by Ed West
However Canute’s threat led the king to do something which historians are eternally grateful for, conducting a huge survey of every piece of private property in the country. The idea was to find out how much everyone owned so he could raise a new tax to fight off the Danish invasion. The authorities called it the King’s Roll, or the Winchester Book, but the natives, fighting conquest with irony (not very successfully), named it The Domesday Book, as if it was the very day of judgement from the Lord.9 The book recorded who owned what in 1086, when it was made, and who owned it on the ‘day King Edward lived and died’, and the speed in which it was made is seen as proof of how efficient the Anglo-Saxon state was; it was so extensive that it was last used to settle a land dispute in the early twentieth century.10
As for Edgar the Atheling, he had been involved in the 1069 uprising, or at least been a figurehead, before fleeing to Scotland where his sister married King Malcolm. The Scots ruler had promised to help Edgar regain the throne but this was always going to be not entirely popular with the English who feared the Scots at least as much as the Normans.
Instead William invaded Scotland and Malcolm recognized he was in fact right; Edgar had now wandered around the continent with the king of France promising to help him if he’d invade Normandy, but this failed, too. Eventually Malcolm persuaded his brother-in-law to make peace with William, after which he seems to have been quite a lowly figure, and the Domesday Book shows his estate worth just £10. Eventually in 1086 William allowed Edgar to go to Apulia in southern Italy with two hundred knights to fight with the Normans there.
After all opposition was crushed, the Normans responded to resistance with increased fines. England now groaned under the weight of taxes to support the conquering army, and William still imposed Danegeld, even though it was as outdated as asking the taxpayers now to pay for a fund to fight Hitler.11
The Normans: mass murderers and also sexist
Another way in which Normans are depicted as baddies is that they were puritanical male chauvinists who oppressed women. Some historians argue that women had more rights in Anglo-Saxon England than they did at any time until even Victorian times. Before 1066 there were strict penalties for sexual assaults and rape, whether against free women or slaves, and for fraud, impotence or enslavement a woman could have a marriage annulled and keep all her goods. As far back as the laws of King Ethelbert (written soon after AD 600) women could walk out of a marriage and take half the property, and a third of the thirty surviving wills from Anglo-Saxon England are from females. Before the Normans, as well as owning property or running monasteries, women could hold the position of’ ‘lord’, literally ‘loaf-giver’, a title not exclusive to men. Husbands were also expected to endow their wives with a cash payment to secure their financial independence, the morgengifu—literally ‘morning gift’, paid by a man to his new wife on the morning after their first wedding night—on condition that she had had sex with him the night before, which must have made her feel really good about the whole thing.
There were also double monasteries in the seventh and eighth centuries ruled over by abbesses who were not under the control of men, something that would have been inconceivable to the later Church. Attitudes can also be guessed at from surviving literature; in the Anglo-Saxon poem Genesis B, Eve is not the cause of man’s downfall but was being tricked by the devil’s heavenly vision.
Generally historians agree that life was better for women in Anglo-Saxon England than in the following centuries, and like the Vikings they had a fairly progressive view. Progressive for the period that is. However some others dispute this image of the Normans as proto–golf club chauvinists, and claim that women could still have wills and contracts, hold land, sue and appear as their own attorney before the law. Some say it was all a myth invented by a mixture of nineteenth-century feminists and Francophobes and that the condition of women didn’t actually change that much.
One woman who certainly did well out of the conquest was Matilda, William’s wife, who ran a number of religious houses and received countless rents and gifts; London had to provide oil for her lamps and wood, while Norwich had to give her a small horse each year.12
The Normans were certainly progressive in a couple of ways, though; during William’s reign the death penalty was abolished, since the Normans didn’t approve of execution, although his son reintroduced it. Instead wrongdoers were usually castrated and blinded, which was progress of sorts (blinding was biblically significant and the king, a very religious man in some ways, was obsessed with swearing eye-related oaths and apparently coined the phrase ‘damn your eyes’).
The Norman conquest would also embed chivalry, the warrior code which in England reached its high point in the fourteenth century, and which prohibited the killing or mistreatment of aristocratic prisoners, who in Anglo-Saxon times would have expected to be executed.13 After Waltheof no English aristocrat would be beheaded until the fourteenth century. Chivalry also encompassed ideas about the treatment of women, and although much of what we imagine by chivalry today is a later romantic idea from the far gentler Victorian era, as the medieval period went on women and children were increasingly spared during war.
Although he increased the number of serfs in England, William did phase out slavery, under pressure from the Church, and there was a big difference; although serfs were not free, unlike slaves they couldn’t be legally killed without good reason, and because they were tied to the land their families weren’t split up. Going from slavery to serfdom was a big improvement.
There were other positive aspects to Norman rule, such as the continental influences it brought on the English Church. Having become friends eventually, William had hired the Italian Abbot Lanfranc to replace Stigand as archbishop of Canterbury, largely against his will it has to be said. Lanfranc was one of the greatest minds of his time, if also one of the most modest. He had served for twenty years as head of Bec Abbey in Normandy, and despite being widely respected had refused many prestigious jobs because he wanted to stay in the monastery; he was either very holy, or lazy. Popes Nicholas II and Alexander II offered him a place in the curia—the Vatican bureaucracy—but he refused, and in 1067 turned down the plum job of archbishop of Rouen. But William made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. Under the Normans the number of English monasteries, which were at the time the equivalent both to universities and industry, increased, from 60 in 1066 to between 250 and 300 in 1154.14 In particular the white monks from Abbey of Citeaux, known as Cistercians, would become famed sheep farmers across the north, growing very rich.15
By all accounts Lanfranc absolutely hated living in England, and complained: ‘I am continually hearing, seeing and experiencing so much unrest among different people, such distress and injuries, such hardness of heart, greed and dishonesty, such a decline in holy Church, that I am weary of my life.’ A few weeks after becoming head of the English Church he had written to the pope trying to get out by saying he was inadequate. The pope refused.
There were other positives to Norman rule. Arguably the conquest made central authority in England stronger, and the country never had the same fracturing as in Germany or France, which would lead to continual war and despotism, although geography meant it was probably going that way anyhow.16
The Normans also put up many great buildings: Winchester Cathedral was the longest in western Europe, the Tower of London the biggest keep and Westminster Great Hall the largest secular covered space; Christ Church priory in Canterbury probably took more cut stone than the pyramids.17 The Normans introduced the Romanesque style of stone building to England, where previously most had been wooden. On the other hand quite a lot of Norman buildings fell down—churches at Winchester, Ely, Evesham, Bury St Edmunds and Chichester all collapsed shortly after their hasty construction, and the Normans also knocked down many Anglo-Saxon churches.
There are also numerous beautiful small churches directly linked to the bloodshed of 1066; the Church ordered every Norman to do a year’s pena
nce for each person they killed and if they weren’t sure how many they had slain then to build a church instead.
There was also an economic boom in the late eleventh century and beyond, while castle building created jobs, and provided the focus of new trading centres. Many English towns expanded after 1066, exports of wool to Flanders increased, and trade to southern Europe went up, while new settlements, such as Newcastle, Hull, Boston and Portsmouth, were built.18 But all of this might have happened anyway, as Europe was entering a renaissance that would continue until growth was somewhat slowed by famine and plague wiping out half the population in the fourteenth century.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
William’s Children All Kill Each Other
If it was any consolation to the English, William’s life would get progressively worse as he fell out with pretty much everyone, including his own wife, brother and children. After he died his three surviving sons then fought each other until one was dead in a mysterious hunting accident and another locked away in prison for three decades, and his grandchildren would spend another twenty years in conflict. William and eldest son Robert Curthose (‘Fat legs’ or ‘shorty-pants’, a nickname that his father had invented) hated each other. At Christmas 1078 Robert had managed to personally wound his father, and not by saying ‘I wish I was never born’, but literally in battle. William’s life was, funnily enough, saved by an English soldier in his army, Toki son of Wigot, who died in the process.1
Robert had inherited his mother’s short stature and while she doted on him, father and son did not get along. The eldest son was nothing like his father, affable, generous to the point of recklessness, but also the sort of spoilt prince who were common in the medieval period. As one historian put it, he ‘had perhaps the greatest faults of character; his life was self-indulgent and purposeless’.2 The potbellied aristocrat surrounded himself with a ‘swarm of obsequious sycophants’ who flattered him, and his court was notoriously seedy and debauched, with jesters and prostitutes of both sexes. He had little to do except wait for his father to die, and when Robert asked for land from him, the old man jeered at him and Robert stormed off, saying he would have revenge.
The great conflict between father and son was triggered in 1077 over, of all things, a practical joke. Robert’s younger brothers William and Henry came along to Robert’s hall one day, where he was feasting with his cronies. The two were in the balcony above playing dice and larking around when they decided to throw a chamber pot filled with fetid water or urine on Robert and his party below, as a prank. (Normans didn’t have particularly sophisticated humour). Robert felt his dignity was damaged, and that the king should have taken his side. In a tantrum the twenty-six-year-old started to besiege the castle of Rouen.
It culminated in the battle of 1078 in which, according to one story, father and son fought each other in full armor without knowing who the other was until Robert recognized him and let his father go. Alas this story sounds too good to be true, but we don’t know much about the outcome because the page of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describing Robert’s rebellion was cut away, presumably because it reflected badly on the king.
Furthermore, when the monarch found out that Queen Matilda had been talking to Robert and secretly sending her grown-up son money, he felt bitterly betrayed and their previously solid relationship never really recovered. William had Samson, Matilda’s messenger, arrested and blinded as punishment, which can’t have helped the marriage.
Eventually William even fell out with his brother Odo, who was arrested in 1082 for a totally bizarre reason. Odo had been distributing money to the people of Rome as bribes, and was trying to recruit knights from England to invade the papal city, which sounds like an unhinged plan. Recruiting knights without the king’s permission was a treasonable offence in itself—overthrowing the pope in a military coup was definitely a no-no, even back then. Apparently Odo had got the idea when a soothsayer told him the next pontiff would be called Odo, which seems an unwise reason. William also heard he had been making enquiries about whether any bishop had been king of England before.
Odo would not have been a popular choice. While William’s other half brother Robert of Mortain was described as ‘dense and slow-witted’, the bishop was famously grasping about money and brutal in his dealings with rebels, ‘dreaded by Englishmen everywhere’. In 1075 Odo had led an army against Waltheof and Ralph the Breton then again in 1080 after locals in Durham had murdered a bishop. Now William had him thrown in jail and nursed a burning hatred towards a man he had helped make vastly wealthy.
The following year William’s wife died and the last restraining influence was gone—luckily though he would not be around for much longer. Things had got harder for the ageing warrior because the new king of the Franks, Philip I, became increasingly assertive and was also alarmed that one of his vassals now had a whole kingdom.
The year 1087 was a terrible one for England. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle described it as ‘a very heavy and pestiferous year in this land’ and ‘such a disease came on men that very nearly every other man had the worst illness’. The book, which was never cheery at the best of times, lamented how ‘many hundreds of men died wretched deaths through the famine’.
The king was more hated than ever, although he spent most of his time in France fighting. In late summer he arrived in the town of Mantes, in the disputed Vexin region, besieged it and set it on fire. William was fifty-nine and grossly overweight, so fat that there were widespread jokes doing the rounds about him being pregnant. This latest conflict began after Philip I had invaded the Vexin; William sent out messengers to demand it back, and Philip replied ‘When is the fat man going to have his baby?’ William had been bedridden with stomach complaints, probably caused by obesity, but when he heard about the joke he replied that after going to Mass following the birth ‘I will offer a hundred thousand candles on his behalf.’ In other words—burn down Paris.
William was probably a bit too old and fat to be doing this sort of thing by now. During the siege of Mantes his horse jumped awkwardly, by one account frightened by the flames, and his saddle ripped into William’s stomach; it became infected and he spent five or six weeks in agony, but at least he died doing what he loved best—burning down cities and killing its inhabitants. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported that William perished after destroying ‘all the holy churches in the city’ and added that ‘two holy men who served God’ burned to death as a result. They also described with barely concealed glee how William then died soon after, so that ‘he who had been a powerful king and lord of many lands now held no more than seven feet of earth’. The tone was such that they may as well have added ‘LOL!’ at the end.
Even William felt regret for all the oppression and brutality he had dished out, and on his deathbed speculated on his legacy: ‘I fell on the English of the northern counties like a raving lion, subjecting them to the calamity of a cruel famine and by so doing became the barbarous murderer of many thousands, young and old, of that fine race of people. I have persecuted its inhabitants beyond all reason. Whether noble or commons I have cruelly oppressed them; many I have unjustly disinherited.’3 If only modern politicians could be so honest in their autobiographies.
By his side were his sons William Rufus and Henry Beauclerc. Robert Curthose had chosen to remain in Paris with the king of France, a final snub.4 However, as William had made the leading nobles of Normandy swear an oath to Robert back in 1063 he could not disinherit him now, and so Robert became duke. As for England he concluded: ‘Having therefore made my way to throne of that kingdom by so many crimes I dare not leave it to anyone but God alone.’ William added, however, that he would be pleased if God allowed Rufus to take the English throne.
He asked for the release of all the prisoners in his care, except for Odo, of whom he said: ‘I imprisoned not a bishop but a tyrant and if he goes free, without doubt he will disturb the whole kingdom and bring thousands to destruction.’ William was eventually persuaded to let h
is devious brother go but he was, of course, totally right.
Wulfnoth, Harold’s luckless youngest brother, was finally released, only to be immediately rearrested and imprisoned by Rufus in a jail in England.
As the conqueror parcelled out his realms to his sons and noblemen, all his nearby possessions were ransacked in a rather undignified scene: ‘The servants—seeing that their master had disappeared—laid their hands on the weapons, the old and silver plate, the rich cloth and the royal furniture. The corpse of the king was left almost naked on the floor.’
The king’s body was then taken to Abbey of St Etienne in Caen to be buried but a ‘yokel’ called Ascelin Fitzarthur said it was his land and refused to allow it to go ahead until he was paid off by Henry. Then at the funeral William’s corpse was so obese that his pallbearers collapsed under the weight of his coffin, and the body fell onto the church floor, stinking out the place and causing everyone to flee.
It’s hard to conclude anything other than that his reign had been a total disaster for England, although one English chronicler begrudgingly admitted that ‘one must not forget the peace he brought to this land, so that all men of property might travel safely through the kingdom’. But then, in much of the north, there was no one left to do any crime.
William Rufus quickly hurried from Normandy to Westminster to claim the throne before Robert could murder him. Meanwhile Henry, the youngest of William’s nine or ten children by Matilda, received £5,000, a fortune but still rather small compared to a whole country. So much did he trust his father that Henry sat counting it in front of him until satisfied it was all there.
William II, nicknamed Rufus because of his red hair and alcohol-soaked red face, was compared to his father a decent man but also ‘a rumbustous, devil-may-care soldier, without natural dignity or social graces, with no cultivated tastes and little show of conventional religious piety or morality—indeed, according to his critics, addicted to every kind of vice, particularly lust and especially sodomy.’5