by Ed West
Even before conquering England, the Normans had rather improbably ended up ruling southern Italy, which all started when some of them began using it as a stopping off point on the way back from pilgrimages in the Holy Land. The first Norman principality was established at Aversa in Campania, close to Naples; it began when in AD 999 a group of forty Normans arrived in Salerno, on the way back from Palestine, and found the town under siege from a Saracen army. The locals asked them to help and this tiny force ended up beating a much larger Muslim force; the holidaymakers went off to Normandy but promised locals they’d be back, and by 1015 they were. Then a Lombard aristocrat asked them to conquer Apulia from the Byzantine Greeks, and although the Greeks beat them in 1018 they stuck around and eventually took charge, led by the twelve sons of an especially virile Norman called Tancred. Their first leader, Tancred’s son William Ironarm, became count in 1042, followed by his brother Drogo.
The Normans had become so powerful that in 1052 Pope Leo IX set up a coalition to get rid of them, a force comprising Greeks, Italians and Germans that attacked in June 1053. However the Normans, despite being in a constant state of internecine feuding at the time, managed to unite and beat the invaders, led by another of Tancred’s sons, Robert Guiscard, literally ‘the Weasel’, so-called because of his cunning. He had arrived in Italy with just five horsemen and thirty foot soldiers but ended up running half the country.
The Normans then captured Leo IX and pledged their loyalty to him even as they kept him prisoner until he changed his mind about them. Now almost in charge of all of southern Italy, the Normans invaded Sicily in 1061, and succeeded. At that time the island had long been ruled by various Muslim leaders, although it was now split between three rival Arab states all in a state of mutual hostility. The Normans ruled Sicily for another century and a half until conquered by the even more violent and uncouth Angevins, from the region of Anjou just to the south of Normandy. Sicily is the one place where the Normans are remembered rather fondly, partly because they drove out the Arabs but also because, compared to the Angevins they were like twenty-first-century Scandinavian progressives.
William the Bastard
William the Conqueror came from a long line of tough men, but Norman leaders had to be, faced with almost constant conflict with their neighbors in Flanders, Brittany and Maine, as well as the king of France, who was in theory their overlord. They also had unrest at home; William’s grandfather Richard II had dealt with a peasants’ uprising by cutting off all their hands and feet. However the biggest challenge was the rivalry between aristocrats so that no Norman duke was ever safe from his relatives, who were generally as venal and violent as he was.
William ‘the bastard’ had it worse than most. His father Robert had supposedly first fallen for William’s mother Herleve when he spied her bare legs as she washed by a river in her hometown of Falaise, a story that the medievals found endearing rather than quite sinister and creepy.6 Herleve is supposed to have been the daughter of a tanner or undertaker,7 and William’s enemies said his mother stank of the tannery—but people who made this joke tended to have body parts chopped off, which proved remarkably effective as a form of censorship. Also, the story about Robert spying her most likely came from the people who worked at Falaise Castle, who used to charge people to see where it all happened, even though the window from which Robert supposedly spotted her wasn’t built until the twelfth century.
Medieval chroniclers certainly seemed to have been sordidly fascinated by this romantic tryst; the Norman chronicler Wace described how Herleve came to Robert’s room and they remained awake for some time and ‘for I do not wish to say anything more about the way a man disports himself with his beloved’. After this Herleve is supposed to have fallen asleep and had a dream in which her ‘inward parts’ began to grow into an enormous tree, so big that eventually the whole of Normandy and England was under its shadow.
William’s father Robert ‘the Magnificent’ afterwards succeeded his elder brother Richard as duke, after he died in mysterious circumstances. It’s often thought Robert poisoned him, since the Normans were always poisoning people, and Robert clearly had the most to gain from his brother’s death and had previously risen in revolt against him. However it’s also worth noting that in the medieval period deaths from accidental food poisoning were also absurdly common since people didn’t practise basic kitchen hygiene. Robert the Magnificent was also known as ‘Robert the Liberal’ although this was due to his generous donations to friendly churchmen, rather than any LGBT activism. Another nickname, the Devil, may have been made up later, but certainly his reign was very violent and dominated by a feud with the Norman aristocracy in which he pillaged church property when it was in the hands of enemies. His own uncle, Archbishop Robert of Rouen, called Duke Robert a ‘scourge of God’.
Although illegitimate, William was accepted as Duke Robert’s heir, but when his son was only seven the duke decided to go travelling to the Holy Land; historians are puzzled by this decision, which seems insanely irresponsible, especially as he himself knew how ruthless his own relatives were and how vulnerable Normandy was. Robert may have journeyed to the Mediterranean because of the heroic tales from southern Italy, which made him jealous of Robert the Weasel. Another theory is that he felt bad for murdering his brother.
Robert fell sick in Jerusalem and died on his way home, leaving William to grow up in a feud-ridden court where several attempts were made on his life: four guardians were murdered during his childhood. Someone called Odo the Fat killed his first protector, Count Gilbert, and then his tutor Turold. Later Osbern, head of the royal household, was stabbed to death, his throat slashed, by William of Montgomery in William’s bedchamber with the young duke in the room. Montgomery was himself later murdered in another feud. After this upbringing William surprisingly grew up to be quite violent and unhinged, and he later said: ‘I was schooled in war since childhood’. This wouldn’t make him the most reasonable man in later life.
By the time that Edward the Confessor passed away William was nearly forty, and battle-hardened by years of conflict with Normandy’s neighbours Maine, Flanders and France. A thick-set and tall man, at five feet eleven, William was exceptionally intelligent but his overriding characteristic was greed. He was ‘a cold, grim and overweening ambitious man, who could be extremely harsh and cruel and brooked no opposition’,8 and ‘violent but scheming, deadly as a snake’, and had a harsh, guttural voice, was very strong and possessed great stamina. All in all he sounds like a terrifying man.
The duke was also virtually teetotal, which stood out in an age when drunkenness was far more common than today. And even more unusually for the time, he was completely faithful to his wife, Matilda of Flanders; in fact it was so expected that aristocratic men would have mistresses that many found William’s fidelity a bit creepy and thought he must actually be up to something.
Matilda of Flanders had at first refused to marry a ‘bastard’, as she put it, and so William rode two hundred fifty miles to Lille, crossing marshland, before arriving at her father’s castle, where he threw her to the ground and ‘tore her robes with his spurs’. Apparently she was impressed and married him, because she ‘recognized that she had met her master’ and ‘he must be a man of great courage and high daring’ to ‘come and beat me in my own father’s palace’.9 This sounds unlikely, and it was most likely Norman propaganda to show how manly William was; which says something about how different their attitudes were to ours. With Matilda he had four sons and five or six daughters;10 strangely she was only four feet two inches tall, a fact confirmed when her grave was later opened.11
A rather humorless man, the only things that made William laugh were cruel practical jokes, and he often used violence in jest, which must have been hilarious. On one occasion he beat a forester with an animal bone for questioning his grant to a monastery—this was a joke. Another time, at a meeting held at Easter he gave the grant of property to the Abbey of Holy Trinity in Rouen ‘by a knif
e which the king playfully gave the abbot as if about to stab his hand’. The Normans did not sound like relaxing company to be around.
Both William and Matilda were very devout and each established religious houses. La Trinite, Matilda’s abbey, had some of the best relics in northern Europe, among them ‘splinters of wood from Christ’s manger and Cross, a piece of bread that He had touched, and a strand of His mother Mary’s hair’, as well as ‘the finger of St Cecile, a hair of St Denis, the blood of St George, and even several entire corpses’.12
One motivation for this piety was that the couple had been too closely related to marry, and the union was opposed by the pope and the Norman clergy, led by an Italian abbot called Lanfranc. William expelled Lanfranc and his men sacked his abbey; however on his way out of Normandy Lanfranc coincidentally bumped into the duke and the two men spoke and got on. William there and then persuaded him to change his mind (this is how pro-Norman chroniclers put it. We can only imagine what this persuasion consisted of).
Before setting off on his madcap adventure Duke Robert had done the decent thing by Herleve by arranging a marriage for her to a local nobleman, by which she produced two sons, Odo and Robert of Mortaine, and the new duke relied heavily on his mother’s relatives throughout his reign, since these were the only people he could trust; he certainly couldn’t trust his father’s family, many of whom were out to murder him.
Having survived a grim childhood, at nineteen William crushed his first rebellion, at Val-es-Dunes, which was provoked by rival Norman warlords; he charged fearlessly into this first battle, and had fought a series of extremely violent wars since. In one of these rebellions, in 1051, the people of Alençon had taunted William by shouting ‘Hides! Hides for the tanner!’ a reference to his parentage, which they thought very funny. After William captured the town he paraded thirty-two of its citizens on the bridge and had their hands and feet cut off in view of everyone. It’s fair to say William couldn’t take a joke.
The year 1053 saw the last internal Norman revolt. A rebel, also called William, was helped by the king of France and it culminated in February 1054 with a brutal battle between Norman and French troops at Mortemer, which the Normans won. After that William became the supreme leader of the region, and King Henry of France, in theory his overlord, never challenged him.
William had beaten all his neighbors, among them rivals Guy of Ponthieu and Eustace of Boulogne; then in 1063 he invaded Maine to the south on some spurious pretext, seizing a castle after paying two children to sneak in and set fire to it. The local count, Walter, was the nephew of Edward the Confessor and so had a very strong claim to be throne of England. He and his wife Bota were taken into Norman custody where predictably soon they died of mysterious causes. William then forcibly married Walter’s daughter to his son Robert.
Feudal Anarchy
This period was characterized by what’s now called ‘feudal anarchy’, a situation where real power lay not with kings but with local lords. Because kings had not effectively centralized power yet, and the concept of nations was still vague, if you had a castle and a private army there wasn’t much anyone could do to stop you. There was private justice and war against all—generally speaking not the best time to be alive, and much more violent than the later medieval period by which time a local lord couldn’t just hang anyone who annoyed him.13
The Normans were not more culturally advanced than the Saxons, but in warfare, and in particular cavalry and archery, they were the best. In the eleventh century they had become supreme horse breeders of the ‘destrier’, which were fourteen hands high, as opposed to the normal ten for a regular horse. Around this period the northern French invented the cavalry charge, which was hugely effective, and terrifying. The Normans also developed kite-shaped shields, which could be used on horseback better that traditional round shields. It was an expensive business: Norman knights would bring four horses to battle, one for riding there, one for battle, one for his squire and another for baggage.
Even Norman priests were known to get involved in fights, including the Conqueror’s half brother Bishop Odo who is seen in the Bayeux Tapestry waving a club. Churchmen were only supposed to carry clubs or maces into battle, rather than swords, as they couldn’t cut their enemies; although this seems fairly pedantic when the net effect was basically the same.
One advantage the conquerors did not have was their distinctive mail, which we associate as being the classic Norman look, since both sides at Hastings wore these long coats of mail, with a coif around the head. Likewise with the conical helmets with a bar over the nose called a nasel and the neck guard, the ‘hauberk’, which also became a sign of aristocratic status.14 In fact the only way to distinguish them was that the Saxons wore moustaches while the northern French were clean shaven, with close-cropped hair.
Chainmail protected against most weapons, although not a direct sword attack or two-handed axe. The battleaxe, the weapon of the English elite housecarls, could easily cut through chainmail and the shields of the time; then there was the Viking sword, which was so powerful it was said a man was sliced ‘so cleanly in two as he sat in his armour, that the cut only became apparent when, as he rose to shake himself, he fell dead in two halves’.15 The surprise on his face when he realised!
The Normans had also developed the couched lance, a spear which was between nine and eleven feet and was deadly when thrown (it could also be pulled out of a body easily, and so used again).
Normandy had a population of around a million, roughly half that of England, but because of the violent nature of Norman society William had thirty thousand soldiers at his disposal; Harold had less than half that. England, being largely secure from land invasion, had become less militarized and had not kept up with the most recent innovation, archery, while also falling behind in the breeding of war horses.
William’s would be the third Norman invasion of England. After Prince Alfred’s poor effort, Duke Robert had attempted one on his cousin Edward’s behalf but a wind had scattered his fleet, which landed in the Channel Islands. He then decided that since he was in the area he may as well invade Brittany, which may have been his real intention all along.
Later William would state that Edward promised him the throne and that Harold Godwinson had pledged to support his claim. This is implausible, for even if Edward or Harold had promised the crown to William, which is unlikely, it was not in their power to give it to him anyway, since the Witan chose the monarch.
William claimed that Harold had personally sworn an oath to uphold his title, most likely in 1064, when he visited Normandy. The reason for Harold’s journey is a mystery, but it’s most likely he went there to bring back his youngest brother Wulfnoth and nephew, Sweyn’s son Hakon, both of whom were hostages there for reasons that still remain obscure. Harold may have been lost in a storm while on his way to Flanders, or tricked into crashing, and he and his men were captured by Count Guy of Ponthieu, a notorious hostage taker who was also William’s brother-in-law. Ponthieu was infamous for wrecking and went by the custom of ‘lagan’, whereby local lord had absolute rights to shipwrecks. It meant people often put out false signals and killed people who were then shipwrecked. Seaside towns often made a living by putting out false lights and then stealing all their goods—wrecking was quite normal until relatively recently.
One of Harold’s men was able to alert Duke William that the Earl of Wessex, by far and away the richest man in England and so a great hostage, was being held; William had previously defeated Guy in battle—and killed his brother—and so was able to order him to hand over the Englishmen.
Now a guest/hostage in Normandy, Harold was invited by William to come and fight in a campaign against his neighbor Count Conan of Brittany, and the two appear to have got on well (Harold probably spoke French, as well as a number of languages). Brittany and Normandy were constantly at war, and Conan had some reasons to dislike the people next door as his father Alan III had been poisoned by the Normans. Harold had by al
l accounts acted very bravely during this battle, and rescued two Norman knights who had got stuck in the quicksand on the border between Brittany and Normandy, a feat of great strength that appears in the Bayeux Tapestry.
Duke William and Earl Harold had got on well despite the obvious awkward issue at hand. William, strangely, was so obsessed with winning England he may have offered the earl one of his daughters in marriage, even though Harold was actually a couple of years older than him; to make it even weirder, Harold apparently chose not the eldest daughter but the second or third, Agatha or Adeliza, who would have been eight or nine. There’s no suggestion that Harold wouldn’t wait before consummating the marriage, as it was common for children to be betrothed to adults, but it’s one of those stories that just looks a bit odd to twenty-first-century readers. In return Harold pledged a sister to one of William’s cronies.
It was then that Harold apparently made an oath agreeing that William should be the next king of England, placing his hands inside the duke’s in a symbolic gesture of being his vassal. Another Norman story has William making Harold promise to support him as king, and then removing the cloth from the table to show saints’ relics underneath, making the promise binding. This was how the Normans presented the story, in order to make William sound clever, although to a later audience it would just make the oath invalid. No one doubted that such an oath, if made, was done under duress. And even if Harold supported William’s madcap idea, it’s clear the Witan would never support a foreign ruler.
Whether Edward had promised William the throne in 1051, as he claimed, we can never know; there’s no real reason to believe that Edward favoured William for being a Norman, since the half-Norman king seemed to hold a grudge against Normandy, as he held a grudge against everyone, for allowing him to rot in virtual poverty and obscurity until his late thirties. Either way, if Edward had nominated Harold on his deathbed then under English custom that overruled any previous promise he had made to William.