Norman Conquest?

What happened at Hastings was not a ‘Conquest’ but merely a Norman victory in battle followed by the coronation of William as King of England on Christmas Day 1066. Christmas, the festival of Christ’s nativity, was an appropriate date for the birth of a new monarchy and all the more appropriate given that it had been on Christmas Day, in the year 800, that Charlemagne, King of the Franks had chosen to be crowned not just as King but as Emperor (the origin of the so-called ‘Holy Roman Empire’, successor, after a hiatus of more than 300 years, to the vanished western empire of Rome). Once again there was a self-consciousness about Norman actions in 1066 that speaks volumes about their sense of treading in the footsteps of the great. William’s Christmas coronation was undoubtedly a significant event. In all likelihood it served as the final climax of the Bayeux Tapestry, now sadly mutilated at its further edge, but originally perhaps recounting the story of the Normans, from an image of Edward the Confessor enthroned and issuing instructions to Harold, via the coronation of Harold near its centre, through to the coronation of William in the aftermath of the great battle.

Yet coronation, even a coronation on Christmas Day, was a long way from Conquest. The English had lost one king, Harold, widely regarded as a usurper, only to acquire another whose usurpation had been even more sudden, more public and more violent. William was a foreigner, a bastard, and some would say a murderer. No less than Macbeth, whose real historical exploits had only recently erupted upon the stage of Scottish history, his path to the throne had been drenched in blood. Even in territorial terms, as a result of Hastings William controlled little English land save for those parts of Sussex and Kent through which his army had marched during the past three months. Like Swein after 1013, or Cnut after 1016, he might have been expected to temper invasion with accommodation. The English earls would retain their lands, now serving a Norman king rather than a Danish or an English one. The royal court would become a bilingual Anglo-Norman affair, closely linked to northern France, just as after 1016 the court of Cnut had looked as much to Scandinavian as to native English affairs. England itself would endure. Regime change would not provoke any more permanent upheaval. To this extent, there was a Norman coronation in 1066, but no Conquest. Conquest only came afterwards and was to occupy William and his men for at least a decade after the Battle of Hastings. Hastings itself, and the events of 1066, are known to us in a detail quite remarkable by the standards of medieval reportage. The events of the later 1060s and 70s, by contrast, still remain largely mysterious. We can write the history of the Norman invasion with some confidence. That of the Conquest remains conjectural and still hotly disputed.