NORMAN RULE ( 1066 – 1154 )

William, Duke of Normandy, the Conqueror, was then nearly forty years old; but it is difficult to say much more about him as a man with any certainty. He seems to have been about five feet ten inches in height, far taller than his minute wife, very strong and rather fat with reddish hair and a harsh, guttural voice. He was violent, domineering, calculating and avaricious, a man to fear. But he was abstemious, a pious Christian and, illegitimate himself, a faithful husband.

Vikings by origin and Vikings still by inclination — so holds one side in a continuing debate — he and his followers invaded England to deprive the island’s people of their liberty, to kill their brave and noble King Harold, ‘the hero and the martyr of our native freedom’. This was the testament according to Professor E. A. Freeman whose classic History of the Norman Conquest was published in five volumes in 1870-9. Another eminent Victorian, Thomas Carlyle, proposed a different interpretation: the Normans dragged us out of our primeval squalor. For what had the English been before they came? ‘A gluttonous race of Jutes and Angles, capable of no great combinations, lumbering about in pot-bellied equanimity’.

Modern scholars rightly warn us to be on our guard against the misconceptions of this ancient and persistent polemical tradition, to recognize both the achievements of Anglo-Saxon culture and the benefits, as well as the ruthlessness, of Norman conquest.

Certainly William was not prepared to be merciful in his subjugation of his English enemies. His claim to the English throne, endorsed by the Pope, was genealogically stronger than the claims of his rivals; and he was determined to enforce it, to overwhelm all those who refused to recognize that his victory at Hastings had turned England into a Norman kingdom. For the moment this kingdom was far from secure: the Earls of Northumbria and Mercia both declined to submit, retiring to the north with the idea of proclaiming King Edward’s young nephew, Edgar, as King Harold’s successor; both the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Archbishop of York supported the proclamation of Edgar as Harold’s rightful heir; King Edward’s widow remained in control of the old West Saxon capital of Winchester; and the gates of London, the key to England’s dominance, were closed against the Norman invader.

Understanding the importance of London, and accepting the difficulties of attacking so large and well-defended a town with the few thousand knights and archers he could lead against it, William decided to surround it. After setting fire to the wooden buildings in the suburb of Southwark on the south bank, he marched west into Berkshire, then northeast to Berkhampstead, devastating the countryside on the way; and once London had been isolated, his enemies, as he had hoped they would, submitted one by one, followed by ‘all the chief men of London, and they gave hostages to him, and he promised that he would be a gracious liege Lord’, a ruler who would treat them justly if they gave him their service. He entered London shortly before Christmas; and on Christmas Day he was crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey where the shouts of acclaim were mistaken for calls for rebellion by the Norman soldiers on guard outside who began killing English spectators.

In places the fight against the Normans long continued; and William, who went back to Normandy three months after his coronation, had to return to England to put down revolts occasioned by the behaviour of the more rapacious of his barons, the powerful magnates, mostly brutal men who from such evidence as has come down to us appear to have been distinguished by moustaches of a monstrous size sprouting on either side of their iron nose guards. On his return to England, William showed scant mercy: great tracts of countryside were laid waste, and towns as far apart as Exeter and Durham were made to suffer his wrath. In the north hundreds of square miles were devastated and whole villages destroyed. In revenge the English ‘here and there lay in wait in woods and secluded places secretly to slay [the hated Normans] as opportunity might offer’. And in retaliation the Normans introduced a Law of Englishry which decreed that a corpse was to be presumed to be that of a Norman unless it could be proved to be that of an Englishman and, on that presumption, a heavy fine was to be paid by the village nearest to the place where the body had been found. No fines were levied for dead Englishmen. It was not until the end of the twelfth century that it became difficult to tell the difference between the one race and the other. By then they had ‘lived so long together and [had] intermarried and become so intermingled’ that contemporaries could ‘scarce distinguish [any more] betwixt Englishmen and Normans’.

By then also the system of land tenure known as feudalism, already developing in Anglo-Saxon times, had become an accepted way of life. In accordance with this system, William had given his followers — Bretons and Flemings as well as Normans — large estates in England, all of which he was deemed to own personally, scattering the estates far and wide over the country, so that those who held them could not easily combine to rebel against the King. The tenants-in-chief of the King, to whom they were obliged to swear loyalty and for whom they were required, when necessary, to perform military service with an appropriate number of knights. They were also required, when summoned, to serve on the Grand Council — the successor of the Witan, the council of the Anglo-Saxon kings — from which Parliament was eventually to develop. The tenants-in-chief retained as much of the land granted them as they wished, distributing the rest to knights as sub-tenants who in turn allocated parts of them to the men who actually worked the fields, either as freeholders or as serfs. These workers at the bottom of the feudal scale paid for their respective shares by serving their master when called upon to do so and by working in his own fields for stipulated periods. The freehold tenants were allowed to leave the land if they wished and to settle elsewhere; but the far larger number of serfs or villeins were tied to the land of their lord and, in most cases, could gain their freedom only by paying for it or by running away to a town where, provided they had not been recaptured within four days, a court order would be required to bring them back into servitude.

In order to have a reliable record of all his lands, his tenants and their possessions and to discover how much they could be called upon to pay by way of taxes, William ordered the compilation of the inventory of his assets known as Domesday Book, now to be seen in the Public Record Office. From this it appeared that in 1086 about half the cultivated land in the country was in the hands of 170 tenants-in-chief, only two of whom were English barons; about a fifth was held personally by the King and most of the rest by bishops and abbots and other heads of religious houses who paid for it by their prayers or by paying scutage, a tax which lay landholders also came increasingly to pay in lieu of knightly service.

To the English serfs who lived within their shadows, the most obvious symbols of the power of their new landlords and masters were the castles that now appeared all over England, no fewer than five hundred of them within a generation of the Normans’ coming. Others were to be built with every passing year; there were to be forty in Kent alone. The earliest of them were usually of wood and quite simple in design. Constructed on an earthen mound, surrounded by a ditch, they comprised a tall tower enclosed on all sides by a palisaded rampart. The ditch was usually filled with water, and a drawbridge led across it to the castle’s single gate. The great castle at Windsor and the Tower of London were first built in this modest way. As time passed, however, castles were required to serve not only as a means of overawing a disaffected and unruly people, as garrisons, supply bases and fortified centres of administration, but also as noble dwellings built of stone or flint or rubble faced with stone. They still had to be formidable fortresses immensely thick walls, high towers and moats, and times, as at Kenilworth, with a staircase on an outside w leading to a heavy, well-protected door on an upper floor. But there also had to be sleeping chambers on the upp~ storeys, dining halls, chapels and, in the larger castles, series of rooms known collectively as the wardrobe which clothes were kept and valuable household stores, including expensive spices, were deposited in locked chests with jewels and plate. Such castles, ruined, restored or rebuilt, can be seen in every county, along the coasts at Dover and Bamburgh, in the west country at Launceston and Berkeley, in Sussex at Lewes and Arundel, along the Welsh Marches at Ludlow and Chepstow, in Yorkshire at Richmond, in the Midlands at Rockingham and at Oakham where there is a fine example of a Norman castle’s great hall built like a church with a nave and two side aisles, since masons had not yet mastered the craft of roofing a wide span.

Churches appeared even more ubiquitously than castles, for the population was rising rapidly and being divided into parishes, neighbourhoods within the counties which have survived virtually unchanged into our own time. There were relatively few people in the north which had been devastated so remorselessly in the years immediately following the conquest: in Yorkshire there were perhaps no more than thirty thousand people, and in the whole of the north probably no more than four people to the square mile. But few counties in the south had fewer than fifty thousand each. There were about seventy thousand in Devon, ninety thousand in Lincolnshire, and in Norfolk — the most populous ).uflty of all — nearly a hundred thousand. By the time of rnesday Book the population of England seems to have en approaching two million. Most of these people still villages, since all but the five largest towns had less a thousand inhabitants, and places where large towns e later to be built, from Portsmouth to Newcastle, and Liverool to King’s Lynn, were not yet even villages. Some towns like, Newbury in Berkshire, were recent Norman foundations ; but most were Saxon towns growing slowly. St. Albans , so populous in Roman times, and having well over seventy thousand inhabitants today, had just forty-six burgesses in 1086.

Yet, even in the north, builders were busily at work, erecting new churches, reconstructing Saxon ones, employing the style of architecture known as Romanesque with its rounded arches favoured by architects of the Roman Empire, square towers and plain vaulting. The west front of the parish church at Iffley outside Oxford is but one splendid example of Norman architecture at its most satisfying and robust, the nave of Durham Cathedral but one such nave in an early English cathedral, the interiors of St Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield and St John in the Tower but two places of worship in London where the atmosphere of the Norman Church is powerfully evoked. Work on Durham Cathedral began in 1093. By then no fewer than fourteen of England’s greatest cathedrals were already under construction; all the rest with one exception were started early in the next century. The one exception was Salisbury Cathedral which was not begun until 1220; but two miles north of Salisbury, at Old Sarum, a cathedral had been in existence since 1092.

William took a deep interest in the development of the Church in England, encouraging the efforts of the Italian-born Lanfranc — whom he had summoned from Normandy to install as Archbishop of Canterbury — to bring a characteristic Norman efficiency into the administration of ecclesiastical affairs and to take the English Church closer to Rome. Yet the King, for all his professed regard for the Pope and the Roman Church, took care to maintain his own independence: no bishop might visit Rome or even write to the Pope without his permission; no excommunications might be imposed in his large realm without his express consent. Although William’s determination to be supreme in Church as he was in State often brought Lanfranc into dispute with the Pope, the Archbishop remained as loyal as he was devoted to the King; and when news was brought to him of the death of the Conqueror after an injury received while riding on the Continent, he was so prostrated by grief that his monks thought that he too might die.

Lanfranc’s distress was exacerbated by his concern that the son whom William had chosen to succeed him was wholly unfitted for kingship. This son, also William and known as Rufus because of his florid complexion, was a short, fat, bull-necked man with a bitingly sarcastic tongue and a savage, bullying temper. He mocked the piety of churchmen, insulted foreign envoys and flaunted his homosexual tastes. One day he asked Anselm, the leading theologian of his day — who had been appointed Lanfranc’s successor as Archbishop of Canterbury after a long delay during which the King appropriated the archiepiscopal income — what sin he would be condemning in his next sermon. Anselm bravely replied, ‘The sin of Sodom.’ The King laughed in his face.

While accepting money from malefactors who could afford to pay bribes to evade justice, William inflicted punishments on those who had offended against him with even severity than his father had done, blinding and castrating one rebel noble, and flogging the noble’s steward by door of every church in Salisbury before having him hanged. But to no malefactors was he more severe than he was to those who offended against the forest laws, the scope f which he much extended.

His father had earned widespread hatred for his strict rnposition of these fierce laws and for extending the boundries of the royal forests which included tens of thousands of acres of land, by no means all of it wooded, over which he King and his friends could hunt deer. To preserve this ,leasure for himself William I had poachers blinded and mutilated, and even those who gathered sticks on royal land were savagely punished. Disregarding the objections and pleas of rich and poor alike, he ‘recked not of the hatred of them all, for they needs must obey his will if they would have life, or lands or goods’. In creating the royal game preserve known as the New Forest in Hampshire, which still today encompasses over 90,000 acres, he demolished dwellings and entire villages. Nor was the New Forest the largest of the royal forests: the whole of Essex was subject to the forest laws; so were immense tracts in the Midlands, around Windsor in Berkshire and in Oxfordshire where the hunting park of the Anglo-Saxon kings at Woodstock remained in royal hands until the beginning of the eighteenth century when Queen Anne gave it to the first Duke of Marlborough for the building of Blenheim Palace.

By the time of William l’s grandsons, the royal forests had become so extensive that they may have covered almost a third of the country. A sizeable proportion of the rest of the land in England was enclosed as game preserves by the King’s tenants-in-chief. Some of these preserves are still in private hands like Knowsley Park, the property of the eighteenth Earl of Derby. In others herds of red and fallow deer still roam between the rocks and bracken in the shade of ancient oak trees as at Bradgate Park in Leicestershire where stags and does were once hunted by the medieval Earls of Winchester.

In August 1100 King William II was hunting in the New Forest when he was killed by an arrow, shot either accidentally or on purpose. His companions disappeared and his body, dripping blood, was taken by local serfs in a cart to Winchester where it was buried in the recently consecrated Cathedral whose tower soon afterwards collapsed, a disaster attributed to the unworthiness of the intolerable King for Christian burial.

‘All things that are loathsome to God and to earnest men were customary in this land in his time,’ wrote an English chronicler; ‘and therefore he was loathsome to all his people, and abominable to God, as his end showed, forasmuch as he departed in the midst of his unrighteousness, without repentance and without expiation.’

His younger brother, Henry, who had also been hunting in the New Forest that day, immediately appropriated the royal treasure and insignia and had himself crowned in Westminster Abbey without delay. A severe man like his father, he was avaricious and crafty as well as cold-hearted; he had a passion for slaying deer and was said to have callously thrown a prisoner from a castle tower into the waters of a river far below. But he was anxious to persuade the English people that the lawless days of his brother’s time were over. He imprisoned the detested Rannulf Flambard, the Bishop of Durham, William’s deeply unpleasant chief adviser, in the Tower of London; he called Anselm back to Canterbury from France where he had been exiled by William; he issued a proclamation to the people promising to observe their rights; he put a stop to the depredations of the royal bodyguard who in his brother’s day had become notorious for their robberies and rapes during the progresses of the royal household and its officials, the effective government of the country. He frequently went on progresses himself, visiting as many parts of his kingdom as he could and keeping a sharp eye upon the barons whose loyalty to the Crown was not to be taken for granted. ‘Great awe there was of him,’ recorded a chronicler, ‘No man dared misdo another in his time.’ Able to read and write — accomplishments then mastered by few, even of the highest rank — he acquired a reputation for scholarship as well as for firmness of hand: men called him Henry Beauclerk.

He won much goodwill by setting an example, soon to be followed by other Normans of high rank, by taking an English wife, Matilda, who was descended directly from Alfred the Great. Already the father of numerous children by a succession of mistresses, he had a son by Matilda, a boy of whom he held high hopes; and when this ‘goodly heir’ was drowned at sea with the entire crew and all but one of the passengers of the White Ship, the fastest vessel in his fleet, the King is said to have fallen unconscious to the ground at the woeful tidings and, as every English schoolboy used to know, he never smiled again.

The boy’s mother had by then died herself. The King married again; but by his second wife, daughter of the Duke of Lower Lorraine, he had no children, and so he decided to make the drowned boy’s sister, Matilda, his heir. This young woman was nineteen at the time of her brother’s drowning. She had been married to the Holy Roman Emperor at the age of twelve and after his death had married Count Geoffrey of Anjou. Most of the barons did not take kindly to the thought of Matilda as their Queen. She had lived so long abroad that she seemed to them a foreigner; moreover they considered her far too autocratic and masterful for a woman. Indeed, in the opinion of one observer, Annulf of Lisieux, she was a woman who, apart from her undoubted beauty, had ‘nothing of the female in her’. Many barons preferred the claims of Matilda’s cousin, Stephen, Count of Blois — whose mother was William the Conqueror’s daughter — an affable, apparently easygoing and generous man who made many promises to his potential supporters, offering them splendid rewards when he became King.

Stephen rushed over to England upon King Henry’s death and was welcomed into London where his brother, Henry of Blois, the most powerful of the English bishops, persuaded the Archbishop of Canterbury to crown him at Westminster shortly before Christmas 1135.

Outraged by her cousin’s breach of faith, Matilda, who was still in Normandy, appealed unsuccessfully to the Pope; then, having done her best to make trouble for Stephen in England, she landed in Sussex, travelled to Bristol where the barons of the West Country rallied to her support, and entered London in triumph. By then the English people, commoners and barons alike, had grown to resent Stephen’s weak and erratic rule, the violence of his Flemish mercenaries, the power exercised by his influential Flemish adviser, William of Ypres, his scattering of the treasure which Henry I had accumulated, and his failure to abide by an oath to disafforest various royal lands. But Matilda was no better liked than Stephen. More arrogant and haughty than ever now that she was in control of the capital, she took the title of Queen without being crowned, appropriated lands to which she had no right, and when a deputation of the citizens of London petitioned for the observance of ancient laws she swore at them and drove them from the room. Soon afterwards she herself was driven out of London.

The years of quarrelling and fighting during which Stephen and Matilda and their baronial allies struggled against each other for the throne were so horrifyingly described by a monk of Peterborough — who lived in the midst of an area of peculiar turbulence — that they have been taken as characterizing the whole of the ‘nineteen long winters’ when ‘God and his angels slept.’ The barons ‘greatly oppressed the wretched people by making them work at their castles,’ the monk of Peterborough recorded, ‘and when the castles were finished they filled them with devils and evil men. Then they took those whom they thought to have any goods, both men and women, and put them in prison for their gold and silver, and tortured them with pains unspeakable.’

Certainly there did occur such horrors. Geoffrey de Mandeville, grandson of one of William the Conqueror’s knights, who changed sides as often as he conceived it in his interests to do so and wrung all manner of rights and privileges, including the earldom of Essex, from the opposing sides, rampaged about the country on indiscriminate raids, pillaging and burning, taking hostages and exacting blackmail. But Geoffrey de Mandeville was mortally wounded by an arrow at Burwell in the summer of 1144; in 1147 recruitment for the Second Crusade drew many other adventurers out of the country; and at the beginning of the next year Matilda returned to Normandy, her cause lost. The worst troubles were then over. Stephen ruled for a further seven years until his death at Dover. Buried at the Cluniac Faversham Abbey, which he had founded, he was succeeded by the son of his rival Matilda and her second husband, who came to the throne as Henry 11 in 1154.

NATIVES ROMAN BRITAIN ANGLO-SAXON HOUSE OF PLANTAGENET

Crown and People Twilight of Middle Ages Tudor England Early Stuart England

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