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Updated: June 7, 2025
"He governed with a strong hand," says Orderic, but the strong hand was the hand of a king, not of a tyrant. "Great was the awe of him," writes the annalist of Peterborough. "No man durst ill-do to another in his days. Peace he made for man and beast." Pitiless as were the blows he aimed at the nobles who withstood him, they were blows which his English subjects felt to be struck in their cause.
But we can say nothing as to the further merits or demerits of the Donjon, and the Three Maries sheltered us well enough by the space of six days. Exmes and Almenèches; one fancies that those names will sound strange to almost any one save those who have been lately reading the eleventh book of Orderic the Englishman.
Some sought shelter with kinsfolk and friends. The Abbess herself and three nuns went to Saint-Evroul, where Orderic, who tells the story, dwelled as the monk Vital. They found a shelter and a place of worship in an ancient chapel where Saint Evroul himself had dwelled "coelesti theoriae intentus solitarie degebat."
And a monastic site from which everything monastic has been swept away is not so instructive as a fortified site from which the fortifications are gone. We should be best pleased to find at Saint-Evroul a church in which Orderic may have worshipped, but it would be better to find a later church we had almost said one with discontinuous imposts to its pillars rather than no church at all.
The judgment of Orderic Vitalis, who was still writing in Normandy, is the final judgment of history on the act: "Surely in this permission is to be seen the great simplicity of the king or his great stupidity, and he is to be pitied by all prudent men because he was unmindful of his own safety and of the security of his kingdom." This was the turning-point in Stephen's history.
Orderic, a writer of the twelfth century, gossipy and confused but honest and well-informed, tells us much of the religious movement in Normandy, and is particularly valuable and detailed in his account of the period after the battle of Senlac.
The son, who was at the moment busy securing his kingdom in England, afterwards erected in it a magnificent tomb to the memory of his father. Round, Victoria History of Hampshire, i. 412-413. But See F. Baring in Engl. Hist. Rev. xvi. 427-438 . Orderic Vitalis, ii. 260. Round, Peerage Studies, pp. 181 ff.
Even the historian, Orderic Vitalis, half English by descent and wholly so by birth, but writing in Normandy for Normans and very favourable to William, or possibly the even more Norman William of Poitiers, whom he may have been following, was moved by the sufferings of the land under these repeated invasions, revolts, and harryings, and notes at the close of his account of this year how conquerors and conquered alike were involved in the evils of war, famine, and pestilence.
The judgment of Orderic and of William of Malmesbury confirms the impression of Hildebrand. But the Normans have been their own witnesses, the cathedrals which they raised from the Seine to the Tyne are epics in stone, inspired by no earthly muse, fit emblems of the rock-like endurance and soaring valour of our race.
And the king granted their request." The most complete amongst the chroniclers of the time, Orderic Vital, says, touching this meeting at Angers of Bertrade's two husbands, "This clever woman had, by her skilful management, so perfectly reconciled these two rivals, that she made them a splendid feast, got them both to sit at the same table, had their beds prepared, the ensuing night, in the same chamber, and ministered to them according to their pleasure."
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