by Jack Lindsay
Walter was assassinated. Such plots were possible in disordered times; the failure of central controls that gave Walter his head also made it possible for the people to strike back at the ravagers.
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An example of the conflict in the monastic world is the fight at Glastonbury in 1083 when the Norman abbot Thurstan tried to install the Dijon type of rites and chants in place of the Gregorian chant of which the monks claimed to be the inheritors. The Chronicle tells us:
Its origin was the abbot’s folly in abusing his monks about many matters. The monks made an amicable complaint to him about it and asked him to rule them justly and have regard for them and in return they would be faithful and obedient to him. The abbot however would have none of it, but treated them badly, threatening them with worse. One day the abbot went into the chapter and spoke against the monks and threatened to maltreat them. He sent for laymen, who entered the chapter fully armed against the monks. Not knowing what they should do, the monks were terrified of them and fled in all directions. Some ran into the church and locked the doors against them, but the pursuers went after them into the monastic church, determined to drag them out since they were afraid to leave.
More, a pitiful thing took place there that day when the Frenchmen broke into the choir and began pelting the monks in the direction of the altar where they were. Some of the men-at-arms climbed up to the gallery and shot arrows down into the sanctuary, so that many arrows stuck in the cross standing above the altar. The wretched monks lay about round the altar and some crept underneath, crying aloud to God, desperately imploring his mercy when none was forthcoming from men. What more can we find to say except to add that they showered arrows and their companions broke down the doors to force an entrance and struck down and killed some of the monks, wounding many there, so that their blood ran down from the altar on to the steps and from the steps on to the floor. Three of the monks were done to death and eighteen wounded.[544]
The knights used to subdue the monks seem to have been members of the abbot’s familia. The gallery was probably a timber construction at the end of the nave such as once existed at Deerhurst, or else a chamber above the side aisle.
In the works of Goscelin we can luckily find what the literate Englishman thought of the conquerors. Of St Bertin, who lived for twenty years under the protection of Bishop Herman. About 1080 he wrote from Peterborough, where he had taken refuge, to an old pupil and friend now at Angers:
How many thousands of the human race have fallen on evil days. The sons of kings and dukes and nobles and the proud ones of the land are fettered with manacles and irons, are in prison and in jail. How many have lost their limbs by sword or disease, have been deprived of their eyes, so that when released from prison the common light of the world is a prison for them. They are the living dead for whom the sun, mankind’s greatest pleasure, now has set. Blessed are those who are consoled by eternal hope; and afflicted are the unbelieving, for, deprived of all their goods and also cut off from heaven, their punishment has now begun.
We may suspect that William preferred mutilation to hanging because the blinded or crippled man remained as a spectacle of warning for the others. Goscelin goes on to lament the end of asceticism in the church under the Normans.
They would do far better to learn through education how to preserve humility, which is the guardian of all virtues, and to stamp out the barbarous pride and bragging of the undisciplined. We shall soon see the unlearned deriding and despising the learned and counting illiteracy secular wisdom or holiness of life. No wonder they neglect what they do not know, and prefer what they do know, that the blind despise those who can see, and ignorant men take pride in the cult of humility.
He saw the Conquest as the imposition of rule by ignorant, arrogant and prejudiced barbarians, who sought to crush English scholarship and civilization. (Later he became reconciled.)[545]
The Normans retorted in kind. At St Albans, Paul called his venerated predecessors uneducated simpletons; the abbot of Abingdon dismissed such saints as Edmund and Aethelwold as rustics; Lanfranc overrode his chapter and omitted many English saints from the calendar. Writing to Abbot Paul, who was Anselm’s nephew, he declared that the barbarians would fail to understand him, but his labours would not be in vain. ‘What you cannot say to them, you can show by your life.’ We see the veiled hostility in the jokes made at Bishop Wulfstan, who had to be tolerated as useful to the Conqueror. Wulfstan dressed modestly, and Geoffrey of Coutances, also a bishop, asked why he did not wear sable, beaver and wolf, as he could and should, but wore lamb skin instead. Wulfstan replied that it was right for men of secular wisdom like Geoffrey to use the skins of crafty animals, but he himself was content with lamb skin. Geoffrey persisted, suggesting he should at least wear cat skin, and Wulfstan answered, ‘Believe me, we chant more often of the Lamb of God than of his Cat.’
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The resistance in the spirits of the English to the Norman conquest appeared in tales told about the English kings. A strong peasant element intrudes in these versions. Athelstan is given a peasant pedigree; Alfred wandered among the common folk in the guises that brought him close to everyday life. The story of the burnt cakes first turns up in Henry of Huntingdon; in Layamon’s Brut he has become England’s Darling; and he is regarded as a Solomon, a repository of all wisdom. His Proverbs were collected; in the English The Owl and the Nightingale a host of sage comments are attributed to him. And as we shall see the band of the resister-outlaw Hereward came to be made up of peasants in the tales.
William of Malmesbury in his tale of Athelstan’s birth says that his source was ‘old ballads popular through the times that followed, rather than books expressly written for posterity’s information’. The lovely daughter of a shepherd saw in a vision the moon shining from her womb ‘and all England illuminated by the light’. She told her friends next day; and the tale reached the woman who had nursed the kings’ sons and who then adopted her as daughter. Edward, Alfred’s son, passed through the village and stopped at his nurse’s house, where he fell in love with the girl. He spent one night with her, and she bore Athelstan.[546] Even a character like Godwin had a folk tale attached to him, in which he too was a peasant in origin. He takes the role of the lowborn hero who is to act a saviour part. Map tells how King Aethelred, when hunting, strayed and at night sought shelter from the cold in a cowherd’s house. He was hospitably entertained, especially by the son Godwin, whom he took into his service. Godwin rose to be earl of Gloucester. (There were no such earls at the time, but the storytellers gave the setting of their own times.) However, at this point a counter-tradition, that of the tales told by the Normans, breaks in; the popular hero becomes a villain. He rapes the nuns of Berkeley and cheats the archbishop of Canterbury of his Bosham lands. The existence of an English epic is further shown by passages from the Knytlinga Saga and from Randulph Niger, which correspond with the first parts of Map’s story.
Some of the English even began looking to Arthur. At least one Londoner of the twelfth century attributed to his days the city’s folk moot. And lesser heroes were not forgotten. Thus the account of Byrhtnoth in the Book of Ely seems to be from a later and longer poem than the extant Battle of Maldon. Veneration quickly began to gather round the tomb of Waltheof, last of the English earls, whom William executed at Winchester. Anselm sent an archdeacon to tell the abbess and nuns of Romsey to drop all ‘superstitious veneration of a dead man whom they considered a saint’. (There was as yet no fixed method of canonization; the main principle was that there should be no veneration without episcopal authorization. But sanctification often happened fast; at Winchester Bishop Aethelwold’s body was performing miracles and was translated to the choir twelve years after his death.)[547]
Edward the Confessor was said to have made a death-bed prophecy that anticipated events of the early twelfth century. After two speechless days, the tale said, he spoke out. Two monks whom he had known in his youth in Normandy had appeared and told him that
after his death England would pass for a year and a day ‘into the hand of the enemy and devils will wander over the land’. The cause was that the heads of England, the dukes, bishops and abbots, were the ministers not of God but of the devil. The monks said that the English could not repent and thus save themselves. ‘When would the calamities end?’ asked Edward.
When a green tree shall be cut down the middle, and the part cut off, being carried the space of three acres from the trunk, shall, without any help, become again united to its stem, bud out with flowers, and stretch forth its fruit as before, from the sap again uniting; then may an end of such evils be at last expected.
This prophecy was obviously invented after Henry I’s marriage with Matilda, which brought together the English and Norman lines; the three acres represent the reigns of Harold, William and Rufus. Henry and Matilda had three children: a son who died in infancy; Maud born February 1102; William born before August 1103. The prophecy was doubtless connected with this third birth. We are now entering the territory of Geoffrey of Monmouth; but we must leave him till we have considered the tales about Harold and Hereward.
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The legend of the dead hero who cannot die, who will return in time to free his people, found its most powerful form in the tales of Arthur; but a rationalized version appeared in connection with Harold Godwinson. The folk could not believe that he was dead. Tales of his survival occur in three Norse texts; in all three he ends as a hermit. The most interesting is the Icelandic tale of Heming Aslaksson. The full account deals with the conflict between Heming and King Harald Hardrada. Heming started as a ‘fool’, who however beat the king in a series of athletic tests or ordeals but was almost murdered by being forced over a cliff. (One test involved a William Tell feat of shooting a nut on a brother’s head.) He went off to England, Rome, and back to England where he became athletic instructor to Harold, accompanied him on the visit to Normandy, and fought for him at Stamford Bridge and Hastings. At the end we are told that Harold was found by a cottar and his wife; they put him in a waggon and took him home, where they hid him from the Normans. When he was recovered he sent for Heming and asked him to get a hermitage built in Canterbury, where he could watch King William in church. When he died, William found out about him, pardoned Heming, and offered to make him a powerful baron; but Heming asked only for the same hermitage.
Norse tradition, despite Stamford Bridge, remained friendly to the Confessor, Godwin and his sons; but it did not invent the theme of Harold’s survival, which we find also in Gervase of Tilbury. The Vita Haroldi insists he was rescued from the battlefield, conveyed to Winchester, and there nursed back to health by a Saracen woman. Two years later, he went abroad, failed to win help in regaining his kingdom, and travelled east as a pilgrim. Returning, he lived as a recluse in a cave near Dover. At last, while wandering disguised on the Welsh marches, he reached a hermitage and stayed there till his death. His brother Gyrth is reported to have turned up at Henry II’s court at Woodstock, ‘by then indeed very old’. The link with Chester represents a strong tradition. Florence of Worcester says that after Hastings the queen was sent by her brothers there; and Girald tells a story of a disguised emperor (apparently Henry V) ending his days in a hermitage near the city.[548]
The theme of defeat, exile and return of a dispossessed hero appears in the stories of Haveloc and Horn. There are strong Viking elements here. Haveloc was connected with Grimsby. He had been deprived of his rights by a treacherous regent in Denmark, the princess Goldeburh of her rights in England. Haveloc fled to England with the fisherman Grim, earned his living as a kitchen-boy, and was forced to marry Goldeburh by the regent who meant to degrade her. As a man Haveloc went back to Denmark, gathered those faithful to his line, defeated the regent and gained the throne. Then he returned to England with his wife, rallied her adherents and won her throne as well. Grimsby was where he landed; the place was called after the fisherman who saved his life and was made an earl. The town seal of Grimsby, said to be not later than Edward I, showed the figures of Haveloc, Grim and Goldeburh. A local legend seems to have been conflated with material from Norse sagas.[549]
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But it is in the historical character of Hereward that the theme of the exile was given full relevance to the hopes and fears of the defeated English; we may note that elements from his story as well as others from King Horn survive in the ballads of Robin Hood. The exile was the outlaw, the total outsider in Anglo-Saxon or Norman societies. A decision of the king or his courts put him outside the protection of law; he lost his birthright, privileges at law for which the king was only the guardian. A price was put on his head as on a wolf’s, so he was said to have a Wolf’s Head. Civiliter mortuus, he could be killed with impunity. (Gradually the full harshness was modified; by the thirteenth century he forfeited chattels and rights, but did not lose all claim to inheritance, nor was his killer free from a charge of homicide.) His only hope was to elude authority and sue for pardon from the men who had condemned him. In making him an outlaw the system admitted its weakness, its inability to bring him to justice; and if he had enough support, he could withdraw to a remote place and defy the law. Hereward went to Flanders as an exile. He was shipwrecked near St Omer where Count Manasses welcomed him; he took part in a war against the count of Guines and was captured by the count’s nephew; he wooed and wed Torfrida; he joined in two expeditions with Duke Robert to Scaldemariland. The material is legendary, but possibly with factual elements. The future Robert I did lead an expedition against Zealand (probably in 1067); Manasses seems to have been count of St Pol at about this time; the shipwreck faintly suggests the Harold story. But we meet sheer folklore in the tale of the fight with a bear with human intelligence; its father, carrying off a princess, begot on her Bearn of Norway, a man with a bear’s strength, and the bear with a man’s mind. Hereward also killed the Giant of Cornwall, saving a king’s daughter; the jealousy of the king’s knights made him flee to Ireland; and he had his wonder mare Swallow. Such tales are valuable in showing how popular he was as an heroic figure.[550]
The Gesta says he returned from Flanders in 1068; he wanted to see if any kinsmen had survived the Conquest. Leaving Torfrida and his two nephews, he went with a single servant to his ancestral home at Bourne. (The tales link him with Bourne; Domesday shows him holding land of the abbey of Crowland; and Hugh Candidus says he held from the abbey of Peterborough. He or another Hereward had Warwickshire lands in 1086.) Without revealing himself he entered the house of Osred who had been his father’s knight, and was offered hospitality. He found the household mourning. Only the day before, the Norman lord and his men had come to the village to demand the whole family estate. Hereward’s younger brother killed the man who laid rough hands on Hereward’s wife; he was surrounded and cut down, and his severed head was set over the door of the house. As Hereward was going to bed, he heard noise and singing. Cloaked, he went with his servant to see. The Normans were celebrating. He took down his brother’s head and wrapped it in a cloak. Inside he found his enemies lying drunken in the arms of the village women whom they had forced along; a dancer entertained them with songs insulting the English and with mimes of their coarse manners. One girl protested, ‘If our lord’s other son Hereward was here, he’d change your tune before tomorrow morning.’ The Norman lord jeered, ‘That particular rogue isn’t likely to show his face just now this side of the Alps.’ The jester took up his words. Hereward, leaping from the shadows, cut him down with one blow. Some of the drunken Normans he killed while at the door his servant dealt with those who tried to dodge out. None escaped. In the morning fourteen heads grinned down from over the door in place of the brother’s. Other Normans in the district fled.
There is nothing impossible in the tale. About twenty years earlier, in Italy, a large number of peasants, monks and townsfolk had resorted to guerrilla warfare against the Norman marauders. Amatus tells how a young baron Rodolf came with his band one day to the monastery of Monte Casino, and went in
to pray. They left their swords outside, as was the custom. At once the servants seized the weapons and horses, closed the doors, and rang the bells. The country folk, thinking the monastery was being attacked, rushed to the rescue and burst in. Soon the Normans, armed only with daggers, gave in, asking to have their lives spared out of respect for God’s house. But by the time the monks arrived, Rodolf was a prisoner and his fifteen men lay dead on the floor.[551]
Countryfolk now came hurrying to join Hereward, who chose a small body of retainers, mainly men of his own kin. They drove out any Frenchmen who dared to linger in the lands of his inheritance. He seems to have gone as far afield as Peterborough; for he was said to have been knighted there in the Saxon manner by the last English abbot, Brand. Frederick, brother of the earl of Warenne, swore to hunt him down; but when he met Hereward late one evening, he was killed. So Earl William himself became Hereward’s bitter foe. Hereward meanwhile decided to fetch wife and nephews from Flanders, and disbanded his men, promising to return in a year and give them a sign. (Warenne also had links with Flanders; he had. married Gundrada, sister of Gerbod the Fleming and was given control of Surrey while Gerbod gained Chester.) Hereward duly returned and as a sign set fire to three villas on Brunneswald above his Bourne manor, where no Norman had dared to set foot. He gathered the bravest of his men, many of whom were old rebels: Leofric the Mower who with his scythe drove off the score of Normans who tried to take him as he harvested alone; Leofric the Crafty who had often escaped captivity by his guile; Wulric the Black, who once darkened his face with charcoal, slipped among the Normans by night, and killed ten of them; Wulric Hraga who rescued four brothers from execution and killed the guards; Leofric the Deacon; Utlamhe (the Outlaw); Hereward’s cook; Winter; Hurchill; Grugan; and the two nephews, Siward the White and Siward the Red.