after the festival the flame burst forth. The great body of the Norman lords of England were in open revolt against the son of the man who had made England theirs.
The rebel nobles.
Robert of Mortain
and William of Eu.
Earl Roger and the border lords.
Osbern.
The list of the rebel nobles reads like a roll of the
Norman leaders at Senlac or a choice of the names
which fill the foremost places in Domesday. With a
few marked exceptions, all the great men of the land
are there. Along with Odo, Bishop and Earl, the other
brother of the Conqueror, Robert of Mortain and of
Cornwall, the lord of Pevensey and of Montacute, joined
in the revolt against his nephew.[1] So did another kinsman,
a member of the ducal house of Normandy and
gorged with the spoils of England, William son of Robert
Count of Eu, grandson of the elder William and his
famous wife Lescelina.[2] Of greater personal fame, and
of higher formal rank on English soil, was the father
of one of the men who had crossed the sea to trouble
England, Roger of Montgomery, whose earldom of
Shrewsbury swells, in the statelier language of one of
our authorities, into an earldom of the Mercians.[3] He
brought with him a great following from his own borderland.
Among these was Roger of Lacy, great in the
shires from Berkshire to Shropshire;[4] and with him
came the old enemy Osbern of Richard's Castle, whose
- [Footnote: 666 C; "Munitiones suas fossis et hominibus, atque alimentis hominum et
equorum, abundanter instruebant."]
- ↑ On Count Robert, see N. C. vol. ii. p. 296; iv. pp. 78, 168, 170. His name does not now occur in the Chronicles, nor in Orderic, who does not mention the siege of his castle of Pevensey. But his action comes out strongly in Florence, who classes him with Odo as a leader, though in his narrative he appears merely as his tool. The Hyde writer (297) also dwells fully on his share in the work, but he has no special facts or legends.
- ↑ See N. C. vol. iii. pp. 117, 672; iv. pp. 39, 562, 825.
- ↑ In Orderic, 667 B, he appears as "Rogerius Merciorum comes."
- ↑ Flor. Wig. 1088. "Rogerius de Laceio, qui jam super regem invaserat Herefordam." He appears in Domesday in Berkshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Shropshire, but most largely in Herefordshire. See Ellis, i. 442.
