by Ed West
Afterwards Henry, mean as always, returned his son’s widow Matilda of Anjou to her father Fulk but kept the dowry.
Henry died in 1135, supposedly by overdosing on lampreys, a type of eel that kills its prey by cutting its stomach and sucking out its insides; the fish was considered a delicacy at the time. Leaking black fluid, Henry’s corpse was taken to Reading Abbey, which he had established as a memorial to his son. The king’s embalmer was unskilled and died after inhaling the stench of the cadaver, ‘the last of many whom King Henry had put to death’, as Henry of Huntingdon said. After this William the Conqueror’s grandchildren, true to family tradition, spent the next twenty years fighting each other, and as one monk wrote: ‘Never did a country endure greater misery’.
The Anarchy
Such disasters were quite common in the Anglo-Norman kingdom, and in the mid-twelfth century more courtiers died from drowning than fighting for the crown.8 But only this one would lead to civil war, a war appropriately known as ‘the Shipwreck’ or ‘Anarchy’. Henry’s only surviving child was yet another Matilda, who lacked the most important quality of medieval kingship, a penis. Neither the Franks, the English nor the Normans had ever had a female ruler, and they were not going to start now. However, when Henry made his nobles swear allegiance, there was a scrum to be first to pledge support for Matilda; after David, king of Scots, got there first, the king’s illegitimate son Robert of Gloucester and nephew Stephen of Blois fought to be the second. Stephen won, but when the old king died most would go back on their oath.
Matilda had spent most of her life on the continent. At the age of just eleven she was betrothed to the German emperor Heinrich V, who was thirty-two, and she spent much of her second decade running Germany while her husband was away. Her time there was not exactly easy; at fourteen she was accompanying Heinrich on a war in Italy, crossing the hazardous Brenner Pass across the Alps. At this young age she already held the titles Queen of Germany and Queen of the Romans, and was popular, known to her German subjects as ‘the good Matilda’.
However her husband died of cancer and now in her midtwenties Matilda headed back to England with only some mementoes of her time as Europe’s most powerful woman, including two jewelled crowns of solid gold, ‘one so heavy that it could only be worn when supported by two silver rods—and the mummified hand of the apostle St James’. She now found herself demoted, forced to marry the fifteen-year-old Geoffrey of Anjou, scion of a neighbouring county whose people the Normans viewed as vicious barbarians.9 The marriage was not a success. In fact Matilda and Geoffrey were only married because of the threat posed by William Clito, who had become Count of Flanders, which made it necessary to acquire Anjou—and six weeks after their wedding Clito was stabbed to death in a fight with a foot soldier while preparing to attack his uncle yet again.
Within a year the couple were separated but Henry had forced them to get back together and soon two sons were born. Despite this the king still hated Geoffrey, partly because the Normans hated the Angevins, and partly because he just hated Geoffrey. So did the barons. In fact even Matilda hated Geoffrey, who came from a long and especially vicious line of murderers and sexual sadists. The king preferred his easygoing nephew Stephen, who he made the richest man in the kingdom through his largesse, and whom he had adopted virtually as a son.
Stephen was famously relaxed and unambitious and so it was a surprise that when Henry died he raced across the channel and arrived in Winchester, where his brother Henry was bishop, and had himself crowned. The most popular choice for king was Henry’s son Robert of Gloucester, but he refused because he was illegitimate, an increasing sign of how strict European rulers were becoming about marriage. Stephen also had an older brother, but his name, William the Simple, rather explains why he was not in contention. He seems to have had a sort of personality disorder and after threatening to kill a priest was quietly encouraged to retire to a country house somewhere by their mother Adela, who instead pushed Stephen forward.
Nineteen years of war followed, a conflict that must have been of supreme indifference to the English peasantry; indeed there was only one proper battle, most of the conflict consisting of skirmishes, murder and general lawlessness. Kidnappings, robberies and killings rocketed, and local barons took the opportunity to lock people up and demand money from them, so that dungeons across the land were filled. This was ‘feudal anarchy’ in action, where local bigwigs with armed followers could do whatever they liked; atrocities during sieges were common, in order to grind down enemy morale, with corpses hanged from walls and prisoners taken by the attackers killed in clear view.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry of 1139 was especially depressing, describing how both sides in the civil war kidnap ‘peasant men and women, and put them in prison for their gold and silver, and tortured them with unutterable torture … They hanged them by the thumbs, or by the head, and hung fires on their feet; they put knotted strings about their heads, and writhed [twisted] them so that it went to the brain … Some they put in a chest that was short, and narrow, and shallow, and put sharp stones therin, and pressed the man therein, so that they broke all his limbs … I neither can nor may tell all the wounds or all the tortures which they inflicted on wretched men in this land.’
The problem was that Stephen was too nice to be king. He had a very light voice, and had to get someone else to make speeches before battle. When Exeter rose in rebellion Stephen’s brother Bishop Henry recommended massacring the rebels, pointing out that ‘kingship rather than humanity’ was the order of the day. On the other hand Robert of Gloucester suggested mercy, and so Stephen allowed the rebels to go free; Robert soon defected to his sister which suggested he might not have been giving Stephen the most helpful of advice.
Henry I or Canute would have hanged or blinded half the population on a good day, but Stephen was ‘a mild, good-humoured, easygoing man, who never punished anybody’, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle put it. In the eyes of most people this made Stephen weak.
Matilda was meanwhile hampered by her relatives. Soon after Stephen seized the throne the north was invaded by David of Scotland, Matilda’s uncle, which probably wasn’t a great help, since northerners were quite reasonably terrified of the Scots. Likewise her estranged juvenile husband Geoffrey, being an Angevin, was tremendously unpopular.
However in 1141 Empress Matilda was on the point of victory after Stephen had been taken captive outside Lincoln. He was led to Bristol in chains, but in September Matilda and her ally Robert of Gloucester were besieging Winchester when they were caught by an army loyal to Stephen. Robert heroically fought long enough to allow his sister to escape while he was captured. He was then exchanged for Stephen, and so they were back to square one.
We know less about the later stages, because its main chronicler, William of Malmesbury, unfortunately died in 1143; the last sentence of his last book, Historia Novella, reads ‘I am disposed to go into this more thoroughly if ever by the gift of God I learn the truth from those who were present’.
Matilda meanwhile had sparked a riot in London, and such was her haste to escape the angry Londoners that she left her dinner unfinished, and for the rest of the conflict she spent her time running around the West Country. Londoners were angry partly because she’d taken away their town council but also that she could not protect them against an army sent by Stephen’s ruthless wife, Eustace’s daughter Matilda of Boulogne (often spelled Mathilde by historians just to make things a little bit easier). Mathilde led a harrowing of London with a ‘magnificent body of troops … [who] raged most furiously around the city with plunder and arson, violence and the sword.’ Londoners watched as ‘their land was stripped before their eyes and reduced by the enemy’s ravages to a habitation for the hedgehog’. Matilda now found that everyone who had previously supported her deserted, including Stephen’s brother Bishop Henry, who two months earlier had proclaimed her Lady of England and ‘cursed all who cursed her, blessed those who blessed her’. (St Bernard of Clairv
aux called Bishop Henry ‘the man who walks before Satan’.)
To make matters worse her husband Count Geoffrey, who was running Normandy as duke, now refused to help her by sending soldiers.
Matilda, who styled herself, ‘Lady of the English’, was also apparently haughty towards Londoners, although the hostile chroniclers who suggested this might have said this about any woman who ruled. One pro-Stephen account says: ‘She at once put on an extremely arrogant demeanour instead of the modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex.’
Things only improved when the pope launched the Second Crusade in 1147, and many of the warring aristocrats went to fight there. The crusade itself was an absolute failure, and ended with the Christians all hating each other, but there were was one significant result; along the way the English contingent stopped in Lisbon, where the local Christians persuaded them to join an attack on the Saracens there, which they did, helping in the creation of Portugal.
With her support dwindling, Matilda fled from Oxford in 1149, escaping by rope from an open window and crossing the frozen river, she and her four companions camouflaged in white against the snow.
Eventually the war entered a new generation and was being fought by the eldest sons of the two claimants, Eustace and Henry Fitzempress. The Peterborough version of the Chronicle recorded of Stephen’s son: ‘He was an evil man and did more harm than good wherever he went; he spoiled the lands and laid thereon heavy taxes.’ Matilda’s son Henry, meanwhile, was something of a boy prodigy when it came to war. He had invaded England when he was aged just thirteen with some mercenaries but after a failed attempt to seize a castle his band of soldiers began to desert him and he was left stranded. Stephen, ‘ever full of pity and compassion’ bailed him out to send him home, like the parent of a spoiled gap year kid who’s got in trouble with the police abroad.
Eventually the barons were so sick of the pointless conflict they began concluding private peace treaties. The earls of Leicester and Chester, whose land adjoined each other and were sworn to opposing sides, had a private deal that when they were called to have a war they would only turn up with twenty knights each and after the fight return all property that had been captured. In 1153 a peace was concluded but in a rage Eustace defied it by going on the rampage across East Anglia; he arrived at the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, wrecked the lands when it refused his extortion demands, and then sat down for dinner in its refectory, where he choked to death.10
Tired of all the bloodshed, Stephen acknowledged Henry as his successor, and then died a year later of a stomach illness, perhaps the same condition that had saved his life twenty years earlier. Matilda lived for another fourteen years, acting as the king’s advisor, her last piece of advice being for him to not hire his friend Thomas Becket as archbishop; like Harold, he should have listened to his mother.
The very last entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle signed off in typically miserable style that same year: ‘Never did a country endure more misery. If the ground was tilled the earth bore no corn, for the land was ruined by such doings; and men said openly that Christ and his saints slept.’
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
We Shall Never Surrender
An English farm in 1114 listed its workers as being called Soen, Rainald, Ailwin, Lemar, Godwin, Ordric, Alric, Saroi, Ulviet and Ulfac, while the manor was leased by a man called Orm.1 Around the same time a boy from Whitby petitioned to change his name from Tostig to William because he was being bullied.2 By the end of the century all these names had disappeared, and among the only surviving English monikers were Alfred, Edmund and in particular Edward, which remained in fashion because of the cult attached to Edward the Confessor. Henry III, Henry I’s great-great-grandson, in the thirteenth century was so devoted that he named his first son Edward, starting a long line of kings by that name.
For a while a man’s social class could immediately be deciphered just by his first name, and it is with enduring English class divisions that the Normans have always been associated. Certainly later, middle-class protestors against the aristocracy would see themselves as Saxons fighting against the Norman yoke, even if it was a bit of a fantasy.
Many on the parliamentary side during the English Civil War of 1642–49 saw their struggle as being the restoration of Saxon liberties taken away by a foreign tyrant, as they fought a Scottish-born monarch who was married to a French Catholic. The leader of the Diggers, Gerrard Winstanley, saw his band of Civil War radicals as inheritors of the Saxons against the Normans. In his crackpot pamphlet The New Law of Righteousness, which advocated a sort of Christian Communism, he argued that the Bible said everyone should be equal and: ‘Seeing the common people of England by joynt consent of person and purse have caste out Charles our Norman oppressour, wee have by this victory recovered ourselves from under his Norman yoake.’ This wasn’t remotely true; before 1066 there was widespread slavery and vast inequality, but what differed after the conquest was that the oppressors spoke a different language. Winstanley, meanwhile, spent his last few years fighting over a small financial legacy he believed to be his.
Later, American revolutionaries such as Thomas Jefferson would identify with the defeated of 1066, seeing themselves as descendents and political successors of Harold’s men. Jefferson, a keen student of Anglo-Saxon history, proposed that one side of the seal of the United States feature Hengest and Horsa, the semi-mythical fifth-century Jutish leaders who conquered Kent. And Thomas Paine warned that Americans under the British would find ‘ourselves suffering like the wretched Britains under the oppression of the Conqueror’.
Much of this was more down to early modern attitudes to the French than anything. By the time of Jefferson France had long become the cultural leader of Europe, the center of sophisticated courtly manners and other aspects of high culture; but it was also run by a despotic aristocracy who treated their peasants appallingly and it was easy to transfer these qualities to the Normans.
In the nineteenth century Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli’s idea that the country was divided by ‘two nations’ originated, he said, with ‘the conquerors and the conquered’. In that same period one of Britain’s most popular novels, Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, told the story of a heroic Saxon being hounded by the country’s Norman rulers while brave King Richard is off on crusade. The Victorian era, a high water mark for English national self-confidence and pro-German feeling, also saw peak Anglo-Saxonism. It was during this time that the Robin Hood myth, originally set in the 1260s and about economic discontent, was transferred to the 1190s and featured a Saxon rebel bandit resisting a Norman elite.
The idea has stuck, so that in his 1999 book on life as an activist for the British Labor Party, Things Can Only Get Better, John O’Farrell wrote: ‘It struck me that the classes in Britain were still basically divided along the lines of Normans and Saxons. The Normans of Fulham still drank wine and owned land in France and the Saxons of Fulham still drank ale, used “Anglo-Saxon” vocabulary and tended small strips of land behind the playing fields.’3 Britain at the time was led by a Tory with that most Anglo-Saxon of surnames, Thatcher.
Perhaps the Duke of Westminster’s advice remains solid; research published in 2011 found that people with Norman surnames are still richer than the population as a whole, by some 10 percent on average.4 However while most of the Anglo-Saxon elite fell at Hastings and large numbers were dispossessed, for many life went on as before, and a number of Anglo-Saxon gentry families did survive in their place. Among the thirteenth century ‘landed’ families who traced their line back to before 1066 were the Berkeleys, Cromwells, Nevilles, Lumleys, Greystokes and Audleys.5
The England that emerged from the Norman period was still recognizable as the Englalond of 1000, including its laws and culture. Matilda’s son Henry II, a descendant of Edmund Ironside, would introduce the jury system that had its origins in Ethelred’s reign. The Anglo-Saxon Witans would not be forgotten and remained potent symbols of nationhood; they were quoted during the debates ove
r the Pennsylvanian constitution in 1776.
A number of Englishmen fled rather than accept Norman rule; some went to Scotland, where they tipped the linguistic balance against Gaelic and ensured that country would be English speaking. Many others, perhaps enough to fill three hundred ships, sailed to Constantinople to join the Emperor’s Varangian guard. The English Varangians even got to fight the Normans in Sicily, and while it would be nice to say that here they got revenge alas once again the Normans won; they generally tended to. Even more bizarrely, some English refugees settled on the coast of the Black Sea at a place, perhaps Crimea, that they called Nova Anglia, or New England; this colony survived until the thirteenth century when it was absorbed.6
The Normans did not stop in England, and would eventually conquer Wales and Ireland. In 1098 the Norman Earls of Chester and Shrewsbury were marching through North Wales in pursuit of the local leaders Cadwgan and Gruffydd and were on the point of capturing them when they met with sudden disaster in the form of Magnus Barefoot, king of the Norwegians, who happened to be on a sort of piracy holiday around the Irish Sea. The Earl of Shrewsbury was among the Normans killed while the others fled. Alongside Magnus was Harold Haroldson, son of the former king, who after failing to start an uprising had eventually gone to Norway where Magnus II treated him well because Harold had spared his life after Stamford Bridge. After his trip with Barefoot, Magnus II’s son, we hear no more of him.
Meanwhile Harold’s daughter Gunhild had became a nun at Wilton in southern England where she was cured of a tumor by Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester (the one who hated long hair). While she was there the Breton Lord Alan the Red was supposed to be married off to another nun, Edgar Atheling’s niece Edith, but Alan preferred Gunhild and abducted her. On top of this rather nonprogressive form of wooing Alan had been at Hastings, and his brother Brien had fought her brothers in Devon afterwards, but the two seemed to have been happy together despite this obvious bone of marital contention. After his death Gunhild married Alan’s nephew, another Alan. Meanwhile Edith’s father Malcolm had tried to get William Rufus to marry his daughter instead but he wasn’t the marrying type and she instead was matched to his brother Henry I.