The limited resources of Edward the Confessor had ensured that, before 1066, the King struggled to keep pace with the power and wealth of his greatest subjects, above all with the Godwins. The combined wealth of the three greatest earls in England, before 1066, had been far more than anything that the King alone could muster. Hence Edward the Confessor’s dependence upon negotiation, in 1042 at the time of his succession, and again in 1051–2, when alliances with the earls had enabled him to exile Earl Godwin but thereafter failed to make that exile permanent. By contrast, after 1066 William ‘the Conqueror’ obtained more land, more wealth and more raw power than most other rulers in English or indeed in European history. Nothing in this was ‘feudal’, at least not in the sense in which French historians would apply the term to a society dominated by aristocratic privilege, tending towards the breakdown of public authority, poised on the cusp of a ‘feudal anarchy’ in which the wishes of the few prevail over the interests of the many. Were we to think of England in terms of this sort of feudalism, then it is clear that William did not introduce feudalism to England. On the contrary, by curbing the power of the over-mighty English earls, he strangled feudalism at birth.
European Connections
The idea that William brought England for the first time into proper or natural connection with European affairs is highly misleading. England, before 1066, had never been an island entirely sundered from the European main. During the century that preceded 1066, it had faced crises provoked by Danish, Norwegian, Norman and northern French neighbours. Its laws were a combination of Germanic and late Roman. Its Church, first implanted by Frankish missionaries, looked to Rome as its ultimate authority. Edward the Confessor built Westminster Abbey and dedicated it to St Peter in direct commemoration of Rome and the prince of the apostles. He was buried there in 1066 wearing eastern silks and a pectoral cross (or ‘encolpion’) clearly of Byzantine workmanship, carrying images of the crucifixion and housing a relic of the True Cross, itself advertised as the greatest relic of the Christian world, acquired for the city of Constantinople in the fourth century by Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine the Great, herself reputed to have been a native of Colchester in Essex.
Edward’s Queen Edith, daughter of Earl Godwin, patronized the German bishop of Wells, and may well have played a part in the election of other foreign bishops. In 1050, she had supported the removal of the south-western bishopric from Crediton to Exeter under the rule of the continentally educated bishop Leofric. Even Harold Godwinson had visited Rome and the Holy Roman Empire in Germany. His religious patronage was directed chiefly towards the canons of Waltham in Essex, living under a discipline derived from the reformed clergy of the Rhineland (the central region of the medieval Empire, named Lotharingia by association with Lothar, one of Charlemagne’s grandsons). To present Harold as patriotic defender of the national cause against the foreigner, William of Normandy, is significantly to miss the point. Harold’s own family owed its rise not to its Englishness but to the patronage of the Danish King Cnut. Harold’s brother, Tostig, had no qualms in making common cause with the Norwegian King, Harold Hardrada, and Tostig’s widow was subsequently remarried to Duke Welf of Bavaria, scion of one of the greatest aristocratic houses of eleventh-century Europe. The Battle of Hastings itself derived its name from a Sussex port where land already belonged to the monks of Fécamp, a Norman monastery which for much of the eleventh century had been ruled by a succession of Italian or Burgundian abbots.
If England, before 1066, was a great deal less isolated from Europe than is sometimes supposed, then afterwards it retained a peculiarity that does not accord with the generally accepted idea of a French-speaking aristocracy dragging the English reluctantly into the European limelight. Two great conflicts came to dominate the affairs of Europe in the late eleventh century: the disputes between popes and emperors (the so-called Investiture Contest), and the summoning of a crusade after 1095 to ‘liberate’ Jerusalem from the hands of the Islamic infidel. Normans, particularly the Normans of Sicily, played decisive roles in both of these conflicts. Englishmen, or indeed Norman lords with English connections, were almost entirely absent. It was the very isolation of England from the papal–imperial disputes of the 1070s and 80s, that rendered those disputes so bitter in England when they did belatedly cross the Channel. Then, as today, the English economy and English politics marched to a significantly different rhythm to that sounded elsewhere in Europe. Even the idea that the French language somehow ousted English as the mother-tongue of William’s new realm fails to account for the extraordinary way in which the English language itself mutated after 1066, and in which the Normans came to adopt an early form of Franglais in their daily dealings.
English Languages
The English had long been a bilingual, or even a trilingual people, speaking in various dialects of the Anglo-Saxon language inherited from their Germanic ancestors, writing in a highly stylized dialect of West Saxon that bore little relation to living speech (historians of language would call such a split identity ‘diglossic’), instructed in God’s mysteries and reserving many of their more profound thoughts for Latin, the language of the Church, and required frequently to deal with peoples from Wales, Cornwall, the Scottish lowlands or Cumbria, who themselves spoke a bewildering variety of Celtic dialects. True, only those at the upper end of society were forced actively to engage with this multitude of languages. As throughout history, the ability to communicate in more than one language has always been one of the accomplishments of the educated and powerful. Even so, like French peasants who even today can converse both in patois and in standard French, the peasantry of England would have been forced to adopt at least two registers of speech, to neighbours and to outsiders. The accents of Newcastle or Yarmouth would have been as incomprehensible in Kent as the King’s West Saxon writings were gobbledegook to the inhabitants of Derbyshire. The tendency when dealing with the Middle Ages is to assume that we are dealing with a more ‘primitive’ society than our own. On the contrary, it is clear that regional diversity encouraged a more sophisticated approach to the comprehension of language than anything which the modern BBC would credit to the British population. In our crudely post-Freudian age, those who speak in two accents, or who reserve particular thoughts for particular languages, are likely to be dismissed as frauds or victims of an ‘identity crisis’. The Middle Ages knew better than this. In the eleventh century, not only the elite but anyone living on the frontiers with a region of different language or dialect would have been required to exhibit the same sort of skills that today we assume to be confined to ‘impersonators’ or to the bi- or trilingual inhabitants of a country such as Switzerland.
After 1066, French was added to this already rich mixture. Rather than entirely replacing English, either amongst the elite or the peasantry, French acquired an English flavour in England just as the English now acquired an entire new vocabulary of Franglais. To English speakers William might be ‘royal’ in his French pomp, but he was still an English ‘king’. His Norman ‘barons’ ate French ‘mutton’, but it came from English ‘sheep’ owned by a ‘lord’ who ate his ‘beef’, whilst the lesser cuts, like ‘ox tail’, were left to his English servants. The English ‘horses’ of the Normans made them ‘knights’, rather than ‘chevaliers’, and the chief local representatives of royal authority, although assigned to Francophone ‘counties’, also known from the old English as ‘shires’, were named ‘earls’ not ‘counts’, ‘sheriffs’ rather than ‘vicomtes’.
At Peterborough, despite or perhaps precisely because of a massive and deliberate implantation of Norman knights under a new Norman abbot, the monks continued to maintain their own version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written in the language of Alfred or of Aethelred for a century after the ‘Conquest’ of 1066. By the time that this archaic relic was finally discontinued, in or shortly after 1154, new forms of English were already being recorded, not just for use by the illiterate peasantry but for the entertainment of
those far higher up the social scale, written in the new Middle English tongue that made its first appearance less than a century after Hastings and whose chief characteristic was its strong regional diversity. This was an English far closer to the language actually spoken in the shires than the highly formalized Anglo-Saxon of Wessex used in most vernacular writing before 1066. Far from destroying the English language, the Norman Conquest vastly enriched and transformed it.
In our haste to uncover the roots of the modern English language, we should not ignore the effects that Anglicization had upon French. The Normans of 1066 already spoke and wrote a language that was subtly different from that of the inhabitants of other parts of France. The Conquest greatly heightened this distinction, so much so that within a hundred years it is questionable whether a Norman or French baron learning his French in England would have been anything but a laughing stock had he spoken in his native accents in Paris or the fairs of Champagne. Dialects carry with them a multitude of social and economic presuppositions, so that the assumptions made by a modern German about someone speaking in Dutch or Viennese dialect or Swiss-German will be clouded by all manner of cultural assumptions, just as the accents of modern-day Devon or Glasgow or Essex evoke very different reactions amongst English-speakers. In the twelfth century, even the son of an English king, of French birth but brought up in England, was apparently mocked because he spoke French not after the school of Paris but after that of Marlborough in Wiltshire. Chaucer’s prioress, two centuries later, was equally ridiculed for speaking French after the school of Stratford-atte-Bow, perhaps the first recorded instance of an Essex or estuarial accent, ‘because French of Paris was to her unknown’.
Like the English in India, not only did the Normans in England acquire a series of English loan words, the eleventh-century equivalent of the ‘bungalows’ and ‘tiffins’ of the Raj, but the language which they themselves bequeathed to their English subjects as Norman French was itself just as strange and foreign to Frenchmen of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as is the English spoken today in many foreign call-centres. By 1200, Norman French itself was fossilizing into a high-status language, used in noble speech and writing, rather like the written language of Anglo-Saxon Wessex: no longer a true vernacular, but a high-status acquisition taught in schools and learned from books rather than from living speech.
Norman Efficiency
Finally, the idea that 1066 ushered in a new phase of Anglo-Norman ‘efficiency’, with (in the words of the nineteenth-century sage and reactionary Thomas Carlyle) the ‘pot-bellied equanimity’ of the Anglo-Saxons easily mastered by the ‘heroic toil’ of their new Norman drill serjeants, is itself badly in need of rethinking. The military caste of the Norman Conquest has undoubtedly led to the portrayal of the Normans themselves as a warrior nation, dressed in chain mail even when in bed, plotting lordly proto-Thatcherite schemes to impose order upon a chaotic society. Out went the hobbit burrows of the Anglo-Saxons and in came the newly pre-fabricated efficiency of castles, counting houses and dungeons. Norman hard tack was substituted for Anglo-Saxon cakes and ale.
In reality, the myth of Norman administrative efficiency is precisely that: a myth. To cope with Viking attack, Anglo-Saxon England had developed a sophisticated concept of social responsibility in which many within society were required to contribute to the burden of society’s defence. The King served as collector of taxes such as the Danegeld (intended to buy off the Danes), Heregeld for the payment of ships and their crews, pontage for the building and maintenance of bridges, and wall-money (later known as ‘murage’) for the building and upkeep of town defences. By contrast, after 1066, the tendency was for the new Norman kings to treat such revenues as perquisites from which their own expenses could be met and, so far as their greater lords were concerned, as obligations from which favoured friends might be exempted. The outcome was a rapid decline in the capacity of taxation to raise the funds necessary for the task in hand, and consequently the imposition of an ever heavier burden upon an ever dwindling base of potential taxpayers.
There are parallels here with the history of taxation in the last years of the Roman Empire, when increasing demands for taxation were placed upon an ever dwindling number of tax payers. Thanks largely to the fact that England experienced no threats comparable to that posed by the Vikings to the kings of Wessex, or by the Germanic tribes to the Roman Empire, public works after 1066 somehow muddled through. Responsibility for bridges, for example, particularly for those such as Rochester’s, which had an annoying tendency to fall down, was placed unfairly but with some degree of success upon the local people with most interest in maintaining communications, which in practice meant those owning land on either side of the bridge. This is nonetheless far from arguing that the state became more rather than less interventionist after 1066. On the contrary, in many respects, save when the King himself could hope to gain from the proceeds of taxation, justice or public works, there was less attention paid after 1066 to even such seeming social necessities as the maintenance of roads and bridges, which were, to a very large extent, as before the seventh century, left to take care of themselves.
Domesday
Set against this miniaturist view of the Norman state, we have one massive and seemingly incontrovertible piece of evidence: Domesday Book, still proudly displayed in the Public Record Office in London as the greatest archival monument to the Norman Conquest. As is widely known, there are at least two books now stored in the Public Records described as ‘Domesday’: ‘Great’ Domesday and ‘Little’ Domesday, the first covering most of England and parts of Wales, the second covering East Anglia in particularly close detail. A third volume, housed in Exeter Cathedral, known as ‘Exon Domesday’, appears to supply an earlier stage of the survey of the western counties, which were later revised in Great Domesday. Other such ‘satellites’ record various stages in the inquest as it proceeded in the various part of England. As has become apparent in recent years, we badly need to distinguish the Domesday survey itself from the ‘Book’ in which it resulted. As has become equally apparent, the survey would have been inconceivable had it not been for Anglo-Saxon precedent. Far from testifying to Norman efficiency, Domesday actually reveals an enormous amount about the wealth and sophistication of the old English state. The fact, for example, that every manor could be assessed at a valuation applied not only to 1086, the year in which the survey was made, but to the date of the death of Edward the Confessor in 1066, and that such valuations were available for each of the shires of England, speaks volumes about the sophistication of Anglo-Saxon record keeping, and in particular about the need by the Anglo-Saxon state to maintain regular geld rolls, reporting the potential financial obligations of each local unit of assessment. Had Domesday Book not survived, it is highly unlikely that historians would be willing to credit its existence. Certainly, no such detailed accumulation of information survives for any other part of eleventh-century Europe. We would need to look to ancient Rome for a similar level of sophistication and to eleventh-century China for a contemporary regime capable of compiling records on this massive scale and with this degree of detail. Both the extent and the detail of Domesday are chiefly functions of Anglo-Saxon traditions of local government and record keeping rather than of Norman ‘efficiency’.
The fact that the survey was made at all testifies to the limited number of royal officials involved in its making. If such surveys were to be completed, they were best made in haste. Anything more deliberate or involving larger numbers of officials was likely to remain unfinished, as kings were to discover in the thirteenth century, when both King John and King Edward I embarked upon much more ambitious surveys than Domesday, both of them so extensive and involving so many pairs of hands that neither was ever completed. Domesday as passed down to us was made by about seven circuits of commissioners, each comprising no more than half a dozen persons, written up in the case of Great Domesday Book, for most of the shires of England, by a single editorial hand. In short, i
t took a ‘government’ of less than forty persons, virtually none of whom was permanently in ‘government’ employ, to make both the survey and the book. What we have is evidence of a tiny and hence easily managed bureaucracy, not of a massive apparatus of state. Nor was Domesday by any means a complete survey of England: it omits most parts north of the Mersey and the two largest cities, Winchester and London. Even within those parts that were surveyed, the apparent monotonous uniformity of each entry – who owns what land, who owned it previously, what is it worth, what was it worth in 1066, how many hides of land, how many tenants, mills, acres of woodland or pasture, etc. – masks very considerable variation between one circuit of surveyors and another, and even between one estate and another. It is apparent, for example, that the greater ecclesiastical barons, such as the bishop of Worcester or the abbot of Bury St Edmunds, were responsible for making their own returns and in the process for exaggerating or playing down their own particular rights and resources.
A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485 Page 7