A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  In his 1966 essay, ‘The Norman Conquest’, R. H. C. Davis assumed that at first the Normans would have had to live like an army of occupation, ‘living, eating and sleeping together in operational units . . . and . . . exploiting their estates as absentee landlords for the time being’. But castles of various types soon encroached like a malignant rash across the English landscape, to enforce obedience. The simplest type comprised an earth mound (the motte) topped by a palisaded enclosure, or possibly a wooden tower, surrounded by a ditch and a palisade enclosing an outer compound, the bailey. Designed as protection for the henchmen of an alien warrior brigandage intent upon becoming a ‘nobility’, it was a constant menace to the subject countryside and a standing humiliation to its people whose forced labour had raised the structure. Stone-built keeps (donjons) replaced the first emergency timber towers. That the French name for a tower rising skywards was transmuted into ‘dungeon’ in the language of the conquered population to signify the dank and dreadful pit at its base, the domain of torment and sewer rats, recalls realities of the Conquest years that are rarely touched on. But the Normans had a hidden advantage. Many ordinary English may have felt that the invaders were sent as a scourge from God for the nation’s sins. After all, the pope in Rome had, for reasons known to himself, blessed the alien banners.

  The more adventurous among the conquerors might take advantage of the general confusion to add to their holdings. Some ‘manipulated’ the suitors at the shire courts to make false returns in their favour. For example, Rochester Cathedral under its Anglo-Saxon bishop suffered for years at the hands of a Norman sheriff named Picot. He claimed that the cathedral’s manor of Freckenham in Suffolk was in fact royal demesne and as such under his management – and kept the profits for himself. In due course, however, the old English bishop was succeeded by a Norman and he persuaded King William to have a shire court convened to give judgement as to ‘whose the land ought to be’. Eventually the new bishop tracked down the Englishman who had managed the cathedral estates in the Confessor’s time and he confirmed that the manor had indeed belonged to the king.

  King William was as interested as anyone to discover the exact location and value of the grants of lands he had made and whether any of his followers had seized more than allotted to him. Confident in the Rolls-Royce administration of his new kingdom, he ordered an inventory of England and its landholders – Domesday Book. The first question posed about any manor was ‘Who held it in King Edward’s time?’ If the answer did not match the one expected, in other words if the present occupier was not the one to whom the king had awarded the lands of the Anglo-Saxon lord named, then he could expect trouble. Many clamores or complaints came before the Domesday commissioners, some revealing attempted encroachments on the king’s land and then it could be the Normans’ turn to suffer. A certain Berengar, charged with invading the royal demesne land, found himself ‘in the king’s mercy’ – he became so ill that he was unable to attend the official hearing.

  Before the Conquest it had become common practice for the great monastic houses to keep detailed records of their estates, tenants’ rents and so forth; lay landowners may have followed the same practice. The machinery of the sheriff’s court was essential to the Domesday inquests but such estate records, as we saw in the case of Freckenham, must have provided invaluable back-up material:

  The Domesday survey brought the Norman Conquest to a conclusion by examining all the details of the ruthless spoliation, and approving them only when they had been done with authority . . . It made the Norman settlement permanent.22

  English heritage

  The death in a hunting accident of the second Norman king, William Rufus, in the New Forest near Winchester on 2 August 1100 seemed ill-omened to contemporaries and still attracts conspiracy theories: the most lurid of these claim that he was the sacrificial victim of a pagan fertility cult, although more likely it was the result of a coup. On Friday 3 August, the day after the body was interred in the cathedral at Winchester, the assembled barons elected his brother Henry to be king. Having put a guard on the royal treasury, still housed in the old West Saxon ‘capital’, Henry rode for London, its English citizenry ranked below only the bishops and the Norman baronage in their influence on national affairs. That Sunday he was consecrated as Henry I by the bishop of London before the altar in Westminster Abbey ‘and all the people in this land submitted to him’. Barely three days after one king’s accidental death a new one is elected, consecrated and acclaimed.

  By the terms of William the Conqueror’s will Robert, the eldest son, had Normandy; to William went the newly acquired conquest of England; Henry received only money. William was unmarried and Robert away on the First Crusade. He was now on his return. Once he and William made their brotherly reunion Henry could kiss goodbye to the English throne unless it should become vacant – quickly. The timing and location of William’s accident, an hour or so’s ride from the kingdom’s treasury, was certainly convenient.

  At the consecration Henry solemnly pledged ‘before God and all the people . . . to uphold the best of the laws upheld by any of his predecessors’. This was confirmed in a ‘charter of liberties’, which specifically committed Henry himself to maintain ‘the law of King Edward [the Confessor]’. Intriguingly the text of the Latin document as we have it uses the vernacular word laga instead of the Latin lex.

  For England’s Norman conquerors the model for good government was to be found in pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon England. The Confessor as Law-giver would be cited in many a post-Conquest text. Yet no laws actually issued by him have survived. The text known as Leges Edwardi Confessoris dates from about 1140 and is not an authentic record of any previous code. It is of course possible that Edward did make laws that are lost or that his reputation for justice rested on his judgements and pronouncements by word of mouth.

  Henry sent a copy of his coronation charter to every shire; then he turned to the threat from his brother Robert. At length in September 1106, largely thanks to his English troops, he defeated his brother at the Battle of Tinchebrai in Normandy, and Robert became his prisoner for life. The English fought enthusiastically for their Norman king, not least because he had married into the English royal house, his wife Matilda/Edith being the great granddaughter of Æthelred II.

  During this reign there was something of a resurgence in things Anglo-Saxon. Although probably the son of a French father and an English mother, William of Malmesbury, who wrote his Gesta regum Anglorum following a request by Matilda/Edith that he compile an account of her ancestors, considered that Hastings had been a fateful day for England, ‘our sweet country’. His contemporary John of Worcester, born, a contemporary tells us, of English parents and a partisan for the memory of King Harold, drew on Bede and other Anglo-Saxon sources to amplify the English content in his continuation of a ‘Universal Chronicle’ he worked on up to about 1140. In addition he also produced royal genealogies of the pre-Conquest kingdoms. The last of these ‘Mercian-born’ historians, Henry of Huntingdon, wrote his Historia Anglorum (‘History of the English’) in ten short books. It found a wider market. The abbot of Westminster made a premature move for the beatification of Edward the Confessor. Miracles claimed for the king included the story that Earl Godwine had choked to death on bread blessed by him, while attempting to prove his innocence of the mysterious death of Edward’s brother, Alfred, years before (see the cover illustration of this book).

  As a twelve-year-old, Henry I’s son William had received the homage of England’s Norman baronage and was presented as the ætheling to a gathering of English notables. He drowned in the wreck of the White Ship in 1120 but his sister Matilda, wife of Emperor Henry V (the third daughter of a king of England to marry into the empire since the accession of Æthelstan), continued the blood line. Years later Henry Plantagenet, her son by Geoffrey, count of Anjou, would become Henry II of England. Now the promotion of the Confessor’s cult began in earnest as Henry, the first post-Conquest king to have the English
blood royal in his veins, took up the cause. Pope Alexander III proclaimed the new saint in February 1161. In October 1163 Thomas Becket, the controversial new archbishop of Canterbury, presided over a dazzling ceremony at Westminster Abbey at which the saint’s bones were installed in a new shrine.

  Henry II’s treasurer, Richard FitzNigel, wrote that he could no longer detect a difference between the king’s English and French subjects. In London ‘a considerable proportion of the aldermanic class remained English’ and these great men of the city took high umbrage when the low-born Frenchman William Longchamp, bishop of Ely and chancellor to King Richard I, failed to address them in English. So, in the country’s metropolis, a minister of the crown was now expected to speak the language of the governed and not of the government. In the early 1200s the barons who would force Richard’s brother John to grant Magna Carta at Runnymede were appealing back to the laws of Edward the Confessor. The king himself looked to other English patrons, being buried at his own request in Worcester Cathedral, where his tomb is presided over by Bishop Wulfstan and Bishop St Oswald.

  His son Henry III sought to honour St Edward by rebuilding his abbey of St Peter at Westminster and in 1268 had the Confessor’s body solemnly translated to its new resting place behind the high altar, where it still lies; the discovery of the exact location of the Confessor’s tomb by radar imaging was announced in December 2005. Henry named his eldest son Edward and on his crusade to Palestine in 1270–71 this Edward inaugurated the crusading Order of St Edward of Acre, yet another, if transitory, token of the Plantagenet cult of Englishness.

  Edward was followed by his son Edward II and he by his son Edward III, who led England to victory against France in the Hundred Years War. His first-born son was also christened Edward, and this Edward, known to history as the Black Prince, also named his eldest boy after the Anglo-Saxon saint. But the line of Edwards was broken when the Black Prince and his eldest son both died prematurely young, and the Prince’s second son Richard came to the throne. And yet it was Richard’s reign that produced the most powerful testament of nostalgia for the old pre-Conquest monarchy in the magical painted panel known as the Wilton Diptych. Here we see King Richard II adoring the Virgin Mary, supported by St John the Baptist and the Anglo-Saxon royal saints, Edward and Edmund.

  In the context of world culture the legacy of Anglo-Saxon England has been incalculable. The common era for the dating of the world’s events is still the one adopted by England’s first historian, the Venerable Bede. For the best part of five centuries the majority population of the southern half of Britain inhabited a society in which the vernacular language, mother of today’s global language, was the norm in every walk of life. Then came conquest and, except among the aldermanry of the city of London, the habit of English among the nation’s elite seemed lost. But although Latin and Norman French were to remain the principal languages of officialdom for generations, in 1263 we find the first ‘certainly known governmental document in English issued after the reign of William I’; in this King Henry III proclaimed his willingness to abide by the terms of the Provisions of Oxford, forced on him by his barons five years before. The proclamation was copied to all the shire courts, in the language of the country23 – as had been standard Anglo-Saxon governmental practice before the coming of the Normans.

  APPENDIX 1

  THE BAYEUX TAPESTRY

  Recent important publications and a new theory

  At the time of going to press, the most recent work published on the subject was Lucien Musset’s The Bayeux Tapestry (2005). This followed the commercial release in 2002 of The Bayeux Tapestry Digital Edition, devised by Martin Foys, and The Bayeux Tapestry: Embroidering the Facts of History (2004), edited by Pierre Bouet, Brian Levy and François Neveux, while in the summer of 2005 George Beech, emeritus professor of medieval history at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, published Was the Bayeux Tapestry Made in France? The Case for St Florent of Saumur.

  Anyone who has walked along the Bayeux Tapestry in its display case in Bayeux will know the vigour and violence of the scenes, the tension and drama of the unfolding narrative, and the sense of frustration as it breaks off before the end of the story. We have seen Edward, king of the English, on his throne; Harold, king of the English, on his throne and how he arrived at it; Duke William of Normandy receiving Harold at his court; a long and mysterious episode showing them on campaign in Brittany; then we have followed the historic battle between the two: surely, after his death, which we have just seen, the pictures will lead us up to William, the new king of the English, on his throne with all the action accompanying such a climax. We do not know how much of the fabric is missing; also we cannot be certain as to the authenticity of all the surviving images. What we see today differs in some details from the way it looked when it was put on public display at Bayeux in the early 1700s. The most famous episode of all, the standing figure with an arrow apparently in his eye (supposedly King Harold at the moment of death), has been the subject of much controversy. The stitches and stitch holes that today represent the ‘arrow’ are probably later additions. And then perhaps it was a spear: it has even been suggested that King Harold is in fact the adjacent figure being felled by a swordsman.

  There is no direct evidence of any kind as to the location of the workshop where it was made, as to who may have been the person who commissioned the work or the person or persons who planned and devised this masterpiece of design, or even to the date of its execution. At one extreme we have the suggestion that, because the work is generally sympathetic to the English, it was commissioned and made between October 1066 and the English rebellion of 1068–9: that is a maximum of two years for the discussion, planning, designing and actual manufacture of the artefact.

  The existence of the work was first attested in the 1470s, when it was being hung in the nave at Bayeux Cathedral during the annual celebration of the Feast of Relics. This led to the supposition that it had been commissioned by Duke William’s half-brother Odo, bishop of Bayeux, for the consecration of the new cathedral there in 1077. For the last five years of William’s reign (1082–7) Odo was in disgrace, having been imprisoned by William for raising an army without permission.

  In France it was long known as the Tapiserie de la reine Mathilde (Queen Mathilda’s Tapestry, that is the Conqueror’s wife) and presumed to have been the work of French craftswomen. Then the general opinion came round to the view that it was done by a team of Englishwomen, presumably nuns, at either Canterbury or Winchester, though there is no trace of workshops at either place. However, the English were renowned throughout the Middle Ages for this craft and skill, particularly for their work in gold and silken threads, and such hangings are quite often mentioned in tenth- and eleventh-century England. Wills of the period commonly bequeath such items as ‘a set of bed clothing with tapestry and curtain’, ‘a hall tapestry to Ælfwine’ or ‘a tapestry for a hall and tapestry for a chamber’, while the twelfth-century chronicle of the abbey of Ely records a piece donated by the widow of Earl Byrthnoth of the Battle of Maldon, in the form of a hanging that depicted the heroic deeds of her husband.

  Then, in July 2005, Professor Beech argued the case for the manufacture of the tapestry at an embroidery workshop operating from the late tenth century at the abbey of St Florent at Saumur on the River Loire. The workshop has long since disappeared and there are indeed few remains of the abbey itself. A fire devastated the workshop in the 1020s, but it seems to have been restored and was again in production some years later. The historian of the abbey, writing in the later twelfth century, makes no mention of the manufacture of the famous tapestry; this is explained by supposing that, once finished, the great work would have been sent to the commissioning patron, presumed to be William the Conqueror, for display ‘somewhere in Normandy or England’; thus it need never have featured in the holdings of Saumur. Unfortunately, the abbey’s chronicler makes no mention of any textile production of any kind at the workshop during the 1070s and 1080
s, the very period when, Professor Beech believes, it must have been created. The twelfth-century chronicler offers a tantalizing hint of possible English connections when he speaks of une reine d’outremer (‘a queen from overseas’), who apparently commissioned work at St Florent in the 1010s. This lady, argues Beech, must have been Emma of Normandy, queen to both Æthelred and Cnut and, coincidentally, the aunt of Duke William. But if St Florent’s chronicler saw fit to mention, allusively, a commission from William’s aunt 160 years in the past, why would he not mention a commission only 70 years before his time made by her nephew, the most famous figure in northern France during that period?

  Professor Beech points to the close links between William of Normandy and the family of William, the abbot of St Florent. Rivallon, the abbot’s father, was lord of Dol, the fortified town in Brittany that stood close to the duchy’s frontier with Normandy. He allied himself with Duke William against his natural overlord, Duke Conan of Brittany, whose capital was at Rennes, when William raided into the duchy. That campaign occupies about 10 per cent of the length of the surviving tapestry and the siege of Dol features among its scenes. The lord of Dol and his family became favourites with the duke of Normandy.

  Thanks to Duke William’s lavish endowments of priories, churches and church land the abbey of St Florent was a major presence in the Norman church. Perhaps these were in payment for the great embroidery commissioned, Beech proposes, from the abbey workshops; he suggests that the extensive Breton sequence was included at the prompting of Abbot William. Certainly the tapestry displays intimate local knowledge of Brittany and Breton personalities.