The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  Chapter Nine – William Rufus to Henry II

  As soon as William died, early on 9 September 1087, all respect for him vanished. His corpse rapidly stank. The nobles hurried off, leaving the cell and its body to be despoiled by servants.[336] But an imposing funeral service was organized. As the procession entered Caen, part of the town caught fire. In the abbey of St Etienne, Henry attended the service, which was interrupted by a man claiming that the burial plot had been stolen from him. Orderic says that the rite had to be rushed, so great was the stink now coming from the coffin into which the fat body had been crammed. Morcar and Harold’s young brother Wulfnoth were freed, but Rufus at once clapped them back in prison. The barons hastened to take advantage of the relaxation of harsh ducal controls; frontier fiefs fell away. Orderic says, ‘The Norman barons expelled all the royal custodians from their castles and again plundered their rich country with their own soldiers. And so the wealth they’d taken by force from the English and other peoples they deservedly lost through robbery and pillage.’ In many ways Normandy reverted to the condition it had been in before William brought it under his controls. In England the need for a common front against the defeated population ensured that there would be no anarchy. Further, the survival of the old English administration kept intact forms of order which had never existed in Normandy. After the first excesses of the foreigners had ended and William’s devastations had made more large-scale revolts impossible, the lack of any alternative candidate for the throne slowly made the English accept him as the only possible source of order, security and law. Hence the way in which they began to rally to the king’s defence. Above all, the old fyrd obligation was carried right into the Norman epoch and formed a basis on which English loyalties could slowly gather afresh round the kingship. The gathering took a long time before it was completed, but the process had already begun under William.

  The Norman kings continued to use both the great fyrd and the select fyrd. The great fyrd was linked with the Anglo-Saxon custom of general allegiance to the crown and the subsequent obligation for all free men to defend the realm when in danger. (It corresponded to the continental arrière ban, which was to be called only when an invasion took place, and the continental custom for the burghal militia to serve within half a day’s march of their town.) The Anglo-Saxon system is to be more found in the Dooms of Edmund, and the duties are set out even more definitely in the Ten Articles of William the Conqueror, which declare that all freemen must pledge loyalty to King William within and without England, preserve his lands and honour, and defend him against enemies. The obligation was made yet more definite in a revision of the Ten Articles dated to the reign of John.[337] The fyrd was different from the arrière-ban because of the whole administrative system in England with its folk moots, which tended to draw men under the king’s peace; so in war there was generally a far higher degree of allegiance to the crown. The fyrd thus provided an important means whereby that allegiance was slowly attached to the new monarchy at new levels of national development.

  All this does not mean that the English soon accepted William or his successors in any whole-hearted way. What militated more than anything else against a quick assimilation of the conquerors, as was the case to a certain extent under Cnut, was the cleavage in language and culture. For several generations the Normans could not but be isolated from most of English life, and sharply marked off as a conquering race, who regarded with varying degrees of contempt the defeated race they exploited. In any feudal society there could not but be a continuous tension between lords and peasants, whatever social differentiations existed within these two basic classes. But when the lords were seen daily as alien intruders the tensions could not but grow deeper and clearer. However it was not until the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that these tensions reached an explosive level. By that time the process of assimilation was far advanced; but elements from the past, however diffused and hard to analyse, must have continued to affect people. The peasant revolts from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, with their climax in 1549, differed from the Jaqueries of France because of these elements, though they were in turn based on the specific forms of English development rooted in the situation we have been discussing.

  William Rufus quickly took advantage of the bequest of England. He had himself crowned by Lanfranc, put down a revolt in favour of his elder brother Robert, duke of Normandy, and set out to rule as closely as he could in his father’s way. Looking at the treasure at Winchester, he was dazzled at the wealth that the avaricious William had heaped up. ‘It was impossible for anyone to describe how much was accumulated there in gold and silver and vessels and costly robes and jewels and many other precious things that are hard to recount’ (Chronicle).[338] He carried out his father’s testament. For William’s soul, he gave ten gold marks to each of the larger minsters, six to each of the smaller, 60 shillings each to the ordinary churches and £100 to each shire for distribution to the poor. He commissioned Otto, a German goldsmith in England, to make a silver gilt gem-studded superstructure for the tomb (perhaps recalling Einhard’s account of Charlemagne’s). The epitaph in gold on the monument was composed by Thomas archbishop of York.

  William’s empire seemed to be breaking up. Something of a crisis in feudal tenures was involved, strikingly expressed by the fact that the ruler’s eldest son inherited a duchy while a younger son gained a kingdom. No effort had been made to build up a system by which a single ruler could rule over both England and Normandy. Estates in Normandy were held by hereditary right; in England the nobles had gained land by right of conquest, by acquisition, and such land was not governed by the rules of inheritance. It could be used, for instance, to provide for younger sons. There were nobles who held land in both England and Normandy, or who were members of a family where the elder son had been given the Norman patrimony while the younger took the acquired land in England. With one brother ruling the Norman duchy and another the English kingdom, and both continually at loggerheads, there was all sorts of divisive pressures at work on the barons; and the threat of depriving a baron of his land in one region, or of actually dispossessing him, merely meant that he became a rebel turning to duke or king as the circumstances led him. Orderic puts into the mouth of Odo of Bayeux a speech that sums the situation up: ‘How can we give proper service to two mutually hostile and distant lords? If we serve duke Robert of Normandy properly, we shall offend his brother William, and he will deprive us of our revenues and honours in England. On the other hand if we obey king William, duke Robert will deprive us of our patrimonies in Normandy.’ Duke and king were compelled to intervene in title and succession — as was particularly easy where land was acquired rather than inherited. This sort of situation, greatly worsened in 1087, was to carry on for a long time, with divisions and conflicts sharpening as the strains between Normandy and England intensified.

  But for the moment we must return to William Rufus and the problems he faced as the result of divided Norman allegiances or interests. Normandy was anarchic; Maine and various border fiefs had fallen away or were rebellious. In such a situation William and Robert could not remain quietly content with the areas they had received, and Henry threatened to cause trouble. A long struggle over Normandy began. Rufus and then Henry, using English resources, were to take it from Robert; finally, after 1144, it was to be ruled by Angevin counts and in 1204 lost by John to the French king. All the while it caused unbalance and distraction for the rulers of England. For long William I’s attitude prevailed: England was a necessary source of title, prestige, wealth and land for the kings, but they saw themselves as Normans, continental potentates, and strained every nerve to maintain their foothold in Europe, in their ancestral duchy and the regions it dominated. They were French princes who luckily happened to have England to exploit. Yet all the time forces were at work anglicizing the Normans in England while they in turn greatly affected the English.

  Meanwhile Rufus’s gifts to the church impoverished his treasury;
and he made an amiable error of judgment in restoring his uncle Odo to the earldom of Kent. Odo was smarting from his years of confinement, and at once began intriguing against Rufus, who by 1088 found that his chief lords were turning to Robert and awaiting his arrival. They wanted a single ruler over England and Normandy, and they must have felt that the eldest son who had inherited Normandy was somehow more their overlord than Rufus, even though their English estates had been acquired or won and had thus been directly enfeoffed to them by William I by right of his conquest of the land and gaining of the English title. Some vassals, however, were loyal: Hugh of Avranches earl of Chester, William of Warenne, Robert fitzHamon. The minor barons, especially in the midlands, waited to see what happened and who was likely to win. The church, except perhaps the bishop of Durham, stood by the king; and Rufus won over the lesser landholders, who included Englishmen, by promising to restore ‘Edward’s Laws’ and to give relief from geld and the forest laws. He decided to deal first with the region where Odo was strong and forces from Normandy might land; he took Tonbridge and moved on towards Rochester. Odo got away to Pevensey, but Robert did not join him. The forces he sent by sea were driven off. Odo had to surrender, promising to persuade Rochester to yield. But when he arrived there, the garrison rescued him. Rufus was enraged. He called up more levies, under the Norse penalty of dishonour: being held nithing. The barons had begun to find out what a strong character he was. Rochester surrendered. The defenders, granted their lives, came out to the jeering of trumpets. It was significant that the English levies shouted for the hanging of the traitors. Rufus could now deal with the west, which the Mowbrays and William of Eu had been devastating while Roger de Lacy had attacked Worcester where the aged English bishop Wulfstan had stirred the citizens to resist. By autumn Rufus had only one important rebel to crush, the bishop of Durham, a churchman who refused to accept a lay court’s judgment affecting his bishopric.[339]

  Rufus seems to have been a sceptic in religious matters, so that it was all the easier for him to raise revenues by pillaging monasteries; but his actions in this repect were not much different from those of many magnates, a Mortain or a Meulan. What created antagonisms towards him was his effort to extend the royal authority and the way he thus annoyed his tenants-in-chief; he interfered increasingly in local affairs through itinerant justices and the shire councils. His minister Ranulf Flambard was hated for his part in these measures; when released after his imprisonment by Henry I, he feared that the people would stone him to death. His origin was said to be lowly; but so was that of many ministers raised by Henry I ‘from the dust’. Lords, resenting royal intrusions, resented them doubly when the agent was in their eyes of base birth. Ranulf seems to have come from the backstairs of the royal household, one of the many men of fairly menial status, clerks, crossbowmen and engineers, whom medieval kings, considering them capable, turned into bishops, seneschals and justiciars. There was already a permanent board of officials who had more complicated duties than those who had run the old treasury; they had the duty of ensuring that all revenues due to the king did indeed reach the treasury and of judicially determining what was due to him. The abacus, the technical device of the treasury, was known to members of Rufus’s curia; Robert of Hereford, who heard pleas in his court, was skilled in the new methods, as was Walcher, prior of Malvern. Both these men had come under the influence of Arab ideas. (Gerbert, who became Pope Sylvester II in 999, knew the abacus and used the Hindu-Arabian signs for numbers. An early account of the abacus in England describes the form used by Gerbert; it was written by a monk of Ramsey in about 1111.)[340]

  Relations between Rufus, Robert and Henry continued to be complicated. Rufus instigated a revolt at Rouen in 1090, which Robert suppressed with the help of Henry and Robert of Bellême. A burgher leader of the English party, Conan, was thrown by Henry himself off the city tower. But because he intrigued with both his brothers Henry was in the end distrusted by both. Rufus expressly disinherited him, though he was heir presumptive to both England and Normandy. Yet at times all three combined, as in August 1091 when they dropped plans to restore order in Normandy in order to cross the Channel and deal with troubles in Wales and Scotland. Rufus had no title to Normandy, but could not keep out of its politics. Late in 1093 Robert, tired of waiting for help from him, denounced the treaty they had made. Rufus was on good terms with the Flemish count, who had been angered at the French king’s repudiation of his step-daughter. He now raised money with help from the barons and called the feudal host to Hastings in February 1094. Archbishop Anselm consecrated Battle Abbey on the old battle site, and Rufus complained about the meagreness of his aid, receiving retorts from Anselm about the vices of the court and the scandal of vacant abbeys. On 19 March Rufus went off. At a conference the twenty-four guarantors of the treaty with Robert found him at fault. There was an inconsequential war in which Robert, helped by his French overlord, did better than Rufus, who then called for 20,000 English footsoldiers; which seems an impossibly large number. But when the fyrd gathered at Hastings, Flambard took from each man the 10 shillings provided by his district for maintenance; and with the money Rufus hired mercenaries. In the autumn he won Henry, now lord of Domfront, to his side; and in October Henry, with the earl of Chester, went to England, where Rufus joined them late in December. There were rumours of plots, discontent in the church, a dangerous situation in Wales, and yet another Scottish invasion. Rufus was arguing once more with Anselm, who wanted to go to Rome for his pallium, when a baronial revolt broke out. Rufus’s harsh controls had stirred anger in Robert of Mowbray, earl of Northumbria, who had plundered two Norwegian merchant ships taking refuge in a northern port and who then ignored the order of restitution and the summonses to attend the Easter and Whitsun courts of 1095 to stand trial. He conspired with the marcher lords of Wales and Scotland, who also resented interference, the earl of Shrewsbury and his brother Philip, Roger de Lacy, and William of Eu (a kinsman of Rufus). They hoped to kill Rufus and crown his cousin Stephen of Aumale (son of William’s sister by her third husband, who had been disinherited as count of Champagne but was lord of Holderness in England). After the Whitsun court Anselm was put in charge of Kent to block any invasion from France while Rufus went north, captured Newcastle, then, after two months’ siege, Tynemouth, and finally invested the stronghold of Bamburgh. He turned next to Wales. Mowbray was caught by a trick and his wife yielded Bamburgh to save her husband from being blinded. Rufus now saw the full scope of the conspiracy, jailed Mowbray, and decided to appoint no northern earl. Some plotters bought their peace; the earl of Shrewsbury was said to have paid £3,000. The remaining malcontents were brought up before the large gathering of barons at the Christmas court. William of Eu, worsted in ordeal by battle, was mutilated; his steward was hanged; others were mutilated or disinherited. Rufus was secure enough now to scare the barons from making further combinations against him.[341]

  His last years were taken up by Normandy. From November 1097 to April 1099 he was there fighting. He triumphed; but in June, hunting at Clarendon, he learned that a vassal of Anjou, his enemy, was investing the castle of Le Mans. He hurried to France, relieved the castle, and was back hunting in England by Michaelmas. Robert had mortgaged Normandy to him for 10,000 marks so that he might go off crusading with several neighbouring rulers; in September 1099 he was returning from Jerusalem. But we shall never know if Rufus, who was negotiating a similar business venture with the duke of Aquitaine, would have restored the duchy. In August 1100 he was shot while hunting in the New Forest.

  He had been a strong king, but without his father’s all-enveloping sense of martial purpose. He confirmed the royal power in England and managed to end the anarchy in Normandy. A bold, mocking, merry character, he has come down in history as a villainous debauchee because he had no respect for the church and its property. But he handed on his legacy intact to his younger brother, who was astute at building effectively on the base created by William and strengthened by Rufus. Henry had be
en waiting for the chance to assert himself. The day after Rufus’s death he took decisive action in grabbing the royal treasury from its reluctant custodian. He won over most of the court officials and was supported by some leading families, such as the Clares and the Beaumonts. By 5 August he was crowned at Winchester by the best available bishop, Maurice of London; Anselm was in exile and Henry did not want to wait till the archbishop of York arrived. He quickly rewarded his adherents and put Flambard into the Tower. Henry issued a coronation charter, which was confirmed by the next two kings and influenced John’s Magna Carta greatly. In content, however, it did not differ much from the proclamations of William and Rufus. It promised that the church should be ‘free’ and not robbed by the king when appointments were vacant (as Rufus had done), and it rejected the ‘unjust oppressions’ of Rufus, swearing to maintain peace and re-establish the good old laws (those of Edward as amended by William).[342]