A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  Far from being a monument to Norman efficiency, Domesday is a highly fallible resource made possible only by the solid Anglo-Saxon foundations upon which it was based.

  Perhaps most remarkably of all, despite the identification of its principal scribe as a clerk in the service of the bishop of Durham, despite intensive statistical analysis of the social and economic information that it supplies, and despite more than a hundred years of scholarship that has produced a small library of books and articles devoted to nothing but Domesday, we still have no very certain or agreed idea of why the survey was made or what purpose it was intended to serve. Was it, as early commentators supposed, a Geld Book, intended as part of a reassessment of national taxation? Was it linked to the invasion scare of 1085 and to the need to assess individual baronial resources so as to billet vast numbers of troops in a realm threatened by the King of Denmark? Was it intended as a vast confirmation charter, recording in documentary form the state of landholdings built up piecemeal since the 1060s, in order for the holders of these estates to render homage to the King, by oaths taken at Salisbury in the summer of 1086? None of these explanations has proved entirely satisfactory.

  What is clear is that neither the survey nor the book marked an end to the process of Norman colonization in England, and that far from being some sort of valedictory offering or successful shareholder statement presented to King William towards the close of his reign, Domesday testifies to a real flesh and blood process of conquest and to real suffering on the part of those whose land was conquered and who now, in many cases as jurors to the inquest, were called upon to report the process of their own dispossession. What one modern historian has described as the ‘tormented voices’ of history’s poor and put-upon do occasionally whisper their sad tales from Domesday’s folios. Such is the case of the Buckinghamshire tenant of William fitz Ansculf, who according to the local jurors held his land at Marsh Gibbon ‘harshly and wretchedly’. The most detailed documentary monument to Norman success is itself a mausoleum to the vanished hopes of the Anglo-Saxons without whose assistance it could never have been made.

  Fate or Accident

  There is a natural tendency when writing about the past to assume an inevitability or internal logic to past events, that what was had to be. Attempts to challenge such comfortable assumptions generally take the form of ‘counterfactuals’, or ‘what ifs?’, of which, for England after 1066, two questions pose themselves ahead of all others: what might have happened had Harold won the Battle of Hastings, and what would have been the outcome had Normandy and England remained divided realms despite William the Conqueror? The first of these questions invites images of a long-haired line of Harold’s descendents, buoyed up by victory at Hastings, but surely, in the longer term, brought low either by foreign invaders (the King of Norway, the King of Denmark, the Count of Boulogne, or any others of those who, even before 1066, had expressed an interest in acquiring the wealth of England), or by civil war provoked by the Godwins’ own hubristic hoarding of wealth. Ireland might provide an apt comparison here. Theoretically united by the late eleventh century under a race of native high kings, one of whom is reputed to have fought alongside Tostig at Stamford Bridge, Ireland was in practice divided between the various claimants to high kingship, which led, sooner rather than later, to foreign intervention and, a century after Hastings, to a full-scale English invasion. The destinies of Scotland and Wales, as we shall see, followed a similar pattern. The eleventh and twelfth centuries, indeed, can be regarded in general as a period during which European and above all French traditions of lordship were extended across the North Sea world, not just through the Norman conquest of England, but through the conversion of Iceland to Christianity, the Danish conquest of Norway, and the forced incorporation of the Baltic regions of Prussia, Lithuania and Sweden into European affairs.

  The Godwinsons were not entirely exterminated by the Norman victory in 1066. Though Harold, Leofwine and Gyrth, sons of Earl Godwin, were all killed at Hastings, three weeks after the death of their brother Tostig at Stamford Bridge, Harold left a mother, at least two women claiming to be his widow and several children by both of these marriages. In 1068, his mother fled to Flatholme in the Bristol Channel and thence into exile at the court of her nephew, Svein of Denmark. Harold’s sons by his first marriage attempted armed landings from Ireland in 1068 and 1069. A son by his second marriage, also named Harold, was as late as 1098 engaged in attacks by the Norse King Magnus ‘Barefoot’ Olafson against the Norman settlers of Anglesey. Meanwhile, Harold’s daughter Gytha had been married to Vladimir Monomakh, prince of Kiev, becoming sister-in-law to the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry IV, kinswoman to the emperors of Byzantium, and the begetter of several dynasties of princes and princesses across Russia. There is some suggestion that Harold, via Gytha and her Russian offspring, was the ancestor not only of the future queen Isabella of England, wife of King Edward II, but of the composer Modest Mussorgsky and the aristocratic Russian anarchist, Peter Kropotkin. Another of Harold’s daughters, lover of Count Alan Rufus of Brittany, gave birth to a daughter who married into the Norman family of Aincourt and thus produced a minor line of Nottinghamshire gentry, more than happy, within forty years of Hastings, to commemorate their English royal ancestry.

  At much the same time that the Aincourts were raising a funeral monument to Harold’s granddaughter, Harold himself reappeared in England, or so it was alleged. Far from dying at Hastings, being interred on the seashore at the high tide mark or carried off for royal burial at his foundation of Waltham in Essex, he had recovered from his wounds and, after a period of continental wandering, returned to live as a hermit outside Dover, eventually moving to Chester where he died in 1176 or 1177, presumably aged about 170, his identity confided to only a close circle of initiates. As late as 1332, a Welsh chronicler reported that the body of Harold, dressed in golden spurs and crown, had been found at Chester, still incorrupt and smelling as sweetly as the day on which it was buried: a clear sign that Harold was now amongst God’s saints. Such reports fit into a common pattern of survival myth that can be traced from the legends of King Arthur, to ideas of the survival of members of the Russian imperial family after 1917, of Adolf Hitler after 1945, or even of Elvis Presley restored, beyond the grave, to perfect voice and waistline. Ultimately, such legends derive from the love of a good story and to some extent from religious impulses, specifically from the idea of Christ the risen king, triumphing over death. What is most interesting about the survival myth of King Harold is that it should have been confined to Chester and a very narrow audience: those disconcerted by the new style of kingship pioneered after the 1150s by Henry II. If in Wales Harold was remembered as a saint, in England he was commemorated, not as a threat to William I and his heirs, but chiefly as a mighty warrior against the Welsh. Many inscribed stones had been raised by him on the Welsh Marches, so it was alleged, still visible when Gerald of Wales toured the region in the 1180s, stating that ‘Here Harold defeated the Welsh’. To this extent, both the Welsh and English began to take comfort from Harold’s memory. Harold himself, meanwhile, had become an irrelevance. Rather than threaten the foundations of Norman or Plantagenet kingship, he and his family had been fully subsumed within English myth.

  Far more intriguing from a counterfactual perspective is the question of what would have happened had William of Normandy died soon after 1066, leaving England and Normandy once again to go their own separate ways. Here, no doubt, much the same would have happened as in the reign of King Cnut: a brief period of North Sea imperialism, the promotion of various foreigners to land and power in England, but thereafter the rapid collapse of this empire and a restoration of the status quo. It is here that the truly momentous nature of the changes in English society after 1066 come into focus. There seems little doubt that, to begin with, William’s intention was to govern England from Normandy, rather as Cnut had ruled from Denmark, treating England as an imperial fiefdom subject to foreign control. William had already show
n a willingness in Maine, where he had extended his authority, to work in harmony with the local aristocracy who retained their lands and wealth, albeit under a new Norman administration. Like Julius Caesar before him (and we should remember here that there were many at William’s court who had read Caesar’s Gallic Wars), William used the English earls as local ‘feodati’ to control English tribal loyalties. Meanwhile, he retained a number of the old king’s officials, most notably the chancellor, Regenbald, who now issued writs and charters in the name of King William just as he had previously issued them for King Edward and King Harold, composed both in Latin and in the English vernacular. At Christmas 1066, William was crowned in the old English style albeit, like Harold, in Westminster rather than at Winchester, the traditional coronation church of the West Saxons. It is symptomatic of William’s later difficulties that the Norman soldiers standing guard outside the coronation misinterpreted the shouts of acclamation raised by the English assembly within, assuming that the crowd was baying for his blood. A massacre of the English by the Normans was only narrowly averted.

  Rebellion

  After 1066, there were numerous rebellions or threats of rebellion in England, and almost as many invasion scares. The widespread fear of an English uprising, or that Danish, Flemish or Irish war bands were about to repeat William’s coup at Hastings, tells us a great deal about the insecurities and guiltridden nature of the first twenty years of Norman rule. A millennium later, and Hastings appears as a mighty and permanent paragraph break in English history. At the time, there was no guarantee that the victors of Hastings would not themselves be swept away in the subsequent chaos of plunder and revenge. In fact, none of the rebellions or invasions attempted after 1066 amounted to much. Their failure has been blamed upon the incompetence or churlish indifference of the English themselves, with Carlyle’s heroic Norman toil once again triumphing over Anglo-Saxon ‘pot-bellied sloth’. In fact, the failure of the English resistance can be traced to a number of different causes. It was poorly coordinated, reminding us of the deep personal and regional divisions that had long been apparent in English society. It was launched by families that had themselves been traumatized by the events at Hastings and which in many cases had already been robbed of their strongest or most dynamic male warriors. In a single day at Hastings, William had cut off not only England’s head but its strong forearm.

  The outcome was a series of rebellions, inadequately prepared and poorly led, beginning at Exeter in 1068, via risings in the north in 1069 brutally suppressed by William, through to the so-called revolt of the earls in 1075, when a rising by the Northumbrian Earl Waltheof, the Breton, Ralph, Earl of East Anglia, and Roger, earl of Hereford, was decisively crushed by King William’s loyal viceroy, Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, without the King even having to set foot in England. This did not entirely end resistance. As late as 1085, there were fears that Cnut IV of Denmark, cousin of the late King Harold and son of Danish King Svein Estrithsson, who had attempted invasions of England in both 1069 and 1070, would mount a major expedition to England in league with his father-in-law, Count Robert of Flanders. In the remote fenlands, at Peterborough in 1070, and then in a final desperate stand at Ely in 1071, a local landowner named Hereward earned a heroic reputation for himself as a captain of English ‘freedom-fighters’. Like the Jews in their great fortress at Masada in the histories of Josephus (one of the most frequently read ancient histories, not least because it appeared to supply an alternative history of Christ’s Judea to that available from the Bible), Hereward and his men were forced to watch from Ely as the Normans slowly built a causeway towards them, eventually taking the island with great bloodshed. According to the later semi-fictionalized account of these events, known as the Deeds of Hereward, Hereward himself was pardoned by King William. Another early historian, however, tells us that he was murdered in France by a band of disgruntled Norman soldiers. In any event, like Harold Godwinson, Hereward very rapidly faded from reality into myth. According to the Deeds of Hereward, one of his first acts of heroism was to fight with a ferocious bear, offspring of one of the last talking bears in the north, from whose acts of rape were descended the kings of Norway. After that as an introduction, anyone who believes much else in the Deeds of Hereward does so very much at their peril.

  English rebellion itself slowly faded from violent reality to distantly remembered legend. Modern historians, who like to speculate on what might have happened in 1940 had the Germans crossed the Channel, may find the events of the 1070s instructive. The English did attempt resistance, and very brave resistance it must have been. William the Conqueror, for all his claims to be the heir to Caesar or Charlemagne, was a brutal enemy. In the 1050s, when the men of Alençon in southern Normandy had rebelled against his ducal rule, manning the walls of their town and banging on pelts to taunt William for his ancestry as a tanner’s bastard, William exacted a vicious revenge, having their hands and feet cut off. In the winter of 1069, when he led an army across the Pennines to suppress northern resistance, almost unimaginable horrors were unleashed: pillage, deliberate starvation, all of the more ghastly accompaniments to military action against a civilian population. This was a war against English terrorists, conducted with all the brutality that such wars tend to engender. According to the chronicler Orderic Vitalis, himself of mixed birth as the son of an English mother and a Norman father, raised in Shropshire and later a monk of St-Evroult in Normandy, this ‘harrying of the north’ was a crime in which William succumbed to the cruellest promptings of revenge, condemning more than 100,000 Christian men, women and children to death by starvation, besides countless others slain by fire or the sword. Though Orderic’s statistics are not to be relied upon, before the days of war-crimes tribunals or the Geneva Convention, brutality and terror were not disguised but, on the contrary, deliberately advertised as the hallmarks of successful warfare.

  William certainly brought a brutal enthusiasm to the task in hand, but it is arguable that the English themselves were inured to brutality. The north of England, even before 1066, had seethed with vengeance killings and blood feud between the houses of Bamburgh and York. Even at the English royal court, there had been murders and conspiracies that rendered England in many ways a far less chivalrous society than the supposedly brutal society of pre-Conquest Normandy. With their songs of Roland and Charlemagne, it is arguable the Normans were already acquiring a veneer of chivalry and polite manners, imported for the most part from further south, from the princely courts of Aquitaine and ultimately from Spain, from the court of the Arab caliphs. It was the distant civilizing influence of Islam in the eleventh century which ultimately did most to smooth away the brutalities of European warfare. In particular, wars between equals were henceforth to be conducted openly and according to some sense of legal propriety. Peasants and lesser peoples might be tortured, starved and treated as the brute animals that they were perceived to be, but women, children and high status prisoners were not deliberately to be harmed. Even the most significant of noble enemies were to be imprisoned or ransomed, not mutilated or murdered.

  These were rules obeyed as much in the breach as the observance. William did not order the execution of any close member of the ruling dynasty of Wessex or even of the Godwinsons. Indeed, he seems to have striven to preserve a fiction of courtesy, even when members of these families were caught in the most blatant of conspiracies. But when Earl Waltheof of Northumbria rebelled in 1075, the outcome was judicial execution. Waltheof’s beheading was treated in some circles as an act of martyrdom, yet another reason, perhaps, for William to tread a more chivalrous path in future, to deny rebels either the crown of martyrdom or the oxygen of publicity. Henceforth, for unmitigated brutality we would need to turn away from civil war or disputes between Christian knights, to the frontiers of Wales or the more distant parts of Scotland and Ireland. Here, the Normans behaved as if the local population lay quite outside the rules of Christian warfare. Being barbarians, who themselves failed to observe the
chivalric niceties, such peoples were to be suppressed with maximum prejudice. Long before American frontiersmen invented the rituals of scalping, English soldiers on the Welsh Marches had turned head hunter. In the early 1060s, Harold Godwinson had sent the head of the Welsh King Gruffydd to Edward the Confessor. After 1066, this brutal trophy-collecting remained a regular feature of Anglo-Welsh warfare. By the 1230s, the English crown was paying a bounty of a shilling a head for all hostile Welshmen decapitated on the Marches.

  Collaboration

  In England, meanwhile, the earliest phase of violent pillage after 1066 eventually yielded place to accommodation and collaboration. The English themselves were tamed. They were also renamed. The new spirit of collaboration is perhaps most clearly marked in personal naming patterns adopted after 1066. Even within families of pure English descent, the Alfreds, Aethelreds and Edwards of the 1060s, within twenty years were naming their sons Geoffrey, Richard and above all William, adopting the names of England’s new Norman master race. By the 1170s, so ubiquitous were such names that the eldest son of King Henry II was able to hold a special session of his Christmas court at which only men named William were allowed entrance. There were more than 110 knights at this feast. How many English children, one wonders, might have been christened Napoleon or Adolf had later invasion plans come to fruition? How many Caribbean children might not now be named Wesley, Washington or Winston were it not for the accidents of imperialism?