Fulk: The man I call Fulk de Montgomery was actually named Roger. He became very well known as the first Earl of Shrewsbury after the conquest, but in this story he was all too easily confused with Roger de Beaumont. Montgomery was a little too formal for continual use and I did not feel I could shorten it to Monty because of the far more famous General Montgomery. In the end, I decided to rechristen him as Fulk – a core Norman name that I liked and that did not feature elsewhere in the story. I hope he will forgive me this imposition and enjoy his more unique name.
Historical Events
Harold’s visit to Normandy
It is documented in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that Harold’s ship was wrecked at Ponthieu and that he was rescued from Count Guy by William himself and thereafter spent some time in the ducal court, fighting with William in a successful Brittany campaign and making some sort of oath before he left. What is not documented is exactly when or, indeed, why he went. Theories range from him being blown off-course on a fishing trip, to him trying to rescue his hostage brother and nephew, to a diplomatic mission from King Edward. We will never know but this was clearly a vital period as the men who would meet on Hastings Field two years later spent a considerable time together. I touched upon the effect of his visit on Harold in The Chosen Queen but it was fun in this novel to explore the Norman side of the story.
It is documented that Harold and Mathilda sat up together at times during his visit and there are even vague hints of a possible scandal. This is highly unlikely but it is nice to indulge in the possibility that Harold was tempting for Mathilda, if only because he was so very different to William.
There certainly seems to have been an attempt to make a marriage alliance with Harold. Some historians believe that one of the few women in the Bayeux Tapestry, shown in the scene where William takes Harold to his court, is meant to be William’s daughter being offered to Harold as a wife. There are others, however, who believe that it could be one of William’s possible sisters, or even one of Harold’s sisters, offered as a wife for young Robert in exchange for hostages. Any such marriage plans, however, were clearly abandoned once Harold and William were set against each other as enemies.
William’s near death
There is documented evidence that at some point between 1063 and 1066 William fell gravely ill and was laid on the ground as if at point of death. The story goes that he vowed to establish canons in the cathedral church of St Mary in Coutances if God would let him live and Mathilda went to that church and put one hundred shillings on the altar praying ‘that God and St Mary would give her back her husband’.
It’s recorded that her hair was loose and dishevelled, suggesting she was distressed and perhaps that she had been up all night with William. Contemporary chroniclers took this as proof of her devotion to him and in the novel I chose to use it as a crisis point for the couple.
In reality William’s illness seems to have happened in Cherbourg and we have no evidence that it was linked to Harold’s departure but narratorially it seemed to me a satisfactory moment for it to happen. Similarly, we have no evidence that it was linked to his daughter Adela’s death of what may have been Spanish flu but Adela was sent to marry Prince Alfonso at around the same time and does seem to have died on the journey, so the possibility is there.
Mathilda’s coronation
In the end, Mathilda was not crowned as Queen of England until Easter 1068, although when she was, it was with newly drawn-up rights as a Queen Consort that saw her more clearly acknowledged than ever before in English history. We do not know that she intended to sail to England with William in 1066 (although it was possible – Elizaveta of Kiev sailed with Harald Hardrada) but she was certainly pregnant with Adela and was also named as regent, so it is probable she was always intended to stay and hold Normandy firm. What is curious, however, is why it took so long for her to travel to England.
The answer, of course, is the start of the rebellions, which made it too dangerous for her to sail into the country and foolish to attempt anything as potentially incendiary as a coronation. In the epilogue I have William intending to take her back with him in Spring 1067. We do not know if this was actually his plan but he was keen to establish her as queen and it seems likely to me that it was the rebellions in Kent and Mercia that stopped her travelling that first year. By Easter 1068 William had put down both of these rebellions, plus another centred on Harold’s mother in Exeter, and the way was tentatively clear for the new queen to visit her subjects. The coronation seems to have been a success, although there were to be further rebellions in Northumbria, the south-west, and again in Mercia later in 1068.
Whilst in England, probably in Yorkshire, accompanying her husband against rebels, Mathilda gave birth to her last child, Henry. This English-born child was later to become Henry I, arguably the most successful of the Norman kings.
The history of Normandy
In the opening chapter Mathilda calls Normandy a ‘province barely one hundred years old’ and at several other points characters refer disparagingly to the duchy’s relative youth, especially in comparison to England. This is a valid point as William was only the seventh ruler of Normandy, a province that had been created in the tenth century when Viking invaders were carving up Europe.
France at that point was not so much a single country as a set of duchies and counties that owed nominal allegiance to the French King Charles II, known as ‘the Simple’. When a Danish invasion fleet under the command of Rollo (or Hrolf) sailed into the Seine Valley in 911 Charles seems to have been unable to repulse his attacks. Instead, he took the common route of attempting to buy him off, not with money but with land – namely the land around Rouen, already effectively in Viking control. This was ratified in the Treaty of St-Clair-sur-Epte and a year later in 912 Rollo converted to Christianity and named his lands Normandy – quite simply ‘land of the northmen’. His foot was well and truly in the door.
Being a fierce Viking leader, however, he was not content to settle for such a small territory and kept pushing to expand his borders. In 924 King Ralph granted him the concession of Bayeux and Maine – now central Normandy – and in 933 his son William Longsword was granted ‘the lands of the Bretons situated on the sea-coast’, i.e. Avranchin and Cotentin – lower Normandy.
William Longsword, born and bred around Rouen, stepped away from old-style Viking raiding and instead made treaties and marriages to ally himself to other leaders in western France. He was then succeeded by Richard I who ruled for fifty years, consolidating and stabilising the duchy and, in the process, turning the Normans more and more French in terms of language, government and architecture. His successor, Richard II, also started to reach out of northern France when, in 1002, he married his daughter Emma to Ethelred of England – inadvertently setting in motion events leading to the fateful Battle of Hastings.
Richard was succeeded in 1027 by his eldest son Richard III who died mysteriously (or perhaps not so) a year later to make way for his ambitious younger brother Robert I – William’s father. Robert led a fairly loose-living and vicious life in his early years, including claiming the beautiful Herleva as his mistress, but he seems to have sobered considerably after William’s birth and in 1035 he undertook a pilgrimage to Rome to atone for his sins. Before he went he made his bastard son William his heir and forced all his nobles to swear allegiance to the child. It was presumably not a promise he thought they would have to fulfil but he died of a fever on the journey back and William, aged just seven, became Normandy’s seventh duke.
The death of the Norman legacy
The Normans were achieving amazing things in this early period of their history. I was astonished when I began researching them in detail to discover that way before they conquered England they had already triumphed in southern Italy. They were clearly an ambitious and effective nation but for various reasons they were soon assimilated into France and became simply a subsidiary province, little heard of until the tragic Norman landings in the
twentieth century.
Despite William being succeeded on the English throne by two sons – William II (Rufus) and then Henry I – his line died out when Henry’s son William was killed in the White Ship disaster of 1120. Henry named his eldest daughter, the dowager Empress Matilda, as his heir but he’d also been negotiating with his nephew, Stephen of Blois, and on his death Stephen invaded to successfully assert his claim. Matilda did not take this lying down and for years the parties of Stephen and Matilda fought each other. Matilda was never actually crowned queen though she did rule for some months in 1141 (the first female monarch in England) but the dispute created a form of anarchy in England that was only eventually broken by a truce in which Stephen took the throne in return for naming Matilda’s son, Henry, as his heir.
That son became King Henry II in 1154, so technically speaking he was still of William’s bloodline but he was known as an Angevin king because of his father Geoffrey of Anjou and his Norman roots were all but forgotten. King John then lost Normandy for good in 1204 and although English kings continued to fight for possession of parts of France way into Tudor times, Normandy was not among them.
Sicily and southern Italy, both firmly in Norman hands in 1066, went much the same way. Sicily, which was so gloriously recovered from the Saracens by the Norman Roger de Hauteville, was ruled by a German king by 1194. And Italy soon splintered into city states, ruled by lords who considered themselves very much locals even if they had Norman heritage.
What is interesting in all this, however, is that William was not the only Norman conqueror. I love the way he was not so much a stand-out ruler as one sitting within a set of driven, ambitious and successful men. But it was not to last. The Normans were essentially Vikings and Vikings all over the world (for example, in England, Russia and Ireland) showed an amazing skill at absorbing the culture of the places they conquered, marrying local girls and taking on local customs rather than trying to impose their own identity. This may have been why the ‘Norman’ adventurers disappeared from history as a defined set of people.
Historical Features
Guardrobe
In Bruges Mathilda and Judith select their dresses from a guardrobe, a room I show as an innovation introduced by Mathilda’s French mother, which is perfectly possible. The word is French in origin (garde, meaning ‘watch’ or indeed ‘guard’, and robe, meaning ‘dress’) and was originally used to denote a room such as I describe in Chapter Three. Even today in European public places, the word garderobe denotes a cloakroom or wardrobe used to temporarily store visitors’ coats at functions.
Readers could be forgiven, however, for thinking I had made an error in using the word as at some point in the development of castles in medieval England, it seems to have shifted meaning to denote a toilet-chamber. The reason for our word for a wardrobe being used for this very different room is lost in the mists of time, but it may simply be to do with its comparably small size.
Bedchamber
In the novel, William and Mathilda share a bedchamber everywhere except when they go to Westminster and this may strike some readers of later historical novels as odd. Certainly by Tudor times highborn lords and ladies had their own chambers, indeed suites of rooms, but pre-conquest this was an alien idea. Indeed, it would not be unusual for a lord and his lady to sleep in a bed in their great hall, surrounded by their retainers with the curtains around their four-poster bedframes as all the privacy they would expect.
William and Mathilda, as Normans, were living in stone-built castles and palaces with several storeys (rather than the Saxon and Viking residences that tended to be separate wood-built chambers) so it is possible they had separate chambers but very unlikely. Privacy was not a concept that had yet been fully developed, as life was lived, even at a high level, in a very communal way, so having a chamber just for the two of them would be luxury enough. Similarly, in the daytime a queen or duchess like Mathilda would not keep to her own rooms as in later periods, but would go to the ladies bower, often above the hall, to join the rest of the women of the court for weaving and needlework and, presumably, gossip. It was not really until the 1400s that family/court life began to be segregated into independent rooms in any significant way.
Tafel
Tafel was a strategy game played on a chequered board – a precursor to our chess, which evolved in the twelfth century. There seem to have been a variety of different ways to play but the general rule was a two-to-one ratio of ‘attackers’ to ‘defenders’. Attacking pieces were set out around the edges with the goal of capturing the lesser defending ones around the king in the centre whose own goal was to escape to the edge of the board. Clearly it mimics battle strategies and as such was favoured by war leaders. We do not know if William enjoyed it but the more I learned of it, the more it seemed the perfect game for this stern, careful ruler.
The Ship List
This is an extant record of the contribution of ships and men made by William’s magnates in 1066. The copy we have actually dates from c. 1070 and was almost certainly drawn up at Fécamp Abbey but can be presumed to be a good copy of the original. It details them thus:
When William, Duke of the Normans, came to England to acquire the throne, which by right was owed to him, he received from William FitzOsbern the steward sixty ships; from Hugh, who later became Earl of Chester, the same; from Hugh of Montfort fifty ships and sixty soldiers; from Romo (Remigius), almoner of Fécamp, who later became Bishop of Lincoln, one ship and twenty soldiers; from Nicholas, Abbot of St-Ouen, fifteen ships and one hundred soldiers; from Robert, count of Eu, sixty ships; from Fulk of Aunou forty ships; from Gerald the Steward the same numbers; from William Count of Evreux, eighty ships; from Roger of Montgomery sixty ships; from Odo Bishop of Bayeux one hundred ships; from Robert of Mortain one hundred and twenty ships; from Walter Giffard thirty ships and one hundred soldiers. Apart from these ships which altogether totalled one thousand, the duke had many other ships from his other men according to their means.
Note that the tally given does not ‘total one thousand’ but seven hundred and sixteen, so either the clerk could not add up or he did not list all provisions (notably Hugh de Grandmesnil is missing, though two other Hughs are listed). Nonetheless, this remains a vital source for establishing who was working with William to make the invasion the success that it ultimately was and shows how vitally important the ships were. It is also an astounding primary source in a period seriously lacking in such sources.
The Mora
The same ‘ship list’ also details William’s flagship:
The duke’s wife, Mathilda, who later became queen, in honour of her husband had a ship prepared called ‘Mora’ in which the duke went across. On its prow Mathilda had fitted a child who with his right hand pointed to England and with his left hand held an ivory horn against his mouth. For this reason the duke granted Mathilda the earldom of Kent.
There are a number of theories about why Matilda called the ship the Mora, including suggestions that it was an anagram of ‘amor’, or an allusion to her Flemish ancestors who were known as the Morini. I chose to stick with the idea of ‘amor’ but to make it something more personal to the couple – an ‘in joke’ to keep her in his mind as he sailed with his men.
Horse ships
No self-respecting Norman noble would ever have fought as anything but cavalry, so the key to a successful Norman invasion in 1066 was undoubtedly the ability to transport horses across the sea. This was not something the Normans had done before – except in Italy. Researching this led me to a fascinating article published in 1985 by Bernard S. Bachrach suggesting that Norman experiences in Italy were vital to the fleet that crossed to England and also suggesting reasons for them to have sailed from St Valery to Pevensey – locations that have often been presumed to be a random result of storms and tides.
Bachrach cites a Danish experiment in 1967 in which historians proved a horse could jump out of a shallow boat if it was beached, tilted and secured by lines, as shown
on the Bayeux Tapestry, but that a boat like this would not survive the channel loaded. To do that it needed gunwales at least five feet high – too high for a horse to jump. What William needed, therefore, were experts in equine transport and they were to be found in the Mediterranean where the Greeks, Byzantines, Arabs and Romans had long since been taking their mounts across the sea. It is documented fact that Hugh de Grandmesnil was exiled to Italy for a period (although not over Emeline, who I made up) and as he was my cavalry captain he seemed the perfect conduit for this knowledge in the novel.
Bachrach suggested that William used Byzantine-style horseships – hippagogoi – to carry the horses and their riders to England in 1066 and that these special ships needed proper, Roman-style ports to load them. Records show that St Valery had a recognised Roman port as did Pevensey. I suggest in the novel, therefore, that William did not end up in St Valery because he was forced to flee there after storms prevented a first attack as is often thought to be the case, but that he planned to go there all along (though he almost certainly did lose some ships in storms on the way). Similarly his fleet did not end up at Pevensey because they missed Hastings first time round, or just because the tide took them there, but went there with the specific aim of safely unloading their precious cavalry horses. After all, William was a planner – why would he not plan this as well as the rest of the conquest?
Offices
The Norman court was a very male and martial one. There were a huge number of families fighting for supremacy below the duke and, indeed, looking to supplant him with a claimant of their own. William’s early years as duke were fraught with danger and it is down to the courage of both him and his protectors that he made it to adulthood. Gradually over the first ten years of his rule, however, as William put down rebellion after rebellion by branches of his own family, he replaced them as his closest companions with the men with whom he had been raised – his chosen companions and ones he knew he could trust.
The Conqueror's Queen Page 36