A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  As today, the obligation to pay taxes, which in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were used chiefly to support the King’s military endeavours, does not imply any ability on behalf of the taxpayer to discharge the functions for which such taxes pay. We may grumble about our taxes paying for tanks and guns, but we ourselves would not know one end of a bazooka from the other. Even the equipment necessary for fighting – a mail coat, a sword and shield, a helmet and, in particular, the expensive war horse that the Bayeux Tapestry depicts carrying the Normans into battle, a sleek and priapi-cally masculine creature – all of this lay beyond the means of a large number of those who in technical terms appear in England after 1100 described as knights. In a society organized for war, founded upon war, and with war as its chief sport and future ambition, the professional players could be attracted only at a very considerable premium.

  Landholding and Loyalty

  Hence the fact that, by the 1080s, we find so many of these ‘real’ knights holding land from large numbers of Norman lords, all of whom were keen to attract the very best of subtenants. If we take just a couple of examples from the Domesday survey, we might begin with a man named William Belet, literally ‘William the weasel’. By 1086, William, whose nickname is clearly French and probably Norman, held the manor of Woodcott in Hampshire, a substantial estate at Windsor in Berkshire and several Dorset manors, all of them directly as a tenant-in-chief of the crown. In addition to these tenancies-in-chief, however, William had also acquired at least one subtenancy in Dorset from the major baron, William of Eu, principal lord of the Pays de Caux, north of Rouen, in which the Belet family lands in Normandy almost certainly lay. In turn, since William Belet’s heirs are later to be found as tenants of several other manors held from the descendants of William of Eu, William Belet can almost certainly be identified with an otherwise mysterious William, without surname, who at the time of Domesday held most of William of Eu’s Dorset estate as an undertenant. Furthermore, by the 1190s, the Belet family is recorded in possession of the manor of Knighton House in Dorset, held at the time of Domesday from another baron, King William’s half-brother the Count of Mortain by another mysterious William, again almost certainly to be identified as our William Belet.

  In this way, with a little detective work, we can very rapidly put together a picture of a Domesday Norman knight who held from at least three lords, including the King, and whose heirs were to remain a considerable force both in local and national politics for two hundred years thereafter. Rising at the court of the Conqueror’s son, King Henry I, William Belet’s son or grandson, Robert Belet, acquired the manor of Sheen in Surrey for service as the King’s butler. As a result, the Belets became hereditary royal butlers, responsible for the procurement and service of the king’s wine, the Paul Burrells of their day. Michael Belet, a leading figure at the court of Henry II, is shown on his seal enthroned on a wine barrel with a knife or bill hook in both hands, testimony both to his proud office and to his close access to the royal court. His seal, indeed, can be read as a deliberate mockery of the King’s own seal on which the royal majesty was displayed enthroned, carrying the orb and sceptre in either hand. Michael Belet and his sons were a major presence at the courts both of King Henry II and King John, founders of Wroxton Priory in Oxfordshire, later the residence of that least successful of British prime ministers, Lord North, of American Independence fame. Yet even by the 1180s, the Belet family was quite incapable of personal military service to the King. Michael Belet, the butler, was a courtier, a King’s justice and lawyer, not a warrior. The family estates in Dorset had by this time been so divided and dispersed amongst several generations of brothers, sisters and cousins, that the Dorset Belets were merging into the ranks of the free peasantry.

  To see how common a pattern this is, let us take another example, again more or less at random. In Domesday, we find a knight named Walter Hose, literally Walter ‘Stockings’ or Walter ‘the Socks’, tenant of the bishop of Bath for the manors of Wilmington and Batheaston in Somerset, and holding land in Whatley of the abbots of Glastonbury. In 1086, Walter was also serving as farmer of the royal borough of Malmesbury, paying an annual render of £8 to the King, probably already as the King’s sheriff for Wiltshire, an office which he held until at least 1110. A close kinsman, William Hose, held other lands in Domesday of at least two barons, the bishop of Bath and Humphrey, the King’s chamberlain. The Hose family remained a major force in Wiltshire politics thereafter. Henry Hose or Hussey is to be found fighting in the civil war of the 1140s, in the process acquiring a castle at Stapleford in Wiltshire and establishing a cadet branch of his family at Harting in Sussex. One of these Sussex Hoses returned to Wiltshire after 1200, joined the household of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, and fought in Marshal’s wars, acquiring a major Irish estate in the process. As a result, the chief Hose or Hussey fortunes were transferred to Ireland. The family in England remained, like the Dorset Belets, as a reminder of vanished glories, not without resources and not without land, but no longer at the cutting edge of the military machine.

  What do such stories teach? To begin with, they should remind us that competence has always been a rare quality, and that the able and the talented, in this case knights, can command a high price for their services. From the very start, however, there would be a problem with any model of ‘feudal’ society that attempted to assign either the Belets or the Hoses to a particular rank or position within society. Both families began with knights, but knights who held both from the King and from other lords. We can assume that William Belet was a wealthy man, with estates scattered across at least three English counties, one of the premier league players in the game of Norman conquest. Walter Hose was the King’s sheriff for Wiltshire, one of the leading figures in local administration. Yet neither of these men, if rather more than mere knights, were barons. Moreover, even by the 1080s, their loyalty to the lords who had rewarded them was very far from clear. If the Count of Mortain should rebel against the King, in the case of William Belet, or if the bishop of Bath should seek to seize land from the abbot of Glastonbury, in the case of Walter Hose, which lord would William or Walter support?

  At least William and Walter were fighting men whose support was worth purchasing, but what of their sons and grandsons? The hereditary principle ensures that, once a landed family becomes established, it is relatively hard to divide it from its land or wealth. But this is no guarantee that the children of such a family will continue to dream of battle and the clash of arms rather than the pleasures of the wine cellar, the counting and spending of their money, or, dread thought, such ignoble pursuits as farming, reading and even writing. Military ability or general intelligence, unlike wealth, cannot be guaranteed by inheritance. Loyalty is most certainly not a genetically transmitted trait. Just because a family ancestor was loyal to the Count of Mortain or the Bishop of Bath, this is no guarantee that the children or grandchildren of such a man would remain loyal to future counts of Mortain or bishops of Bath in the years, indeed centuries, yet to come. The great, the kings and counts, earls and bishops of this world, have always had to repurchase the loyalty of their servants and cannot rely upon tradition alone to buy them either brain or muscle.

  Status and Title Deeds

  The ‘following’ (historians tend to call it the ‘household’ or the ‘affinity’) of a great man, was what distinguished a truly powerful baron from his inferiors, in the eleventh century as in the eighteenth, or indeed as is still the case amongst the modern-day affinities of pop stars or Hollywood egoists. A man who travelled with twenty knights, forty servants and a menagerie of hangers-on, up to and including a clown and a pet monkey, was to be accounted a great deal better than someone who travelled alone or with a smaller retinue. We begin to get lists of these affinities and of the knight service of the great from the late eleventh century onwards, because listing them was one way of boasting of wealth and status. The letters and charters, the documents by which kings and barons conveyed th
eir instructions and gifts, are the most common historical sources because they have been carefully preserved. All manner of deeds and documents might be discarded from an archive, but not the charters by which land had been acquired, the jealously guarded title deeds to an estate. In themselves, such deeds often display the pride and power of the barons who issued them. Not only are they written instruments from a time when writing itself was a rare accomplishment, but they are authenticated with wax seals, generally showing a stylized figure of a warrior riding into battle, with lance or sword and shield, his horse being the chief symbol of lordly authority. From horseback, it is very hard not to look down upon pedestrian concerns, just as today the pedestrian finds it hard not to look up to a mounted police officer.

  As a second guarantee of authenticity, medieval documents were also witnessed, not, as in a modern marriage register, by one or two close friends, but by a great list, sometimes as many as twenty or thirty of those present at a charter’s award. It is from these lists that we can reconstruct the affinity of the greater barons, always bearing in mind, of course, that the lists themselves were intended, even at the time, to give an impression of the strength, number and authority of a baron’s hangers-on. In this way, the witness lists to royal charters are our best, indeed sometimes our only guide, to who was or was not at the King’s court. The witness lists to the charters of barons and bishops tell us who was in, and who was out, amongst a baronial or episcopal affinity.

  What do such lists tell us about the connection between knights, land and loyalty in post-Conquest England? Firstly, they suggest that within one or at most two generations of the Norman Conquest, not only had the division between Normans and other Frenchmen from various parts of northern France been largely smoothed away, but that a new gulf was beginning to open up, dividing those who held land on either side of the Channel. Not all Normans with lands in Normandy participated in the Conquest of 1066. In the aftermath, even those families which gained land in England might choose to divide their estate on the death of its founder, with the Norman patrimony remaining with the eldest son, the newly acquired English lands passing to a separate branch stemming often from a younger son in England. The effects of this over time, as we shall see, were to prove momentous. Secondly, they suggest that even by the 1130s, within less than a century of 1066, barons were being required to bring new men into their affinities, either because the ties of loyalty between them and the descendants of the tenants to whom their fathers and grandfathers had given land had begun to fray, or because the specific requirements that they placed upon their followers could not be discharged from within the pool of talent supplied by their existing tenantry. Within a further half century, indeed, it becomes increasingly hard to find any tenants regularly attached to the household of a great man whose ancestors were that great man’s original followers in the aftermath of Hastings. The military tenantry of the greater estates tended to solidify into nothing save a tax-paying rump. The actual knights serving a baron would be recruited by other means, in return for money, less often in return for land. Land was the ultimate goal of such men, but after 1100 it was in much shorter supply than had been the case during the great bonanza years of the 1070s and 80s.

  Moreover, lords had learned their lesson: to grant land in one generation was to risk indifference or even disloyalty in the next. If we take a particular example, a Wiltshire knight of the 1140s, descended from men who had arrived in England only shortly after the Conquest of 1066, inherited little land from his father so went abroad to carve a reputation for himself on the tournament fields of northern France. He became so famous as a knight that kings vied for his service. Eventually, aged nearly 50, he was allowed to marry a great heiress in the King’s gift. Shortly afterwards he was granted the ceremonial belt that conferred title as an earl. In his new estates, however, he was a stranger to his tenantry, unknown to those whom he now ruled as lord, none of whom had owed him any sort of allegiance before his rise to greatness. Instead, he turned back to the Wiltshire friends of his youth and began to import large numbers of these cronies, or the sons of these cronies, into his household, some of whom, when land became available, were richly rewarded from his new estate. The man in question was named William Marshal, and he will reappear later as one of the leading figures in English, Irish and Anglo-French history towards the end of the twelfth century. In the meantime, his story is significant in disproving two persistent myths that continue to attach themselves to the Normans and the Norman Conquest of England.

  Myths of the Conquest

  The first is that mercenaries or knights serving for money fees played no real role in English military organization prior to the late thirteenth century. On the contrary, not only were large numbers of mercenaries maintained even for William of Normandy’s army of conquest in 1066, but thereafter the mercenary was a standing feature of most armies. A list of the payments made from the household of William de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, as early as the 1180s, records a whole series of money fees paid as annual retainers to unlanded knights, conveniently divided between those attached to the earl’s household either in England or in France, supplying yet further proof of the tendency, within a century of the Conquest, for the two parts of the Norman empire to go their own separate ways. Secondly, although, after 1066, the baronial honour and its court served as a significant instrument of social control, and although, on a local scale, such courts functioned in many ways as royal courts in miniature, we should not exaggerate either their cohesion or their sense of group loyalty. Once a generation had passed, the original loyalties upon which they had been formed soon dissolved in forgetfulness and changeability. Like all revolutions, the Norman Conquest of 1066 did not establish an unchanging social order of its own. On the contrary, it led inexorably towards yet further and more profound social change.

  Names and Nicknames

  Before we leave our model Norman knights, William ‘the weasel’, and Henry ‘the socks’, their names deserve brief mention. Before 1066, both in England and Normandy, Christian names were only rarely accompanied by nicknames (‘Eric the Red’), trade names (‘Windy the Miller’ and ‘Postman Pat’) or place names (what the specialists would call toponyms, ‘Eadric of Laxfield’). Below the topmost levels of the aristocracy, it was virtually unknown for such names to survive more than one generation or to become in any way ‘surnames’ or family names as we would understand them today. Within any particular family, a limited number of Christian names might be favoured, which can sometimes help us to reconstruct family descent, but even here there was no certain rule. Surnames, sometimes derived from a nickname or place name, sometimes from the Christian name of an ancestor, only began to develop in Normandy on the very eve of 1066. Nonetheless, our William Belet ‘the weasel’ and Walter Hose ‘the socks’ as early as 1086 had joined that select group of men whose families were henceforth identifiable by true surnames. Names that might be thought to be dismissive or pejorative, ‘the weasel’, ‘the fat’ (Gros, or Crassus), the ‘fat headed’ (Grosseteste, name of a famous future bishop of Lincoln), ‘the beaky nosed’ (Becket, name of a yet more famous archbishop of Canterbury), even, notoriously from Domesday Book, Humphrey ‘Goldenbollocks’ (like Robert ‘the Perverted’, or ‘Tesco’ of Colchester, one of the more bizarrely named of the Essex tenantry), not only began to proliferate but to be carried by successive generations as proud badges of descent. By the 1130s, families such as the Fitz Geralds, descended from an ancestor named Gerald, began to adopt not just patronymics, those names beginning Fitz This and Fitz That (son of X or Y) that clutter up the ‘F’ section of the indexes to books of medieval history, but true family names so that the son of Henry fitz Gerald was named Warin fitz Gerald not Warin fitz Henry.

  What is perhaps most interesting here is the extent to which the Norman Conquest itself forced families to adopt these new badges of self identification. Newly established in England, families held on to the place names of their Norman birth and the perso
nal names of their Norman ancestors long after they had ceased in all other terms to be anything other than English by birth, breeding and outlook. This great explosion of surnames, for the most part derived from Norman place names, ensures not only that we can attempt to trace the precise geographical origins of large numbers of families established in England after 1066, but that, throughout English history, the names of the greater English baronial or aristocratic families have a distinctly French ring to them. The definitive form of the document known as Magna Carta, first issued in 1215, comes to us from the reissue in 1225 and claims to have been witnessed by twelve bishops, twenty abbots and more than thirty barons. This list of barons begins with the names of a dozen earls or officials known by the names of their English counties, all but one of them from French families and with their French family names specified in Magna Carta in no less than six cases. Of the remaining twenty-two barons, four have ‘Fitz’ names, three have names derived from English places. The other fifteen all have Norman or French toponyms, in the vast majority of cases commemorating the names of places which the barons themselves had never so much as visited but which had cradled their ancestors. England’s greatest constitutional document is therefore to a large extent French. Like later colonialists, scattering ‘Hotel Bristols’ or ‘High Streets’ or bungalows named ‘Windy Ridge’ across the Indian subcontinent, the descendants of the colonialists of the 1060s and 70s remained Norman in name long after they had ceased to be in any way Norman in person.