A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  William of Normandy’s own history to some extent mirrored that of his elder cousin in England, Edward the Confessor. Like Edward, William had been orphaned at an early age. His father, Robert of Normandy, had died in 1035, returning from a penitential pilgrimage to the Holy Land, when William was only seven or eight. Like Edward, William was dependent during his youth upon much older and more powerful men. Like Edward, William clearly suffered his own share of indignities, not least the murder of some of his closest counsellors in the ducal court, acts of public violence which suggest, like the murder in England of Edward’s brother or the upheavals of 1051–2, not only a society loosely governed under the law, but one in which the ruler struggled hard and often ineffectively to make his rulings stick. Such was the fear of assassination that William himself had to be hidden by night in the cottages of the poor, to escape the plots of his enemies.

  Here, however, the comparisons between England and Normandy end and the contrasts begin to assert themselves. The rulers of Normandy, like those of England, exercised the same late-Roman proofs of public authority: for example, jurisdiction over roads, public crimes such as murder, rape or arson, the minting of coins and the disposal of treasure. Even today, much of the authority invested in the person of Queen Elizabeth II – over the Queen’s highway, treasure trove, the Queen’s counsels and the law courts in which they act, the royal mint – derives from far more ancient precedents than the Roman emperors or even the rulers of ancient Babylon might have recognized as specifically ‘royal’ prerogatives. Yet, in the eleventh century, there was a considerable contrast between Normandy and England, both between the extent to which such prerogatives were exercised and between the instruments by which they were imposed.

  Normandy could boast nothing like the wealth of England. The English coinage, for example, with its high silver content, stamped with a portrait of the reigning English King, regularly renewed and reminted as part of a royal and national control over the money supply, has to be contrasted with the crude, debased and locally controlled coinage of pre-Conquest Normandy, at best stamped with a cross, at worst resembling the crudest form of base-metal tokens, the sort of token that we would use in a coffee machine rather than prize as treasure. In Normandy, the dukes had local officials, named ‘baillis’ or bailiffs, but nothing quite like the division of England into shires, each placed under a shire-reeve in theory answerable to the King for the exercise of royal authority through the meetings of the shire moot, the origins of the later county courts. In particular, whilst in England kings communicated directly with the shire by written instruments, known as writs, instructing that such and such an estate be granted to such a such a person, or that justice be done to X or Y in respect of their claims to land or rights, there is no evidence that the dukes of Normandy enjoyed anything like this sort of day-to-day control of local affairs. Not until the twelfth century were writs properly introduced to the duchy, fifty or more years after the Conquest and in deliberate imitation of more ancient English practice. Norman law itself was for the most part not customized or written down into law codes until at least the twelfth century. Above all, perhaps, the dukes of Normandy were not kings. Although they underwent a ceremony of investiture presided over by the Church, intended to emphasize their divinely appointed authority, they were not anointed with holy oil or granted unction as were the kings of England, raising kings but not dukes to the status of the priesthood and transforming them into divinely appointed ministers of God. The Bayeux Tapestry shows William of Normandy wielding the sword of justice, sometimes seated upon a throne, sometimes riding armed into battle. By contrast, both in the Tapestry and on his own two-sided seal, Edward the Confessor is invariably shown seated, enthroned, carrying not the sword but the orb and sceptre, far more potent symbols of earthly rule. William had to do his own fighting. Edward the Confessor, as an anointed king, had others to fight for him.

  Thus far, the contrasts between England and Normandy seem all to be to the advantage of England, a much-governed and more ancient kingdom. Yet there is another side to the story. Precisely because they were newcomers, parvenus, risen from the dregs of a Viking pirate army, the heirs of Rollo were spared much of the dead weight of tradition that tended to gather around any long-established dynasty. To take only the most obvious example here, in England no king could afford to ignore the established power of the great earldoms of Mercia, Wessex and Northumbria. Earls were in theory the appointed delegates of the King. In practice, when Edward the Confessor attempted to appoint his own men to earldoms – Ralph of Mantes to Herefordshire, Odda of Deerhurst to western Wessex, Tostig to Northumbria – the fury of local reaction was such that these appointments were either swiftly revoked or risked head-on confrontation with local interests. Normandy had a secular aristocracy, but it was one that had emerged much later, for the most part in direct association with the ruling dynasty, in most instances from the younger sons and cousins of the ducal family. By the 1050s, under William, most of the higher Norman aristocracy were the duke’s own cousins or half-brothers. This tended to intensify the rivalries within a single, all powerful family, and William faced far fiercer and more frequent rebellions against his rule than ever Edward the Confessor faced from the English earls. Yet the very ferocity of this competition tended to focus attention and an aura of authority upon William himself as successful occupant of the ducal throne. The more fighting there is over a title, the greater the authority that such a title tends to acquire. From both of the great crises of his reign, in 1046 when there was concerted rebellion against his rule in western Normandy, and again after 1051, when the malcontents within Normandy threatened to make common cause with outside forces including the counts of Anjou and the King of France, William emerged victorious. At the battles of Val-ès-Dunes in 1047, Mortemer in 1054, and Varaville in 1057, he himself triumphed over his enemies, in the process gaining not just an aura of invincibility but significant practical experience of warfare. Edward the Confessor, by contrast, for all his fury and petulance, had never fought a battle and emerged in 1052 from the one great political crisis of his reign with his authority dented rather than enhanced. There was no Norman equivalent to the Godwins, threatening to eclipse the authority of the throne.

  William of Normandy enjoyed distinct advantages, not only in respect of the secular aristocracy, but in his dealings with the Church. In England kings were anointed as Christ’s representatives on earth. Patronage of the greater monasteries and the appointment of bishops were both distinctly royal preserves. King and Church, Christian rule and nationhood had become indivisibly linked. Even in his own lifetime, Edward was being groomed for sanctity. As early as the 1030s, there is evidence that the King, by simple virtue of his royal birth, was deemed capable of working miracles and in particular of touching for the king’s evil (healing scrofula, a disfiguring glandular form of tuberculosis, merely by the laying on of his royal hands). There was nothing like this in Normandy. William, as contemporaries were only too keen to recall, was descended from ancestors who had still been pagans almost within living memory. Ducal patronage of the Church was itself a fairly recent phenomenon: William’s tenth-century ancestors had done more to loot than to build up the Norman Church. And, yet, in the century before 1066, it was this same ducal family that went on to ‘get religion’ and in the process refound or rebuild an extraordinary number of the monasteries of Normandy, previously allowed to collapse as a result of Viking raids.

  They also introduced new forms of the monastic life, above all through their patronage of outsiders: men such as John of Fécamp who wrote spiritual treatises for the widow of the late Holy Roman Emperor, and the Italian Lanfranc of Pavia, one of the towering geniuses of the medieval Church, first a schoolmaster in the Loire valley, later prior of Bec and abbot of St-Etienne at Caen in Normandy, promoted in 1070 as the first Norman archbishop of Canterbury.

  In England, the West Saxon kings might have their own royal foundations and their own close contacts with mon
asteries such as the three great abbey churches of Winchester, or Edward’s own Westminster Abbey, but members of the ruling dynasty were not promoted within the church. To become a bishop, a man had first to accept the tonsure, the ritual shaving of a small patch of scalp. Perhaps because the tonsure was associated with the abandonment of throne-worthiness (in the Frankish kingdoms it had been the traditional means, more popular even than blinding or castration, of rendering members of the ruling dynasty ineligible for the throne), there is little sign that any West Saxon prince was prepared to accept it.

  In Normandy, by contrast, William not only patronized the church and founded new monasteries, but promoted members of his own family as bishops. At Rouen, for example, the ecclesiastical capital of the duchy, Archbishop Robert II (989–1037), son of Richard I, Duke of Normandy, and founder of a dynasty of counts of Evreux, was succeeded by his nephew, Archbishop Mauger (1037–54), himself son of Duke Richard II. William the Conqueror’s half-brother, Odo, was promoted both as bishop of Bayeux, in all likelihood future commissioner of the Bayeux Tapestry, and as a major figure in ducal administration. As the Tapestry shows us, not only did Odo bless the Norman army before Hastings, but he rode into the battle in full chain mail. For priests to shed blood was regarded as contrary to their order. Odo therefore went to war brandishing not a sword or spear but a still very ferocious looking club. The Tapestry shows him at the height of battle, as its contemporary inscription tells us ‘urging on the lads’. In the aftermath, Odo was appointed Earl of Kent. His seal showed him on one side as a bishop, standing in traditional posture, tonsured, dressed in pontifical robes and carrying a crozier. On the other side, however, he is shown as a mounted knight riding into battle with helmet, lance and shield, unique proof of the position that he occupied, halfway between the worlds of butchery and prayer.

  William himself might not have been anointed as Duke of Normandy, but in the eyes of the Church he commanded perhaps an authority not far short of that wielded by the saintly Edward the Confessor. In particular, the fierce penitential regime of William and his father lent an aura of religiosity to what might otherwise be construed as their purely secular acts of territorial conquest. William’s father, Duke Robert, died whilst returning from a penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the ne plus ultra for anyone concerned to advertise their Christian piety and remorse. Jerusalem at this time, of course, was still firmly under Islamic rule. To visit it, and to walk in the places where Christ had trod, was both an arduous and an expensive undertaking. William himself, by marrying his own cousin, Matilda of Flanders (thereby forging an alliance with the greatest of the magnates on Normandy’s northern frontier), was obliged to undergo penance by the Church. It was penance, however, that both broadcast a particularly powerful image of the duke himself and paved the way for further acts of territorial expansion. To atone for his sins, William built the massive Benedictine monastery of St-Etienne at Caen. Matilda, at the same time, paid for the construction of a sister house, a no less massive monument on the other side of Caen, intended for nuns, the abbey of La Trinité. In the space between these two great monasteries, William laid out a vast ducal castle, surrounded by ramparts, the whole complex of abbeys and castle itself surrounded by a new town wall. As an advertisement of ducal power, the planning and construction of Caen took place on a truly epic scale. To lead his new abbey, William promoted the outsider Lanfranc: a clear bid to demonstrate his commitment to the reforming party within the Church as a whole, and a means of strengthening ties between Normandy and the reforming Church in Rome.

  By the 1060s, the Norman Church basked in papal approval. The English Church, however, became ever further severed from continental tendencies, not least through the promotion by Queen Edith of Stigand, Bishop of Winchester and a member of the Godwin affinity, as Archbishop of Canterbury. Thereafter he ruled both Canterbury and Winchester as a pluralist, against the dictates of the Church, and, more seriously still, blessed as archbishop of Canterbury not by the rightful pope of the reforming party but by a rival, whom the Roman aristocracy had briefly established on the papal throne. In the eye of the papacy, Stigand was a scandal. William of Normandy, by contrast, was later to claim that his invasion of England was undertaken as a holy war, intended to cleanse the polluted Anglo-Saxon Church and to bring enlightenment to a nation sunk in sin. The Pope, Alexander II, certainly sent William a banner, as a token of friendship and special favour. Whether Alexander realized that William would use this banner to lead his men in the conquest and slaughter of fellow Christians across the English Channel is another matter entirely. The banner, like William’s close relations with Rome, was a powerful tool of propaganda. Propaganda itself, however, does not necessarily accord with ‘truth’.

  Edward’s Death and the Eve of 1066

  So to 1066 itself, and the sudden conjunction of political crisis in England with Norman ambition and Norman military might. So far as we can tell, the reign of Edward the Confessor ended in chaos and confusion. The expulsion of the King’s earl, Tostig, from Northumbria, was followed by no effective royal counterattack. Edward may have raged against the treachery of the northerners, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that he raged, but he was powerless to act. His rage indeed may have brought on the final illness from which he died, at Westminster, on 5 January 1066. From here on, we can trust neither the English nor the Norman account of events, since both were written posthumously, after the Battle of Hastings, and with a clear intention to justify what took place.

  King Harold

  According to the English, and to some Norman sources, on his deathbed Edward commended both his widow Edith and his kingdom to the keeping of Harold Godwinson, Edith’s brother. Harold was duly crowned King, probably within a day or two of the late King’s death, but certainly not at Easter 1066, despite the fact that Easter was the traditional, some have argued immutable date of Anglo-Saxon coronations, being the feast of the risen Christ and therefore the most suitable feast-day for the crowning of Christ’s representatives on earth. Harold was crowned perhaps on 6 January, the feast of the Epiphany, associated with kingship since it marked the arrival of the Magi, the three wise men from the East, at Christ’s nativity. Even so, the failure to observe an Easter coronation suggests a sense of urgency, perhaps of panic, about Harold’s crowning. Not just the mythologized King Herod who had tricked the Magi, but the flesh and blood rulers of several northern European peoples were now likely to turn murderous eyes upon the English. The Bayeux Tapestry, as if to signal such panic, reverses its otherwise standard chronological narrative at this point, placing Edward’s funeral cortège before his death, and on this unique occasion superimposing two scenes, of deathbed and funeral, immediately before Harold’s coronation in a way that may have been intended to emphasise the speed and sudden disjunction of events. Under its depiction of the crowned Harold, the border of the Tapestry reveals a scene of three ships, unmasted, ghostly, yet clearly the threat of an invasion fleet that the English not only feared but expected. Harold himself is shown inclining his head to the right, as a courtier whispers in his ear news of the sighting of Halley’s Comet, always an omen of change and ill-fortune. As he listens, Harold’s crown tilts sideways, threatening to slip from his head. The portents here were far from favourable.

  From the moment of his crowning, Harold faced at least two threats of invasion. The first, led by his disgruntled brother Tostig, in alliance with Harold Hardrada, King of Norway, was both the first to materialize and the first to be suppressed. The Norwegian army was cut to pieces by Harold at Stamford Bridge, eight miles east of York, on 25 September, five days after their short-lived victory against the northern earls Edwin and Morcar at Fulford, just across the Ouse from the modern York racecourse. No one claimed that the Norwegian invasion was anything other than opportunistic, provoked no doubt by Harold Godwinson’s mishandling of his brother, Tostig.

  With the Norman invasion that burst upon England a few days later, things were rather different. Across
northern Europe, virtually everywhere except within Normandy itself, Duke William’s attack was treated as an act of violent usurpation, an unprovoked onslaught upon a Christian opponent, the rape rather than the conquest of England.

  Within Normandy, however, William’s propagandists rapidly got to work to justify the invasion according to the laws both of God and of man. Edward, so it was argued, had promised the throne to William since long before 1066 (a claim for which there is no real proof). Harold had sworn oaths to William, shown indeed on the Bayeux Tapestry, placing his hand on holy relics, perhaps in the presence of the consecrated host, the body of Christ, promising to support William’s claims. Harold may well have crossed to Normandy at some time shortly before King Edward’s death, but quite why and with what outcome remains unclear. Possibly he went to negotiate not over the succession but over the release of hostages, including his own younger brother, held by William apparently since 1052, given up by Earl Godwin not in respect of the succession but in the aftermath of his return to court as guarantors for his own future good behaviour in respect of Edward the Confessor. If so, if William were holding English hostages against the will of the English King, and if Harold was forced to swear an oath rather than volunteering to do so, then even under canon law and the tenets of the Church, nothing that Harold had been made to do in Normandy could be held against him afterwards. An oath sworn under compulsion, like a marriage into which either of the parties was forced, was not in any way to be considered binding. ‘He made me do it’ has always been an acceptable excuse for misbehaviour, whether in the playground or a court of law.

  In any event, and despite the subsequent Norman claims, Harold’s visit to northern France might not have been intended to take him to Normandy. Even the Bayeux Tapestry seems to imply that Harold’s ship drifted off course and that his landing in the county of Ponthieu, at the mouth of the Somme, was unplanned. Perhaps, rather than being sent to swear oaths to William, Harold went to France on his own account, to negotiate alliances with other northern French magnates, the Count of Boulogne perhaps, or the Flemings to whom his father, Godwin, had fled at the height of the crisis of 1051. Rather pathetically, one English source later alleged that Harold was not heading for France at all, but rather blown off course on a fishing trip along the Sussex coast. If so, and given that the Bayeux Tapestry shows Harold’s men loading hawks and hounds on board his ship – traditional aristocratic gifts offered to foreign princes – one has to wonder what sort of fish he was hoping to catch. What is perhaps most surprising about Harold’s brief period as king, from January to October 1066, is that he secured not only coronation but the apparent assistance of the other English earls, most notably the earls of Mercia, against both of the foreign threats now facing England. This does indeed suggest, contrary to Norman propaganda, that Harold’s claim to the throne was widely acknowledged and that the deathbed dispositions of Edward the Confessor were treated as a legitimate bestowal of the late King’s succession.