by Marc Morris
The alternative, of course, is that this change in policy was caused by a change in personnel at the top. It is just conceivable that the switch to territorial grants was the brainchild of Bishop Odo, acting in his capacity as regent. This, after all, was the basis on which his own lordship of Kent had been created, and we know from other evidence that he had wide-ranging powers to decide on matters of landholding. At the very least Odo must have been responsible for implementing the new policy, and in some cases we can see that the recipients of territorial grants in the north were drawn from the ranks of his own followers.17
By the mid-1070s William and Odo were not the only ones granting out lands. Just as the king or his regent granted out territory to men who had served them well, so too these men began in turn to grant it out to their dependants. This process – modern historians call it ‘subinfeudation’ – is not well documented, especially in the case of laymen. Orderic Vitalis provides a vague description of how Roger of Montgomery distributed positions of authority in Shropshire to his ‘brave and loyal men’.18 However, since the monasteries had been informed in or around 1070 that they too would have to supply the king with a set number of knights, we find better descriptions in the pages of monastic chronicles. The Abingdon Chronicle records how, in the initial years of his rule, the new Norman abbot, Adelelm, ‘securely protected the monastery entrusted to him with a band of armed knights’:
At first indeed, he used paid troops for this. But after the attacks had died down, and when it was noted by royal edict in the annual records how many knights might be demanded from bishoprics, and how many from abbeys, if by chance compelling need arose, the abbot then granted manors from the possessions of the church to his followers (who had previously been retained by gifts), laying down for each the terms of subordination for his manor.19
For lay lords, especially if they had received a generous grant of land from the king, distributing a portion of it among their followers made good sense, for it was probably more cost-effective than maintaining such men permanently within a baronial household. For the monasteries and bishops the incentive was probably even stronger, for accommodating a troop of knights was not only ruinously expensive but highly disruptive. Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, recalls William of Malmesbury, was obliged to maintain an array of knights that drained his resources, and stayed up late in his hall, drinking and brawling into the night.20
The quid pro quo for a grant of land was that the recipient would furnish the donor with military service. One of the earliest charters enshrining such an arrangement, by which Robert Losinga, the Norman bishop of Hereford, gave land to a knight called Roger fitz Walter, is helpfully explicit. ‘Previously the said bishop held this land as his own demesne and for the sustenance of the church’, it says at one point, ‘but the bishop, by the counsel of his vassals, gave [Roger] this same land in return for a promise that he would serve the bishop with two knights, as his father did, whenever the need arose.’21
In many cases, as we’ve seen, the king also required his tenants to supply men to guard his castles, and, again, the same expectation existed between a lord and his own subtenants. Whether he had simply stepped into the tenurial shoes of an English predecessor, or received a block of territory that paid no regard to previous landowning patterns, the first act of a new Norman lord was invariably to establish a castle. If it were the former case, he might well choose to erect the earthworks over his predecessor’s existing residence; several Norman mottes have proved on excavation to be built on top of Anglo-Saxon halls.22 Equally – and especially in the case of those who received territorial grants – he might plant the castle wherever he chose in order to assert his lordship. The point of a castle was to dominate the surrounding countryside – to control road and water routes for economic and military purposes – and to protect its Norman occupants. Some territorial lordships are specifically referred to in the Domesday Book as ‘castleries’, indicating that the entire district was arranged around the castle at its centre. In other cases this is evident from the way a lordship has been organized. At Richmond in Yorkshire, for example, we can see that lands were granted out in such a way that castle-guard was performed on a rota basis, each subtenant serving for a period of two months, so that the castle was kept in a permanent state of defensive readiness.23
Described in this way, the Norman settlement and colonization of England can sound like a fairly orderly process: the king grants land to his leading men in return for military service; they keep some themselves and distribute the rest to others. There is disruption and upheaval at a local level as castles are built, especially if these castles are the centre of new territorial lordships. Yet the impression of order remains, both in the way land is distributed and the way that new patterns of landholding are imposed.
It is without doubt a misleading impression, for it masks the considerable chaos and confusion that the process of settlement entailed. Obviously, the fact that land was granted out on two different principles meant that there was huge potential for conflict between incoming Norman lords, with some claiming all the land with a certain administrative district, and others insisting that they held particular manors within it as the heirs of English predecessors. But this confusion was magnified many times over owing to the complicated nature of Old English lordship. In pre-Conquest England, a man could be bound to a lord in a number of different ways; he might hold land from him, but then again he might not. In some cases a lord could have jurisdiction over certain men but not be their landlord. In other cases, the lord-man relationship could be one of ‘commendation’, a tie which was purely personal, and had neither tenurial nor jurisdictional content. Some land was held of no lord at all, which explains the frequent statement in the Domesday Book that a particular Englishman ‘could go with his land where he wished’. In Normandy, by contrast, the tenurial bond was much stronger. Although land and lordship did not automatically go together, the general assumption was that they should, because the trend had been in this direction for many decades. Hence there was ample scope for confusion and disagreement after 1066 when the Normans encountered the tangled strands of English lordship. An aggressive newcomer, for example, might try to treat men who had merely been commended to his predecessor, or under his predecessor’s jurisdiction, as if they were his tenants; in so doing, he would provoke not only protests from the men themselves, but also opposition from other Normans who regarded their rights of lordship to be superior.24
So the Normans interpreted (or, rather, wilfully misinterpreted) the rights of their English predecessors in their own interests and pushed them as hard as possible. They also, in many cases, simply grabbed whatever they could. There is abundant evidence to show that, while much land was given out by the king and entered into legally, a considerable amount was acquired by less legitimate methods – extortion, intimidation and violence. In certain areas of the country – the east Midlands and East Anglia – the Domesday Book shows no clear pattern of land-distribution, which has been interpreted as indicating that the Norman settlement in these regions was something of a free-for-all. More concretely, Domesday also preserves the testimony of local jurors that certain Normans had helped themselves. Take, for instance, Richard fitz Gilbert. A longstanding friend of the Conqueror (he was the son of William’s ill-fated guardian, Count Gilbert), Richard was rewarded soon after the Conquest with a large, territorial lordship based on Tonbridge in Kent – he erected the mighty motte-and-bailey castle that still dominates the town today, and later styled himself ‘Richard of Tonbridge’. But, in the years that followed, he continued to extend and add to his lordship at every available opportunity. Domesday jurors swore in 1086 that he had illegally seized three manors in neighbouring Surrey, while a compensation package later agreed by his son reveals that Richard had also relieved the monks of Rochester of several properties in the same county.25
Confronted by a figure like Richard fitz Gilbert – who, by 1086, was one of the ten richest men in the kingd
om – to whom could a dispossessed Englishman turn? Of old he might have appealed to the king’s representative in the shire – the ‘shire reeve’, or sheriff. After all, sheriffs had been introduced during the reign of Æthelred the Unready as a means of checking the influence of the king’s mightier servants, the earls. But, since the Conquest, the English sheriffs had been for the most part swept away and replaced by Norman newcomers. Like the men they supplanted, these Normans tended to be men of very modest backgrounds but, by comparison with their English predecessors, they seemed altogether more determined to raise themselves higher. And, with the earls themselves gone, who was going to stop them? Plentiful evidence exists to show that, when it came to land and landholding, the supposed gamekeepers were the worst poachers of all. As Henry of Huntingdon later put it, ‘the sheriffs and reeves, whose function it was to preserve justice and legality, were fiercer than thieves or robbers, and more savage to all than the most savage’. Every monastic house seems to have suffered at the hands of its local sheriff. According to William of Malmesbury, the new Norman sheriff of Worcester, Urse d’Abetôt, planted his castle so close to Worcester Cathedral priory that its ditch cut through the monk’s cemetery (provoking a celebrated put-down from Ealdred, the city’s erstwhile bishop: ‘Thou art called Urse – have thee God’s curse!’). The monks of Ely, meanwhile, had it even worse, since their support for Hereward the Wake and his fellow fenland rebels earned them lasting royal displeasure. Many local Normans seem to have assumed thereafter that it was open season on the abbey’s estates, and none more so than Picot the Sheriff. Such was the scale of his appropriations from Ely that the monks remembered him in the twelfth century as ‘a hungry lion, a roving wolf, a crafty fox, a filthy pig, a shameless dog’.26
The tide of complaint from the monastic chronicles gives the impression that the Church suffered far more than the laity, but in actual fact this is likely to be the reverse of the truth. The Church certainly suffered but, being blessed with institutional continuity and possessed of copious documentation, armed with the spiritual weapon of excommunication and having access to friends in high places, including the king and the pope, senior churchmen were often able to obtain redress if their rights were violated. In 1077, for example, King William himself wrote to his leading magnates in England (Richard fitz Gilbert is among the addressees), requiring them and the sheriffs to return any Church property they had seized by intimidation or violence.27
One suspects that English laymen, by contrast, had rather less luck. Surrounded by land-hungry Norman neighbours and predatory sheriffs, the small English landholder had few remaining options. He might, perhaps, try to put himself and his lands under the protection of a sympathetic local abbot: the chronicler of Evesham Abbey recalled how, immediately after the Conquest, Abbot Æthelwig ‘attracted knights and men to him with their land … promising them protection against the Normans’. But protection, in this instance at least, lasted only as long as the abbot. When Æthelwig died in 1078 he was replaced by Abbot Walter, who (in addition to barbecuing the abbey’s relics) began to grant out estates entrusted to the abbey’s protection to his Norman friends and relatives.28 The only alternative open to the defenceless lay landowner, therefore, was to make the best of a bad deal – to approach the new lord or sheriff and try to secure the right to one’s own property, even it meant sacrificing a part of it, or holding it on unfavourable terms.
This is the darker side of the Norman settlement of England – not merely confused and chaotic, but violent, rapacious and in many cases unjust. It was, one might argue, an inevitable part of any military takeover, only to be expected in circumstances where aggressive men, expectant of reward and greedy for spoils, are unleashed on a vanquished people. Yet it cannot have helped matters that, in the late 1070s, the worst offender of all was the man in charge. Odo of Bayeux, it seems, was from the first a great believer in self-help:
He established himself in the county of Kent very strongly and exercised great power therein. Moreover, because in those days there was no one in that shire who could resist so powerful a magnate, he attached to himself many men of the archbishopric of Canterbury, and seized many of the customary rights which pertained to it.
So begins a report, written at Canterbury, of a great assembly held at Penenden Heath near Maidstone, probably in 1072. It goes on to explain how Archbishop Lanfranc, after his appointment in 1070, discovered the extent of Odo’s usurpations and complained to the king, who in turn arranged the meeting at Penenden as a means of investigating the matter. So numerous were the lands in dispute, we are told, that the hearing went on for three days, by the end of which Canterbury’s rights were vindicated.29
But while the archbishop managed to reclaim some of his lost property from the earl, other churchmen were not so successful. ‘Holy monasteries had good cause to complain that Odo was doing them great harm,’ says Orderic Vitalis’, ‘violently and unjustly robbing them of ancient endowments made by pious Englishmen.’ This must have applied in particular to the period during the late 1070s when the bishop apparently governed England with unfettered power. At Evesham Abbey, for example, it was remembered that the bishop ‘ruled the country at that time under the king like some tyrant’. Odo, the abbey’s chronicler complained, preyed on Evesham’s estates ‘like a ravening wolf’, packing the courts with hostile witnesses to deprive the monks of no fewer than twenty-eight properties, ‘more by his own evil influence than by legitimate means’. Again, if the Church, which to some degree had the ability to resist such encroachments, suffered in this way, then the laymen who came up against Odo must surely have suffered more. Such indeed is the impression given on folio after folio in the Domesday Book, with jurors complaining time and again that the king’s half-brother had obtained lands to which he had no legal right.30
‘Read the scriptures, and see if there is any law to justify the forcible imposition on a people of God of a shepherd chosen from among its enemies.’ The words, if we believe Orderic Vitalis, of Guitmund, a pious and learned Norman monk, summoned to England by King William soon after the Conquest and offered a plum position in the English Church. ‘I deem all England to be the spoils of robbery, and shrink from it and its treasures as from consuming fire.’ Historians have been rightfully sceptical of this scene, pointing out that the opinions expressed in the speech are Orderic’s own, and that any monk who had actually been so frank before the Conqueror would most likely have been found hanging by his cowl from the nearest tree. At the same time, there may be a kernel of truth in the story. Guitmund was most certainly a real person, a noted theologian who for some reason felt compelled late in his career to leave Normandy and seek alternative employment at the papal court; he ended his days as bishop of the Italian city of Aversa. Other evidence suggests that some Normans did have reservations about participating in what was descending into a colonial carve-up. But they were clearly outnumbered by the legions of other men, secular and religious, who were rushing across the Channel to join in the scramble for worldly goods and riches.31
17
The Edges of Empire
While Odo lorded it over the English, William was still struggling to bring his errant eldest son to heel. The king of France had taken full advantage of his enemy’s discomfort, installing Robert in the castle of Gerberoy, a fortress close to Normandy’s eastern frontier, from where the frustrated young man and his followers – now supplemented, says Orderic Vitalis, by many common knights and mercenary French barons – made frequent raids into his father’s duchy. Finally, soon after Christmas 1078, William moved against him and a bitter stand-off ensued. As the various chronicle accounts make clear, it was yet another occasion where the once invincible warrior was worsted. After enduring a three-week siege, Robert led a sortie against his father, at one point fighting him in person and wounding him in the hand. The Conqueror’s other adult son, the loyal William Rufus, was also injured in the clash, while many other men were killed or taken prisoner. When the king’s horse
was shot from under him, the man who tried to bring him a replacement was felled by a second bolt. According to John of Worcester, William escaped only because Robert recognized his voice and, giving up his own horse, commanded his father to ride away.1
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the wounds from this encounter took a long time to heal. William was evidently very sore, his humiliation compounded by the discovery that Matilda, ‘feeling a mother’s affection for her son’, had been secretly supporting Robert by sending him large sums of silver and gold. (Such as least is the story told by Orderic.) For most of 1079 there can have been little movement in the direction of reconciliation, despite repeated efforts on the part of the queen, the bishops and the most senior Norman magnates to intercede with William on Robert’s behalf, hoping ‘by fair speech and pleading to soften his harshness’. It was not until the early months of the following year that a breakthrough was achieved: