His treatment of his wife
and his godson. to form the likeness of an Ottoman Majesty, Excellency, or Highness in the nineteenth. But his domestic life was hardly happy. His wife Agnes, the heiress of Ponthieu, the mother of his one child William Talvas, was long kept by him in bonds in the dungeons of Bellême.[1] And, more piteous than all, we read how a little boy, his own godchild, drew near to him in all loving trust. Some say, in the sheer wantonness of cruelty, some say, to avenge some slight fault of the child's father, the monster drew the boy under his cloak and tore out his eyes with his own hands.[2]
His enmity
to the men of Domfront;
to Helias;
to Rotrou of Perche;
to the prelates of Seez.
The list of the men, great and small, who were simply
wronged and dispossessed by Robert of Bellême, is
long indeed.[3] Some of them, it is true, were now
and then able to revenge their wrongs with their own
arms. He seems, as might have been expected, to
have been the special enemy of all that was specially
good in individuals or in communities. He was the
bitter foe of the valiant and faithful men of Domfront.[4]
He was before all things the enemy of Helias of La
Flèche. He was the enemy of his neighbour Count
Rotrou of Perche, who also bears a good character among
the princes of his day.[5] As temporal lord of Seez, he
was the enemy of its churches, episcopal and abbatial;
he had not that reverence for the foundation of his
- ↑ Ord. Vit. 708 B. She at last escaped to Countess Adela at Chartres, and got to her own land of Ponthieu.
- ↑ The story is told with the difference spoken of in the text by Henry of Huntingdon (de Cont. Mundi, 11) and by William of Malmesbury (v. 398). Henry says only, "Filioli sui oculos sub chlamide positi quasi ludens pollicibus extraxit." William supplies a kind of motive; "Puerulum ex baptismo filiolum, quem in obsidatum acceperat, pro modico delicto patris excæcarit, lumina miselli unguibus nefandis abrumpens." That is, the Archdeacon makes the ugly story still uglier, just as in the case of the children of Juliana. See N. C. vol. v. pp. 157, 841.
- ↑ Ord. Vit. 708 A. "Ob insolentiam et cupiditatem plurima contra collimitaneos prælia cœpit; sed sæpe victus cum damno et dedecore aufugit."
- ↑ See further on in this chapter.
- ↑ Ord. Vit. 675 D.
