his service then and there, and made him his friend forever: the Conqueror could make good friends. Then he sent Lanfranc to make his peace with the Holy See. Understanding William’s passion for building, Lanfranc, the peacemaker, arranged that William and Mathilda should each build an abbey in expiation of their marriage. And William and Mathilda performed their contract so royally that France has lately restored their abbeys, line for line, as national monuments.[3] Thus a tableau of Caen, as the Conqueror saw it, actually lies before twentieth century eyes.

Ah, put yourself in his place! I never knew a traveler to leave this old town without becoming attached to its founder. The strong, orderly, noble and logical Norman buildings express the old Conqueror at his best; at Caen one prefers his older, gentler, more unique title of William, the builder, for, indeed, many have conquered in England, but William I built up his conquest.

In this interesting old Norman church, with its suspicion of the pointed arch (probably the earliest instance) pointing toward the unparalleled Gothic that developed in Normandy, one feels like congratulating the old Conqueror, both as lover and architect, and reinstating his old claim to romance, even though modern research has discovered that he was not a very gentle knight.

William I was no saint; but why should he have been one? Professional saints were only too common in his day: he was but a strong, direct man in a most superstitious, childish and indirect age. Is not the position of one who can stand alone through his age heroic enough?

What a curious world the old Conqueror lived in! A world of professional marauders and their soldiers, of professional saints and their serfs; with a confusion of fighting barons, lay and ecclesiastic, some or the most interesting bishops being no mean warriors; and worst of all, a lot of begging friars producing little but corruption. To the day of his death, the Conqueror makes no apology for his wars in Normandy. There he was simply holding his own. The behavior of the wild and worldly barons was not all he had to contend with; there were also the visions and the notions of the unworldly clergy, who, with intent, more or less good, more or less self-seeking, interfered absolutely with good government, and William’s tact and breadth with them, considered at a time when it is easy to be wise, nearly one thousand years after the event, is astonishing. It fell to his lot to deal with that peculiarly well-intentioned pope, Gregory VII, who, by his ability to conceive and carry out his well-intentioned policy, worked such incalculable evil. Spain is struggling with his Shades today.

What a problem the mystics of the eleventh century, with their tremendous following and their curious allegorical interpretations of everything great or small in heaven or on earth, must have been to a statesman! Listen to this eleventh century letter of thanks from Saint Ivo to Gerard of Ham, for “an instrument of the whiteness of snow for combing the hair.” This comb is agreeable to him in and of itself, like other objects of beauty; but above all, it pleases him because of the elevation of ideas, which it so beautifully symbolizes: he is quite sure that thy prudence (ta prudence) has wished hereby to give a suggestion to his vigilance to seek constantly by all sorts of exhortations to reform the disorderly manners of his people, whom he compares to a disarranged head of hair. And yet Saint Ivo was in his day a strictly practical person, not to be fooled as Savonarola was four hundred years later by the ordeal of fire. Saint Ivo forbids a husband to condemn his wife even when the man he has accused could be burned by hot irons; and when the martial old bishop of Le Mans, who is accused of having treacherously surrendered that town, offers to walk on hot irons to prove his innocence, Saint Ivo writes him that ordeals are uncanonical and that he must not submit to them. But then no reader of his correspondence can fail to see that Saint Ivo was very timid. How he did dread the Channel! He entreats the holiest men of his acquaintance to pray unceasingly for him while he is on the water.

But let us turn to the Conqueror’s own review of his life, as he discussed it on his death-bed. Two of his clergy took it down. Thus, as he would speak to his sons, he speaks to history. Here we have his perplexities at first hand. That we may put ourselves in his place as literally as possible, let us repair with the document to the beautiful Abbey aux Dames, so tenderly connected with the Conqueror’s queen. There, it is said, she made her thank-offering for her lord’s safe deliverance, alike from the perils of war and the perils of the Channel. This abbey was consecrated the year of the Conquest, eleven years before the Abbey aux Hommes (ladies first). Many of the Conqueror’s followers supplied their own ships, but Mathilda herself fitted out the Conqueror’s,—the regal Mora—so splendidly stocked with wine. Her good ship bore him safely to England and victory, and brought him back, as ever, true to his queen. To this abbey they dedicated their daughter Cicely, when she was a child, and she became a great and powerful abbess. Here we may picture her praying, as a woman in the intense Age of Faith could pray, for the souls of her parents.

Eight hundred and twenty-five years after its original construction we found another high-bred cloistered Lady of the Trinity in passionate prayer at the tomb of Mathilda. Was this pretty young nun a legitimate part of the restoration? Though the cloisters of France were supposed to have been abolished, this one had been passed by, for the Conqueror holds Caen, and some iron hand of the past seems to have retained this spiritual young girl in prayer at the tomb of his queen. A strange sight it was, one of the curious tragedies of conservatism; but like many every-day tragedies imperceptible to its actors.

To the eye all seemed beauty. From a fine old garden we stepped into a majestic aisle of a great abbey. As we walked down in its dim half-light, a curtain was drawn displaying a brass grill impassable in the eyes of the church. Impassable it had been, in fact, for nearly eight hundred and fifty years, but now to climb over it would be a minor athletic feat. It separated the chapel of the foundress and the nuns of the order of the Trinity from the whole outside world. The entire central space of this chapel was occupied by Queen Mathilda’s enormous cream-colored sarcophagus (restored). One might read the inscription in eleventh-century characters, fresh from a modern chisel. The chapel walls were lined with dark, carved wooden stalls, freshly oiled, and new-born sunbeams peered decorously through rich-colored glass on two kneeling nuns clad in the old-time flowing ivory-colored robes of the Ladies of the Trinity.

One was a fleshy, middle-aged woman, mechanically counting her beads, the other was young and beautiful. She was looking up, and, though she was as motionless as the tomb beside her, her attitude expressed action as sculpture may. What was she thinking of? Is the life of today any less inscrutable than that of one thousand years ago? Here, in the charity of the church, let us consider the Conqueror’s apology (apologia); we are translating the word too literally, but the spirit of the document is humble and explanatory and, withal, very winning.

In this apologia William considers that he has done his duty to the church, and history endorses him; in general, when he was at variance with it he was in the right. But of his expedition to England—every move of which is justified upon the Bayeux Tapistry—he repents, although, fortunately, not fanatically enough to try and undo the deed. He only makes what reparation he can to certain victims. Though on his death-bed he liberated Harold’s son and nephew, he seems to overlook a curious persecution, cruel in intent but easily repaired, that, in the confidence and fury of his power, he had directed against the soul of the defeated king. The Conqueror carried Harold’s body from the battlefield (he wrapt it in the purple, it is true), but he had insisted upon burying it in unhallowed ground, although for it Harold’s mother had offered the weight in gold,—both parties firmly believing that to lie in unconsecrated ground would militate against the repose of the spirit. Though he tried to undo many a deed, the Conqueror ignores entirely his arrogant revenge upon a soul. Facing death matures our sense of value.

Though but one century removed from a forebear whose God was Odin, whose Valhalla was a place where heroes cut each other to pieces daily in fair fight, but where the blest are perpetually restored to life at meal-time that they may eat of the wild boar and fight again and forever,[4] at least the Conqueror came to shudder at his massacres at Hastings and York, to truly repent and to die humbly commending his soul to Mary.

The spirit of the nineteenth century was iconoclastic; it demolished alike old heroes, old superstitions and old faiths. But the twentieth century would call them back, not as realities, but as heroes, superstitions and faiths, treating them philosophically, as great moving forces, or poetically, as starting points for new ideals. The hard, rational doubt which emancipated thought in the nineteenth century develops into the sympathetic doubt of the twentieth. The nineteenth century laughed at barbaric old heroes, while the twentieth century smiles at them. Who wants to live in a world without heroes? All men are not equal; but by reverent appreciation the small man may become brother to the genius.

Every place, every document connected with the Conqueror bears his strong individuality. Read of him where you may, between the lines of the Domesday Book (that conscientious effort to tax all that the traffic will bear), or in the broken lays of the troubadours, or by the light or the density of contemporary chroniclers, Norman or Saxon, you find before you a man great in himself and a forerunner of greater things: a great builder, building better than he knew; a great ruler, ruling farther than he knew—a true hero of the strenuous life.

Following the chance records from which the Conqueror’s biography is put together, one is amazed by the integrity of his political instinct. William the Norman is an instance for the poet who said, “The world is what a few great men have made it.” The Conqueror seems such a typical Englishman, alike in his love of the forests and the “high deer,” of which the old Saxon chronicler complains, and in his appreciation of justice and stability, for which the same chronicler gives thanks on the spot. The Conqueror’s appeal is a very wide one. Even the economists, who hold that the world is what demand and supply have made it, write with an enthusiasm peculiarly their own of the Domesday Book and its wisely self-seeking, avaricious author.

It cannot be argued that the Conqueror was a popular king, but sinners, like saints, may be proven by their influence after death—the Conqueror’s was strong and manly. His spirit entered widely into mediÆval legend. He is the Arthur, the ideal ruler, whom Malory commends for manly purity, justice and probity; also for “open manslaughter.” We may take Malory’s word for it, it was better than the savage treachery known even four hundred years later, when that old raconteur was mixing probabilities, improbabilities and impossibilities so picturesquely, and we have our old hero back. Although we must alter Malory’s ideal, we can add to it as well as subtract from it. We have the splendid barbarian who brought order out of chaos both in England and Normandy, who loved and trusted his wife, who loved nature and had an instinct for art, whose intelligent attitude toward religion and learning left the Dark Ages behind, and whose loyal leadership opened the romantic days of chivalry.

Near Caen is a lovelier town, “Dinan, where the Conqueror slept.” Here history’s scroll seems to loosen, displaying an enchanting pastoral of the ages; there lies the simple, old hamlet by the river, just as it might have looked when William the Norman and Harold, son of Goodwin, camped there together, a little less than one thousand years ago. Then, back of the river on the bluff, later a securely walled town appeared, but now the old fortifications have turned into charming parks and playgrounds, girding the loveliest of French villages; and on a summer day in fair France one can feel sure that though much of life is at cross-purposes, all is not vanity: old moats may make the loveliest of gardens; old warriors, the gentlest of heroes.