The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  The monks of Ely, who were averse to having a French abbot, were helping another rebel band. With them, says the Gesta, were Earl Morcar, Count Tosti, and the abbot. Later tales added Earl Edwin, Stigand, Frithric (an exile from St Albans), and even Edgar Aetheling. Hereward, summoned, joined them the safest way, by water; but Warenne tried to cut him off where the channel was narrow, at Herberche. Hereward got there first and the earl found him on the far side. Hereward shot and knocked him down with an arrow that glanced on his armour; then in the familiar fens he and his men slipped through to the isle of Ely, a site that was impregnable as long as the garrison could live on what they caught or grew. The best line of attack was through Aldreth village to the south-west, but even there a bridge had to be built over the marshes. Gaimar says that the king called up his host, French and English, shipmen, sergeants and freebooters, against Ely this year, 1171; and if this is correct, William then summoned his feudal host for the first time in England. His first attack failed; the bridge sank under the weight of armed men, those in front slithered into the bog and many died. The writer of the Gesta, some forty or fifty years later, recalled seeing their skeletons in rusty armour hauled up by fishermen. Only one Norman, Deda, keen for the rewards promised the first entrant, reached the isle. Hereward treated him with courtesy and after a while sent him back. He gave William a full account of the garrison’s way of life. Desperate men, they were ready for any hardship, as servitude was the alternative. Well defended, the isle could stand four sieges. The rebels were ever prepared to meet an attack, and the monks would join in with arms. They all dined together, monks and soldiers, with weapons hung ready on the walls; at the high table dined the abbot, the three earls, and the two outlaw leaders, Hereward and Thurkill. Each day was busy. Strong defences had been raised. The isle was fertile and everyone joined in tilling the soil; the garrison could almost live on the proceeds of hunting alone; the waters were thick with fishes, the woods with wild creatures and herons; waterfowl were trapped (no doubt in the traditional way, by netting). Deda had seen a thousand birds taken at the same time from a single marsh. The many fenmen in Ely knew how to live off the fens. There was no point in surrounding the place year after year, and the outlaws would not be able to drive investors off; the best thing was to offer terms.

  William came near to agreeing; but Warenne and Ivo Taillebois wanted to fight on till the end. Ivo had a new plan. He knew a witch with spells strong enough to put the garrison’s courage to sleep and fill them with fear; and he won William over. Everything was done with the utmost secrecy so that the Englishmen might not be warned and concoct some magic of their own; but rumours of the preparations reached Ely. Hereward volunteered to go into the Norman camp as a spy and find out what was going on. He set off on Swallow, ungainly looking but the fastest of horses; her ugliness helped his peasant disguise. Meeting a potter, he borrowed his pots. Then, reaching the camp before nightfall, he found lodging in an old woman’s cottage, where Ivo’s witch was also. Dozing off, he heard the two old women discuss their plans — in French, which they thought a rustic couldn’t follow. Then he watched them go to a spring, where they asked questions of the unseen guardian; but he failed to catch the answers.

  In the morning he cried his wares in the camp. Servants from the king’s kitchen came; but a soldier noticed that the potter was like Hereward. The crowd argued as to whether a warrior could really be so short and stocky. They asked the potter if he had ever seen Hereward. ‘Indeed I have, and I’ve good cause to remember it. He stole my cow and four sheep, all I had apart from my pots and this old horse — and me with two sons to rear.’ The cooks invited him to their quarters, where they got on with the king’s dinner. Wanting more tales, they plied him with drink, and they too drank. One of them suggested a joke that involved shaving the potter’s beard and crown with a kitchen knife. Hereward laid out the joker with one blow and was immediately surrounded by angry cooks with knives and forks; but as they led him off he broke loose, grabbed a sword, and dashed down the steps into a lower court. (William seems to have been lodging in some sort of mansion.) He leaped on his horse, pursued by a passing group of young knights, whom he soon shook off in the marshes. One knight, who did catch him up, was soon forced to yield and was sent back with news of who the troublesome potter had been. (The episode looks back to the tales of Alfred entering the Danish camp, but even more strongly forward to those of Robin Hood and his stratagems; it provides the basis of one of the earliest surviving ballads; it was also told of Eustace the Monk.)

  Hereward and his men got rid of the witch. As she cast spells from a wooden siege tower, they fired the dry sedge. The wind fanned the flames and the Normans retreated, while the tower burned. The Chronicle gives a more sober account of William’s progress: ‘He ordered out naval and land levies, and surrounded the district, building a causeway as he advanced deeper into the fens, while the naval force remained to seaward.’ (The scyp fyrd was hardly likely to have been the product of service owed by a select fyrd; more likely it was made up of sea-mercenaries, as is suggested by Florence’s use of the term butsecarl.)

  Another story tells how Hereward, disguised this time as a fen fisherman, joined the labourers on William’s pontoons. Then one night he burned them all. However the monks began to lose heart; they heard that the king’s vassals were sharing their estates outside the isle. Afraid for their property they entered into secret parleys and agreed to yield up the isle if allowed to keep their lands. With their guidance William’s men began the march to Ely. Hereward was away on a raiding party, says the Gesta. He turned back, hoping to burn the place down before the Normans got in. A monk met him and his band with faggots on their shoulders; he argued that William was already too near. Hereward, at last persuaded, made for his boats on one of the big marshes and took refuge in the heart of the fens. Gaimar says that with five men he eluded William’s guards under the net of a fisherman who had sold his catch to the soldiers. He returned to Brunneswald and made raids near and far, sometimes from his home base, sometimes from the deep forests of Northamptonshire near Peterborough. He used all sorts of tricks and devices to fool the enemy. Once his band reversed their horses’ shoes to deceive pursuers. Once Abbot Turold and Ivo almost hemmed them in, but they broke through. Turold in turn was captured, then freed for a ransom of £30,000. He failed to keep his word and pay the money, so Hereward fell on Peterborough, burned the town, and took the monastery’s treasures. But a midnight vision of St Peter brandishing a huge key made him return the spoils. In return, lost in the woods at night, he and his men were guided by a great white hound, while unearthly lights, like will-o’-the-wisps, played about their lance points. At dawn they saw that what they had thought a hound was a white wolf, which disappeared into the forest.

  He continued his struggle, raiding, fighting and encountering William’s champions, and was even joined by some French. One tradition has it that he took part in the revolt of Norman earls in 1072. But he had fallen in love with a beautiful Englishwoman, Alfthrida, who undertook to make his peace with William. They were betrothed and Torfrida went to a nunnery. But, lacking her counsel, he never did so well afterwards. Alfthrida got his lands restored, but he had too many enemies. Through intrigues of Ivo and Warenne he was imprisoned. Rescued by his old companions, he was again admitted to the king’s peace. Finally he settled at Bourne and ended his life quietly, says the Gesta. Gaimar says his enemies never forgave him. Though he was always guarded, one day a sentinel slept and they surprised him at table. In a great fight he was at last struck down, but with his last blow he killed his killer. Gaimar adds that had there been four such men in England, William would not have won. ‘Under his command assembled all those who were outlaws.’

  All we can be sure of is that Hereward did exist, that he fought at Ely, and that he became the emblem of resistance to the Normans. His story includes elements from ancient folktales and from the sagas; it moved towards romance (as in Gaimar) and begot much imagery of popular
resistance to all forms of oppression. Storytellers tried to raise the hero’s status by emphasizing the romantic aspects. One version called him grandson of Leofric, earl of Mercia under Edward; another called him nephew of Ralph the Staller. But the pull of the outlaw theme was stronger and Hereward became the symbol of popular resistance. There are distortions of history in the tales, as when Gaimar and the Gesta both put the sack of Peterborough after the siege of Ely; and some of the persons said to be on the isle could not have been there, for example Edwin or Stigand, who was in jail at Winchester. The story divides clearly into several main stages. The first deals with the wonderful adventures of a young exile; then in the fight against William the chivalric elements fade out (though revived in some of the tales of his last years). The setting now is the wild fens; the themes are the tricks, guises, and ambushes of desperate men in waste places; the surrounding characters are cooks, potters, peasants and fishermen. The Book of Ely says that songs about him were still sung in taverns by the peasantry; and it refers to a Life by Prior Richard, who seems to have been working in the third quarter of the twelfth century. Gaimar gives no hint as to his sources. The Latin Gesta claims to use part of a book about Hereward in Anglo-Saxon by Leofric the Deacon, who was one of his contemporaries. It declares that many accounts were still to be found flourishing in the fens; but its author could not verify the story he had heard of some great book stowed away in a monastery. However, he had talked with men who could recall Hereward and even with some of his contemporaries; out of this material he made up his account.

  Hereward’s fame lasted long. In the thirteenth century men still went to see the ruins of a wooden structure in the fens called Hereward’s Castle. Ingulph declares, ‘His deeds are still sung to this day on the king’s highway.’ Ingulph was a fourteenth-century fraud; but this touch was clearly meant to give versimilitude and would not have been added if Hereward were unknown. He worked in Crowland, not far from the scene of Hereward’s exploits.

  *

  A tradition that there were pockets of resistance was still alive in the thirteenth century, as we see from the Flowers of History. The author, while describing the peace that William had established by the end of his reign, insists:

  Those of the English who were of gentle birth were driven from their lands; they could not dig; they were ashamed to beg. So with their kindred they took refuge in the woods, living by what they could hunt, and only falling back on raids when all else failed them...

  In their lairs in the woods and waste places...they laid a thousand secret ambushes and traps for the Normans.[552]

  We find traces of resisters other than Hereward. Twice his Gesta refers to Brumannus who captured a Norman abbot and ducked him in the sea in a sack. Evidently the story was very well known. And we can see that legends gathered round Eadric the Wild. Silvaticus, his epithet, Wildman or Forestman, perhaps means no more than silvestris used of the Wild Welsh; Giraud de Barri was called Giraldus Cambrensis alias Silvestris; and the Scottish Highlander is silvester et montanus. But it also suggests the outlaw whose home is the woods. Eadric led a revolt in the marshes of Wales in 1067-9. The Chronicles of Wygmore Abbey have tales of his fight with the Norman lord Ralph de Mortemer; and Walter Map shows that there were many folk-tales about him. Wandering one night in the forest, we are told, he came on a remote house within which a band of lovely girls were at play; he went in and before morning one of them was his bride. They left the forest and lived together a few years; then one day he asked her if she didn’t wish to visit her sisters, and at once she vanished. He could never find the forest house again.

  The theme of the exile-outlaw also entered the upper levels of culture. Two historical figures under John were made the heroes of romances, in which magical and chivalric elements conflicted or merged with the motifs of revolt. These were Fulk fitzWarin and Eustace the Monk. In its prose texts Fulk has two quotations from the Prophecies of Merlin. It opens with references to the months of April and May when a man’s fancy should turn to memories of his ancestors’ deeds. Giving a fanciful account of William I’s pacification of the Welsh marches, it moves on to describe its hero’s family; its main part consists of the story of the struggles of the third Fulk against John, his exile and wanderings in France under an assumed name, his turn to piracy, his return in the guise of a merchant, his further adventures, then his homecoming and pardon. The author was probably a monk of the New Abbey, a Benedictine house founded by Fulk II. Chronology and details are confused, perhaps deliberately; one sees here illustrated the background of innumerable forged charters. The romance has many elements that anticipate Robin Hood. ‘In all the time he was a banished man neither Fulk nor any of his did damage to anyone, save the king and his knights.’ He fights for the right, and ‘was a good purveyor and a liberal, and he caused the royal highway to be turned by his hall at his manor of Alleston, so that no traveller should pass without food or other honour, or good of his’.

  Eustace is a more dubious character, an outlawed knight, a renegade monk, a tremendous magician. As a sea captain he was a real person who became the terror of the Channel. The Chroniclers call him the Archpirate, the Apostate, a man who ‘from a black monk became a demoniac’. After his death the legends grew till under Edward II William of Hemingford took him to have been Monachus, a tyrant of Spain, who, hearing that England was ruled by a child (Henry II), aspired to conquer the land. He was in fact killed in a battle off Sandwich in 1217. His history contains many elements that were important later in the ballads of Robin Hood; and in general the tone is much more popular than that of Fulk. Like Fulk, the Monk is in the right; he combats a tyrannous count who has taken his land; but he is not the complete rebel like Hereward (in the core of his story) or like Robin. The popular elements in the Hereward saga had meanwhile disappeared from the upper levels of culture, or been absorbed into tales of other outlaws. Matthew Paris recalled his name and the siege of Ely, but little more.[553]

  *

  With the story of the Confessor’s prophecy of the Great Tree we noted that we were trespassing on the field of Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Prophecies of Merlin seem to have been completed and known in 1134, a couple of years later to be incorporated as Book VII in his Historia Brittanorum. Thus the Prophecies certainly seem to have been the originating core of the Historia. For us the interest of the Prophecies does not lie merely in the important way in which they brought Celtic traditions into the mainstream of medieval literature, but also in the fact that, by doing so, they revealed the need of the Normans to find a living relationship between their culture and the English past. By making Brut the Trojan the ancient invader of England, bringing a superior culture, the Norman conquest was justified and put in a new perspective. Trojans, Britons, Romans, English and Normans all had their place in this perspective as the creators of the complex reality of English life, its governmental forms, its institutions.

  The Arthurian material was to take many forms with a variety of meanings, finally issuing in the great medieval epic-romance. In this on the one hand the Grail theme fused the monastic and the chivalric motifs in terms of a mystery quest, as the Templars never succeeded in doing in actual life; on the other hand the story of Arthur and his Round Table became the supreme expression both of the dream of a harmonious society of interlocked and dedicated hierarchies and of the disastrous awakening to the facts of pervasive treachery. The Celtic hope for a redeeming leader, who would restore freedom and unity to his people, was linked with the real conflicts and ways of life of the twelfth century (such as courtly love), lending the story its comprehensive range of meanings, its hidden force. That the Arthurian theme was thus able to win so central a place in the medieval world was in the last resort due to the skill and insight that Geoffrey showed in bringing together his materials and relating them to the deepest problems of his age, of Anglo-Norman culture in its quest for roots.

  Most of the records we have of his earlier life as a churchman link him, not with Llandaff a
s in later Welsh tradition, but with the region of Oxford in the diocese of Lincoln; he is here found as witness in seven charters (1129-51) and is concerned with houses of Oseney, Godstow, and Thame, and with the canonical house of St George in Oxford castle. Among his fellow witnesses are Walter archdeacon of Oxford and Ralph of Monmouth; he himself may have taught at Oxford. He was also known as Geoffrey Arthur, as early as 1129. He seems then to be of Breton rather than Welsh blood, reared in a Norman environment on the Welsh marches; linked politically with Robert of Gloucester, ecclesiastically with Oxford and Lincoln.[554] He tells us that he made a start with his Historia when the prevalence of rumours about Merlin led Alexander bishop of Lincoln and others to ask him to make a Latin version of the prophet’s British utterances. His Merlin he concocted of various figures including the prophet Lailoken who had encountered St Kentigern (Glasgow’s Mungo) just outside the city. The prophecies were long compositions in symbolic language, with imagery from the animal world. The Kingdom of Arthur is foretold, with six inheritors (the Historia gives only five); then we find some events drawn from the later struggles of the Saxons, the coming of the Normans, the slaying of Rufus, the dominion of Henry (the Lion of Justice), and the wreck of the White Ship. Here historical allusions stop. A reference to Henry’s death seems to be an interpolation. Some vague comments can be made to fit later events. Thus, a king is to overthrow the Walls of Hibernia: which suggests Henry II in Ireland. But an expedition had long been contemplated. We can dimly make out references to the Celtic peoples and the expulsion of aliens. The animal images thicken: a goat of the Castle of Venus, a Lioness of Stafford, and so on. Many geographical names are English. The work ends with an astrological version of chaos or world-end. Stilbon of Arcadia will change his shield, the helmet of Mars will call to Venus, the Virgin will mount on the back of the Archer and darken her maiden honour, the Moon’s chariot will disturb the Zodiac, and so on.[555]