by Jack Lindsay
But then was the king’s presence not necessary for all feudal expeditions? No doubt he was expected to be there, but he did not always attend. The feudal army in England was a royal one. In the thirteenth century, however, by the time of Edward I, the king’s presence was required as one of the many limitations and specifications breaking down the simple system of military origins.
In battle the commanders knew how to make use of the combinations of foot and horse, and of reserves. Generally the infantry formed a defensive wall, from which the knights could charge; if the latter failed, they could withdraw behind the infantry and regroup. This method was employed by the Guiscard in Italy and by the crusaders in the east. The rise of the mounted soldier did not mean that footmen became unimportant, and these footmen had many of the qualities of the infantrymen who won such victories in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; in infantry tactics, as in so many other things, England was much ahead of the continent. So far from thinking that the Englishmen at Hastings used out-moded tactics, the Normans seem to have been much impressed. At Tinchebrai, the first major conflict after Hastings, an eyewitness, a priest of Fécamp, says that ninety-six per cent of the royal army fought on foot, including the king Henry I. Henry looked on the footmen as effective enough not only to brigade them with horsemen in each of the two leading divisions, but to take his place among them ‘so that they might fight with more constancy’. His brother Robert on the other side opened the battle with a cavalry charge, which failed. The men of Brittany and Maine, posted out on a flank, then decided the issue with a mounted attack. In a smaller engagement in Brémule in 1119 Henry dismounted most of the knights under his own command; and it was this group on foot who defeated the loose cavalry attack on the French. At Bourg Theroulde in 1124, the force that stood loyal to him won a victory in the same way. The important Battle of the Standard in 1138, in which the English defeated the Scots, saw the whole of the former force, partly made up of shire levies of the fyrd and partly knights, fight on foot in a single close formation. Three years later, Stephen at Lincoln drew up part of his army on foot, and fought on foot in their ranks himself. (Dismounted knights were also used elsewhere, e.g. by the Flemish at Cambrai.)
Not that the mailed horseman ceased to be the most powerful type of warrior; at Lewes and Evesham in the thirteenth century it was cavalry that won the day. But the value of trained footmen as a solid defensive force was recognized, and measures were taken to organize them in units under capable command. In the late twelfth century we find records of constabulariae of footmen, often under the command of knights; and we see that one important use made of the lessening number of fighting knights was to put them over fair-sized bodies of men-at-arms. A century later the organization of foot units had much advanced; the men in charge of groups comparable to modern platoon, company and battalion were paid in accordance with their rank. These vintenars, centenars and millenars carried on through the rest of the medieval period.[419]
We may now ask afresh what part did the English fyrd and English ideas about obligation play in the development of Anglo-Norman feudalism. The question does not admit of a simple answer, yet without doubt the interplay of English and Norman elements was profound, complex and enduring. We have noted how the English army was both archaic and advanced; at Hastings its footmen had many of the characteristics of the infantry of the fourteenth century, in which we see a strong defensive formation with good weapons, able to meet cavalry charges and to afford adequate logistic support, and which heartened the men and gave them confidence and solidarity. The analogy holds despite changes in weapons. The later footmen had pikes, and longbows. By their time the cavalry too had had time to grow and change. William saw and made use of the qualities of the English soldiery, just as Edward I, conquering Wales, learned to know and use the Welsh archers. The final reason why the English could anticipate these later developments was that they had a degree of social unity, evolved organically out of tribal bases despite divisive forces, which in some ways corresponded to the growing national cohesion of the later Middle Ages. That cohesion was linked with the economic forces which led to the building of communes and towns, and brought interrelationships among men to a far higher level than in the eleventh century; but the element of continuity was there.
In English practice the free man had been as much involved in keeping the peace as in fighting wars; and this tradition that it was the duty of all able-bodied men to carry out police duty at local level was carried on in the Norman period.[420] Furthermore, despite differences, there was continuity of the idea of having retainers. The French term chivaler was not taken over; instead the English word cniht became in time knight.
We have noted how, when any united resistance had become clearly impossible, the English often rallied to the Norman king against malcontent nobles. They were in part recognizing that nothing was to be gained by anarchy, which made the lords more free to make exactions from them, but they were also in part carrying on their traditional loyalty to the king. The land folc supported the king against the earls in 1072, and many examples of this sort of thing could be cited from the following years. In 1088 Rufus twice called on the English, and the second time he raised a huge force, containing more English than French. (Some English, however, did join the rebels.) The first summons, directed to both French and English, may have been meant to gather the feudal host and the select fyrd (a section of the great fyrd, drawn from the inhabitants of every five hides); the second was an appeal to all freemen. By the time of Henry I the term English is perhaps ambiguous, meaning both the native English and the generation of Anglo-Normans since 1066. Henry seems to have felt, at least at certain moments, that he could trust the English more than his Norman nobles; but like Rufus he relied mainly on mercenaries. However, some English levies no doubt served in such armies as those of 1114 or 1121. Freemen of Yorkshire fought at the Battle of the Standard where the sheriff Walter Espec seems to have commanded them, the units being parish levies led by their priests. How far this was typical of the great fyrd, we do not know, but parochial units appeared in the arrière-ban of the continent as early as 1038 — there, however, villeins played a large part while at Northallerton there would have been only freemen.[421]
Anyway, in some form or another the fyrd carried on through the Anglo-Norman period and beyond. We meet sokemen serving cum militibus, with the knights; the reference cannot be to fyrd service in general and seems to touch on men of a status high enough to have obligations beyond those of the normal freemen, yet not holding knight’s fees. Generally we may say that knight service tenures were linked with the territorial fyrd structure without much affecting it. In East Anglia fief tenants took over roles that had belonged to groups of freemen and sokemen; but what happened was merely that the earlier tenants dropped down to the next level in the tenurial scale.[422] The existence of two systems, to some extent superimposed, must have been a great burden on resources. Drastic hidage reductions altered the pattern of the five-hide groupings on which calling-up had been based; and the process which drove the knights up into the gentry or nobles or down to the free peasants, completed the dislocations. At the same time the mass of middling free tenants was moving towards villeinage. Reorganization was necessary, with the stress changed from hidal recruitment to customary service in war and a dropping of the other big hidal obligation, Danegeld.
What we see is a slow penetration of Norman conceptions about tenure by certain deep English attitudes. All moot-worthy men had had the responsibility of attending the shire and hundred courts; gradually the liability was attached to particular tenures. We see sokemen, through their fyrd duties, becoming men who held land by military sergeantry tenures; the levying of taxes shifted from an assessment in terms of hides or carucates to one in terms of yearly rent or income. A more exact way of measuring land values grew up.
In Henry II’s Assize of Arms of 1181 England’s military force was divided into four categories. The first corresponds to the feud
al host. The second and third seem to represent the select fyrd cut into two levels (that of the freeman with chattels and rents of sixteen marks and that of the freemen with ten marks). The fourth brings us to the broad level of free commoners, the general fyrd. All groups are to swear fealty to the king. Their arms are specified: mailcoat, helmet, shield and lance for the first; the same for the second; hauberk, iron cap and lance for the third; gambeson, iron cap and lance for the fourth. A similar assize was arranged for Henry’s continental domains; but only in England do we find an emphasis on the military obligations of all free men and a denial of arms to the unfree.
The Assize of Arms, when examined, shows underneath a strong likeness to the Old English select fyrd, with recruitment-system based on hide and carucate. The national army was serving for wages by the end of Edward I’s reign; wages were the accepted basis during the fourteenth century. But in any event the duty of keeping arms and bearing them in the royal service went on being based on the value of lands or chattels. So the idea of a national territorial system based on land-value had a long and varied history. ‘The Conqueror himself had been quick to appreciate its potential value, but even he could not have foreseen its crucial contribution to the stability of the Norman monarchy, much less its central role in the great tradition of territorial infantry service that extended from Edington, Maldon, and Stamford Bridge, to Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, and far beyond’ (Hollister).[423]
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The castle was as characteristic a Norman contribution as the fief. The few castles in England in 1066 were the work of Norman favourites of the Confessor. English society knew nothing like the private fortress with a distinctive structure. The burhs were larger and quite different in nature. The castles that the conquering Normans raised were built of earth and timber, and could be set up quickly, without skilled labour. Their weakness lay in the timberwork set in the earth, as it was vulnerable to fire. On the Bayeux Tapestry we see the Normans using fire weapons at Dinan against the timber. These early castles were of the motte and bailey type, and were based on elements that were later to be developed in stronger and more complex ways: mound, tower, ditch and palisade. At times a natural knoll was used, to save time and work in throwing up earth. The largest mounds have tops more than a hundred feet in diameter; three could carry halls and have been called residential mottes. The smaller ones, quickly constructed, could be as little as twenty feet across. Documents give few details except that timber was generally used. In the Vita Johannis episcopi Tervanesis by Walter, archdeacon of Térouanne, we find an account of a motte at Merckeghem (France, Nord):
They make a mound of earth as high as they can, and encircle it with a ditch as broad and deep as possible. They surround the upper edge of the mound, not with a wall, but with a palisade of squared timbers firmly fixed together and with such turrets set around it as are fitting. Within, they build their house, a citadel that commands the whole. The gate can only be reached by crossing a bridge, which springs from the outer edge of the ditch, and, gradually rising, is supported by double or even triple piers trussed together, at suitable intervals; thus ascending as it crosses the ditch, it reaches the mound-top level with the gate’s threshold.
When the visiting bishop was going out over the bridge, the weight of the gathered people and the devil’s agency made it collapse; all fell at least thirty-five feet, but the bishop’s saintliness ensured that no one was hurt. The description of the flying bridge tallies with the structures spanning the ditches of mottes on the Bayeux Tapestry, which also shows a motte being constructed at Hastings. Excavations at Abinger showed the palisade, represented by an outer circle of deep post-holes and an inner circle of more widely spaced and shallower ones. The outer uprights were taller than those inside; the cross-bracing between the two series provided the basis for an inner parapet. A gap in the south-west indicated the gate, which was deliberately not right in line with the bridge foundation in the ditch. The central tower, twelve feet square, was represented by very deep post holes; it was built as a lookout tower, a vantage-point. Mortices or slots in the sides of the north and west corner-posts (preserved in the sand) showed that the vertical members were slotted for timbering that lay below the surface and stabilized the structure; no doubt the same slotting system was used above ground. Horizontal planks were slipped edgeways down continuous slots in the facing of each pair of corner-posts, forming a complete wall, edge to edge.
This motte must have been one of the adulterine constructions under Stephen, soon broken down; we have no documentary reference to it. The nearby manorhouse lasted at least until the late thirteenth century. But the structure revealed is of the early type and enables us to understand the Tapestry drawings. Here, however, the bridge was not a flying one. The lower parts of the tower framework were probably left open; there was shelter from arrows unless they were shot up almost vertically. (That technique, used at Hastings, was doubtless evolved to solve the problem of shooting into a motte.) On the Tapestry a soldier at the foot of Dinan castle passes his arm behind the lefthand corner-post and it reappears on the outside of the tower; it seems the tower was a sort of box on stilts. A capital from Westminster Hall shows just such a stilted and embattled building (1090-1100). The massive stilts are of wood, for a shielded soldier attacks one with an axe. Also, the carving shows the enclosed upper part divided into rectangles, each with a central boss and raised rim round the sides; the Tapestry gives a conventionalized version of these units. The Dol castle has rectangles treated as a chequer pattern of dark and light, and shows rims and bosses. The units cannot be hides stretched on wooden frames on account of the bosses (really raised rings with a central hole); they must be protective plates of some kind — not shields, though the idea of using them may have come from the practice of hanging shields on castle walls and the sides of ships. The holes may represent the means by which they are fastened on, or perforations in the walls. They do not seem to be loop-holes for archers; but they may have been used for thrusting out lances to defeat attempts to scale the tower.
The motte tower may go back to such works as the Romans timber watchposts on the frontiers; stilted towers of this sort appear on Trajan’s Column. From Charlemagne’s time there was a rash of private fortifications, which in 864 Charles the Bald ordered to be demolished. A stilted watch tower may have stood in the middle of the Viking fortresses such as that at Trelleborg, where also, in a larger scheme, we meet the palisaded ringwork of earth. Indeed a motte at east Jutland helps us further to grasp the method of construction. Large vertical posts had been put through the centre of the mound from the top to the original ground level, where they rested on a bed of sill or stone rubble to prevent lateral movement; and part of a large slotted timber was found. The main uprights were reared first, then the earth thrown up to enclose them. Indeed we can perhaps make out four kinds of motte: (1) where the superstructure rests on the mound (Abinger, Hoverberg near Cologne), (2) where the substructure rests at original ground level and is quite buried in the mound (made in wood in Denmark, perhaps at Burgh castle, Suffolk; made in stone perhaps at Totnes, with superstructure of wood), (3) where the substructure rests at the original level, but is buried only on its outside, the interior being kept as a cellar (made in wood at South Mimms; in stone at Farnham, Ascot Doilly, perhaps Wareham — Farnham had two storeys underground), (4) with a freestanding tower to which a mound was later added (Aldingbourne, Sussex, with fine ashlar facing the tower-base; Lydford, where the material of the mound covers tower windows).
The sequence is hard to determine. It has been suggested (by Bloch) that the wooden tower was primary, the motte arising as a protective mound at the base. But from the Tapestry it seems that the first two types were prevalent in the eleventh century; the third type seems to be transitional; and with stone superstructures we come to normal keeps. The Abinger type would then be the last phase of the motte, not the first. But by 1050 the first phases may have been left far behind and the Tapestry types may not rep
resent the primitive form.[424] In the fully developed motte a palisaded bailey was added at the side.
William’s reign was a great time of castle building, often done hastily, since the Normans did not feel safe without their castles. Some five or six hundred existed by 1100. The Laud Chronicle stresses the oppressive burden this laid on the poor; the Winchester Chronicle says that in 1067 when William left Odo and fitzOsbern in charge, castles were built far and wide, causing great hardship among the common folk, who must have been impressed for the digging, timber-cutting, and building. To the burden of such heavy labour were added at times when the central control slackened, all sorts of ravages. We read of Matilda and her friends under Stephen:
She built castles over the country wherever she might to best advantage; some to hold back the king’s men more effectively, others for the defence of her own people — one at Woodstock, king Henry’s place of most private retirement, another at the village of Radcot, surrounded by water and marsh, a third at the city of Cirencester, next to the holy church of the religious like another Dagon before the Ark of the Lord, a fourth in the village of Bampton, on the tower of the church there, which had been built in ancient days of wonderful design by the amazing skill of ingenious labour; and she allowed her helpers to build other castles in different parts of England, from which there arose grievous oppression to the people, a general devastation of the realm, and the seeds of disorder on every hand.