In Search of the Dark Ages

by Michael Wood

  DOMESDAY BOOK

  1085 … The king spent Christmas with his councillors at Gloucester, and held his court there for five days … after this the king had important deliberations and exhaustive discussions with his council about this land, how it was peopled, and with what sort of men. Then he sent his men all over England into every shire to ascertain how many hundreds of hides of land there were in each shire, and how much land and livestock the king himself owned in the country, and what annual dues were lawfully his from each shire … and what or how much each man who was a landholder here in England had in land or in live-stock, and how much money it was worth.

  Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

  Domesday Book is the product of that inquiry: a general survey of land property and lordship, as it had been in 1066 when King Edward was still alive, and as it was in 1086. In real terms it is a record of the Norman Conquest. Domesday Book consists of two volumes in the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane and a related book now in the Cathedral Library in Exeter. The Domesday survey has been seen as the first great achievement of Norman government in England. It might equally well be considered as the last testimony to the sophistication and efficacy of the late Saxon government. Indeed the main volume, the Great Domesday, is in a single English hand, and it has been conjectured that this unknown man, grown old in the service of Edward and William, could have been the hand of ‘the master mind of the enterprise, the man who worked out the detailed organisation of this elaborate and impressive scheme’ (Christopher Brooke). If so, he may have been the last of a long line of gifted clerics who from Athelstan’s time had run the royal secretariat.

  For the purposes of the investigation England was divided up into seven or nine circuits to each of which was allotted a separate panel of royal commissioners. The examination was made twice: a second series of investigators followed the first, only into regions they did not know, ‘so they could check the findings of the first survey’, wrote Bishop Robert of Hereford, who was there that Christmas at Gloucester, ‘and if necessary denounce its authors as guilty to the king. And the land was vexed with much violence arising from the collection of the royal taxes.’

  Everything of importance was to be recorded concerning every estate: how many labourers, poor tenants, slaves, how many freemen, how much woodland and pasture; how many mills; how many fisheries: all to be recorded three times – how much the estate was worth in 1066 when King Edward died; how much when William gave the estate; and as it was in 1086. ‘And it was also noted,’ adds an Ely document, ‘whether more could be taken from the estate than is being taken now’ (that is, in revenue and produce). In all this the stark and grasping mind of the Conqueror is inescapable. The result though is our first and greatest public record.

  Here is a typical entry, that for Roger de Montgomery’s land at Montgomery:

  At the castle of Montgomery the earl himself has four ploughs, and he has six pounds of pence from a certain district of Wales belonging to the same castle’s district. Roger Corbet has two ploughs there and from Wales he and his brother have forty shillings. The earl himself built a castle called Montgomery to which adjoin 52½ hides which Sewer, Oslac and Azor held of King Edward (the Confessor) quit of all geld. They had these hides for the chase. … These lands three thegns held. Now earl Roger holds them. They are and were waste.

  THE ENGLISH THEGNS

  What happened to thegns like Siward, Oslac and Ozurr, who held the estates around Montgomery in 1066? The redistribution of land after the Norman Conquest has been called a tenurial revolution of the most far-reaching kind and a catastrophe for the higher orders of English society from which they never recovered. The record of Domesday Book, completed only twenty years after Hastings, shows that though some Englishmen still held considerable estates, very few held any position of influence. It has been estimated that only eight per cent of the land was still held by English thegns in 1086. Only two, Thurkill of Arden in Warwickshire, and Colswein of Lincoln, held important tenancies from William (out of around 1500 tenants-in-chief). These men are survivals of the long and deep-rooted aristocracy which had provided the backbone of military power for the great West-Saxon kings of the tenth century. Now that society was effectively shattered. The lower reaches of society, the peasants and free farmers, were less hard hit - they carried on paying their rents to a new master; indeed the Normans never attempted to impose a uniform system of estate management to the conquered land. For example the different forms of social, legal and administrative custom in the Danelaw, which dated from Alfred the Great’s time, were just as marked in 1166. But for the top men, their world had been upturned by foreign invaders, and they had no place in a new order which had to find rewards for upwards of five thousand Norman and French nobles and soldiers of fortune who wanted a cut of the cake.

  In 1066 the numbers of English landowners who held manors and who might be called thegns can be reckoned in thousands. The fate of very few is known. Here and there Domesday Book names men who died in the battles of that year. And indeed with three such severe battles many hundreds of thegns must have perished even before the Norman triumph. This is especially true of Hastings, an eight-hour battle which ended in the total destruction of the English army. The English losses were remembered for generations. An Abingdon chronicler writing just a century after the Conquest refers as a matter of course to the thegns who were former tenants of his house who fell at Hastings. The sporadic but bitter fighting between 1068 and 1071 with notable risings in Western Mercia and Northumbria probably accounted for further heavy loss to the Anglo-Saxon landed nobility. It was a shattered aristocracy which the Domesday clerks recorded in 1086.

  Of those who survived the grim period of the late sixties and early seventies, many saw no reason to stay in England once the Conqueror’s grip was assured. There is much evidence for a widespread emigration of Englishmen into other countries, into Denmark, into Scotland and, most remarkably of all, to Greece and the Byzantine empire where there is good contemporary evidence that large numbers of Englishmen took service with the emperor in Constantinople in the generation following Hastings. As for those who stayed behind and came to terms with the Conqueror, most found themselves as subtenants on their native land, ‘public servitude’ as a late eleventh-century writer called it. The conditions of their lives, their very existence, depended on the extent to which an alien king (who never even learned their language) could control his alien followers. Behind the bureaucrats’ prose of Domesday Book, the sorrow of individuals sometimes comes to light: Aelfric of Marsh Gibbon who held his land freely in King Edward’s time now holds it from William, son of Ansculf, ‘at rent, heavily and wretchedly’. The process is generally unrecorded by which the Normans were eventually assimilated into English society and became English, rather than the other way around. It took a long time for English conception of England to pass into the Norman consciousness, and such thoughts were far away in 1086.

  ‘PENITENCE FOR ALL THE BLOOD I SHED’

  Towards the end of 1086 William crossed the Channel for the last time. In the summer of the following year he launched a retaliatory offensive against the French king down the Seine towards Paris. At Mantes in the Vexin, only thirty miles from Paris, when the garrison sallied out against him, he caught them in a surprise attack, broke into the town and totally destroyed it, church and all. Now sixty years old, corpulent and cantankerous, the Conqueror could no more be crossed than in his youth. It may be that this barbarous destruction was an exercise in terror as a prelude to an attack on Paris itself. If it was we will never know, for as he rode through the falling embers in the burning streets of Mantes, his horse threw him so hard against his high pommel that he ruptured his stomach. In great pain he retired to Rouen, and when it became clear that he was dying, asked to be carried to the priory of St Gervais on a hill in the western suburbs. There the man who was ‘too relentless to care though all might hate him’, as an English chronicler wrote, burst into floods of tears as he pray
ed for divine mercy, worried about the future, and grudgingly softened his heart towards his rebellious eldest son Robert. But even in that moment it was over the disposal of his treasures that he spent most thought, for this was a man ‘greedy beyond all measure’ (so an Englishman said). He also expressed penitence for the vast bloodshed which had been the price of his greatness. William died at dawn on 9 September 1087, asking to be commended to the Virgin Mary, ‘that by her intercession I may be reconciled to her Son our Lord Jesus Christ’. He was buried at his monastery of St Stephen in Caen, the Abbaye-aux-Hommes; the tomb was destroyed in the religious riots of the sixteenth century, and today a simple stone slab records the place.

  THE FACE OF THE CONQUEROR?

  Thus passed the great political genius of early English history. Tall, inflexible of purpose, fearless, ‘he conquered by fire and sword and ruled by fear’, writes a modern scholar of him. There is however a bizarre tailpiece to his remarkable career. In 1522, on instructions from Rome, his tomb was opened for the first time since the eleventh century, and the body examined. It was found to have been embalmed and was in a remarkable state of preservation. The papal visitors had the presence of mind to call for a local painter who copied the face onto a wooden panel, which was subsequently hung by the royal tomb. The painting survived the destruction of 1562 but soon afterwards vanishes from the historical record. However in the sacristy at St Etienne there is still to be seen today a painting of William in the costume of the period of Henry VIII; an attached note adds that this picture is a copy of an image which was displayed on one of the walls of the abbey. Is this then a copy at one or two removes from the macabre portrait, the death mask of 1522? Can we still gaze on the face of the Conqueror?

  If anyone desires to know what kind of man he was or in what honour he was held … then we shall write of him as we have known him, who have ourselves seen him and at one time dwelt in his court. King William, of whom we speak, was a man of great wisdom and power, and surpassed in honour and strength all those who had gone before him. Though stern beyond measure to those who opposed his will …

  A hard man was the king

  … he was sunk in greed

  And utterly given up to avarice. … Alas! that any man should

  bear himself so proudly

  And deem himself exalted above all other men

  May Almighty God show mercy on his soul

  And pardon him his sins.

  Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

  POSTSCRIPT

  IN THE YEARS since this book was first published, new discoveries and fresh appraisals have continued, as always, to augment and modify our knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon period. In particular, there have been a number of dramatic archaeological finds. The most significant in potential is still in its early stages. This is a comprehensive re-excavation of the entire gravefield at Sutton Hoo, which, as suggested in Chapter 3, is already proving to be a far more complex site than its first excavators could have guessed. Late in 1986 a Coptic bowl of the kind described here was found nearby, adding to our impression of the wide contacts of the East Anglian dynasty. New finds in local archives in Suffolk have provided place-name evidence pointing to the site of a pagan religious sanctuary between the ship burial and the river Deben: in Tudor times it was the site of a gallows (ancient execution sites often mark traditional places of heathen ritual). Other local place-names may help investigators pin down the whereabouts of the presumed royal residence at Sutton, and of the pagan cemetery for the royal staff. Excavation of the fields around the ship mounds has already shown that occupation of the site goes back through the Bronze Age to Neolithic times. Historical investigation has already established that the events which took place at Sutton Hoo in the early seventh century had a deep and lasting effect on the landscape and on subsequent settlement of the neighbourhood. How much this was in turn affected by the Roman, Iron Age and prehistoric history of the place remains to be discovered. Finally, as for the Sutton Hoo Man himself: was the mound opened in the mid seventh century and the body removed from the pagan burial site to a Christian church (at Sutton?), after which the wooden coffin rotted, leaving its impression, but no body?

  Perhaps the most significant development in recent years in historical studies of the early Saxon period has been a revaluation of ideas about kingship, and especially of overlordship. In particular there is the notoriously thorny question of the ‘bretwaldas’. Recent scholarly work has tended to emphasise that Bede’s famous list of kings who held the imperium (see here) should be seen more as a literary reflection, as an attempt by Bede to give a ‘potted’ history of great Anglo-Saxon rulers, than as a list of successions to a recognisable political office. The nature and extent of their power must have varied greatly according to individual circumstance, and accordingly it would be a mistake to see the imperium literally as an ‘office’ of overking with rights and duties. The chronicler of King Alfred’s day who added Egbert of Wessex to the list as ‘the eighth king who was Bretwalda’ may be interpreting Bede’s kings in a way he never intended, just as modern historians have perhaps been too hasty in reading into this poetic term an institutionalised ‘bretwaldaship’. At the same time, the survival of such documents as the Tribal Hidage (see here) and a late copy of a remarkable seventh-century tribute list from Dal Riada (the early kingdom of the Scots in the Clyde valley), which was probably drawn up for one of the Northumbrian overkings named by Bede, suggests that Bede was still right to list certain kings who held power as ‘wide-rulers’ and claimed imperium over other kings.

  One of those imperatores was Offa’s predecessor Aethelbald of Mercia (see here) who Bede notes was the pre-eminent king in England south of the Humber at the time he (Bede) was completing his Ecclesiastical History. Exciting finds at Repton in Derbyshire have confirmed the importance of that place to the Mercian royal family (see here). Close to the mausoleum used for royal burials, fragments of a standing cross have been found bearing a tremendously striking – and grimly realistic – image of a mounted warrior king, heavily armoured and bearded. It has been suggested by the excavator that this is a ‘portrait’ of Aethelbald himself in still vigorous old age, depicted in the manner of imperial Roman equestrian portraiture.

  The Repton dig has also brought to light sensational new information about the onslaught of the Viking ‘Great Army’ on Midland England in 873–4. The semicircular ditch of the Danish winter camp that year has been excavated with a dock for repairing the Viking longships which had been sailed all the way from the Humber up the Trent into the heart of Mercia. Inside the ditches, under a mound covering a half demolished funeral monument, were found the disarticulated bones of about 250 men, many of them bearing the marks of old wounds. Presumably these were members of the ‘Great Army’ who had died of disease or in skirmishing during the occupation of Mercia in 873. A local antiquarian’s journal reveals that these burials were first exposed and then reburied in the eighteenth century: originally the bones were laid in neat rows around the central chamber, in which there was a single body, perhaps a Viking king or chief. Further mounds await investigation.

  Alfred the Great’s response to the threat posed by the ‘Great Army’ and its successors is becoming much better understood. A recent revaluation of the Burghal Hidage (see here) has suggested that in its original form it may be dated from before 886, in which case it represents the defensive measures taken by Alfred to protect Wessex against Viking attack in the eight years after his triumph at Edington. This massive reorganisation involved the movement of thousands of settlers to provide garrisons and entailed the creation of a network of support in the surrounding countryside to feed the new ‘urban’ dwellers. Also implicit in the burghal system is provision to allow members of the burh garrisons, and of the mobile field army, to be absent from the normal duties of agriculture for long stretches at a time. Such far-going reorganisation probably demanded an even more drastic reshaping of society than has been thought. It is likely that the pressures of war durin
g Alfred’s reign accelerated the decline of an ‘independent’ peasantry in southern England, and the spread of nucleated villages under strong lordly control, with the growth of the classic form of crop rotation and communal farming, the ‘three-field system’. Recent archaeological and documentary investigations strongly support the hypothesis that here, as elsewhere, the reign of Alfred was a watershed in the development of Anglo-Saxon kingship.

  The models for Alfred’s ‘hidden’ revolution can be found in Carolingian kingship on the continent, both in its practical achievements and in the wealth of theoretical material generated by its experts on ideology and political theory in the ninth century. There had been connections between the West-Saxon dynasty and the Carolingians from the early ninth century, but in Alfred’s reign they were particularly close, and two of his chief intellectual advisers were continental scholars – Grimbald from St Bertin in Flanders, and John ‘the Old Saxon’ from the Rhineland. One practical result of the influence of such men may have been the creation or extension of the system of hundreds and ‘tenths’ (tithings) over southern England. Though we have to wait till the early twelfth century for a definite statement on this (in William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Regum), the system of local government groupings of units assessed at 100 hides, each of which had its own court for administration and justice, seems to have developed between the late ninth century and c. 940; the idea was adopted from current Frankish practice, and bears out our numerous hints that underneath the idealised picture of Alfred as the ‘Truthteller’ and ‘England’s Darling’ lies the dimmer, more elusive image, far more complicated and subtle, of a politician who could be a far-sighted and even ruthless administrator, consciously juggling deeply felt secular and spiritual responsibilities – to God, to his kinsmen and people, to his dynasty (past, present and future) and even to English people in the wider territories occupied by the gens Anglorum: as one eminent scholar has said: ‘The gulf between the theory and practice of Christian kingship was never narrower than during his reign.’