by Marc Morris
Not wanting to baffle the uninitiated, but equally anxious not to offend female readers or members of the lower clergy, I have tried to steer a middle course between these two extremes, and create what might be called a justified narrative. Rather than discuss all the source material separately at the end of the book, I have introduced each source as the story progresses – without, I hope, sacrificing too much forward momentum.
Readers can rest assured I haven’t left out the juicy bits. I say this because there are some who assume that historians seek to keep these bits to themselves, like the best silver, to be brought out only in academic seminars. If I had a pound for every time I’ve heard a comment along the lines of ‘I would have liked to know more about his wife/children/private life/emotional state’, I might not be a rich man, but I would probably be able to go out for a nice meal. We would all like to know more about these topics, but for the most part they remain closed to us. One of the frustrations of travelling back almost a millennium into the past is precisely that many of the characters we encounter are two-dimensional. Often they are no more than names on a page— shadows cast by a single, flickering flame. There are kings in this story for whom we do not possess a reliable contemporary description – not even so much as an adjective. Any attempt to discuss their personalities would be idle speculation. As William of Poitiers, our most important Norman source, explains at one point, poets are allowed to amplify their knowledge in any way they like by roaming through the fields of fiction. So too are the historical novelists of our own day, and goodness knows there are enough of them if such invented detail is desired. In this respect alone I sympathize with Professor Freeman (an otherwise deeply unsympathetic character) who, having completed his massive six-volume history of the Conquest, received an enquiry from a painter, wanting to know what the weather had been like on the day of the Battle of Hastings. ‘What odd things people do ask!’ he exclaimed in a letter to a friend. ‘As if I should not have put it into my story if I had known.’9
So I’ve put in the good stuff where it is known. I have also tried to be as fair and balanced as possible. There is still a widespread assumption with the Norman Conquest that the Normans are ‘them’ and the English are ‘us’. The Normans, it goes without saying, are the villains of the piece, responsible for introducing into England bad things like feudalism and the class system. The notion persists that pre-Conquest England had been a much nicer place – freer, more liberal, with representative institutions and better rights for women. Thus the Conquest is still regarded in many quarters a national tragedy.10
But almost all of this is myth. It arises not from contemporary evidence, but from opinions passed on the Conquest in later centuries. In the case of the status of women, it arose as recently as the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when it was argued that before the coming of the Normans women had better legal rights, allowing them to control their own property and to have a say in whom they married. The period before 1066 was imagined as a golden age, when women and men rubbed shoulders in rough and ready equality, only to be ended by the coming of the nasty Normans. Latterly, however, these arguments have been comprehensively discredited. The reality is that women were no worse off under the Normans than they had been under the Anglo-Saxons; they simply had a bad time both before and after 1066.11
Certainly, Englishmen at the time were extremely sore about being conquered by the Normans. ‘They built castles far and wide throughout the land, oppressing the unhappy people, and things went ever from bad to worse,’ wept the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1067. ‘When God wills may the end be good!’ But, as we shall see, the English had largely overcome these feelings by the end of the twelfth century. The notion that the Conquest ushered in new and enduring forms of oppression for Englishmen is the work of writers and propagandists working in later periods. It began to develop as early as the thirteenth century, when Normandy and England were once again ruled by different dynasties, after which time the English began to develop a hatred of France that lasted for the rest of the Middle Ages and beyond. It was given a further twist in the seventeenth century, in the struggle between Parliament and Crown, when Parliamentarians went looking for a golden age of English liberties, found it in the Anglo-Saxon era, and declared the absolutism of the Crown to be a Norman creation. Although this view was challenged at the time, Parliament’s triumph ensured that it remained the dominant one for the next two centuries. It was championed by Freeman who, like many men of his day and age, despised everything French and Norman and considered all things German and Anglo-Saxon to be pure and virtuous. Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest was, indeed, so obviously biased in favour of the English that it provoked instant reaction from other academics, most notably John Horace Round, who spoke up in defence of the Normans.12 Since then scholars have tended to support one side or the other, Saxon or Norman, even to the extent of declaring which side they would have fought on had they been present at Hastings.13
Some readers may come away with the impression that, in the unlikely event of having to choose, I would line up with the Normans; if so it would only be because I know that they are going to win. I have no particular fondness for William and his followers. Like all conquerors, they come across as arrogant, warlike and inordinately pleased with themselves, as well as (in this particular case) holier than thou. But, at the same time, I don’t much care for the English either, as they were in the eleventh century, with their binge drinking, slavery and political murders. Whoever these people were, they are not ‘us’. They are our forebears from 1,000 years ago – as are the Normans. At the risk of sounding more pious than the most reformed Norman churchman, it is high time that we stopped taking sides.
Needless to say, however, I still think the Conquest is hugely important; indeed, I would agree with those historians who continue to regard it as the single most important event in English history.14 Many of the traditional claims made for the Normans, it is true, have been overturned in recent decades. Some of the things we once thought had been changed by their coming have been shown to have changed at other times and for other reasons, or simply not to have changed at all. Nobody now thinks that the Conquest introduced the nucleated village or much affected the development of the parish system; it is generally thought to have had little long-term effect on existing political structures, the economy or the arts.
But even as these questions have been settled on the side of continuity, other areas have been shown to have experienced dramatic change. Not only did the Normans bring with them new forms of architecture and fortification, new military techniques, a new ruling elite and a new language of government; they also imported a new set of attitudes and morals, which impinged on everything from warfare to politics to religion to law, and even the status of the peasantry. Many of these changes could be grouped under the heading ‘national identity’. The Conquest matters, in short, because it altered what it meant to be English.15
One last thing: this book is about the impact of the Normans on England, not about their impact in general. The Normans had all sorts of other exciting adventures in the course of the eleventh century, invading both Italy and Sicily and, eventually, as participants in the First Crusade, the Holy Land. These adventures are not part of this story, which is focused on the Conquest of 1066. This means we will look at events in Normandy and France up to that point, but not have much room for events in these regions thereafter. Also, because the book concentrates on England, we will not have much to say about the other countries and peoples in the British Isles. In recent decades there have been many brilliant books and articles reminding us always to consider the British Isles as a whole, and not just as England and its ‘Celtic Fringe’. The Normans did have an enormous impact on the peoples of Wales and Scotland – eventually. In the first generation after 1066, however, that impact was minimal. Some contemporary Celtic chroniclers failed even to register the Conquest, or noted it only in passing as something that was happening elsewhere that
would not affect them. Events would soon prove them wrong, but they are events that fall outside the time span of this story.16
Stories have to stop somewhere. The Bayeux Tapestry stops with the death of Harold, but only because the original ending is lost. Most scholars assume that in its complete state the Tapestry stretched a little further, and probably concluded with the coronation of William the Conqueror at Christmas 1066. This story also stops with William, but it stretches a good deal further, ending with the king’s death in 1087.
Similarly, stories have to have a beginning. The Tapestry begins not long before the Norman invasion, with events that probably took place in 1064. To tell our story properly, we must necessarily go back much further. But, again, we do start with the same person.
1
The Man Who Would Be King
The Bayeux Tapestry begins with three men in conversation, two standing and one seated. The standing men are not identified, but the seated figure carries a sceptre and wears a crown, while above his head the caption reads ‘Edward Rex’— King Edward. Today he is known, more conveniently, as Edward the Confessor. His memorable by name arose in 1161, almost a hundred years after his death, when he was recognized as a saint by the pope. The pope was satisfied that Edward had performed miracles while alive, and that miracles had continued to occur after his death.1
From the record of events in his own day, Edward does not appear to have been particularly saintly. There are suggestions in contemporary sources that he may have been more pious than most, but otherwise he seems to have cut a typical, indeed unexceptional, figure. He lived a fairly long life by medieval standards, dying in his early sixties. On the Tapestry he is shown as an old man with a long white beard, and his death forms one of the most important scenes. The date of his death – 5 January 1066 – is enough to indicate that he is crucial to our story. But in order to understand that story properly, we need to travel back to his youth, and explore how he came to be king of England in the first place. It is a remarkable tale – the one aspect of his career that is indubitably miraculous.
England at the start of the eleventh century was a country both old and new. Old, because its roots stretched back into a distant past, when tribes of Germanic peoples, now collectively known as the Anglo-Saxons, had begun migrating to the island of Britain in the fifth century. Fierce warriors, these newcomers eventually made themselves masters of southern and eastern Britain, defeating the native Celtic peoples, subjugating them and driving them into the upland regions to the north and west. In the areas where the Anglo-Saxons settled, new kingdoms had arisen, the names of which are still familiar as the counties and regions of today: Kent, Sussex and Essex; East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria. Pagan at first, the rulers of these kingdoms began to convert to Christianity from the end of the sixth century, and so in time did their peoples.2
But in the ninth century, this galaxy of competing kingdoms was destroyed by new invaders – the Vikings. Despite attempts to rehabilitate them in recent times, the Vikings, with their lust for blood and glory and their gruesome human sacrifices, were not surprisingly regarded with horror by the settled Anglo-Saxons, who witnessed their monasteries being torched, their gold and silver treasures being looted, their precious illuminated manuscripts being destroyed, their young men and women being led away as slaves, and anyone else who stood in the way being mercilessly put to the sword. One by one the several kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxons fell: first Northumbria, then East Anglia, and finally even Mercia, the mightiest kingdom of all, collapsed in the face of the Viking onslaught.3
But the kingdom of Wessex endured. Led first by the celebrated King Alfred the Great, and afterwards by his sons and grandsons, the people of the most southerly Anglo-Saxon kingdom at first doggedly defended themselves, and then successfully fought back. And not just in Wessex. During the first half of the tenth century, the West Saxon kings became the conquerors, pushing their frontier northwards, driving the Vikings into retreat, and bringing the neighbouring peoples of Mercia and East Anglia under their dominion. In 954, the Viking capital of York finally fell, and the lands north of the Humber were also annexed by the heirs of Alfred.
In driving the Vikings out, the kings of Wessex had forged a powerful new state. As their armies had advanced, their conquests had been cemented by the foundation of fortified towns, known as burhs (boroughs), around which they had established new administrative districts, or shires. Where there had once been several, competing kingdoms there was now a single source of authority. Henceforth the various Anglo-Saxon peoples would swear an oath to one king, and live under one law; they would use a single silver coinage and worship a single Christian God.
But, having conquered, the kings of Wessex took care not to be seen as conquerors. Anxious not to alienate his new Anglian subjects, Alfred had urged them to forget their former differences, and emphasized the common Christian culture that united them against the pagan hordes they were fighting. Diplomatically he was not a rex saxonum in his charters but a rex angul-saxonum, and his people were collectively described as the angelcynn. In a further effort to promote unity, he also stressed their common history, commissioning a chronicle that would circulate around the kingdom’s major monasteries. Remarkably, this Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (as it was later known) was written not in Latin, as was the practice in virtually every other literate corner of Europe, but in the everyday language that people spoke. By the end of the tenth century, this language had a name for the new state: it was ‘the land of the Angles’, Engla lond.4
Such was the kingdom, at once ancient and modern, that Edward the Confessor would eventually inherit. Dynastically speaking, his credentials for doing so were impeccable, for he had been born into the royal family at some point between 1002 and 1005, a direct descendant of King Alfred (his great-great-great-grandfather). Statistically speaking, however, Edward’s chances must have seemed vanishingly slim, for he was the product of a second marriage: six older half-brothers were already waiting in line ahead of him in the queue for the succession. And yet, at the time of Edward’s arrival, it would have been rash to have placed a bet on any particular candidate, because the world was once again being turned upside down. A decade or so earlier, the Vikings had come back.
They came at first in small parties, as they had done in the past, testing the waters, raiding and then retreating with their loot. But in 991 a large Viking horde had landed at Maldon in Essex and defeated the overconfident English army that had set out to meet them, and from then on the Vikings had returned to burn, pillage and plunder on a more or less annual basis; by the time of Edward’s birth, the violence had become almost a matter of routine. Under the year 1006, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that the Vikings ‘did as they had been wont to do: they harried, burned and slew as they went’. The citizens of Winchester, Wessex’s ancient capital, ‘could watch an arrogant and confident host passing their gates on its way to the coast, bringing provisions and treasures from a distance of more than fifty miles inland’.5
Why did the powerful kingdom of England, so good at expelling the Vikings in the tenth century, fail to repel them in the eleventh? In part it was because the Vikings who came in the second wave did so as part of bigger, better equipped and better organized armies: the giant circular fortresses they built around this time in their homelands at Trelleborg and elsewhere give some indication of their power. But Viking success was also caused by an abject failure of leadership in English society, beginning at the very top, with Edward’s father, Æthelred.
Just as Edward has his famous cognomen ‘the Confessor’, so too his father will forever be remembered as Æthelred ‘the Unready’. As it stands, ‘unready’ is a pretty fair description of Æthelred’s level of preparedness for Viking attack and kingship in general. In actual fact, however, ‘unready’ is a modern misreading of his original nickname, which was the Old English word unraed, meaning ‘illcounselled’ or ‘ill-advised’. (It was a pun on the king’s Christian name, which meant ‘n
oble counsel’.)6
That Æthelred was ill-advised is not open to doubt: the king himself admitted as much in a charter of 993, in which he blamed the mistakes of his youth on the greed of men who had led him astray. From that point on he put more faith in peaceable churchmen, but they regarded the Viking attacks as divine punishment, and thus saw the solution as spiritual reform: more prayers, more gifts to the Church, and, in the meantime, large payments of tribute to persuade the invaders to go away. Naturally, this last policy only encouraged the Vikings to come back for more. At length – by the time his son Edward was a small boy – Æthelred embarked on a more confrontational policy. In 1008, says the Chronicle, ‘the king gave orders that ships should be speedily built throughout the whole kingdom’. But this shift coincided with Æthelred placing his trust in his most discreditable counsellor of all, the contemptible Eadric ‘the Grabber’ (Streona), who had risen to power at court by having his rivals variously dispossessed, mutilated and murdered. The result was that the English aristocracy was riven by feud and rivalry, with disastrous consequences. When the newly constructed fleet, for instance, eventually put to sea, arguments broke out between the two factions; twenty ships deserted, then attacked and destroyed the others.