Surviving records

Fundamental to all this were questions raised and never properly resolved by the Conquest after 1066. How were the descendants of William the Conqueror to legitimize their rule and succession when their title to the throne had come to them only through bloodshed and main force? How were such kings to resolve the lopsided realities of a dominion or empire, divided by the Channel, ruled by Normans yet powered by England’s wealth? Our knowledge of events is sketchier than we might wish. Only for William the Conqueror and King Stephen do we have contemporary ‘lives’, and, compared with modern day ideas of biography, both of these leave a great deal to be desired. The ‘Gesta Guillelmi’ or ‘Deeds of William’ by William of Poitiers was written to sanitize William’s part in the violent overthrow of Anglo-Saxon England. In its present state, it breaks off, incomplete, shortly after William’s accession. The ‘Gesta Stephani’ describing the deeds of King Stephen was written to demonstrate the King’s recovery after the disasters of the early years of his reign. The fact that Stephen, far from recovering his reputation, then went on to even more ignominious failure perhaps explains why the author seems thereafter to have abandoned all interest in the King’s cause.

The only surviving manuscript of William of Poitiers has been lost, burned in the great fire of 1731 that destroyed so much else of the library of Sir Robert Cotton. We need to remember here that our knowledge of the past is based upon small fragments of information, salvaged when the great bulk of medieval writing was destroyed, sometimes by accident, sometimes, as in the Dissolution of the Monasteries of the 1530s, by design. Cotton was one of those antiquaries who set out to salvage what he could from the scatterings of monastic archives. It was into his library, and those of his contemporaries such as Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, that an extraordinary proportion of the surviving chronicle and charter evidences for medieval England were gathered. The accidental burning of a large part of the Cotton library in 1731 destroyed an inestimable quantity of such materials, as can be seen, for example, from the blackened vestiges of Cotton’s copy of Magna Carta, still displayed in the British Library, its seal reduced to a formless lump, like a half-chewed toffee.

Fortunately, in the world of manuscripts there are always discoveries to be made as well as losses to be reported. Another perhaps much better copy of William of Poitiers’ chronicle, said to have existed in the 1620s, has never been traced and may still lurk, unrecognized, on the shelves of a private library in France. Stranger things have come to light even in the past few years. It used to be believed that both the ‘Vita Edwardi’, our principal source for the life of Edward the Confessor, and the so-called Encomium, a sort of life of King Cnut, survived in single manuscripts, in one case incomplete. Then, within a period of only a few months in 2009, not only did a second complete and indeed extended copy of the ‘Encomium’ emerge from a library in Devon, but a large chunk of the ‘Vita Edwardi’, previously unknown to scholarship, turned up in the British Library, copied out by a sixteenth-century antiquary whose papers had never been properly surveyed. Medieval history is not just about making patterns from small pieces of evidence. It involves hunting down the evidence itself, often to strange or unexpected places.

For those unfamiliar with such sources, it is important to bear in mind that medieval biography omits an enormous amount that today we would take for granted. It rarely includes dates. It may supply only the briefest and most stylized of descriptions of personality, personal appearance, personal taste or friendships, indeed of all of those qualities that we would today assume essential features of a human life. Sexuality, let alone psychology, lay well beyond the bounds of what biographers could describe. Even if mentioned, most often through the delineation of sexual misdeeds, adultery or fornication, references to the king’s sex life are generally to be read in a moral rather than a literal sense, as an indication of the degree to which a fallible individual failed to heed God’s imperatives. The models for this sort of writing lay partly in the Bible, partly in the work of classical historians, above all of Suetonius, the highly scandalous, highly moralizing biographer of the Roman emperors. As a result, we cannot expect medieval biographies, particularly royal biographies, to supply anything other than the crudest and most distorted of portraits. Even when their details seem authentic, we must take care that they are not simply copied from Suetonius or some account of an Old Testament king.

A fragmentary account of William the Conqueror, for example, supposedly written by a monk of Caen, tell us that the King was very abstemious in his use of wine and rarely drank more than three times at a meal. This is, in fact, a detail copied directly from Einhard’s Life of the Emperor Charlemagne, and in turn, by Einhard from Suetonius’ life of the Roman Emperor, Augustus. It tells us nothing reliable about the drinking habits of William the Conqueror, though it may potentially tell us a great deal of the imperial models which William and his biographers were keen to ape. For the rest, we depend upon chroniclers such as William of Malmesbury, Orderic Vitalis and Henry of Huntingdon, all of whom had particular axes to grind, all of whom set out to moralize their histories, chiefly by pairing off good against bad kings, and most of whom were writing long after the events they described, in an attempt to explain to themselves and their own bewildered contemporaries how such a cataclysmic event as the Norman Conquest had come to pass. The surviving letters and charters of the kings themselves may sometimes assist us in establishing who was at court, or where exactly the King was, but these charters are rarely dated, leaving even such matters as the King’s day-by-day movements, his ‘itinerary’, largely hidden from us. For the entire period of William I’s reign, for example, from 1066 to his death in 1087, we know the King’s precise whereabouts for only 42 days out of about 7,500.

William the Conqueror’s first five years as king were spent dealing with the rebellions and invasion scares that convulsed the English after 1066. In 1070, re-enacting his coronation of Christmas 1066, he was crowned King by papal legates, at Easter, the feast of Christ’s rebirth, in an attempt to set a seal of papal approval upon the Conquest. In the same year, at the Council of Winchester, all but one of the surviving English bishops were removed from office, including Stigand, the scandalous archbishop of Canterbury. This paved the way for William to promote Lanfranc as head of the English Church. In 1072, having put down risings at Peterborough and Ely, William was able to lead a joint land and sea operation against the Scots and their king, Malcolm Canmore, resulting in the so-called peace of Abernethy. Malcolm recognized William as his overlord and surrendered hostages for his future good conduct. In 1068, William had already visited Cornwall, being perhaps the first King of England to do so in the past century, putting down the rebellions that had troubled Exeter and the West Country and appointing a Breton as earl. In 1070 during the harrying of the north, he had built castles at Stafford and Chester intended to offer future protection against the Welsh. In the 1080s, he intervened in disputes between the rival Welsh princes of Morgannwg and Deheubath, personally travelling as far west as St David’s, in theory as a pilgrim, in practice as part of an itinerary intended to emphasize his political authority. His successor, William II, in the 1090s, kept up the pressure on the Scots and Welsh, expelling the local ruler appointed to Cumbria by the Scots king, refounding the Roman garrison town of Carlisle as a new outpost of Norman rule and, on the east coast, pushing his rule as far north as Bamburgh and the Tweed. These were the actions of an imperial regime, extending Norman rule to the furthest corners of what might be regarded as England and beyond.

Having dealt with the Scots, William I retired to Normandy where he remained for all but a few months of his final years, troubled by disputes in northern France, where Flanders now emerged as an enemy rather than an ally. Maine, on his southern frontier, was only with difficulty restored to Norman control, henceforth disputed by William’s powerful southern neighbours, the counts of Anjou. In 1074, the collapse of a rebellion by Edgar the Aetheling, last of the surviving great-grandsons of King Aethelred, and in the following year, the brutal suppression of the rebellion led by the earls of East Anglia, Hereford and Northumbria, appeared to usher in a new period of stability in England. At Christmas 1075, as if to symbolize the end of the old order, William attended the funeral of Queen Edith, the widow of Edward the Confessor and sister of Harold Godwinson, laid to rest in Westminster Abbey. The execution of Earl Waltheof of Northumbria, however, and the subsequent miracles said to have been worked at his tomb in Crowland Abbey, where he was venerated as a martyr, merely paved the way for yet further Anglo-Norman hostilities. Orderic Vitalis blamed the death of Waltheof, the last of the English earls, for all of King William’s subsequent troubles.

These troubles took a predictable and familiar form. The question of succession and legitimacy had long loomed over English history, from the death of Aethelred in 1016, through to Edward the Confessor’s failure to nominate an heir in the 1050s and 60s. In 1078, the same issue re-emerged, this time as a result of quarrels within the family of William the Conqueror. William had at least four sons, one of whom died young, killed, as we have seen, in a hunting accident widely interpreted as God’s punishment for Norman pride. The eldest of the sons, Robert known as ‘Curthose’ (‘short legs’ or ‘short stockings’), had been promised the succession to the duchy of Normandy from at least 1063, aged only thirteen. With his father refusing to relinquish control over Normandy’s affairs, Robert increasingly considered himself cheated of his rightful position and authority. In 1078, he rebelled, so Orderic Vitalis tells us as the result of a family quarrel in which his younger brothers, William Rufus and Henry, playing dice in a room above Robert’s lodgings, jokingly urinated on Robert and his attendants. Henry was only ten years old at the time, Rufus eighteen. We seem to be here in the same sort of ‘broken society’ of binge drinking adolescents that modern politicians claim to be so anxious to ‘heal’. Like many absurd family quarrels, this one had serious consequences. In the ensuing family war, Robert personally wounded his father in a skirmish fought outside Gerberoy to the north-west of Beauvais. William was only saved through the intervention of an Englishman, Toki of Wallingford, a remarkable instance of the way in which a Norman king could now trust to the loyalty of the very people that he had met and defeated in battle less than twenty years earlier.

Although relations between William and Robert were thereafter patched up, tensions between father and son were widely reported by contemporaries and never entirely resolved. After 1084, Robert once again broke with his family and spent the next three years, through to his father’s death in 1087, as an exile from Normandy. Such dissension was only increased in 1082 when William arrested and imprisoned his half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, accused of plotting to succeed as king or even of attempting to buy himself the papal throne in Rome. The purchase of holy office, associated with the New Testament sinner Simon Magus mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, in the eleventh century had come to be seen as the most serious of crimes: simony, a sin which cried out for a root and branch reform of the Church’s affairs. The fact that Odo was accused not just of simony but specifically of attempting to use simony to gain the papal throne suggests a deliberate campaign of propaganda against him and the raking up of the most outrageous charges that any enemy could devise. Meanwhile, William’s arrest of Odo, the man responsible for commissioning the Bayeux Tapestry, still today the most optimistic and forthright statement of the Norman claim to the English throne, is a fitting symbol of the slide of William’s family towards disputation and the politics of revenge.