A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  Laws and Hobbits

  With regard to law, although we have law codes issued by successive Anglo-Saxon kings, from Ethelbert of Kent through to the Danish King Cnut, and although these codes are eloquent upon such matters as feuding and the control of violence, the punishment of arsonists and rapists and other ‘public’ crimes, they ignore ninety per cent of the law as we would understand it today. The vast majority of property disputes seem to have lain beyond the control of the King’s courts, or at least beyond the competence of those lawyers and churchmen who wrote the King’s law codes. Moreover, although the public declaration of law, through the courts of the counties and the hundreds, and through the regular reissuing of royal codes, was clearly of great significance, it is questionable to what extent it was actually the King’s law that was applied in practice or at key moments of crisis.

  There is perhaps a tendency to look upon Anglo-Saxon England through the rose-tinted lenses of one its most famous students, J.R.R. Tolkien. For nearly forty years as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford, Tolkien occupied his time not so much in studying the Anglo-Saxons known to history as in inventing an entirely fictitious parallel universe in which the world of Beowulf rubbed shoulders with a peculiar brand of late-Victorian Catholic piety. Tolkien’s vision continues to dominate much thinking about the Anglo-Saxons, relocated in a Tolkienesque England of well-governed and law-abiding make-believe: a Shire of freedom-loving hobbits writ large. Yet the definition of a law-abiding society must surely be one in which the law is widely known and applied, not only in peacetime but in time of disorder or war. The greatest crisis in the history of Anglo-Saxon England, which emerged in the 1050s and 60s over the question of an heir to the English King, was to be settled, not by lawyers or law codes, but by acts of violence and usurpation which themselves suggest that a large part of Anglo-Saxon law-making was mere window-dressing, intended to mask a rather more primitive and brutal reality. These were hobbits with swords and an attitude far from peaceable. Law codes, like the Deuteronomy of the Old Testament, gave the impression that the kings of Anglo-Saxon England were law-makers and law-givers in the mould of David or Solomon. Whether in practice such laws were applied, widely used or even widely read, remains a much more difficult question to answer.

  English Wealth

  If we remove the three pillars of a united kingship, Christian nation and law, then a very large part of the substructure imagined by Bede and his successors vanishes from our understanding of Anglo-Saxon England. This leaves instead quite another unifying principle, one that in reality may have played a much more significant role in the idea of an entity named England. Just as modern Italy or Switzerland or Belgium are divided nations in terms of language, regional loyalties, culture or even administration, but united in the sense that they represent powerful trading communities with a single national economy, it is arguable that it was the wealth, rather than the religion or even the language of the English, that served as the principal unifying feature before 1066. England was precocious not only in terms of its sense of national identity, but in terms of its wealth. It was this potential bounty, over and above any other considerations, that first drew foreign invaders, Phoenicians and Romans of antiquity, Angles, Saxons and Jutes of the fifth century, Vikings of the ninth and tenth, and Normans and Frenchmen of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, to stake their claims to rule or own the land. There is every sign that England was extremely wealthy. There is very little proof of the source from which this prosperity derived.

  It came perhaps from the mining of metals, above all tin, but lead too, and gold and silver, which, though now confined to a single gold mine in Wales, were in the early Middle Ages possibly abundant in the Mendips and the hills of Cumberland. These mineral resources probably first drew Britain into contact with the Mediterranean world, as long ago as the fifth century bc, when a Phoenician admiral reported the mineral wealth of Cornwall, long before Julius Caesar conceived of a Roman military conquest of Britain. The British Isles are formed of every conceivable rock and sediment heaved up from each of the great convulsions of the vanished continents of prehistory. England may have been the Gold Coast of early medieval Europe, dependent upon the export of those same two commodities, gold and slaves, upon which a much later British Empire was to be founded. Bristol was almost certainly a centre for the trade in slaves to and from Ireland and Wales, and perhaps for silver from Wales or the Mendips, long before it became involved in the trade in gold and slaves from Africa or sugar from the Caribbean. St Patrick, one of the most mythologized yet significant figures in Irish history, may have begun his life as a slave, captured in what is today south-west England and traded to the Irish c. 410 AD.

  More likely, however, the wealth of the Anglo-Saxons derived from animal rather than from mineral or human resources, in particular from the export of wool. Wool exports can be meaningfully measured only from the late thirteenth century, but this was a trade in all likelihood much more ancient. It was English wool, spun and dyed, sometimes in England, more often by foreign weavers and dyers, that supplied the English with many of their best-known exports: Lindsey blankets, Worsted from Norfolk, and above all, the most precious of products made from English wool, Scarlet, woven with twisted yarns according to techniques originating in Central Asia, dyed white, blue, green but most often carmine red. If the Bayeux Tapestry was produced in England, as most modern commentators suggest, then the very variety of the colours supplies testimony, not only to the wealth that first drew William of Normandy to the idea of conquering England, but to the trade that already linked England to the European and Mediterranean worlds.

  We have no firm proof that it was wool which made England rich before 1066. Nonetheless, there is powerful circumstantial evidence to this effect, not least the rise of neighbouring Flanders. If England was rich, then Flanders in the centuries before 1066 was growing richer still. Flanders itself was a great blank of flatlands and bogs, much of it undrained as late as the seventeenth century. Yet this unlovely corner of northern Europe already by the eleventh century boasted flourishing towns and an extraordinary density of knights, the elite ‘haves’ in a society of ‘have nots’. Flemish knights, the ‘Brabanters’ and ‘routiers’ of the twelfth century, were to provide the staple of many a mercenary army in English and continental history. Flanders flourished probably as a consequence of its position on the trade routes between north and south, and in particular on the trade routes to England. In the two centuries after 1200, it was English wool, purchased by Flemish merchants, that fuelled the economies of both England and Flanders. There is every reason to suppose that this was a much more ancient phenomenon, and that the rise of Flanders tells us much about the rise of the English wool trade. Without sheep, and without Flemish merchants to trade their wool, the very idea of England might have been just one of those good ideas left unfinished on the cosmic drawing board.

  By the eleventh century, across the continent, from northern France down to southern Italy, England was famed not only for its wools but for its role in associated luxury trades: precious metalwork, intricately painted manuscripts, and perhaps above all for the manufacture of ‘Opus Anglicanum’, literally ‘English Work’: luxuriously decorated vestments, painted by needle with silks, pearls and the most precious of gold and silver thread, that through to the fifteenth century and beyond kept the English brand current upon the luxury export markets of the world. The Canterbury monk Eadmer, accompanying his archbishop to the papal court at Bari in southern Italy in the 1090s, was amazed to be shown a cope, a liturgical vestment, worn by the Archbishop of Benevento, trimmed all around with gold, apparently made of the most precious Opus Anglicanum. The cope had been presented to the archbishop in England many years before in part-payment for a most precious relic, the arm of the apostle St Bartholomew, sold to relieve a famine in Italy. That an Italian archbishop, in the 1020s or 30s, should regard England as a potential source of famine-relief tells us much about perceptions of En
glish wealth. That he accepted and treasured such a gift for more than sixty years tells us that such gifts were particularly sought. In the same way, the English desire to acquire Mediterranean relics tells us much about England’s cultural dependence upon Europe and in particular upon Rome, a much battered city but still viewed as the cradle of European civilization. An inventory of the Pope’s treasures, drawn up at the end of the thirteenth century, lists no less than 113 pieces of English embroidery, exchanged for who knows what sort of reciprocal benefits to the English.

  English Land

  The wealth of England, like all medieval wealth, was ultimately invested in land. Buying or acquiring an estate was just as much a symbol of status and a guarantee of future prosperity as buying a house remains today. It was such land, inherited, purchased or acquired, upon which the sheep were fattened to supply wool, and from which grain was harvested to feed the men and women who sheared, milked and fed the sheep.

  The land and the landscape of England into which William of Normandy came were, of course, very different from those which a visitor to England, even two centuries later, would have found. England in the year 1000 was above all a land of forests and woods. Some of the greatest of these stretched across the southern counties, from Kent through to Dorset. The Battle of Hastings was itself fought on the edges of the great forest of the Weald, known in the Anglo-Saxon period as ‘Andredes weald’, from the Roman name for Pevensey (‘Anderida’), precisely the port where William of Normandy landed on his arrival in England in September 1066. Elsewhere, however, regions that we think of as sparsely wooded, not least the Cotswolds and the Wolds of Lincolnshire (derived from the same Germanic root, ‘wald’, as the Kentish ‘Weald’) took their name from the rolling hills left behind when ancient forests that had once rivalled the extent of the German ‘Schwarzwald’ or ‘Odenwald’ were cleared. The clearance of these forests was already a longstanding process, even before the Angles and Saxons first arrived. By 1066, nonetheless, it had made only a relatively minor impact upon a landscape that was still dominated by large, uncultivated tracts of land.

  Within the woods themselves, an extraordinary variety of wildlife continued to thrive. Brown bears, hunted in Neolithic times, had almost certainly vanished from England under the Romans, but wolves and wild cat, boar and red deer remained. In the 960s, the English King Edgar is said to have imposed an annual tribute of 300 wolf skins upon the Welsh, and grey wolf populations, recorded in the 1160s, did not become extinct in England until the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Wild boar, threatened with extinction by the thirteenth century, were still maintained for hunting as late as the reign of Charles I. In the 1220s, the bishop of Winchester is to be found hunting for ‘pigs’, by which we can almost certainly assume ‘wild boar’, in his park at Taunton. In the wetland regions of the east, particularly in the fens, still undrained and inhabited by a semibarbaric population, wildfowl flocked the air in numbers similar to those to be found today in the most remote wildernesses of the Danube estuary or the Carmargue. Custodians of the bishopric of Ely, in the thirteenth century, were regularly required to send vast quantities of wildfowl and fish for the King’s feasts: 50 pike each of three feet, 50 of two and a half feet, 50 of two feet, 200 ‘steilung’, 50 sticks of shaft-eels and 4,000 smaller eels for a single royal banquet in 1257. Besides kings, species such as the eagle owl, or even the European vulture, today confined to the northern and easternmost reaches of the continent, may well have fed upon this extraordinary diversity of English wildlife.

  Population density

  Dispersed across this landscape, the total extent of the human population cannot be estimated with any real accuracy. Population history is still very much a matter of guesswork, a sort of statistical witchcraft. Figures ranging from one to five million have been suggested for the English population in 1066, with the reality probably lying closer to the lower than to the higher end of this scale. For comparative purposes, the population of ancient Rome is estimated to have exceeded one million people. England was a far from densely populated land. More people lived in villages than in towns, though towns there undoubtedly were, and it was upon towns such as London, Winchester, Norwich and York that much of the economic activity of the countryside was focussed, not only because towns boasted markets, but because the urban population needed to be fed. Merely feeding the population of London, by the thirteenth century, was a major economic enterprise, consuming the surplus foodstuffs of Kent, Surrey, Hertfordshire and Essex and ensuring a large part of the prosperity of the south-east.

  The Countryside

  The countryside itself was looked upon with far cooler emotions than would be the case later, when English pastoral became a leading theme of English poetry. No one in their right mind would choose to live in the countryside, a dangerous place, thronged with werewolves, fairies and things that went bump in the night. Elves took delight in laming cattle and kidnapping the unwary. Arrowheads found in the fields (in reality Neolithic carved flints) were proof of their existence. Entire books of elf-charms, and of spells intended to counter elvish tricks, formed a substratum of Anglo-Saxon literature. Even after the Norman Conquest of 1066, which drove the elves into semi-retirement, revenants and spirits, almost invariably malevolent, are a constant theme in twelfth-century miracle stories. Against them, only the power of the saints could be invoked to any real effect. In the 1090s, an entire village in Derbyshire was terrorized by a pair of vampires risen from the dead, only appeased through the intercession of St Modwena of Burton.

  The Village

  By contrast to the open countryside, the life of the village implied civilization rather than small-mindedness, and neighbourliness or protection as much as confinement. From the seventeenth century, landowners planning their mansions began by removing peasants and their houses, opening up a prospect of park and woodland of which Horace or Virgil might have approved. In the Middle Ages, only the most ascetic and world-hating of monks behaved like this, for example the Carthusians, who lived as communities of hermits in near perpetual silence, and who, in establishing a monastery in the 1180s at Witham in Somerset, deliberately depopulated and dismantled the local villages, sending their peasants to live elsewhere. By contrast, up to 1100, most monastic communities tended to be established in or close to towns. Under Norman as under Anglo-Saxon rule, the greatest of aristocratic dwellings were built in proximity to villages, with lord and peasant established in close and deliberate symbiosis.

  Roads and Transport

  With few roads save for those last properly repaired by the Romans, and with only a few stone bridges, transport over long distances was not only difficult but expensive. Where possible, goods were transported by sea or river rather than by land. It was the extensive English coastline, and the access which its rivers supplied to inland markets, that rendered England itself a land so fit for trade, part of an island whose climate and geology permitted the production of an agricultural surplus, blessed with mineral resources, and with plentiful supplies of timber to serve as fuel, yet with no real extremes of climate, no insurmountable mountain chains, and with no part of the island further than a few miles from a navigable river leading ultimately to the sea. Cotton-in-the-Elms in Derbyshire, reckoned by the Ordnance Survey to be the most ‘inland’ spot in England, is in fact only five miles from the river Trent and only forty-five miles from the start of the river’s tidal estuary.

  England’s rivers were not only full of fish but were a major source of power in driving water mills, by 1066 already a regular feature of the landscape. Moreover, in the temperate English climate, these were rivers for the most part free from disease and in particular from malarial mosquitoes. Just as the tsetse fly continues to hold back the agrarian economies of Africa, so in the Middle Ages the malarial swamps of southern France or central Italy served as a barrier to prosperity from which England was for the most part exempt, though tertian malaria or ‘spring fever’ was endemic in certain fenland areas until the nineteenth
century. In the meantime, access to rivers and the sea meant that it was easier and cheaper, even in the twelfth century, to ship coals to London from Newcastle and the Durham coal fields, than it was, say, to sell Hampshire grain in the markets of Somerset, or Yarmouth herrings in Warwickshire. Water-borne trade itself served as a major encouragement to the development of English shipping and ultimately of English naval strength. From the eleventh century through to the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940, it was the small ships of the many dozens of havens and ports scattered along the southern and eastern coasts that served as the guarantors of England’s defence.