The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

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  As a final example of the way in which even small matters could be moralized upon and made into portents, we may take the question of the long hair of the knights, which is also interesting in that it shows the first important borrowing by the Normans from the conquered English in the social sphere. Wulfstan of Worcester had attacked the morals of the English on the eve of 1066, paying particular attention to the men’s long hair. This long hair he took as a proof that they would be unable to defend the land against invaders. He urged Harold when in Northumbria in 1066 to reform such corrupting customs, which had grown up in an age of peace and easy affluence. His biographer Coleman held that his prophecy was confirmed. ‘For such was the feebleness of the wretched people that after the first battle they never attempted to rise up for liberty behind a common shield.’

  In fact the Vikings may have worn their hair long. A stele shows a Frankish warrior of the late seventh century combing his hair: this seems to represent a survival of the forces of life; while a double-headed serpent surrounding his head represents the forces of darkness that take the dead into their realm.[537] The Normans, who had cropped their hair, adopted the English fashion of long hair, apparently charmed by the comeliness of the young English nobles. Eadmer tells us:

  Now at this time it was the fashion for nearly all the young men of the court to grow their hair long like girls; then, with tresses well combed, glancing about them and winking in ungodly fashion, they would daily walk abroad with delicate steps and mincing gait.

  Anselm preached against the fashion at the start of Lent and many had haircuts. The moralists regarded the long hair as a certain sign of homosexuality. Eadmer goes on to tell how Anselm rebuked Rufus:

  This most shameful crime of sodomy, not to speak of illicit marriages between persons of kindred blood, and other wicked dealings in things abominable, that crime, I say, of sodomy, but lately spread abroad in this land, has already borne fruit all too abundantly and has with its abomination defiled many.

  Unless king and church quickly suppressed it, the whole land would become ‘little better than Sodom itself’.

  Rufus seems certainly to have been homosexual, and in a semi-military caste like that of the Norman nobles sodomy was no doubt a common practice. Later Eadmer returns to the theme, citing a letter sent by ‘a man of no mean standing’ to Anselm at Bec. He remarks of the laity:

  They, but most of all the princes, take to themselves wives almost always of their own family; they plight troth secretly; girls plighted contrary, as they well know, to the law of the church they keep and maintain for themselves. What of Sodomites, whom you yourself in the great council excommunicated until they should repent and make confession; or of those affecting long hair, whom just afterwards at the Easter celebration you, robed in your episcopal stole, publicly expelled from the doors of the holy church?

  Near the end of his Historia Eadmer again takes up the subject, the men with long hair who ‘now so abound and so boastingly pride themselves on the shameful girlish length of their locks that anyone who is not long-haired is branded with some opprobrious name, called country-bumpkin or priest’. In his summary of the transactions of the 1102 council, the last and far the longest section deals with the curse on those who commit sodomy or abet it, whether churchman or layman. The council also enacted that men should cut their hair enough to show part of the ear and the eyes.

  William of Malmesbury describes the court under Rufus:

  All military discipline being relaxed, the courtiers preyed on the property of the country people and consumed their substance, taking the very meat from the mouths of these wretched creatures. Then was there flowing hair and extravagant dress, and then was invented the fashion of shoes with curved points, then the model for young men was to rival women in delicacy of person, to mince their gait, to walk with loose gesture, and half naked. Enervated and effeminate, they unwillingly remained what nature had made them; the assailers of others’ chastity, prodigal of their own. Troops of pathics and droves of whores followed the court.

  Orderic tells us of Robert, Rufus’s brother, that he was ‘desperately abandoned to indolence and effeminacy’; at his court in Normandy ‘the Venus of Sodom stalked boldly in the midst of such scenes, with her wanton enticements’, while at Rufus’s court ‘the effeminate predominated everywhere and revelled without restraint’. Henry of Huntingdon saw the wreck of the White Ship as a punishment for sodomy:

  In the passage the king’s two sons, William and Richard, and his daughter and niece, with the earl of Chester and many nobles, were shipwrecked, as well as the king’s butlers, stewards, and bakers, all or most of whom were said to have been tainted with the sin of sodomy. Behold the terrible vengeance of God. Sudden death swallowed them up unshriven, though there was no wind and the sea was calm.

  William of Nangis says that on the ship, ‘The lascivious and showy young men’ were all, or most of them, ‘tainted with the sin of sodomy’, and Gervase agrees. Finally, William of Malmesbury adds an anecdote of an event of the late 1120s.

  A circumstance occurred in England which may seem surprising to our long-haired gallants, who, forgetting what they were born, transform themselves into the fashion of females by the length of their locks. A certain English knight, who prided himself on the luxuriance of his tresses, was stung by conscience about it and seemed to feel in a dream as if someone strangled him with his ringlets. Waking in a fright, he at once cut off all his superfluous hair. The example spread through England; and as recent punishment is apt to affect the mind, almost all military men allowed their hair to be cropt in a proper manner, without reluctance. But this decency was not of long continuance. Scarcely had a year elapsed before all who thought themselves courtly had fallen back into their former vice. They vied with women in length of locks, and wherever they were defective they put on false tresses.[538]

  At the Council of Nablus in 1120 under Baldwin II of Jerusalem the penalty of burning was decreed for sodomy; a contemporary says that the practice caused earthquakes, Saracenic attacks, and all sorts of disasters. The main denouncer of sodomy was Peter Damian in his Liber Gomorrhianus in which he says that it was prevalent among the clergy; he wanted all found guilty to be degraded from the order; but Pope Leo IX, to whom the book was dedicated, thought this too harsh. The English lawyer Fleta, in about 1290, wanted the penalty of burning alive; his contemporary Bracton also wanted the guilty to be burned like sorcerers and heretics.[539]

  Chapter Fifteen – Resistances and Reconciliations

  It is hard to estimate just what the English suffered, how they reacted, what they felt and suppressed, as they watched the arrogant Norman knights. Before we go on to deal with some of the evidence which, directly or indirectly, shows us some of those hidden emotions, we had better take a few more examples of the way the Normans behaved — a better documented matter. Thus Orderic describes Hugh of Avranches, earl of Chester, the sort of ruthless bully whom the English had to watch in stricken impotence and dumb rage. The picture is a curious mixture, a bitter indictment that cannot help revealing a fascinated admiration.

  This man with the help of many cruel barons shed much Welsh blood. He was not so much lavish as prodigal. His retinue was more like an army than a household; and in giving or receiving he kept no account. Each day he devastated his own land and preferred falconers and huntsmen to the cultivators of the soil and ministers of heaven. He was so much a slave to the gluttony of his belly that, weighed down by fat, he could scarcely move. From harlots he had many children of both sexes, who almost all came to a miserable end.

  He loved the world and all its pomps, which he regarded as the chief part of human happiness. For he was an active soldier, an extravagant giver, and found great pleasure in gaming and debauchery, and in jesters, horses, and hounds and other such vanities. An enormous household, which echoed with the clamour of a crowd of youths, both noble and common, was always in attendance. Some good men, clerks as well as knights, also lived
with him and rejoiced to share in his labours and wealth.

  He especially praises Gerold, a clerk from Avranches, in his chapel.[540]

  Eadmer gives us a terrible picture of the behaviour of Rufus’s court, a picture, we must recall, which deals with the situation after some decades of Norman rule. Even allowing for his ecclesiastical prejudice against the king, we cannot discount the general truth of what he says.

  A great number of those attending his court had made a practice of plundering and destroying everything; and there being no discipline to restrain them, they laid waste all the territory through which the king passed. Not content with that, they adopted another malicious practice. Very many of them, intoxicated with their own wickedness, when they could not consume all the provisions that they found in the houses they invaded, made the owners of the goods take them to market and sell for their benefit; or else they set fire to them and burned them up; or if it were drink, they washed their horses’ feet with it and then poured the rest of it on the ground or without fail found some other way of wasting it. What cruelties they inflicted on the fathers of families, what indecencies on their wives and daughters, it is shocking to think of. So, when it was known that the king was coming, all the inhabitants would flee from their homes, anxious to do the best they could for themselves and their families by taking refuge in woods or other places where they hoped to be able to protect themselves.

  The royal court, we must recall, was continually on the move. The truth of the accusations of rape is supported by the story that Queen Matilda told Anselm when he was investigating the charge that she had been made a nun as a girl.

  I did wear the veil, I don’t deny it. When I was quite a young girl and went in fear of my aunt Christina, whom you knew quite well, she — to save me from the lust of the Normans which was rampant and at that time ready to assault any woman’s honour — used to put a little black hood on my head, and when I threw it off, she would often make me smart with a good slapping and a most horrible scolding, as well as treating me as being in disgrace.

  During the civil wars under Stephen there was a return, at least in many areas, to conditions in which the knights and retainers did as they pleased. A later lawsuit has preserved for us the career of one of the lawless soldiers, Warin of Walcote. He desired Isabel the daughter of Robert of Shuckburgh, but was refused. After Robert’s son was killed in the wars, Warin carried the girl away with a host of men and held her for a long time.

  At length, after the death of king Stephen, when the peace of king Henry was proclaimed, Warin fell into poverty because he could not rob as he used to do; but he could not refrain from robbery and he went everywhere and robbed as he used. And king Henry, having heard complaints about him, ordered that he should be taken. At length, when he was sought out and ambushed, he came and hid himself at Grandborough in a certain reedy place, and there he was taken and led before the king at Northampton, and king Henry that he might set an example to others to keep his peace, by the counsel of his barons ordered him to be put in the pillory and there he was put and there he died.

  Isabel, returning home, was married again and bore a son.[541] But even before Stephen we encounter much lawlessness. We may recall for instance the hanging of forty-four thieves in 1124 at Huncot in Leicestershire. It is a pity that the Chronicle does not specify what crimes the men were accused of. Were they mere criminals, or poverty-stricken peasants driven to theft, or members of a group taking revenge on their masters? Did they represent a moment of unrest, or was it merely that the thief-apprehenders were particularly active in late 1124 in that area?

  Discontent at peasant level is hard to prove; but we have evidence of flight from estates. A precept of Rufus bids the sheriffs compel the return of fugitives from the lands of Ramsey Abbey; and more than a generation later Stephen issued similar orders. The second precept covered the chattels of the men as well as their persons. Under Henry I the same sort of trouble occurred on the lands of Abingdon Abbey; in three documents (issued from Woodstock, Wallingford and Westminster) the king ordered sheriffs and others to see that the fugitives were recovered with all their pecunia (probably livestock).[542] William of Poitiers, despite his attempts to idealize the situation, admitted how unreconciled the English were when he complained that neither kindness nor severity was sufficient to make the people prefer a quiet life to turbulent rebellion. In the great peasants’ revolt of 1381 the people often appealed to the ancient charters of Saxon kings, which they believed had guaranteed the liberties denied them by the Norman lords. The men at St Albans appealed to a lost charter of Offa, those of Bury to one of Cnut.[543] Perhaps the murdrum fine instituted by William most clearly reflected the Norman fear of the English in the early days: this made a sharp distinction between Englishman and Frenchman, and sought to scare the English from killing Normans caught on their own. By it a hundred had to prove that the victim of a murderous attack was English or else lay themselves open to a corporate fine. Henry I in a dream aptly saw peasants threatening him with scythe and pitchfork.

  What Richard fitzNeale, bishop of London and Treasurer, who died in 1198, has to say in his Dialogue of the murdrum brings out its significance clearly.

  The Master: Murdrum is, properly, the secret death of a man whose killer is unknown; for the word murdrum means secret or hidden. Now in the earlier state of the realm after the Conquest, those English who were left were used to lie in wait for the dreaded and hated Normans, and secretly to kill them here and there in woods or secluded places. as the chance came up. So the kings and their ministers for some years inflicted the most exquisite tortures on the English, yet without full effect, till at length they imagined the following device. Wherever a Norman was found thus killed, if the killer didn’t show himself or even betray himself by flight, then the whole of the district called the Hundred was fined on behalf of the royal treasury, some in £36 sterling and some in £44, according to the diversity of districts and the frequency of murders: which (as we hear) was decreed in order that this general penalty might secure the safety of wayfarers and all men might be spurred on to punish the crime or to hand over to justice that man who had brought so enormous a loss upon the whole neighbourhood. You must know that they who sit at the Exchequer are free from the payment of these fines.

  The Disciple: Should not the secret death of an Englishman, as of a Norman, be imputed as murdrum?

  The Master: Not at the first institution of this law, as you have heard; but now that English and Normans have lived so long together and have intermarried, the nations have become so intermingled (I speak of freemen only) that we can scarcely distinguish in these days between Englishmen and Normans, except of course those serfs bound to the land whom we call villeins and who cannot leave their condition without permission of their masters. So in these days, almost every secret manslaughter is punished as murdrum except those of whom (as I have said) it is certain that they are of servile condition.

  The law however was not repealed till 1339.

  Ailnoth of Canterbury speaks of the great hopes of the English in East Anglia in 1085 that the Danes would invade. An effective invasion might well have led to a large-scale uprising. Cnut remained highly popular in the area; his rowing song, ‘Mury sung the muneches binnen Ely’, is one of the oldest snatches of popular song in the Norman period. In 1108 Henry I married his daughter to the German emperor, taxing every hide in England 3s for the cost; but what the people really remembered was the marriage of Cnut’s daughter some hundred years before to the emperor Henry. ‘The splendour of the nuptial pageant was very striking,’ wrote William of Malmesbury, ‘and even in our times frequently sung in ballads about the streets.’ Much later Matthew Paris declared, ‘To this day men in their songs in taverns and at gatherings strive vainly to recapture the pomp of that wedding feast,’ and from what follows it is clear that he is not just repeating William.

  Orderic tells us that in 1132 a plot was discovered. All the Normans in England were to be killed on t
he same day and the kingdom was to be handed over to the Scots. No doubt there was more fear than fact in the story, but the fear was none the less significant. The Gesta Stephani, at their fragmentary end, tell how Walter de Pincheny took Christchurch castle by surprise, ravaged the neighbourhood, and secured the lordship of a large district.

  But though he ought to have given up his old ways of cruelty and violence, lest through his sins he should fall once more into his enemies’ hands, he continued to be fierce and tyrannical, to plunder mercilessly the church’s possessions, to worry his neighbours with quarrels, and ceaselessly to extort money and offerings from all around, torturing some and killing off others from mere love of cruelty. But God the just judge at last repaid these grievous wrongs by a righteous judgment. For the inhabitants of the place, with some of the countryfolk, were no longer able to bear his barbarity. They formed a conspiracy with the soldiers on the lordship to which they belonged.