William I (1066–1087)
Though peace had succeeded the Conquest, it was not to last. Outbreaks of resistance continued to flare up particularly as the new rulers turned a deaf ear to complaints from the Anglo-Saxons that Norman men-at-arms were abusing their positions, stealing from the English and carrying off their wives or turning humbler thanes out of their family homes. More dangerous were the attempts of regional leaders such as Edwin, Morcar and Edgar the Atheling and their supporters to regain control of the country by seeking assistance abroad. At Rouen William heard rumours that the king of Denmark and even his own cousin the count of Boulogne had been approached by the English to help them get rid of the Normans. In the west of England three sons of Harold who had been hiding in Ireland started laying waste the country. In the north a widespread resistance movement began, led by the northern earls. But once again, as at the Battle of Hastings, the failure of all these parties to make common cause would mean they could never succeed.
It was enough of a threat at the time, however, to oblige William to leave his wife Matilda of Flanders to govern Normandy with his eldest son Robert, while he returned to London. Impressing contemporaries by his refusal to wait for campaigning weather in the milder spring, at the beginning of January 1067 he sent one army north while he personally marched the second west. His progress through the country to Exeter was marked by the throwing up at regular strategic points of characteristic Norman castles. These were towers or keeps erected on top of a man-made mound, or in Norman French motte, and surrounded by a moat, their purpose to control the countryside. The use of slits for windows and the forbidding absence of decorative features proclaim their strictly military purpose.
Having successfully besieged Exeter and built the castle of Rougemont outside it, William hurried north to confront the greatest threat to his rule. Early in 1069 the Saxons massacred William’s governor in Durham, Robert de Comines, and all but two of his 500 men as they slept. The English population of York soon followed suit, rising against its foreign garrison and destroying it and burning York Minster. When Harold’s sons landed again at Plymouth while the fleet of the King of Denmark sailed unopposed up the Humber river alongside ships loyal to Edgar the Atheling, William’s control of his new domain seemed suddenly in doubt. But, acting with his usual decisiveness, he bought off the Danes and persuaded them, with the English leaders, to retreat up to the Tyne. Then he himself proceeded to York where the local Saxon leader Waltheof, Earl of Huntingdon had been directing operations and in fact doing much of the fighting himself.
This massive slayer of Normans so impressed William that he took him into his service and married him to his niece Judith. But he loosed a dreadful vengeance on the Northumbrians for their defiance. At Christmas, the season of goodwill, the Conqueror sat in grim and solitary state in the empty city of York planning wholesale destruction for a hundred miles around. Every day Norman soldiers were sent out to kill every living thing in the area: men, women, children and all their livestock. Houses and all fruits, conserves and grain were to be burned, ploughs broken and the country from the Humber to the Tees, from the Wear to the Tyne, to be made a desert. Fourteen years later, in the Domesday Book–the celebrated record of landholding in England compiled for tax purposes–all of that country had only the terrible Latin word vasta (meaning ruined or destroyed) to describe it. For fifty years nothing grew there. This episode became known as the Harrying of the North. It was intended to ensure that its inhabitants never rose again against the Norman occupying power.
Nevertheless, thanks to an indomitable Lincolnshire thane named Hereward the Wake, one little place in England held out against William and all his military devices until 1071. That was the tiny Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire, which was then surrounded on every side by impassable marshes and wild fens. It became a symbol of English national resistance. That its leader’s name Hereward the Wake passed into semi-mythical folklore on the level of Robin Hood and King Arthur indicates the strength of emotion surrounding him. Unlike those characters, however, Hereward was a real person whose existence is solidly documented. He had returned from abroad to find his mother turned out of the family home by Norman upstarts who were now themselves living in it. Enraged by her treatment Hereward began harassing the Normans. After the Harrying of the North had driven the two northern earls Edwin and Morcar out of their country they joined him with their followers and Ely became the centre of English resistance.
In the end William could trust only himself to defeat the wily Saxon. He blockaded the Wash for weeks and every little inlet that led into the Fens, trying to starve the English out. But though by then Hereward and the rest of the resistance were living on roots they never gave up. They were so successful in ambushing William’s men when they tried to build a causeway to the island that it began to be rumoured that Hereward had magic powers. In fact the Normans might never have captured Hereward at all had not the monks on the Isle of Ely betrayed him. Unlike Hereward they missed their luxurious diet of fine white bread and venison and good French wines. They sent a message to William revealing the existence of a secret passage which ran between the island and the Normans’ camp. In the middle of the night William and his men poured on to the island, capturing Hereward as he lay hidden in the reeds.
This marked the real end of the English national resistance. Hereward was treated leniently as William was impressed by his courage, and he is believed to have died on one of the king’s campaigns in France to secure the borders of Normandy. But since England continued to be periodically shaken by regional rebellions, minor though they were, William retreated from his policy of using the Anglo-Saxons to govern England for him. The Conquest was still a very recent event and had yet to take permanent root among the people. Owing to the interest neighbouring countries like Denmark and Flanders continued to take in rebel conspirators’ plans, in 1074 when the earls of Hereford and Norfolk and the treacherous Earl Waltheof tried to seize power, William’s attitude to his newly acquired country changed.
Previously, in exchange for paying a redemptive tax or geld many Saxon thanes had been permitted by the Normans to retain their old lands. The shires and shire courts had continued to be largely administered by English officials. Although there had been some land redistribution to reward William’s followers it was on a relatively small scale. But from 1075 onwards the 4,000 thanes who had been the important landowners in England under Harold began to be dispossessed of their ancient estates. Their fields, pastures, meadows and forests would be consolidated into far larger blocs and transferred to the ownership of 200 Norman barons and their own small armies of soldiers. William now believed that only Normans could be trusted to control the rebellious country of England for him, through the military landholding system called feudalism.
Under the Saxon kings land had been owned freely, despite the ancient defensive obligation of the fyrd and the duty to maintain roads and bridges. The Duke of Normandy introduced to England the Norman legal custom in which all landholding carried a military obligation. It was described as being ‘held of the king’. Land was granted by William to his followers on the specific condition that its owner served the lord above him in war. It bound the whole of England into one military unit and could have been achieved only in a revolution such as had just taken place in England. For each unit of land or ‘fief’ that the new Norman landowner held in England, he was obliged to put an armed soldier or knight at William’s disposal to fight for him for so many days a year, and he had to take an oath to be faithful to the lord he held it of, called the oath of fidelity or fealty. The man who took it did homage to the man above him, who was called his liege lord.
The Norman feudal system had accounted for the ease with which William the Conqueror had raised his invading army in 1066. He had called on the knights’ service owed to him by the great Norman lords who held land from him, which meant they had to be ready for war, complete with arms and horses, at all times. The king was at the top of the system and below him were the most powerful nobles called the tenants-in-chief, each bound to supply him with up to 1,500 knights. Many of those 1,500 knights would be supplied from among the tenants below who owed the lord above them knight service.
By 1085 not only had all the land been redistributed, but the official or government class responsible for royal business in the shires was now composed of all Norman Frenchmen rather than English. Shires had also been renamed counties, after the Conqueror’s local representative, the vicomte, who to begin with took over the functions of the sheriff. But, though county remains another word for shire, the office of vicomte soon melted away, and the title sheriff returned. Over the previous ten years the population of England had become used to the sight of large numbers of Norman French officials guarded by soldiers arriving from London to gather information to facilitate the transfer of land in their area. The Normans called up what became known as juries (from the Latin juro, I swear)–that is, panels of inquiry which sat in the open air on the village green to determine what the boundaries, the ancient rights and the labour obligations were for each estate, whether belonging to a lord or a churchman.
The Normans’ claim to England was based on conquest. At the same time they were natural lawyers and immensely businesslike. They were obsessed with legitimacy and believed in doing everything by the book. Even though a Norman lord might be taking over a Saxon property, they intended services and dues to carry on as before or ‘as in the days of King Edward’, in that phrase so resonant of legitimacy for the Normans. William was particularly keen to sort out the large estate owners’ rights when it came to the law of the land. The legal powers of the King of England were far greater than those of other western European monarchs. Although the Anglo-Saxon lord was entitled to hold his own courts to judge disputes over land in his domain, to punish thieves and to assess stolen goods, the English national custom had been established for centuries that those rights were granted by the king. The king and his officials were considered to be responsible for keeping the peace. Moreover, the King of England was entitled to raise taxes in every part of the country. When his instructions or writs came to the shire court, now called the county court, the English tradition was that they were to be obeyed. There was no need for soldiers to enforce his writs.
At Christmas 1085, with the land transfer complete, the king held the last of his tri-annual councils with all the most important new landholders or tenants-in-chief. William was recorded as having ‘held very deep speech with his council about this land–how it was peopled, and with what sort of men’. He was now in a position to send further posses of government officials among the newly Normanized English to set up an enlarged version of the shire court in every county. They were to assess everyone for tax, from cottagers to lords, and once again to obtain evidence on oath about every item of the countryside from a gathering of the propertied locals, evidence relating both to twenty years before, in 1066, and to the current year, 1086. The court consisted of local lords, members of all the hundred courts within the shire and six of the wealthier peasants, as well as the sheriff. The Norman commissioners were to have no interests in the particular shire and the facts were to be checked by another group of commissioners.
The survey with its descriptions of the land twenty years before in 1066, and at the present day reveals how completely during that period the native aristocracy had been displaced by Norman warriors. It also demonstrates the Normans’ powers of organization and their interest in statistics, which were without precedent in medieval times. Indeed not until the nineteenth century would such attention to detail be displayed again. The survey rapidly became known to the irreverent English as the Domesday Book. Affronted by the level of detail required by the Norman commissioners, down to how many geese and pigs a cottager owned, one Anglo-Saxon wit remarked that it was as close a record as the Recording Angel would make at the crack of doom on the Day of Judgement, or Doomsday.
Although some counties are missing from the Domesday Book, it gives us an amazingly detailed picture of England, listing all the woodland, pasture, millponds and fishponds, towns and villages and even the names of the inhabitants, English and Norman alike–many of which remain the same today. Reflecting the redistribution of land among a smaller number of Norman warriors England is treated as a country which from now on was to be organized in terms of manors. Each manor is the basis for an assessment of subordinate hides. The Norman commissioners divided the majority of the population into the following main categories: villein, cottars or cottagers, and slaves. The largest group were the villein or villeins. Although by the thirteenth century villeins had become synonymous with serfs, who being the property of their landlord had no independent legal existence, in 1086 they were free men. They ranged from tenant farmers, who held their land in return for services to their landlords, to small landholders, who owned the title to their land outright. Rents, labour services and plough teams were all assessed to see whether William could get any more money out of his new country.
Thanks to Domesday survey, which is held in the National Archives in London, England has the most complete picture of a country in Europe at that time. Completed in a little over a year it is a monument not only to Norman efficiency but to the tremendous tradition of English local government which had flourished since Alfred’s time. The already extremely well-organized and mature institutions of Anglo-Saxon local government with its hundred and shire courts could not have been better suited to William’s autocratic purposes. But the sort of changes William was rushing through, albeit in an orderly fashion, created such a volume of parchment that by the end of his reign the king’s writing office, inherited from Edward the Confessor, could no longer be attached to the royal household. It had to become an independent department called the royal Chancery, staffed by clerks trained to draft the king’s directives and send writs to the shires.
In August 1086 William considered that the process of settling England in the Norman way had been completed. He called an assembly at Salisbury of all the chief landowners in the country and the smaller barons who held land from the tenants-in-chief. Although not every single landowner could attend, a significant number were there, and each swore a personal oath of allegiance to William, on his knees before his king, who held the man’s hands between his own. This was the remarkable innovation of William the Conqueror and demonstrated the exceptional nature of English feudalism, that all were made aware that they owed their loyalty to the king above their immediate liege lord.
The extraordinary scene on Salisbury Plain of all the landowners in England kneeling before the by now extremely corpulent figure of the Norman king represented a triumphant climax to the Norman Conquest. The rebellions had all petered out and the Danes had finally abandoned their claim to the throne, their last attempt at an invasion being the year before. William had pushed back the frontier with Wales, built a castle at Cardiff and made the Welsh princes and the Scottish king do homage to him or risk further warfare and damage to their countries. All of this was an indication of the strength of the Norman hold on England, and it should also remind us that William had brought peace to England. Most of the English might be in a disadvantaged position, but the fact was that for almost a century England had been at the mercy of powerful foreign invaders. By the 1070s she was the protected centrepiece of a great transcontinental empire as widespread as Cnut’s had been. Unlike Cnut’s, however, William’s empire tore England away from her Scandinavian and Germanic roots. With great consequences for her future she was thrust back into the heart of Latin civilization and the traditions of scholarship which stretched from Roman times.
Nevertheless, for all the positive long-term effects of the Conquest, whatever their circumstances, most Englishmen and women suffered under the Normans. One of the most dramatic effects of Norman rule was the gradual enserfment of the free English tenant farmers, who in 1066 consisted of almost half the population. They who for centuries had played an important part in local government in the hundred and shire court were by 1200 denied access to the king’s courts because they were no longer allowed to call themselves freemen. The term villein had come to mean a serf who was tied to his lord’s domain by the services he performed for him, whose disputes could be judged only in the manorial court. Thus although under the Normans the Saxon practice of slavery died out, because Norman ecclesiastics found it offensive, for 40 per cent of Englishmen and women their freedom was greatly curtailed. Under the Normans the manor court slowly replaced the ancient hundred court, and the lord of the manor alone now decided what previously had been decided by a group of small farmers and landowners together.
Most English saints’ days were suppressed by the new Norman priests, while English went into temporary abeyance as a written language. Whereas poetry and histories like The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had been written in Old English, books in Norman England were now written in French, as that was the language of the court. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle itself, which had been written in monasteries since Alfred’s time, falls silent by the mid-twelfth century. For the next hundred years English went underground, becoming the language of the uneducated.
Even their native forests were taken away from the English, owing to William’s passion for hunting. Until the Conquest, firewood and wild game from the vast forests still covering the country had been a traditionally free source of fuel and food. But William introduced laws forbidding the use of bows and arrows within them, and the presence of hunting dogs. Anyone who cut firewood from the forest or poached deer might be blinded, mutilated or executed. ‘He loved the tall stags as if he were their father,’ declared The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
To make matters worse the Conqueror destroyed churches and towns in Hampshire over a distance of thirty miles in order to create what we still call the New Forest, though it is now 900 years old. Deer roamed while people starved. William’s new forest laws incurred much hatred among the English, but his love of hunting made him unwilling to proceed in his usual cautious fashion. He turned the forests all over England into royal reserves that only he and his friends could hunt in.
William the Conqueror’s tendency was to scatter the manors of his chief men all over the country to prevent regional loyalties becoming a threat. However, for the dangerous border lands with Wales and Scotland this arrangement was modified. For many centuries they would be in a state of perpetual warfare. On the marcher lands, so called because they marched with the Welsh frontier, lords like Roger de Montmorency were allowed to own huge estates concentrated in one area. There the local landowner was responsible for what was in effect a private army keeping the Welsh at bay. These territories were known as the palatine earldoms, and their rulers were far more like the independent barons of Normandy. But once again William’s subtle mind saw a way of cutting down on the power of the palatine earls: where possible he made churchmen palatine rulers. The most famous of these was the Prince Bishop of Durham. By Norman law priests were forbidden to marry and have children, so they could not become a dynastic threat to the eminence of the king’s own family.
The last great change the Norman Conquest brought to England was the reform of the English Church. One of the justifications for the Norman invasion had been the Godwins’ abuses. Having obtained the papal blessing for the Conquest William had to fall in with the wishes of the papacy, which under the direction of Pope Gregory VII (formerly known as Hildebrand, archdeacon of Rome) had embarked on a hard-hitting programme of reforms. In any case they corresponded to the Duke of Normandy’s own austere disposition. William was a deeply religious man and disapproved of corruption. But he waited until the country was quiet before removing the illegitimate Stigand, who had used his influence among the English to secure a peaceful acceptance of the Conquest.
From Normandy William imported his friend the great churchman Lanfranc, Abbot of Caen, to become Archbishop of Canterbury. Lanfranc made a great many changes to the Church organization. In recognition of population shifts, the residences of English bishops were transferred to what had become the leading towns of dioceses–with the Bishop of Lichfield, for example, moving to Chester–and Lanfranc replaced the slack English clergy with the better-trained Normans, thereby depriving the English of parish priests who spoke their own language. Lanfranc was an Italian lawyer who had attended the law school of Pavia and who very late in life had been seized by the religious impulse. He had made the monastery at Bec in Normandy one of the great centres of religious learning of the eleventh century. Possessed of a subtle mind to match his master’s, he reformed the practices of the English Church along Hildebrandine lines. One of Gregory’s VII’s profound beliefs was that the priest should be better behaved than other men–in view of his high calling he should adhere to a more exacting law than ordinary people. Corrupt practices such as simony–that is, selling pardons for sins–were no longer permitted. He insisted on a return to the ideal of celibacy in the clergy. The priest’s wife and children, who had been a common sight in every village, were seen no more.
The marking out of the clergy as a separate caste meant that the Norman Conquest put an end to the seamless robe of government between king and churchmen that had prevailed in Anglo-Saxon England–although priests and clerks continued to serve until the sixteenth century as what were in effect civil servants. Bishops no longer presided over the shire courts as they had under Anglo-Saxon kings. The Church obtained her own courts from William, with jurisdiction to try men in holy orders, disputes over marriage, and any spiritual matters.
Two systems of law thus developed side by side in England. Canon law, practised in the ecclesiastical or Church courts, contrasted strongly with what became known in the thirteenth century as the common law, which was by and large ancient English custom. Canon law derived from the principles of Roman law, which had continued to be studied at centres of learning such as Pavia on the continent where Lanfranc himself had been trained. And it was canon law in which the Church clerks, who until the sixteenth century would provide the trained minds essential for the nascent English civil service, were educated.
In contrast English common law had always had a common-sense aspect to it, since it had always been adjudicated by tenant farmers. It was never particularly precise in legal terms. That imprecision was increased by the fact that the justice meted out by the early Norman kings from what became called the King’s Bench was at first fairly informal. It was decided after a discussion with whatever baron happened to be attending court at the time. Members of the royal council or Curia Regis might send clerks into the counties and there take evidence from the sheriff about a dispute which would be deliberated on locally or perhaps brought back to London for a meeting of the Council.
The higher level of education enjoyed by the Church’s trained clerks was useful to the Normans in an infinite number of ways. But one feature of the far-reaching Hildebrandine reforms was less pleasing to William. Pope Gregory’s belief in the superiority of the clergy to the ordinary man led him to make repeated attempts to liberate the Church from the power of the secular or earthly ruler, by ending their right to confer on bishops and abbots the ring and staff which were their badges of office. He had already clashed with the emperor Henry IV over this principle in the struggle known as the Investiture Contest which rocked Germany and Italy for nearly fifty years.
In William Pope Gregory believed he had a captive ruler. Gregory claimed that not only should the Duke of Normandy abandon the episcopal investiture ceremonies but he should do homage to the pope: the duke’s appeal to the Church Curia to support his invasion of England was an implicit acknowledgement of the jurisdiction of the papal court. In a typically ingenious and complicated piece of exposition the best legal minds in Rome further sought to argue that since England had previously paid a tax to Rome known as Peter’s Pence this proved that England had previously been the vassal of Rome.
But William the Conqueror was far too shrewd to be caught by Pope Gregory. Just as with the Norman barons he had every intention of limiting the Church’s power. In a brief note to Rome he let it be known that he would pay Peter’s Pence, which he acknowledged had been in arrears for some time, but that the ancient custom of the English kings prevented him doing homage as the pope’s vassal. From then on William did very much as he pleased. He gave orders that no pope should be recognized in England until the king himself had done so. Church councils were not to pass laws without the king’s express permission; likewise papal bulls and missives from the pope to the people were to be distributed only when the king had decided that he approved of the content.
The pope generally tolerated William’s behaviour because he advanced the cause of the Church much more than he damaged it, not least in the way he used the clergy as clerks to handle the increasing amounts of government business. He therefore allowed William to invest English bishops with their badges of office even though the German emperor was not permitted to do so. For her part the Church, as one of the most important underlying forces which kept society together, promoted Norman government among the English people.
Owing to the Conqueror’s alliance with the Church the Normans were tremendous builders of churches and abbeys. Many of England’s most famous cathedrals were begun or built just after the Conquest. During the 1070s, Canterbury Cathedral was rebuilt, and Lincoln Cathedral and Old Sarum Cathedral, which lies in ruins above the town of Salisbury, begun. Huge stone churches which looked more like fortresses, in the style called Romanesque that the Normans introduced, sprang up all over England. Romanesque churches, which had little or no decoration other than chevron cross-hatching, were characterized by immensely thick pillars, rounded arches and a very long nave. Visible a long way off, they dominated the landscape almost as much as the Norman castles. The next decade saw the grey stone Norman cathedrals rise at Ely, Worcester and Gloucester. Tewkesbury Abbey was also built, and the cathedrals at St Albans and Rochester were restored.
At the same time the Normans pushed on with their equally distinctive programme of castle-building. In the process they knocked down most Saxon country houses, which is why so few remain. In their place they erected strong forbidding castles in the Norman fashion, some in stone. Towns and commerce likewise flourished under the influence of the energetic Normans, who like their Viking ancestors were keen traders. Jewish merchants returned to England after an absence of 600 years, having left with the Romans.
Despite the sufferings of the Saxon The Chapel of St John built around 1080 in the White people, the Normans had found plenty about England which they admired enough to want to adapt, particularly the Anglo-Saxon political institutions. Within a generation mixed marriages between Normans and Saxons, especially Saxon heiresses, were common. One of the most famous Conquest artefacts, the Bayeux Tapestry, is of entirely English workmanship, even though it was commissioned by William’s half-brother, the Norman Bishop Odo. It shows the high level of artistry in tapestry-making in England and was probably sewn in Canterbury. Two hundred and fifty feet long by twenty feet wide, full of verve and drama, it is also a subtle depiction of the story of the Conquest. As such it is one of England’s most important pieces of historical evidence.
In 1087, the year after the Domesday Book was completed, the mighty duke returned to Normandy for what turned out to be his last campaign. He died attempting to conquer a disputed area of land, the county of Maine, which abuts Normandy. Twenty years before at the time of Hastings the King of France had been weak. But by 1087 a new king, Philip I, was on the throne. This mischief-maker was delighted to help William’s eldest son Robert, the heir to Normandy, stir up trouble against a father who gave him no responsibility, who kept the reins of power firmly in his own hands, and who, to punish him, had deliberately arranged for the kingdom of England to be inherited by his son William Rufus. Now there was open warfare between the conqueror and the French king.
William had always been intending to attack the city of Mantes which had previously belonged to Normandy. But legend has it that the King of France made a cruel joke about William’s grossness which got to his ears. The size of his stomach by now was indeed making it hard for him to keep in his saddle and he no longer got about as he had in his younger days. At Rouen, confined to his palace, the duke heard Philip of France’s mocking bon mot: ‘The King of England keeps his bed like a woman after she has had a baby.’ William sent a deceptively mild message in return. ‘Tell Philip that when I go to Mass after the confinement, I’ll make him an offering of 100,000 candles.’ A month later he had surrounded Mantes. Then he set fire to it–a hundred thousand candles indeed.
This gesture proved William’s undoing. His horse stumbled on an ember and threw him so badly that he suffered fatal internal injuries. Watching over his deathbed was William’s favourite son Henry, later to become Henry I. His calculating and legalistic tendencies were always appreciated by a father who had similar qualities. But meanwhile the Duke of Normandy’s stout son William Rufus, named for his red hair and red face, the heir to the English throne, had immediately hightailed it to England to make sure no Anglo-Saxon seized the crown before he did.