Longueville on the Scie, with streams and forests between them and Eu.[1] Longueville was the last stage of their march. Thither Rufus sent those who knew how to bring his special arguments to bear on the mind of Philip. The King again went back to France, and the confederate army was broken up.[2]
Contemporary notices of the campaign.
Difference between England and Normandy.
There is something very singular in the way in which
this second Norman war of William Rufus is dealt with
by those who wrote at or near the time. Some make
no mention of it at all; others speak of it only casually;
our own Chronicler, who gives the fullest account of all,
does not carry it on to any intelligible issue of success
or of failure. In his pages, and in those of some others,
the war drops out of notice, without coming to any real
end of any kind.[3] The monk of Saint Evroul, so lavish
in local Norman details, seems to have had his head too
full of the local strifes among the Norman nobles to tell
us anything of a warfare which in our eyes comes so
much nearer to the likeness of a national struggle. It
must always be remembered that the local wars which
tore every district of Normandy in pieces did not stop
in the least because two hostile kings were encamped on
Norman soil. There cannot be a more speaking comment,
at once on the difference between Robert and
either of his brothers and on the essential difference
- ↑ Chron. Petrib. 1094. "And se eorl innon Normandig æfter þison, mid þam cynge of France and mid eallon þan þe hi gegaderian mihton, ferdon towardes Ou þær se cyng W. inne wæs, and þohtan hine inne to besittanne, and swa foran oð hi coman to Lungeuile."
- ↑ Ib. "Ðær wearð se cyng of France þurh gesmeah gecyrred, and swa syððan eal seo fyrding tóhwearf."
- ↑ Florence, as we have seen, stops with the taking of La Houlme in 1094. The Chronicler goes on to Henry's Lenten expedition in 1095. After that, neither says anything about Norman affairs till the agreement of 1096, though both of them imply (see below, p. 555) that the war lasted till that time.
