by Ed West
The tapestry is only nine inches tall but eighty yards long, that is a third longer than Nelson’s column,11 or just under half that of the Washington Memorial, although rather frustratingly the last few bits may have been ripped off; it ends with Harold being killed and the English running away.
It was most likely made by Kentish weavers at the instigation of a leading Norman but it’s not explicitly pro-William. Although it shows Harold swearing to uphold William’s claim, the Normans are also presented burning down a village and it refers to Harold as ‘king’, something the Normans refused to recognize.
The tapestry is strange in many ways—running above and below the main narrative are a series of figures, including strange beasts and the ‘odd erotic incident’.12 In the scene where William takes Harold to the hall in Rouen, below them is shown a naked man wielding a tool and working on a wooden object which could be a coffin. It also features some characters we know nothing about, including a dwarf called Turold and a woman, Elfgifu, who appears with a priest placing a veil on her; beneath them is a naked man with an erection mimicking the priest’s action. It’s some sort of in-joke.
But the tapestry also created a bit of confusion about the events; for centuries the keepers cut off bits and gave them away as souvenirs13 and so no one is entirely sure how accurate it is now. It is still not clear which figure is the king under the words ‘Harold is killed’, and whether it was some other poor fellow who was shown being hit in the eye, or if this was added later.
It’s thought the tapestry was commissioned by Bishop Odo, because it was probably made in Kent, which after 1066 he owned in its entirety. Odo is barely mentioned in any written reports of the battles, but he is a major figure in the tapestry; only William and Harold appear more often.
Another alternative theory is that it was ordered by Eustace of Boulogne, the Confessor’s brother-in-law who had joined the invasion despite being hostile to William, who previously killed his stepson Walter of Maine. When Eustace joined, William took his son Eustace hostage and the two men would later fall out. Of the two written accounts of the battle, one shows Eustace as a central figure who leads besides William, and another as an abject coward who only survives because he is knocked unconscious.
Alternatively Harold’s sister Edith may have commissioned the tapestry; she is only one of three women to appear in it, out of 626 people, and is portrayed positively. After Hastings she was allowed to live out the rest of her miserable life in peace, and when she died in 1075 William paid for a lavish funeral, perhaps the least he could have done after killing three of her brothers and having another kept in a dungeon for thirty years.
We’re lucky to still have the tapestry at all, as it was almost destroyed in 1792 during the French Revolution when it was going to be cut up in order to cover an ammunition wagon. Then some revolutionaries planned to rip it to pieces and use as confetti as part of some demented ‘festival of reason’, before a courageous official prevented them. The tapestry became famous soon after this when Napoleon became interested in it, seeing as it portrayed a successful conquest of England. He had it brought to Paris and a play appeared around that time about William’s wife making it (in France it is known as The Tapestry of Queen Matilda, after a mistaken belief she was behind it).
When a sort of comet appeared in 1803 it was seen as a sign, and although Napoleon had 150 to 200,000 soldiers and 2,000 ships ready for an invasion it never worked out this time. Interest in the tapestry continued to grow and in 1816 Charles Stothard, a draughtsman for the Society of Antiquaries in London was commissioned to make drawings and write a commentary over two years. This he did; he also stole a bit and took it home, this chunk ending up with the Victoria and Albert Museum who handed it back in 1871 (however by that stage the bit had been replaced so it was never sown back in). Another part was stolen by a vicar, the Rev Thomas Frognall Dibdin, in 1842.
Meanwhile some Victorian ladies, led by one Mrs Elizabeth Wardle, wanted England to have a version of the tapestry so they got together and made an almost exact replica. However because sexual mores had changed somewhat in eight centuries one of the naked men had his genitals removed in the new version, and the other had some underpants helpfully put on. The otherwise-perfect replica is still on display in Reading.
CHAPTER TEN
The Norman Yoke
The country was now under the rule of a foreign elite; the Witan would disappear forever, the Church purged of English bishops and English cults, shires were renamed counties, and ‘Gyrth’ and ‘Leofwine’ became the kind of names you only gave your kids if you actively wished them to get beaten up at school.
Every Englishman who fought at Hastings whether he live or died, had his land confiscated afterwards, a taste of things to come; William ordered the abbot of Bury to hand over everything in his area owned by men ‘who stood against me in battle and were slain there’.1 The English elite were purged, exiled and driven from their homes, and within a generation there would be no native aristocracy left.
Straight after Christmas the Normans began work on the Tower of London, and then they would build five hundred castles in fifty years, roughly one every ten miles, of which ninety were stone.2 These fortresses were not just symbols of occupation, but an eyesore for anyone living in the overwhelmingly one-storey buildings nearby, many of whom were also forced into building them.
The Chronicle recorded that after 1066: ‘When the castles were built, they filled them with devils and wicked men … they levied taxes on the villages … they robbed and burned’. Women were subject to the sort of horrors one expects, as the Chronicle recorded: ‘noble maidens were exposed to the insults of low-born soldiers, and lamented their dishonoring by the scum of the earth’.
The native aristocracy were dispossessed if they weren’t already dead; five thousand thegns (the equivalent of knights) disappeared as a class, and between a third and half of the country was shared out between just 170 Norman barons; thousands of previously free natives were reduced to serfdom.
There were as many as 200,000 Norman and French settlers in England, but more likely closer to 20,000, out of a total population of maybe two million. Many of the leading barons in England now were Bretons rather than Normans, and others Parisian French. In fact the English referred to the conquerors as ‘French’, and sometimes ‘Romans’, as this is what French speakers still called themselves.3
William spent the winter of 1066 in England while his wife ran Normandy, and when he and his cronies returned to France in the spring the Parisians were ‘dazzled by the beauty of their clothing, which was embroidered with gold’. The new Norman elite were vastly wealthy; according to a 2000 Sunday Times estimate Bishop Odo, who was given Kent and land in twenty-two counties, was worth £43.2 billion ($52 billion) in today’s money, which would put him ahead of the most rapacious third world kleptocrat. William’s other half brother, Robert of Mortain, was worth £46.1 billion ($56 billion) while William of Warenne a staggering £57.6 billion ($71 billion); he held lands in thirteen counties. The new king was richer still, but despite William being staggeringly wealthy, the Godwin family had been probably even richer than he was.
Another crony, William Fitzosbern, as well as being made Earl of Hereford, got the Isle of Wight, where he immediately began building a castle. Unfortunately he was killed only five years later after a Flemish countess had offered to marry him if he invaded her county; that kind of offer was irresistible to a Norman. Even William’s cook Tezelin got a whole manor, Addington in Surrey, after making the king a particularly delicious soup, of chicken, almond, milk and capons.4
The Church was also dominated by Normans, who deliberately suppressed the veneration of English saints and undermined native Christianity. At Glastonbury Abbey in 1083 when English monks there resisted a new Norman liturgy, soldiers killed or wounded several of the brothers, firing arrows at them from choir loft. The Chronicle recorded: ‘blood came down from the altar onto the steps and from the steps to the
floor’.
The new super-elite, who each had enough land and money to run a small army, became the basis of the feudal system, from the Latin for ‘payment’ or ‘obligation’, under which the lords owed the king certain duties in return for holding their land and passing it onto their heirs. Although traditionally the Normans were blamed for introducing ‘feudalism’, something fairly similar existed already.5
In England south of the Tees just two Englishmen, Thurkill of Arden and Colswein of Lincoln, were holding baronial estates in 1086. Although the Anglo-Saxons had an aristocracy their Norman replacements were far smaller in number and far richer; so Roger de Busli held land in Nottinghamshire and south Yorkshire that had previously belonged to eighty different English landowners.
Huge areas were set aside as ‘forests’, one-third of the country, the word literally meaning royal lands rather than a wooded place, where the commoners weren’t allowed to hunt, the New Forest being the most famous (the whole of Essex was also a forest). Punishment for hunting on these royal lands was severe. Any man caught poaching would have his hamstring pulled and be crippled for life; they applied the same punishment to any dog found doing the same. In fact any dog even living in the royal forests had to have three claws cut off on each front paw, and by the reign of Richard I (1189–1199), the deer in royal forests were tame.
Like many homicidal maniacs, King William was sentimental about animals, and ‘loved deer like he was their father’, as one chronicler put it (although to be fair he hated his own son).
Peasants were evicted for the sake of hunting and bystanders were obliged to provide passing hunts with refreshments—otherwise they could be charged with treason. It is argued that whereas previously hunting had been a classless pastime, as it remains elsewhere in Europe, in England it became seen as an upper-class sport, and in the New Forest numerous peasants were evicted to make way for the hunting grounds.6 The Normans were so obsessed with the sport they introduced pheasants and rabbits into Britain for the express purpose of killing them.
There was always going to be conflict, which is why William banned his men from drinking in taverns to stop fights. However the Normans were in a state of permanent alarm at the natives, so a system was introduced—The Laws of Englishry—that any body found by the authorities was assumed to be a Norman murdered by the English unless otherwise proven, and led to the nearest village paying a massive fine (if it turned out to be an Englishman, they were okay). The unintended consequence of this would be that murder would go from being a private matter settled by fine (as the Saxons treated it) to being a crime against the crown itself, but at the time this quite progressive idea was not the intention.
The Resistance
After returning to Normandy in 1067 William left his brother Odo in charge, but it wasn’t long before he was back dealing with rebellion. The first actually came from one of his own allies, Eustace of Boulogne, who in 1067 led an uprising in, of all places, Dover, claiming now to be its defender. Eustace, a descendent of Alfred the Great and Charlemagne, perhaps wanted to be king himself, and then invaded East Anglia with two hundred ships, but his Danish ally Sweyn was paid off and deserted him; Eustace, an undeservingly lucky man, escaped with an apology to the king.
The remnants of the Godwinson family, now living in Ireland, also appeared on the scene again. Harold’s son Godwin launched an invasion of the West Country but it fizzled out and he went back across the sea. Harold’s mother Gytha, well into her sixties, led a far more dangerous rebellion in Exeter, which lasted eighteen days and cost several hundred lives. The tough old lady then fled the country, probably to Scandinavia.
William marched into Exeter in December 1067 with an army of Norman and English soldiers. Although he was normally ferocious, he had not allowed plundering in the city after it had surrendered and had not increased the taxes it had to pay. And so when in 1069 a rising broke out in Devon and Cornwall Exeter sided with William.
There was also the eccentric Eadric the Wild, who led a brief uprising in the border area with Wales, and claimed to have married a fairy princess and introduced her to William with ‘beauty, say hello to beast’ (William never confirmed the story).
But the most serious opposition, and most brutally punished, took place in the north. At first William had given the job of running Northumbria to Tostig’s former sidekick Copsi, but he was murdered after only five weeks, killed in an ambush by one Oswulf, son of Eadwulf of Bernicia; then in the autumn Oswulf was himself killed by a brigand. His cousin Gospatric then bought the earldom from William.
The uprising began in 1069 when a member of the old murder-happy Northumbrian royal family slew a Norman appointee, and a combined English and Danish army marched on York and brutally killed almost all the Normans. Two escaped and brought the news back to William.
The retribution was predictably brutal. After William’s ‘Harrying of the North’, in which cattle and corn were burned and thousands slaughtered, several villages and whole districts ceased to exist altogether. As many as 150,000 were killed, and the survivors left so desolate that they resorted to cannibalism; Yorkshire lost three-quarters of its population and the north of England didn’t recover for centuries. Pious as always, William insisted on celebrating the nativity while campaigning in York in 1069, in a town smouldering with ruin. Even Simeon of Durham, William’s propagandist, could not justify this destruction: ‘I would rather lament the griefs and sufferings of the wretched people than make a vain attempt to flatter the perpetrator of such infamy’.
Another, more celebrated heroic stand came with the mysterious Hereward the Wake, a minor nobleman from Lincolnshire, who led an uprising with the help of his trusty sword, ‘Brainbiter’. Hereward was joined by Earls Morcar and Edwin, the latter peeved because he had been promised William’s daughter Adeliza in marriage but the king changed his mind after four years of waiting.
However in 1071 Edwin was betrayed by his own men, who cut his head off and brought it to William. Even William thought this was a bit much, and was ‘so horrified upon seeing the grisly spectacle that he was moved to tears’.7 Poor Adeliza, who was heartbroken after the marriage to Harold had not worked out, wasn’t having much luck with her engagements. After a third, to Alfonso of Castile, ended in failure she eschewed all further talk of marriage and entered a nunnery.’8
Although celebrated as a hero, Hereward’s claim to be a freedom fighter is slightly colored by the sacking of the Abbey at Peterborough, which was English owned. The Chronicle reported dryly that ‘they said he did it out of loyalty to his minster’. Hereward was promised help from the Danes—the Normans must have been pretty bad if people were getting nostalgic about the Vikings—and indeed the Danes were welcomed to Peterborough in 1070, but then they just went off with the abbey treasure.
Hereward’s forces were besieged and beaten, though he disappeared into the night, leading to speculation that a) he never died and will continue the fight until England is free or b) he just drowned. King William’s grand survey of England, the Domesday Book, later records a Hereward living in the West Midlands years later, and some historians think it the same man, though it seems unlikely a notorious outlaw, except a really stupid one, would give his real name on a census form.
The various uprisings only served to make Norman domination more brutal. The king had initially tried to learn English and rule in a conciliatory way, but he gave up on the language and after 1070 English no longer appeared on official documents. From now on he would rule with terror alone.
One thing that can be said about the Normans is that they were generally quite sparing in their use of execution, and William only beheaded one English aristocrat during his reign, the Northumbrian Waltheof, in 1076. He had been part of the 1069 uprising in York but had made peace with the king and married his niece Judith, and even been made Earl of Northumbria after William had exiled his cousin Gospatric. However despite the conflict with the Normans Waltheof and his relatives were still busily engage
d in blood feuds with other northerners over ancient disputes, the main one involving a family that had murdered his great-grandfather, Uhtred the Bold.
Despite being let off once Waltheof went on to join a conspiracy with two Norman aristocrats, Ralph the Breton and William Fitzosbern, who rebelled because the king refused them permission to marry the women of their choice. Waltheof and his two allies, according to Orderic, spread the message that ‘the man who calls himself king is unworthy, since he is a bastard … He unjustly invaded the fair kingdom of England and unjustly slew his true heirs … all men hate him and his death would cause great rejoicing.’ Which was probably true. However the game was given away when Waltheof was accused of conspiracy by his own wife, Judith, and was condemned to death.
He started crying during his recitation of the Lord’s prayer and the executioner, impatient, cut off his head. It was said that his head continued to recite ‘but deliver us from evil, Amen’. Ralph the Breton was put in prison where William sent him some gifts; he foolishly burned them, and so was never released.
The Vikings still tried to invade a couple of times, but they had lost their old sparkle. King Sweyn had died in 1074 and there was a struggle between his sons Harold and Canute; Canute, the loser, sailed to England with two hundred warships and although William took it seriously, and Durham and other castles were garrisoned, the Danes just attacked York Minster and then ran off home. Meanwhile the locals had taken the opportunity to murder some Normans, and so Bishop Odo led an army for some more harrying.
In 1085 Canute, now king of Denmark, raised a coalition to overthrow William once again. He assembled a fleet but there was a dispute with his own subjects and the ships sailed off without him; the following year he was murdered by his own people. Still, it didn’t end there for Canute because eventually he ended up as a saint, on some fairly spurious grounds, mostly that there was a crop failure soon after his death which was attributed to divine punishment.