[Sidenote:  Henry and the Barons]

Charter and marriage roused an enthusiasm among his subjects which enabled Henry to defy the claims of his brother and the disaffection of his nobles.  Early in 1101 Robert landed at Portsmouth to win the crown in arms.  The great barons with hardly an exception stood aloof from the king.  But the Norman Duke found himself face to face with an English army which gathered at Anselm’s summons round Henry’s standard.  The temper of the English had rallied from the panic of Senlac.  The soldiers who came to fight for their king “nowise feared the Normans.”  As Henry rode along their lines showing them how to keep firm their shield-wall against the lances of Robert’s knighthood, he was met with shouts for battle.  But king and duke alike shrank from a contest in which the victory of either side would have undone the Conqueror’s work.  The one saw his effort was hopeless, the other was only anxious to remove his rival from the realm, and by a peace which the Count of Meulan negotiated Robert recognized Henry as King of England while Henry gave up his fief in the Cotentin to his brother the Duke.  Robert’s retreat left Henry free to deal sternly with the barons who had forsaken him.  Robert de Lacy was stripped of his manors in Yorkshire; Robert Malet was driven from his lands in Suffolk; Ivo of Grantmesnil lost his vast estates and went to the Holy Land as a pilgrim.  But greater even than these was Robert of Belesme, the son of Roger of Montgomery, who held in England the earldoms of Shrewsbury and Arundel, while in Normandy he was Count of Ponthieu and Alencon.  Robert stood at the head of the baronage in wealth and power:  and his summons to the King’s Court to answer for his refusal of aid to the king was answered by a haughty defiance.  But again the Norman baronage had to feel the strength which English loyalty gave to the Crown.  Sixty thousand Englishmen followed Henry to the attack of Robert’s strongholds along the Welsh border.  It was in vain that the nobles about the king, conscious that Robert’s fall left them helpless in Henry’s hands, strove to bring about a peace.  The English soldiers shouted “Heed not these traitors, our lord King Henry,” and with the people at his back the king stood firm.  Only an early surrender saved Robert’s life.  He was suffered to retire to his estates in Normandy, but his English lands were confiscated to the Crown.  “Rejoice, King Henry,” shouted the English soldiers, “for you began to be a free king on that day when you conquered Robert of Belesme and drove him from the land.”  Master of his own realm and enriched by the confiscated lands of the ruined barons Henry crossed into Normandy, where the misgovernment of the Duke had alienated the clergy and tradesfolk, and where the outrages of nobles like Robert of Belesme forced the more peaceful classes to call the king to their aid.  In 1106 his forces met those of his brother on the field of Tenchebray, and a decisive English victory on Norman soil avenged the shame of Hastings.  The conquered duchy became a dependency of the English crown, and Henry’s energies were frittered away through a quarter of a century in crushing its revolts, the hostility of the French, and the efforts of his nephew William, the son of Robert, to regain the crown which his father had lost.