[42] Letter of Henry to S. Anselm in Eadmer, _Hist. Nov._ (Rule), p. 184. Forty years before, on the very same day, William the Conqueror had landed at Pevensey to bring the English kingdom under the Norman yoke. The work of Michaelmas Eve, 1066, was reversed on Michaelmas Eve, 1106; the victory of Tinchebray made Normandy a dependency of England.[43] Such was the view taken by one of the most clear-sighted and unprejudiced historians of the time, a man of mingled Norman and English blood. Such was evidently the view instinctively taken by all parties, and the instinct was a true one, although at first glance it seems somewhat hard to account for. The reign of Henry I., if judged merely by the facts which strike the eye in the chronicles of the time, looks like one continued course of foreign policy and foreign warfare pursued by the king for his own personal ends at the expense of his English subjects. But the real meaning of the facts lies deeper. The comment of the archbishop of Rouen upon Henry’s death--“Peace be to his soul, for he ever loved peace”[44]--was neither sarcasm nor flattery. Henry did love peace, so well that he spent his life in fighting for it. His early Norman campaigns are enough to prove that without being a master of the art of war like his father, he was yet a brave soldier and a skilful commander; and the complicated wars of his later years, when over and over again he had to struggle almost single-handed against France, Flanders and Anjou, amid the endless treasons of his own barons, show still more clearly his superiority to nearly all the other generals of his time. But his ambitions were not those of the warrior. Some gleam of the old northman’s joy of battle may have flashed across the wandering knight as he defied his besiegers from the summit of his rock “in Peril of the Sea,” or swooped down upon the turbulent lords of the Cenomannian border, like an eagle upon lesser birds of prey, from his eyrie on the crest of Domfront; but the victor of Tinchebray looked at his campaigns in another light. To him they were simply a part of his general business as a king; they were means to an end, and that end was not glory, nor even gain, but the establishment of peace and order. In his thirteen years of wandering to and fro between England, Normandy and France he had probably studied all the phases of tyranny and anarchy which the three countries amply displayed, and matured his own theory of government, which he practised steadily to the end of his reign. That theory was not a very lofty or noble one; the principle from which it started and the end at which it aimed was the interest of the ruler rather than of the ruled; but the form in which Henry conceived that end and the means whereby he sought to compass it were at any rate more enlightened than those of his predecessor. The Red King had reigned wholly by terror; Henry did not aspire to rule by love; but he saw that, in a merely selfish point