Only in the remoter parts of England, and in the lowest levels of society, did old English personal names survive. Cumberland in the twelfth century could still boast men named Uhtred, Gamel or Orm, according to pre-Conquest tradition. One of these Orms, a priest from the East Midlands, wrote what today is the very first surviving book composed in the new Middle English, a highly indigestible collection of rhyming homilies known as the ‘Ormulum’. In East Anglia, likewise, old English names survived. The shrine of St William of Norwich was attended, from the 1140s onwards by a succession of pilgrims with names like Lewin, Godric, Gilliva, Godiva, Glewus, Colobern, Godwin Creme and Stanard Wrancbeard: names that are defiantly English rather than Norman, and which transport us to a world far removed from the cosmopolitan fashions of the Anglo-Norman court. At the court, no son of a king of England received an English baptismal name for nearly two hundred years after 1066. Then in the 1230s, things began to change.
Reverse snobbery inclines today’s upper classes to name their children Harry or Jack or Gus, favouring estuarial earthiness over parvenu pretension. The Right Honourable Anthony Wedgwood Benn Viscount Stansgate is transformed into Tony Benn the people’s friend. In the 1230s, a combination of piety and patriotism led the English King Henry III to turn away from Norman or French to English naming patterns. Henry’s eldest sons, themselves the great-great-great-great-grandsons of William the Conqueror, were named Edward and Edmund, in commemoration of Edward the Confessor, venerated at Westminster, and St Edmund, king and martyr, of Bury St Edmunds, the greatest royal saints of the Anglo-Saxon past. Perhaps nothing so clearly marks closure to the violence and inter-racial strife of the Norman Conquest than the fact that in 1272, two hundred years after the death of Edward the Confessor, one of these English-named sons of Henry III, King Edward I, ascended the English throne.
The Cataclysm of the Conquest
In the meantime, we should never underestimate the cataclysm that overwhelmed English society after 1066. The phrase ‘The Norman Conquest’ should not be allowed to reduce events to euphemistic miniature, masking a period of violence and expropriation never to be repeated in English history, even at the height of the Tudor ‘revolution’ of the 1520s or the Civil War of the 1640s. The ‘Conquest’ after 1066 invites comparison not so much with the later history of England as with the nineteenth-century ‘Scramble for Africa’, with England as the land raped and pillaged by foreign colonialists. In part through simple greed, in part from fear of an English backlash, the victors of Hastings very rapidly shifted from accommodation to conquest. Within twenty years, they had dispossessed all but a tiny number of the greater English landholders. Our chief reference point here, the Domesday survey of 1086, makes plain that, by the 1080s, mostly during the 1070s, something like ninety per cent of land held in 1066 by English thegns or English lords had been seized by King William and his followers.
The process of seizure was neither uniform nor well-documented. Some of the greater honours carved out from the spoils of 1066 were centrally organized. Thus in Sussex, guarding the Channel approaches, in Holderness, protecting the Humber estuary from the threat from Scandinavia, or in Cheshire and the Welsh Marches, looking towards the threat from the Welsh and the Irish, massive new estates were created for William’s most trusted followers. The King’s half-brothers Robert of Mortain and Odo of Bayeux obtained vast swathes of land, for Robert in Devon, Cornwall and Dorset, for Odo in Kent. Hugh of Avranches was granted not only Chester and the northern parts of the Welsh March but land in twenty English counties, the origins of the future great earldom of Chester. Roger of Montgomery, another of King William’s closest lieutenants, scooped not only two of the new divisions of Sussex, known appropriately enough as the Sussex ‘rapes’ (from the Anglo-Saxon word for the ‘rope’ which marked out the meeting place of a local court), but a large part of Shropshire and the town of Shrewsbury, protecting the central Welsh Marches. All of these estates, known then and since as ‘honours’, were royally approved. The honours system, then as now, depended upon the crown. Today it involves the bestowal of medals and titles. In the 1060s and for many centuries thereafter it involved the much more solid resource of land.
Even so, not all of the great post-Conquest honours were created or even necessarily sanctioned by the King. In some parts of England, in Yorkshire, for example, following the brutal harrying of the north, equally vast estates were carved out by Norman lords acting on their own initiative, grabbing what they could, evicting the former English landlords, and where necessary defending their plunder against other Normans who might otherwise seize the spoils. This was a Darwinian struggle, in which dog ate dog. It was still in full progress as late as 1086, when the Domesday survey reveals large numbers of manors still disputed between two or more Norman lords. Indeed, one purpose behind Domesday may have been the identification and regulation of such disputes, with the survey, made as the result of cooperation between king and barons, being intended to draw a line under the chaos of the 1060s and 70s and to lend a veneer of royal approval to a process that, at the time, had lain far beyond the control of the King, in the hands of many dozens of greedy and unscrupulous local land-grabbers. If the Battle of Hastings marked a Norman victory rather than a Norman ‘Conquest’, then in the 1070s and 80s there was not so much a single Conquest as a whole host of conquerors seizing what spoils they could. This was the greatest seizure of loot in English history, speedier and even more intense than the process by which the Angles, Saxons and Jutes had conquered post-Roman Britain five centuries before.
In the process, many of the territorial divisions of late Anglo-Saxon England were melted down and entirely reforged. Some of the Norman newcomers laid claim to the estates of particular English lords. In Northamptonshire, for example, the lands of an Englishman named Bardi were claimed virtually in their entirety by the new Norman bishop of Lincoln. Those of a woman named Gytha formed the nucleus of the new Northamptonshire honour of William Peverel, those of a thegn named Northmann, the estate of Robert de Bucy. More often, however, the tenurial map of 1066 was simply torn up and new estates created from the manors and lands of a diversity of Anglo-Saxon landholders. In Suffolk for example, the lands previously held by one of the greatest of Anglo-Saxon thegns, Eadric of Laxfield, were divided between at least four major new Norman honours. In the process, there was a massive transfer of land out of the hands of the late Anglo-Saxon earls and into those of the King and his immediate circle. Whereas the landed resources of Edward the Confessor had been dwarfed by those of the Godwinsons and the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, King William by 1086 was far and away the richest landowner in England, with ten times the wealth even of his half-brothers who themselves, with £5,000 of land, held twice as much as the £2,400 of the next richest landholding family, the Montgomeries.
The outcome was a total reversal of the baronial stranglehold over royal action that had done so much to create the inertia and tensions of the 1050s and early 1060s. By the 1080s, it was the King rather than his earls and barons who held the clear balance both of wealth and power. The more successful baronial families acquired estates across England, scattered collections of manors, rents and lands which thereafter had somehow to be controlled by a single lord. One unintended consequence of this shattering of the landscape into many thousands of family holdings was to emphasize and enhance the significance of royal authority. The primitive institutions of the state and of royal government, the sheriff, the hundred bailiff and the courts of the hundred and county were the means by which an intensely localized society could be made to respond to the needs of landlords with estates now scattered not only across England but on either side of the Channel.
Barons holding directly from the King are known as tenants-in-chief. They could be super rich, modestly wealthy or relatively poor. Thus there was a vast distinction to be drawn between a man like Hugh of Avranches, ancestor of the later earls of Chester, with over £1,000 of land recorded in Domesday Book, and a humble serjean
t like the ancestor of Roland the farter, confined to a few hundred acres of land in the Suffolk manor of Hemingstone, held for the service of making a leap, a whistle and a fart before the King every year on Christmas Day. The services attached to such serjeanties are often peculiar – keeping the king’s hounds or hawks, polishing the king’s boar spear – and some have survived even into modern times. At the coronation of King Edward VII in 1911, for example, the Dymoke family continued to advance claims to serve as King’s champion. The office of champion was a relatively modern one, first recorded at the coronation of Richard II in 1377. Even so, serjeanties held for service as baker, cook and crossbowman were already in existence by the 1080s.
Such men were small fry, of course. England after 1066 was dominated by between a dozen and twenty great families, many of them closely related to the King. Between them, these families, of which about a dozen were in due course granted title as earl, controlled more than half of the wealth of England. Inequality has always been an English characteristic, and the vast disparities in landed wealth between rich and poor were far greater in the eleventh century than in the early twentieth century when inheritance taxes were first devised, in theory as a means of levelling the playing field. As earls, the first being the King’s half-brothers Odo, Earl of Kent, and Robert, Count of Mortain, and his cousin William fitz Osbern, Earl of Hereford, such men had an obligation to oversee the King’s affairs in their own particular region or county. In practice, the duties of an earldom were far outweighed by its privileges, save at moments of particular national crisis.
Beneath the tenants-in-chief, reaching downwards to the humblest of freemen and those barely distinguishable from peasants, stretched a vast array of lesser tenants, holding sometimes, as with the serjeants, directly from the King, more often from one or other of the greater tenants-in-chief. The most significant of these subtenants were the knights, holding their lands in return for military service. By the last decade of the eleventh century, such landholdings were already being described as ‘fees’ or ‘knights’ fees’, and in theory their holders were obliged to send a knight for forty days of military service each year whenever summoned to do so by their lord. Once again, however, theory and practice swiftly diverged. Some knights’ fees represented extensive landed estates, the bare minimum required to support a knight, his horse and his armour being assessed at about £5 of land. In practice, almost as soon as the knight’s fee first emerges into the light of day, in the returns to a survey conducted on the estates of the Archbishop of Canterbury, we find men assessed not just for whole but fractional fees: a half, a quarter, later sometimes as little as an eighth or a twentieth of a knight’s fee. Clearly, someone holding an eighth of a fee was not responsible for supplying an eighth of a physical knight to serve in his lord’s army. What was being assessed here was not a military but a fiscal unit.
Military Organisation
In other words, although we seem after 1086 to find a classic system of landholding in which tenants hold land from barons and barons hold from the King, all owing military service rather than money and all bound together in a feudal ‘pyramid’ with the King at its top and a broad array of knights at its base, this classical formulation had very little to do with the way that armies were actually raised, even as early as the 1090s. Money rents were already a factor in landholding, and what appear to be military units of land are often best regarded as simple fiscal responsibilities. William the Conqueror paid mercenaries to accompany him to England in 1066, and a mercenary or paid element made up a large element of the professional side of the King’s army ever after. Knights’ fees go entirely unmentioned in the Domesday survey, and the very first reference to the emergence of fixed quotas of knights owed by each of the major tenants-in-chief, in a writ supposedly sent by William I to the abbot of Evesham, occurs in what is almost certainly a later forgery concocted long after the events which it purports to describe.
In reality, we have no very clear evidence for the emergence of this quota system until the reign of Henry II, after 1154. We may assume its existence at an earlier date, not least because by 1135 it appears that the majority of the greater barons expected to answer for round numbers of knights, generally measured in units of ten, answering for twenty, fifty or sixty knights. That such quotas ever served in the field, however, or that they were used as the basis for levying taxation on barons who did not themselves serve, remains unproved until the 1150s. One scenario, rather likelier than the traditional presentation of such things, is that barons and the greater churchmen answered for fixed numbers of knights to the King, and were responsible for ensuring that a certain number of men turned up in their retinues whenever summoned, if necessary by paying mercenaries to make up their ‘quotas’. This would explain why lists of such ‘quotas’ begin to appear in monastic records, for example at Canterbury by the 1090s and why the King had cause to complain, again at Canterbury in the 1090s, not of the quantity but of the poor quality of the knight service that was being supplied. Only at a later date, and only really with nationwide effect from the 1150s, did kings begin to charge a tax (known as ‘scutage’ or ‘shield money’) on barons who failed to supply the requisite quota of knights, arranging for this money to be paid to fully professional mercenary soldiers rather than have the baron make up his service by paying any old rag-tag or bobtail retainer.
The classic formulation of the ‘feudal’ pyramid ignores other inconvenient or untidy aspects of reality. With the barons holding from the king, and knights holding from barons, it was clearly necessary for the barons themselves to recruit large numbers of knights. To begin with, in the immediate aftermath of the conquest, such knights were often drawn from the tenantry who in Normandy already served a particular baron. Thus knights with close links to the Montgomery family in Normandy naturally gravitated to the estates of the Montgomeries in Shropshire (amongst them, the father of the chronicler Orderic Vitalis, which explains Orderic’s later move from Shropshire back to St-Evroult and the Montgomery heartlands in southern Normandy). Those Bretons who distinguished themselves in England after 1066, such as the ancestors of the Vere family in Essex, future earls of Oxford, or the future earls of Richmond in Yorkshire and East Anglia, tended to recruit other lesser Bretons into their service. The honour of Boulogne carved out in England, especially in Essex after 1066, recruited large numbers of knights originally associated with the northernmost parts of France or southern Flanders. It has been argued that the consequence here was the emergence of a series of power blocks based upon pre-existing French loyalties. The Bretons stuck together. Normans from the valley of the river Seine tended to stand apart from those from lower Normandy and the Cotentin peninsula. Such may have been the case for a generation or so after 1066. Surveying the rebels of 1075 who had joined the Breton Ralph, Earl of East Anglia in rising against the king, Archbishop Lanfranc was able to describe them collectively as ‘Breton turds’. What is more significant, however, is that such regional identities very swiftly began to break down in the melting pot of post-Conquest England. Normans consorted with Bretons, Bretons married English or Norman wives. By the reign of Henry I, after 1100, it is clear that, within England, those of diverse Norman and Breton background fought together or, on occasion, on opposing sides, without any clear pattern imposed by pre-existing regional loyalties in northern France. Why was this so?
The most obvious answer lies in a shortage of appropriate manpower after 1066. The King had to ensure that those to whom he gave great estates were both loyal and competent. Hence, for example, the extraordinary way in which Roger of Montgomery was promoted not only to command two of the rapes of Sussex, Arundel and Chichester, in the front-line of defence against attack by sea, but also to a vast estate in Shropshire, on the Welsh Marches, clearly in reward for past service but carrying with it future responsibility for the defence of yet another strategically vital frontier. Roger, accustomed to the frontier fighting of southern Normandy, was chosen to fill the shoes of three
men presumably because he was one of the few men whom the King could trust. If loyal commanders were few and far between at the upper end of society, then lower down, too, it was hard to find the competent knights that any great lord would be anxious to attract to his service. In the rebel-infested regions of the fens, within the estates of the monks of Ely and Peterborough, where the English had several times mounted armed resistance after 1066, a deliberate attempt seems to have been made to swamp the countryside with Norman knights. Enormous numbers of small estates were carved out, burdened with knight service and handed over to practically all comers from northern France. A similar and deliberate mass importation of outsiders might explain why the West Country, yet another forum of rebellion, was colonized by knights, many of them from the frontier regions of south-west Normandy, granted in England the so-called ‘fees of Mortain’, held from their overlord, William the Conqueror’s half-brother, Count Robert of Mortain, and possessing the value of only two-thirds of an ordinary knight’s fee elsewhere in the country.
These lesser knights of eastern and south-western England, probably from the very start, lacked the landed resources ever to serve effectively on campaign. It was their sheer quantity rather than their particular competence which won them their English land. As this suggests, there was never a shortage of land-hungry knights, younger sons, ambitious outsiders or thrusting members of the lower ranks. As a simple commodity, knights were, if not quite ten a penny, then certainly bred up in enormous numbers within eleventh-century society. A treaty between England and the Count of Flanders, first negotiated in 1101 and thereafter renewed on a regular basis throughout the next seventy years, provided for the King of England to pay an annual subsidy to Flanders in return for a promise of the service of no less than 1,000 Flemish knights, should he require it. Figures for the total number of knights settled in England by the thirteenth century vary between a parsimonious 1,200 and a profligate 3,000. Of such men, however, relatively few would have been any use in a fight.
A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485 Page 9