by Marc Morris
16
Ravening Wolves
In the summer of 1076, with Earl Roger in prison and Earl Waltheof dead, the Conqueror crossed the Channel in pursuit of the one remaining conspirator, the elusive Earl Ralph. This might suggest a thoroughness on William’s part bordering on the obsessive, but Ralph was no wandering exile. Back in his native Brittany, the earl had ensconced himself in the castle of Dol, from where he and his men were able to menace Normandy’s western marches. And not just his men either: local chronicles reveal that some of the garrison had been supplied by the count of Anjou. Ralph, in other words, was in league with the king’s other enemies on the Continent, which raises the possibility that this had been the case even before his rebellion in England, and thereby casts that rebellion in a new and more serious light. Like Edgar Ætheling before him, Ralph may have been part of a wider plot to topple William from power, orchestrated by the count of Anjou, the count of Flanders and the king of France.1
If anything William seems to have underestimated the scale of the threat. In September 1076 he advanced into Brittany, terrorizing Ralph’s lordship and subjecting Dol to a sustained siege. But the defenders proved more resolute than anticipated and held out for many weeks. Then, with the onset of winter, the king of France came to their aid, surprising William and forcing him into what sounds at best like a hasty retreat, if not quite a total rout. ‘King William went away’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘and lost both men and horses and incalculable treasure.’ It was the first recorded setback of the Conqueror’s military career. Fifty years later, Orderic Vitalis saw it as the workings of divine justice, with God punishing William for Waltheof’s death.2
During the remainder of 1077, therefore, peace negotiations took place with both France and Anjou, with William for once in the uncomfortable position of not having the upper hand. No doubt significantly, the summer and autumn of that year saw the dedication of several major new churches in the duchy, including the king’s own foundation of St Stephen’s in Caen. Perhaps William was worried about divine displeasure and was seeking to make amends. What he was certainly seeking was an alternative means of advertising the full extent of his power. The dedication of St Stephen’s was attended not just by the king, the queen and all the magnates then in Normandy; also there by special arrangement were the most powerful Norman barons from England, as well as Archbishop Lanfranc and Thomas, the archbishop of York. Here was an attempt, surely, to remind Continental observers that the Normans, although preoccupied in many cases with affairs in England, were far more powerful as a result of their Conquest, and, although divided by the Channel, were not divided in their loyalties. Unfortunately, it was not true in every instance, and least of all within William’s own family.3
Since their marriage in or around 1050, William and Matilda had produced at least nine children – four sons and (probably) five girls. If we have not mentioned them before, it is because next to nothing is known about their lives before they reached adulthood. The second son, Richard, had died in a hunting accident during his teens, leaving three surviving brothers. Henry, the youngest child of all, had been born either in 1068 or 1069, while William, known as Rufus on account of his red hair, had been born around 1060 and was therefore just emerging from adolescence. But the firstborn son, Robert, was probably the oldest of all the nine children, and was already long past this stage. By 1077 he was very much a young adult male, and that was precisely the problem.4
Robert, according to OrdericVitalis, ‘was talkative and extravagant, reckless, very courageous in battle, a powerful and sure archer with a clear, cheerful voice and a fluent tongue. Round-faced, short and stout, he was commonly nicknamed “fat-legs” and “shorty-pants”.’ This last nickname was the one that stuck, and, rendered into Norman French as ‘Curt-hose’, has echoed down the ages. If, as William of Malmesbury implies, it was a designation used, and perhaps even devised, by the Conqueror himself, then one might observe that it hardly sounds like a term of endearment. As Orderic and other writers make clear, there was little love lost between William and Robert, who together faced the perennial problem of medieval rulers and their male offspring.5
Robert, like virtually every heir apparent known to history, craved a greater share of his father’s power. During his mid-teens this had seemed an imminent prospect, for on the eve of his departure for England in 1066 William had taken the precautionary measure of recognizing Robert as his successor and swearing all the Norman magnates to do likewise. Since that time, however, the prospect had gradually faded. William routinely left Matilda to act as his regent in Normandy, supported by a council of older, experienced men. The young duke-in-waiting was probably allowed some role in government, for he appears occasionally as a witness to ducal acts. But like every young man, what he wanted was not the exercise of delegated authority, but actual independence – the ability to pick and choose his own followers, and the lands and money with which to reward them. Matters were not helped by the fact that his transition to manhood coincided with the re-emergence of serious threats to Normandy’s security; just at the moment that Robert might have expected to be granted more power, he found instead that his father was almost always present in the duchy to direct affairs in person. According to Orderic, Robert asked to be given Normandy and Maine, but William refused, telling him to wait for a more opportune moment. Robert, says Orderic, ‘took offence because he could get nothing out of his father, and arrogantly came to blows with him on a number of occasions’.6
The crunch came not long after the dedication of St Stephen’s in September 1077, which is the last date we can place William and Robert in each other’s company. At some point soon thereafter, the king was staying in the town of L’Aigle, preparing a military expedition on his southern frontier, when a brawl broke out between Robert and his younger brothers. As Orderic tells it, William Rufus and Henry
came to the town of L’Aigle, where Robert had taken up residence in the house of Roger Cauchois, and began to play dice in the upper gallery, as soldiers do. They made a great noise about it, and soon began to pour down water on Robert and his sycophants underneath. Then Ivo and Aubrey of Grandmesnil said to Robert, ‘Why do you put up with such insults? Just look at the way your brothers have climbed above your head and are defiling you and us with filth to your shame. Don’t you see what this means? Even a blind man could. Unless you punish this insult without delay it will be all over with you: you will never be able to hold your head up again.’ Hearing these words Robert leaped to his feet in a towering rage, and dashed to the upper room to take his brothers unawares.
We might be justly suspicious of this story. In particular, the image of Rufus and Henry ‘climbing above’ Robert suggests at first glance that Orderic has simply constructed a rather laboured metaphor for the brothers’ later political fortunes. But in other respects the story convinces. Why, for instance, are we told that it was Ivo and Aubrey de Grandmesnil who egged Robert on, or that they were staying in ‘the house of Roger Cauchois’, a figure otherwise unknown to posterity? The answer, surely, is that Orderic was well informed about the incident: L’Aigle lies just a few miles from his monastery of St Evroult, and the family of Grandmesnil were the abbey’s founders. The chronicler goes on to tell us that the noise of the fracas quickly brought the king to the spot (William ‘was lodging in Gunher’s house’) and for the time being the quarrel was repaired. The next night, however, Robert and his followers deserted the king’s army and rode hurriedly to Rouen, where they attempted, without success, to seize the city’s castle. When William heard the news he flew into a terrible rage and ordered all the conspirators to be seized, at which point Robert and his adherents fled into exile.7
Orderic’ s pejorative opinion of Robert (he is ‘reckless’ whereas his father is ‘prudent’) should not lead us to underestimate the enormous seriousness of this rebellion. Among the men who followed the heir apparent into exile (Orderic’s ‘sycophants’) were the eldest son of Roger of Montgomery,
Robert of Bellême, and the eldest son of William fitz Osbern, William of Breteuil (the latter doubtless dismayed by the recent imprisonment of his brother Roger). With them went many other members of the younger generation. The struggle between William and Robert, in short, had split the entire Norman aristocracy along similar father-son lines, leaving family loyalties strained and divided. The king’s reaction, predictably, was to try to stamp out the flames. The rebels in the first instance fled to the castle of Rémalard, just across Normandy’s southern border, and William in due course mustered an army and besieged them there. So Robert fled again, this time into the embrace of his father’s enemies: first to his uncle, the count of Flanders, and ultimately to the court of the king of France, who must have been overjoyed at his good fortune. Having spent years trying to find a convincing figure around whom an anti-Norman alliance could coalesce, Philip suddenly and unexpectedly found himself playing host to the Conqueror’s own son and heir. It was a card to trump all others.8
The inevitable result of this family rift was that, once again, William was wholly preoccupied with a Continental crisis, and England was once again left to the rule of others. As was the case in the early 1070s, Lanfranc continued to play a pivotal role. In every surviving letter that the king sent to England from Normandy, the archbishop always heads the list of addressees. At the same time, it seems that during the later 1070s there was another, even more powerful figure in England, in the shape of William’s half-brother, Odo of Bayeux.9
Odo, it almost goes without saying, was a very different character to Lanfranc. He too, of course, was a bishop – his splendid new cathedral at Bayeux had been another of the dedications during the summer of 1077 – and, if we believe William of Poitiers, he was intelligent and eloquent in discussions about Christian worship. But Odo, unlike Lanfranc, had never been a monk, and did not crave a return to the quiet of the cloister. On the contrary, he appears to have revelled in his role as a man of the world, readily accepting the secular position of earl of Kent bestowed on him by William immediately after the Conquest. For Poitiers this made him ‘the kind of man best able to undertake both ecclesiastical and secular business’; for Orderic it merely proved he was ‘more given to worldly affairs than spiritual contemplation’. A man of God, a man of the world, Odo was also clearly a man of war. His own seal depicted him on one side as a bishop holding his crosier, but on the other side as a mounted warrior brandishing a sword. This makes rather a mockery of Poitiers’ claim that Odo ‘never took up arms, and never wished to do so’, and his self-evidently preposterous assertion that the bishop had been present at Hastings only because of the strength of his affection for his half-brother (‘a love so great that he would not willingly be separated from him even on the field of battle’). Against such nonsense we also have the magnificent testimony of the Bayeux Tapestry, almost certainly commissioned by Odo himself, which shows the bellicose bishop charging into battle on a black horse, rallying the Normans at the crucial moment. Whatever reservations others may have had about his behaviour, Odo clearly had no problems with the dual nature of his role.10
Odo’s pre-eminent position in England during the late 1070s is not apparent from surviving royal letters (he is addressed in only two) but from the testimony of the chronicles. ‘He was the foremost man after the king’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘and was master of the land when the king was in Normandy’, while Orderic tells us that Odo ‘had greater authority than all the earls and other magnates in the kingdom’. Just how extraordinary his authority was is revealed in the pages of the Domesday Book, where a series of entries show that he was able to redistribute land and settle disputes about landholding on his own authority, without reference to anyone, including the king. In this respect his power was virtually unique – Domesday shows that William fitz Osbern had occasionally exercised similar power up to his death in 1071, but by the late 1070s Odo was evidently the only figure allowed to handle such business. When, for example, the abbot of Abingdon purchased a new manor at Nuneham Courtenay, he took care to advise Odo of the price and obtain the bishop’s approval. As the abbey’s chronicler explains, this happened when ‘the king was in Normandy and his brother, Odo, bishop of Bayeux, was governing the kingdom’. Orderic states the situation even more plainly. Odo, he says ‘was dreaded by Englishmen everywhere, and able to dispense justice like a second king’.11
Interestingly, the period during which the bishop was in charge coincides with a major change in the way land was allocated. As we’ve seen, the Conqueror’s closest companions – men such as Odo himself and William fitz Osbern – had been granted land in England immediately after the coronation, while other favourites such as Roger of Montgomery had been rewarded in this way soon after the king’s return the following year. In each case these men had been given consolidated blocks of territory – Odo received Kent, fitz Osbern the Isle of Wight, Montgomery the county of Shropshire – which paid no attention to pre-existing landholding patterns. This was most obvious in the case of Sussex, where the new rapes cut clean across the boundaries of earlier estates. Since all of the lands distributed in this way were located on the periphery of William’s realm, the assumption is that the king’s chief concern was security.12
But these early grants to his closest followers seem to have been the exception to the general rule. In other areas, away from the coast and the borders, we find land was allocated on a different basis, with individual Normans being rewarded with the lands of individual English lords. Take, for example, the case of Ansgar the Staller, who was one of the richest men in England below the rank of earl. Ansgar seems to have fought at Hastings (he may, indeed, have been Harold’s standard-bearer) and looks to have received mortal injuries there: the last reference to him comes in the Carmen’s account of the surrender of London, which Ansgar negotiated, despite being seriously injured. Soon thereafter his position as ‘portreeve’ of London – the equivalent to the later position of mayor – was in the hands of a Norman, Geoffrey de Mandeville, who, at the time of the Domesday Book, was holding all of Ansgar’s lands. Geoffrey, in other words, appears simply to have stepped into the place his predecessor had vacated.13
A similar situation occurs with Englishmen who rebelled between 1068 and 1071. The estate of Mærleswein, sometime sheriff of Lincoln and, until his flight in 1070, one of the leading rebels, passed unbroken to his Norman successor, Ralph Pagnell. So too with Siward Barn, who was imprisoned after the fall of Ely; all his lands went to a Norman called Henry de Ferrers. Orderic provides us with the names of several other individuals involved in the English revolt, and in each case we can see from the Domesday Book that their lands passed intact to a new Norman holder. Moreover, the same process seems to have continued beyond the period of rebellion and into the early 1070s. We know, for instance that the northern thegn called Thurbrand died in the winter of 1073–4, because he was one of the sons of Carl killed at Settrington on the orders of Earl Waltheof. In Domesday all his lands in Lincolnshire and Yorkshire are recorded as belonging to the Norman lord Berengar de Tosny.14
At some point thereafter, however, we can discern a switch. No longer are individual Englishmen succeeded by individual Normans. Instead we witness the return of territorial grants – great blocks of land of the kind given out in the immediate aftermath of the Conquest. As an example, consider the case of William’s other half-brother, Robert of Mortain. At some stage before 1086, when it is recorded in the Domesday Book, Robert received a large swathe of territory in Yorkshire. Tenurially speaking it is a total mess – the lands within it were formerly the property of dozens of individual Englishmen; there are whole estates in some places and bits of estates in others. In territorial terms, however, Robert’s new lordship is precisely defined, because its boundaries are formed by the existing administrative subdivisions of the county (what in the south would be called hundreds, but what in the north were known as wapentakes). Clearly it was these boundaries, and not the existing land-holding arrangements,
that provided the basis of the grant.
At the same time, Robert’s territorial dominance within this well-defined area is not quite total, because it is interrupted in one or two places by estates held by other Norman newcomers – men who have acquired their lands on the principal of tenurial succession. The obvious inference is that these men were given their lands first, and Robert’s grant has been made afterwards. We appear, in short, to be looking at a situation where Robert has been assigned an area of territory, demarcated by administrative boundaries, and told ‘take whatever’s left’.15
This is a scenario we see repeated elsewhere in England: large blocks of territory, granted out on the principle of ‘whatever’s left’. It is particularly noticeable in the counties of the north Midlands and beyond – the areas largely untouched by the first wave of Norman settlement. Precise dating of the creation of these lordships is impossible, but the evidence suggests that several of the lords who held in this way were in place by around 1080, and we have seen that straightforward succession on the earlier model appears to have continued up to 1073–4. At some point between these two dates, someone decided on a radical change of policy.16
The most obvious candidate for making such a decision is the Conqueror himself – after all, the distribution of land is about as important a task as one can imagine. If so, the likeliest time for the change would have been the last weeks of 1075 or the early months of 1076, when we known that William was in England to deal with the revolt of the earls and its aftermath. That revolt, like its predecessors, meant more major confiscations as earls Roger, Ralph and Waltheof were dispossessed. At the same time, the decision to grant out land on a different basis may have been due to other factors. If William had been doling out the property of Englishmen on the basis of strict succession for almost a decade, by the mid-1070s there can have been few great estates left with which to reward loyal followers. Also, those followers may have preferred to have the kind of compact territories established immediately after the Conquest, rather than the various manors of an English predecessor, which were often scattered across several counties. But the change may simply have been dictated by politics and pragmatism. By the mid-1070s, William was increasingly embroiled in events on the Continent, and may have decided that grants needed to be made, once again, on the basis of security, rather than in deference to existing patterns of English landholding. If England was in the hands of reliable men, William’s own hands would be free to fight battles elsewhere.