The Norman Conquest

by Marc Morris

  That said, the exercise in 1070 was conducted on a far larger scale; it was not just the bishops who were purged at Winchester and Windsor. ‘Many abbots were there deposed’, says John of Worcester, and although he names no names it seems likely that the cull included the abbots of Abingdon, St Albans and St Augustine’s Canterbury, all of whom lost their positions – and in some cases their liberty – around this time. The king, says John, ‘stripped of their offices many bishops and abbots who had not been condemned for any obvious cause, whether of conciliar or secular law. He kept them in prison for life simply on suspicion (as we have said) of being opposed to the new kingdom.’17

  Naturally, their replacements were Normans. For obvious reasons William preferred to promote men he knew personally, and so turned in the first instance to the clerks of his own chapel. The bishoprics of Winchester, East Anglia, Sussex and Lichfield were in each case filled by former royal chaplains, as was the archbishopric of York, vacated the previous year by the death of Ealdred. Only in the case of Durham did the king depart from this practice, installing instead a Lotharingian priest by the name of Walcher. The net result of these new appointments was that the higher echelons of the English Church were transformed, just as surely and swiftly as the secular aristocracy had been transformed by the Battle of Hastings and the subsequent rebellions. By the time the purge of 1070 was over, only three of England’s fifteen bishoprics were held by Englishmen.18

  The plunder of its monastic riches during Lent; the deposition of many of its leaders during the spring: clearly 1070 was already shaping up to be an annus horribilis for the English Church. But in the course of the same year, it seems, the Church had to absorb yet another blow, when the Conqueror imposed on many of its bishoprics and abbeys the novel burden of military service.

  Military service was something that all medieval rulers expected from their subjects. In Normandy, as we’ve noted, there is scant evidence to indicate how it was obtained before 1066, but enough to suggest that the duchy was moving in an increasingly ‘feudal’ direction, with magnates being made to understand that they held their estates at the duke’s discretion in return for supplying him with, among other things, a specific number of knights whenever he demanded. In England, as we’ve also noted, a somewhat different system was used, whereby individual lords were required to contribute a certain number of soldiers to the royal host, the number apparently determined by the amount of land they owned as measured in hides. Since the start of his reign in England, William had been granting out new estates to his Norman followers and also, in some cases, allowing English lords to redeem their existing lands. The assumption, based on later evidence, is that the king must have seized the unique opportunity afforded by this fresh start to define precisely how much military service each man owed, expressed as a quota of knights.19

  In the early years of the reign such new demands were apparently not imposed on the English Church. Whereas in Normandy it was quite common for monasteries to be expected to provided benefices for their founders’ military followers, in England it was more common for the monks to wave a charter, granted by some obliging former monarch, conveniently excusing them from all such secular burdens. William, given his professed intention at the start of his reign to abide by the laws and usages of his English predecessors, appears initially to have accepted the validity of such exemptions.

  Four years into his reign, however, the Conqueror changed his mind. ‘In the year 1070’, says the chronicler Roger of Wendover, ‘King William imposed military service on all the bishoprics and abbacies which had, until that time, been free from all secular authority’, adding that the king ‘had written down how many knights he wanted each to provide to him and his successors in time of hostility’. Wendover is, admittedly, a late source, writing in the early thirteenth century, which has led some historians to doubt the worth of his words. (There are few more controversial topics relating to the Norman Conquest than the introduction of knight service.) But his comments are supported by those of other chroniclers writing in the twelfth century and, more tentatively, by a copy of an original writ which, if genuine, can have been issued no later than 1076. Despite the controversy, most historians accept that the Conqueror did make new military demands of the English Church at this moment.20

  If we ask why he did so, the answer is self-evidently because he felt that such additional service was required. William may have been content to uphold the promises of his predecessors at the start of his reign, but since that time his new kingdom had been shaken by three years of almost constant rebellion. We know that during these years he had summoned Englishmen to fight in his armies, who presumably turned out on the basis of their existing pre-Conquest obligations; but we can also see that he made extensive use of mercenaries from the Continent, rewarding them with the proceeds of two heavy gelds. As the desperate expedient of plundering the monasteries in 1070 shows, the maintenance of an army by such methods was unsustainable; indeed, one could speculate that the cash-flow crisis at the start of the year might well have suggested to the king and his advisers the necessity of finding new ways to pass on the burden to his subjects. The rebellions may have been over by the spring of 1070, but the need for military service remained pressing. William no longer had a grand army in his pay, but over the previous two years he had founded dozens of new castles, all of which required permanent garrisons. Who was going to pay for this dispersed army of occupation from one week to the next, until some unforeseen time in the future?

  The answer, clearly, was the English Church. According to the twelfth-century chronicler at the abbey of Ely, William informed all his abbots and bishops that ‘from then on, garrisons for the kings of England were to be paid for, as a perpetual legal requirement, out of their resources … and that no one, even if supported by the utmost of authority, should presume to raise an objection to this decree’. Similarly, and more specifically, the twelfth-century Abingdon Chronicle says ‘this abbey was ordered by royal command to provide knights for guard duty at Windsor Castle’. Of course, in some cases the heads of these houses were Normans appointed as a result of the recent purge, and who could hardly have been expected to take up their posts without investing in such protection. At Abingdon, it was later recalled that the new Norman abbot, Adelelm, ‘went nowhere in the first days of his abbacy unless surrounded by a band of armed knights … For at that time many and widespread rumours of conspiracies against the king and his kingdom boiled up, forcing everyone in England to defend themselves.’21

  And, indeed, soon after the council at Windsor was over, a fresh military crisis erupted – or rather the embers of an old one were kindled back into flame. Despite the deal struck the previous year, the Viking army sent by King Swein of Denmark had not returned home. Their plan all along, it seems, had been to establish a base in northern England from which Swein could personally lead an outright conquest, and, at some point towards the end of May 1070, the Danish king finally arrived, joining his brother Asbjorn at the mouth of the River Humber. His reception, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was rapturous. Although the English leaders had either fled or surrendered at the start of the year, the local people came out in support of the invader, assuming that he would carry all before him. Swein himself seems to have remained near the Humber, but Asbjorn and a force of Danish housecarls immediately moved south into East Anglia and seized the town of Ely. Here too there was reportedly a great surge of goodwill among the natives, and optimism about what portended. ‘Englishmen from all over the fenlands came to meet them’, says the E Chronicle, ‘thinking that they were going to conquer the whole land.’22

  One Englishman who was particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of a Danish takeover was Hereward, known to posterity as ‘the Wake’. Of all the figures who chose to resist the Normans, Hereward is arguably the most famous, but sadly his fame derives almost entirely from stories written down several generations after his own day, by which stage they had already taken a legendar
y turn. The twelfth-century Gesta Herewardi, for example, contains a few elements that appear to have some basis in fact, but too many escapades involving witches, princesses and monsters to be taken seriously as a historical source. Even Hereward’s arresting cognomen, once taken to indicate an exceptional level of alertness, is not recorded until the thirteenth century, and probably signifies nothing more than his supposed connection with the Wake family of Lincolnshire. The most we can say about Hereward is that, despite an uncertain ancestry, he seems to have been a man of noble status; apparently in exile at the time of the Conquest, he had returned to England at some point after 1066 to discover the Normans had killed his brother and seized his estates. Certainly when he enters the historic record in the summer of 1070, Hereward is already an outlaw.23

  Having described the arrival of the Danes in East Anglia, the E version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports that ‘Hereward and his gang’ were planning to plunder the monastery at Peterborough (where the E chronicle was later copied and interpolated, hence its detailed description of these events). It seems that they were motivated not only by the Danish invasion, but also by the knowledge that Peterborough had recently been committed to a new Norman abbot. Determined to score another victory against his oppressors, Hereward resolved to ransack the abbey ahead of the newcomer’s arrival. Despite the best efforts of the monks, who sent for help and resisted for as long as they could, Hereward and his followers eventually forced their way into the town of Peterborough and reduced much of it to ashes. They then entered the abbey church and seized its treasures – crosses, altar-fronts and shrines, all made of gold and silver, as well as money, books and vestments – which they carried off in triumph to the Danish camp at Ely. ‘They said they had done this out of loyalty to this monastery’, says the E Chronicle with evident bitterness. Hereward and his companions appear to have convinced themselves, if not the monks, that they were acting like prototype Robin Hoods, confiscating the abbey’s valuables to save them from expropriation by rapacious Normans. It was not, to be fair, a wholly implausible pose: Hereward and his men were tenants of the abbey, and the Conqueror’s raid on English monasteries at the start of the year was still fresh in everyone’s memory.24

  Having torched the town and looted the abbey, there may have been some talk among the outlaws and their Danish allies of holding Peterborough against the Normans. The E Chronicle says that ‘the Danes, thinking they would get the better of the French, drove out all the monks’. Yet when the new incumbent, Abbot Turold, arrived a short time later, he found the place deserted, the raiders having returned to their ships. Turold, it must be said, was no ordinary monk: William of Malmesbury later described him as acting ‘more like a knight than an abbot’, while the Chronicle calls him ‘a very ferocious man’, and reveals that he arrived to take up his post accompanied by no fewer than 160 fully armed Frenchmen. All the same, it says little for the reputation of the Danes and their English allies that they chose to flee from a monk, however fearsome, and what was, in relative terms, a small Norman force.25

  In truth, Danish dreams of conquest had probably died many weeks earlier. It seems likely that on his arrival in England Swein had found the forces under his brother’s command in an extremely sorry state. Orderic Vitalis provides a long description of the privations they had suffered during the winter as a result of storms and starvation. ‘Some perished through shipwreck’, he says. ‘The rest sustained life with vile pottage; princes, earls and bishops being no better off than the common soldiers.’ This is almost certainly a borrowing from William of Poitiers, for it is clearly heavily biased. At one point, for example, we are told that the Danes could not leave their ships for fear of the inhabitants, which is hardly the impression given by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Moreover, the same account misleadingly omits all mention of Swein’s own arrival, saying only that the remains of the Danish army returned home to tell the king the sad story of their losses. Nevertheless, even when all such allowances are made, the essential point that the Danes were in trouble is likely to be true enough. In the wake of the Harrying it must have been very difficult for these men to have found sufficient food to sustain themselves.26

  Swein must have quickly realized that the remnants of his great fleet were inadequate for mounting a conquest: seen in this light, his decision to send Asbjorn into East Anglia looks less like the start of a military campaign, and more like a conventional Viking raid intended to recoup costs. At some point soon after the attack on Peterborough (which occurred on 2 June), William offered terms, and the Danish king readily accepted. His fleet sailed around the east coast, put into the Thames for two nights, then sailed back to Denmark. By midsummer, barely a month since his arrival, Swein was gone, leaving his English supporters high and dry, their hopes of regime change once again confounded. If Hereward and his fellow outlaws had ever truly regarded themselves as simply the temporary trustees of Peterborough’s treasures, now was the moment that they were disabused. ‘The Danes left Ely’, says the E Chronicle, ‘taking all the aforementioned treasures with them.’ The monks had to console themselves with the knowledge that their plunderers did not go unpunished. On its return voyage the Danish fleet was scattered by a great storm, so that only a small fraction of the booty ended up in Denmark, and even that little was lost to fire a few years later. Earl Asbjorn, meanwhile, was accused of having compromised the invasion by accepting William’s bribes, and sent into exile.27

  William, certainly, seems to have thought that Swein’s departure marked the end of the matter. At some point towards the end of the summer or in the early autumn, the king left England and sailed to Normandy. On the Continent, trouble was brewing: in particular, there was disturbing news from neighbouring Flanders, his wife’s homeland, where a succession dispute was threatening to descend into civil war. On the other side of the Channel, by contrast, all seemed quiet. ‘At this time,’ say Orderic Vitalis, ‘by the grace of God, peace reigned over England, and a degree of serenity returned to its inhabitants now that the brigands had been driven off … No one dared to pillage, and everyone cultivated his own fields in safety and lived contentedly with his neighbour.’28

  ‘But’, adds Orderic, ‘not for long.’ He was obliged to qualify his remarks because, once again, a new revolt was fanned from the ashes of the old. William seems to have assumed that, with the departure of the Danes, their English supporters would melt away, or be easily mopped up by local commanders like the redoubtable Abbot Turold. But the English resistance in the Fens proved extremely difficult to eradicate. It was no accident that the Danes had chosen to establish their camp at Ely, for in the eleventh century (and for many centuries thereafter) the town was an island, surrounded on all sides by marshes and accessible only by boat. With the Danes gone, Ely’s inhabitants were left feeling nervous, imagining that their collaboration would be punished with violent repression. According to the Gesta Herewardi (a far from reliable witness, but the only source that attempts to explain the genesis of the revolt), the abbot of Ely feared that he would soon join the growing list of English churchmen ousted in favour of Normans. Naturally, the monks looked to Hereward himself for help, and he in due course came to their assistance. But, as subsequent events show, it was not only the local hero and his band who responded to Ely’s call. From all across the kingdom, other desperate men began to converge on the Fens. ‘Fearing subjection to foreigners’, says the Gesta, ‘the monks of that place risked endangering themselves rather than be reduced to servitude, and, gathering to themselves outlaws, the condemned, the disinherited, those who had lost parents, and suchlike, they put their place and the island in something of a state of defence.’29

  One of these desperate men was Æthelwine, erstwhile bishop of Durham. Æthelwine has something of the reluctant rebel about him. Implicated in the revolts of 1068–9 and subsequently outlawed, he had fled from the Conqueror’s armies during the Harrying and led the people of his bishopric to a temporary refuge on Lindisfarne. By the spring of 1
070 he had returned to the mainland but, according to Simeon of Durham, he did not intend to stay for long. ‘Observing the affairs of the English were everywhere in confusion, and dreading the heavy rule of a foreign nation, whose language and customs he knew not, he determined to resign his bishopric and provide for himself wherever a stranger might.’ But even here Æthelwine met with no luck. When, later in the summer, he set sail from Wearmouth, hoping to reach Cologne, a contrary wind drove his ship to Scotland, where he found himself in the company of Edgar Ætheling, Mærleswein and their dwindling band of fellow exiles. A short while afterwards news must have reached them of the stand being made at Ely. By this stage the bishop must have felt that he had little left to lose: his brother Æthelric had been arrested the previous year, and his own outlawry had probably been confirmed by the papal legates during the spring. The fact that a new rebellion was being mounted at Ely may perhaps have exerted some emotional pull, for Æthelwine was a native of the Fens, having come to Durham from Peterborough. Whatever the precise cause, the bishop abandoned his plan of leaving England and elected to throw his lot in with the rebels. At some point early in the new year 1071, he sailed from Scotland to Ely, taking with him a northern English magnate named Siward Barn and several hundred other exiles, all determined to make a stand.30