The monks welcome Henry. Duke and King.[1] What personal share Roger took in the struggle is not recorded; but some at least of his monks, like the monks of Ely in the days of Hereward,[2] welcomed the small body of followers who still clave to Henry, and at whose head he now took up his last position of defence in the island sanctuary.[3]
Siege of the Mount.
Lent, 1091.
Its position.
The inner bay.
Here Henry was besieged by his two brothers, Duke
and King. Yet we hear of nothing which can in strictness
be called a siege. The Mount stands in the mouth
of a bay within a bay. At high water it is strictly an
island; at low water it is surrounded by a vast wilderness
of sand—those treacherous sands from which thirty
years before Harold had rescued the soldiers of the elder
William[4], and which stretch back as far as the rocks of
Cancale on the Breton shore. In this sense the bay of
Saint Michael may be counted to stretch from Cancale
to the opposite point on the Norman coast, where the
land begins to bend inwards to form the narrower bay.
This last may be counted to stretch from the mouth of
the border stream of Coesnon below Pontorson to Genetz
lying on the coast nearly due west from Avranches.
The Mount itself and its satellite the smaller rock of
Tombelaine lie nearly in a straight line between these
two points. Alternately inaccessible by land and by
water, accessible by land at any time only by certain
known routes at different points, the Mount would seem
to be incapable of direct attack by any weapons known
in the eleventh century. On the other hand, it would
be easy to cut it off from all communication with the
outer world by the occupation of the needful points onsuccessit Rogerius Cadomensis,
non electione monachorum, sed vi terrenæ potestatis."]
