The Norman Conquest

by Marc Morris

  Similarly, the fact that the Normans built castles reveals that they had different ideas when it came to lordship, which they had come to equate with control over land. They strove to acquire new estates, built castles to defend them, and endeavoured to transmit them, unbroken, to their successors. So strong did the association between lord and location become, the Normans even started to name themselves after their principal holdings. ‘I, Roger, whom they call Montgomery’ is how the Conqueror’s old friend described himself in a charter of the mid-1040s.19

  This desire for land was a matter of huge moment after the Conquest of England. Some of William’s followers, like those of King Cnut, had fought for money and gone home as soon as they had received it. But many thousands of others came wanting land, and ended up staying to create a new colonial society. They settled across England, tearing up the old tenurial patterns in the process, reorganizing their estates as manors and erecting castles to serve as their administrative centres. Naturally the colonists wanted to govern and control these new lordships according to their own familiar customs, and so further change followed. New baronies developed courts of their own, and sometimes even sheriffs, which stood apart from and cut across the existing English system of shire and hundred courts. New laws were introduced to reflect different attitudes towards inheritance, favouring the firstborn son so that the patrimony remained intact. Toponymic surnames, which had formerly found no place in pre-Conquest England, suddenly appear thereafter. In their determination to carve out new lordships, the Normans treated the surviving English harshly, forcing many men who had formerly held land freely to become rent-paying tenants, often on extremely onerous terms. Frutolf of Michelsberg may have erred somewhat in saying that the Conqueror had killed off the English aristocracy, but his claim that the king had ‘forced the middle ranks into servitude’ comes fairly close to the truth.20

  At the same time, another different attitude meant that the fortunes of those at the very bottom of English society were perceptibly improved. Slavery, which was already a thing of the past in Normandy by 1066, had still been going strong in England. Yet by 1086 there had already been a sharp decline: where Domesday allows us to compare figures, the number of slaves has fallen by approximately twenty-five per cent. Historians have generally ascribed this change to economics, pointing out that the Normans, in their quest for cash, preferred to have serfs holding land and paying rent rather than slaves who worked for free but who required housing and feeding. This may have been part of the reason, but another was certainly that some sections of Norman society felt that slavery was morally objectionable. William himself, as we have seen, had banned the slave trade, apparently at Lanfranc’s prompting, and is said to have freed many hundreds on his expedition to Wales. The ban cannot have been wholly effective, since ‘that shameful trade by which in England people used to be sold like animals’ was again condemned in an ecclesiastical council of 1102. Significantly, however, this was the last occasion on which the Church felt it necessary to issue such a prohibition. By the 1130s, slavery was gone from England, and some contemporaries knowingly attributed its absence to the Conquest. ‘After England began to have Norman lords then the English no longer suffered from outsiders that which they had suffered at their own hands’, wrote Lawrence of Durham. ‘In this respect they found foreigners treated them better than they had treated themselves.’21

  And this was also true in another respect. With the sole exception of Earl Waltheof, no Englishman was executed as a result of the Conquest. Along with their belief that slavery was wrong, the Normans had introduced the notion that it was better to spare one’s opponents after they had surrendered. The English had been practising political murder right up to the eve of the Conquest, but very quickly thereafter the practice disappears. ‘No man dared to slay another’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, praising William’s law and order policy, ‘no matter what evil the other might have done him.’ The last execution of a nobleman on royal orders took place in 1095, and after Waltheof’s execution in 1076 no earl was executed in England until the early fourteenth century. The Conquest ushered in almost two and a half centuries of chivalric restraint.22

  Lastly, the Normans had brought with them their zealous commitment to the reformed Church. ‘The standard of religion, dead everywhere in England, has been raised by their arrival’, wrote William of Malmesbury in the 1120s. ‘You may see everywhere churches in villages, in towns and cities, monasteries rising in a new style of architecture, and with a new devotion our country flourishes.’ The statement that religion was dead everywhere is, of course, an exaggeration. Historians nowadays would point to England’s existing links with Rome in 1066, and argue that the boom in the building of parish churches had begun before the Conquest.23 Yet there can be no doubt that the Normans accelerated these nascent tendencies enormously. William and Lanfranc saw an institution much in need of reform, and set about introducing separate Church courts, archdeacons and Church councils. Practices such as simony and clerical marriage were banned. And Malmesbury’s point about the rising number of religious houses is borne out by the figures. In 1066 there were around sixty monasteries in England, but by 1135 that number had more than quadrupled to stand at somewhere between 250 and 300; in the Confessor’s day there had been around 1,000 English monks and nuns; by Malmesbury’s day there were some four to five times that number. In the north of England, monasticism had been wiped out by the first wave of Viking invasions in the late ninth century, and there is no sign of any native attempts to reverse this situation in the century before the Conquest. Yet within just a few years of the Norman takeover – very soon after the Harrying – the north witnessed a remarkable religious revival, with monasteries founded or restored at Selby, Jarrow, Whitby, Monkwearmouth, Durham and York. There is no clearer example of how conquerors and reformers marched in step.24

  There is, naturally, a counter-argument to all of this. Some would say that all of these new attitudes – towards lordship, slavery, killing and religion – might have been adopted by the English even if the Conquest had not happened. But there we enter the realm of speculation. One can only point out that there is scant evidence of any strong trends in these directions before 1066, and state with certainty that the sudden replacement of one ruling elite by another caused these new ideas to be adopted very quickly. The speed of this change had profound knock-on effects, for these new attitudes were rapidly adopted in Norman England, but not in the Celtic countries to the north and west. Within a generation or two, men like William of Malmesbury were looking with a fresh and critical eye at their Welsh and Scottish neighbours, noting with distaste that they continued to slaughter each other and to seize and trade slaves. The resultant sense of moral superiority would help the English justify their own aggressive colonial enterprises in Britain during the centuries that followed.25

  It is easy for us, at the distance of almost a millennium, to assess the Conquest in this way, chalking up dispassionately what was gained and what was lost. The English at the time enjoyed no such luxurious hindsight. To them the Norman takeover seemed an unmitigated disaster – a ‘melancholy havoc for our dear country’, as William of Malmesbury put it. They saw their artistic treasures being looted and taken as spoils to Normandy. They saw the bones and relics of their saints being hidden from view, tossed away or tested by fire. They saw the demolition of churches which, however rude or outdated they seemed to the newcomers, had stood for centuries, in some cases since the first arrival of Christianity. ‘We wretches are destroying the work of the saints, thinking in our insolent pride that we are improving them’, wept Wulfstan of Worcester as he watched the roof being ripped from his old cathedral in 1084. ‘How superior to us was St Oswald, the maker of this church! How many holy and devout men have served God in this place!’26

  Men like Wulfstan also noted with dismay the sudden discontinuation of English as a written language. As we have seen, the king’s writing office abandoned the long-established practice
of using English around the year 1070, for the good reason that most men of power by that date were French and therefore could not understand it. From then on Latin became the language of the royal chancery, and English was soon similarly abandoned in monastic scriptoria across the country. To take an obvious example, the C version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ends in 1066, and the D version stops in 1080, leaving only the compilers of the E version to persevere into the twelfth century before the last of them finally put down his pen in 1154. We know that English would ultimately emerge triumphant, its variety increased by its freedom from written constraints, its vocabulary massively enriched by thousands of French loan-words. But in 1070 all that lay a long way in the future. Contemporary Englishmen saw only that a tradition that stretched back to King Alfred, intended to raise the standard of religion among the laity, was dying before their eyes. After the Conquest, there were no new vernacular prayer books or penitentials of the kind that had existed before, and so a vital bridge between the Church and the people was destroyed. ‘Now that teaching is forsaken, and the folk are lost’, lamented the author of one of the few surviving English poems to be written after 1066. ‘Now there is another people which teaches our folk. And many of our teachers are damned, and our folk with them.’27

  But the greatest cause for lamentation remained the enormous loss of life – the ‘bitter strife and terrible bloodshed’, as Orderic called it. Beginning with the carnage at Hastings, continuing with the crushing of rebellion after rebellion, and culminating in the deliberate sentence of starvation served on the population of northern England, the coming of the Conqueror had brought death and destruction on a scale that even the Danes had not been able to match. As the agents of this holocaust, the Normans appeared to the natives to be anything but civilized. ‘In their unparalleled savagery’ said Henry of Huntingdon, ‘they surpassed all other peoples.’28

  To those that survived, there was only one explanation for such suffering: the English had sinned and were being severely chastised by their Creator. ‘God had chosen the Normans to wipe out the English nation’, concluded Henry, and all of his countrymen agreed, even if they did not put it in quite such stark terms. We find similar comments in Orderic, Malmesbury, Eadmer and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The English had once been God’s chosen people, but they had strayed from the path of righteousness, and were being punished by the Norman scourge.29

  Most strikingly, we find this opinion expressed in the Life of King Edward, a tract begun shortly before 1066 as a paean of praise to the Godwinesons, but changed completely as a result of the Conquest and recast soon thereafter as a tribute to the Confessor.

  Woe is to you, England, you who once shone bright with holy, angelic progeny, but now with anxious expectation groan exceeding for your sins. You have lost your native king and suffered defeat, with much spilling of the blood of many of your men, in a war against a foreigner. Pitiably your sons have been slain within you. Your counsellors and princes are bound in chains, killed or disinherited.30

  So great, indeed, is the anonymous author’s grief at the events he has just experienced he can hardly bear to confront them directly. ‘What shall I say about England?’ he asks. ‘What shall I say of generations to come?’

  20

  The Green Tree

  Towards the end of the Life of King Edward, the author describes how the sleeping Confessor had woken on his deathbed and described to those around him a vivid dream. In this dream, two monks whom he had known during his youth in Normandy had come to him with a message from God, telling him that all the top people in England – the earls, bishops and abbots – were actually servants of the Devil. God had therefore cursed the whole kingdom, and within a year of Edward’s death, ‘devils shall come through all this land with fire and sword and the havoc of war’. When the king replied that he would warn his people about God’s plan in order that they could repent, he was told that this would not happen. In that case, the Confessor asked the two monks, when could the English expect God’s anger to end? ‘At that time’, they replied,

  when a green tree, cut down in the middle of its trunk, and the felled part carried three furlongs from the stump, shall be joined again to its trunk, by itself and without the hand of man or any sort of stake, and begin once more to push leaves and bear fruit from the old love of its uniting sap – then first can a remission of these great ills be hoped for.

  When those who were present heard this, says the author of the Life, they were all very afraid. For it was impossible for a tree to move itself or repair itself in the way the monks had described – at least with man. With God, for whom nothing was impossible, such a thing might be possible, but that could only happen when the English had repented. ‘Until then,’ the author wondered, ‘what can we expect but a miserable end in slaughter?’1

  What indeed. To judge from the tone of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, matters had improved very little by the time of the Conqueror’s death. The violence might have subsided, but the Norman takeover had left the English in no doubt that they were an underclass in their own country. William’s writs addressed his subjects as two separate peoples, Angli et Franci, and, as Henry of Huntingdon explains, ‘it was even disgraceful to be called English’. True, the Domesday Book shows that the economic situation had improved in some parts of the country by 1086: in Bury St Edmunds 342 houses are recorded on land that had been arable two decades earlier. But against this the year that followed had brought fresh disasters. A great fire had destroyed most of London, including St Paul’s Cathedral, and there were apparently also fires in almost every other important town and city – whether accidentally or deliberately started we are not told. The Chronicle also notes that the appalling weather of the previous year had brought famine and pestilence in its wake. ‘Such a malady fell upon men that nearly every other person was in the sorriest plight and down with fever: it was so malignant that many died from the disease … Alas! A miserable and lamentable time was it in that year, that brought forth so many misfortunes!’2

  Nor was there much improvement during the generation that followed. The Conqueror’s hopes for the English succession were fulfilled in 1087 when William Rufus ascended to the throne, but his fears about the other members of his family also proved to be well founded. Robert Curthose, once installed as duke of Normandy, plotted to replace Rufus as England’s new ruler, aided by his uncle Odo. This plot failed, but the struggle between the Conqueror’s sons continued for many years. The story of Rufus, Robert and their younger brother Henry in the decade after their father’s death is a sorry saga of betrayal and double-crossing. A temporary peace prevailed after 1096 when Robert left to participate in the First Crusade and pawned Normandy to Rufus in order to pay for his passage. But four years later Rufus was killed, slain by a stray arrow while hunting in the New Forest (a fact not lost on English chroniclers, who observed that the hated institution had now claimed two of its creator’s sons). Henry was crowned as England’s new king, Robert returned from the east and the struggle for supremacy resumed. It was ended only in 1106, when Henry defeated and captured his brother at the battle of Tinchebray. Robert spent the rest of his life in prison, dying in 1134. Henry ruled a reunited England and Normandy until his own death the following year.3

  None of this was particularly auspicious for relations between the English and their new Norman masters. Robert, it is true, had struck up a remarkable friendship with Edgar Ætheling since the latter’s submission to the Conqueror in 1075 – they were virtually foster-brothers, says Orderic. But this closeness between the new duke of Normandy and the last Old English claimant caused both Rufus and Henry, in their capacity as kings of England, to regard Edgar and his ilk with more caution. Rufus, for example, had arrived in England in 1087 accompanied by Morcar and Wulfnoth, recently released from their long captivity, but his first act on disembarking had been to have both men re-incarcerated.4

  More generally, the struggle for the Conqueror’s inheritance meant that Rufus and He
nry had frequent occasion to tax England heavily, just as their father had done, and this remained equally true after 1106, as Henry sought to defend Normandy from both rebellion and invasion. In addition, the fact that from this date Henry, like his father, ruled both England and Normandy meant that the king of England continued to spend much of his time overseas. William had spent sixty per cent of his reign in Normandy and the same figure is true for Henry after 1106.5 Both these trends – high taxation to pay for foreign wars and absentee kings – would persist for the rest of the twelfth century. The political union of England and Normandy during this time had far-reaching cultural and economic consequences: England was drawn inexorably into the European mainstream, dominated by Frankish arms and customs. For some merchants in southern England this was a cause for celebration; but others were left lamenting the loss of the old ties to Scandinavia. For Ailnoth of Canterbury, writing in Danish exile in the 1120s, the failure of the Danes to invade in 1085 remained a matter of lasting regret. Cnut IV, he felt, would have been the liberator of an English people, freeing them from French and Norman tyranny.6

  During the reigns of the Conqueror’s sons the English regarded themselves very much as the subject people in a Norman colony. ‘This was exactly seven years since the accession of King Henry,’ wrote the Anglo-Saxon Chronicler in 1107, ‘and the forty-first year of French rule in this country.’ William of Malmesbury, writing two decades later, could in this respect see no change in the sixty years since the Conquest. At one point in his history he retells the story of Edward the Confessor’s deathbed dream, with its prophecy of the severed Green Tree, and feels he can only agree with the pessimistic interpretation of the original author. ‘The truth of this we now experience,’ he says, ‘now that England has become the dwelling place of foreigners and a playground for lords of alien blood. No Englishman today is an earl, a bishop or an abbot; new faces everywhere enjoy England’s riches and gnaw at her vitals. Nor is there any hope of ending this miserable state of affairs.’7