The arrival of dozens of Norman barons, hundreds of Norman knights and thousands of Norman settlers spelled disaster for the English landholding class. Most of those English thegns not killed at Hastings were dispossessed in the ensuing rebellions or slowly marginalized by their new Norman neighbours. Not everyone lost their lands. There were rare survivals, the quislings of their day, such as Edward of Salisbury, sheriff of Wiltshire, or Thorkell of Warwick, son of a sheriff of Warwickshire, who still appear in Domesday as tenants-in-chief. A list of the knights of the archbishopric of Canterbury from the 1080s includes men named Aethelwine, son of Brithmaer, and Deorman, both of them undoubtedly of Anglo-Saxon descent. Both were Londoners, Aethelwine appearing amongst the witnesses to a charter crucial to our understanding of the role played by the Norman bishop of Rochester, Gundulf, in the building of the White Tower of the Tower of London. In 1125, a man named Ordgar fitz Deorman is still to be found amongst the London ‘Cnihtengeld’, the city’s guild of knights. For the majority of the English landholding elite, after 1066, there were nonetheless few alternatives save for dispossession or exile.
The Varangian Guard
One outlet for frustrated Englishmen lay in the east, reached only after an arduous journey via the trade routes that traversed the North Sea, the Baltic and thence via the Dnieper and the land of Rus to the Black Sea and Byzantium. The elite imperial troops of the city of Constantinople were traditionally recruited from amongst the peoples of the north, the so-called Varangian Guard, ‘the men of the pledge’, ‘the axe-bearers’. As early as the 1040s, John Raphael, the Byzantine emperor’s ‘protosparthios’, commanding a Varangian regiment in southern Italy, was in correspondence with England; his lead seal was rediscovered fairly recently in an archaeological dig at Winchester. The events of 1066 led to a great increase in the number of displaced or dispossessed Anglo-Saxons seeking refuge on the coast of the Bosphorus. By the 1080s, perhaps as many as 1,000 Englishmen were attached to the Varangian guard. Some of them are said to have established a settlement, known as ‘New England’, in the Crimea. Long before the Pilgrim Fathers sailed for America, England may already have spawned its first ‘colony’ as a direct result of the Norman Conquest.
In the aftermath of much later events in the Crimea, following the Crimean war of the 1850s and the setting up of the English camp at Scutari on the Bosphorus, the tombstones of various of the Varangian exiles from England, inscribed with their names and epitaphs, were discovered still lying about, more or less neglected in the city of Constantinople. The inscriptions were copied, but the copies were then burned in a fire in 1870. By the time that anyone returned to the stones themselves, hoping that they might be taken to Scutari for safe keeping, they had been smashed up for rubble. Thus perished, in the shadow of Florence Nightingale’s new English hospital, the last vestiges of the old English aristocracy itself forced into Byzantine exile by the ancestors of the very men who in the 1850s commanded Queen Victoria’s Crimean expeditionary force, the lords Raglan (son of the Duke of Beaufort), Cardigan (of the Brudenell family, introduced from France in the thirteenth century) and Lucan (alias George Bingham, an English name, although a grandson of the distinctly French-sounding Earl of Fauconberg, derived from Fauquembergues to the east of Boulogne, from whence came the Fauconbergs settled in Yorkshire by the early twelfth century). So tenacious was the aristocratic hold over land, and so close the connection between Norman ancestry (even spurious or conveniently invented Norman ancestry) and aristocracy that in popular mythology the Charge of the Light Brigade risked the shedding of almost as much Norman blood as William the Conqueror’s great charge at Hastings.
In the meantime, in the 1080s and 90s, the Varangians, including the Anglo-Saxons amongst their ranks, would have witnessed two highly poignant encounters, in October 1081 (fifteen years almost to the day since the Battle of Hastings), at Durazzo on the shores of the Adriatic, when, in a rerun of earlier events, the Varangians serving the Byzantine emperor clashed with and were defeated by a Norman fleet now seeking their fortunes in southern Italy, and again in 1096, when Bohemond of Taranto and his Normans were received in Constantinople, together with Duke Robert, the eldest son of William the Conqueror, King of England, at the start of that great venture known as the First Crusade. The frosty reception extended by Byzantium to the French-speaking crusaders perhaps owed something to the bitterness with which the Anglo-Saxons now exiled in Constantinople regarded their Norman guests.
Castles and forests
In England, the dispossessions and conquests of the late eleventh century have left an impact not just upon aristocratic DNA and naming patterns but upon the modern English landscape. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, still croaking away in its archaic English prose, reported the death of King William I in 1087 not in a spirit of vengeance or hatred but in something approaching wonder. This King, the chronicler wrote, built castles and sorely oppressed the poor. He also so loved the wild beasts of England, the hart, the hare and the boar, that he protected their habitat with new laws.
William was not the inventor either of the castle or the idea of the forest. Castles of one sort of another had been known in England as long ago as the ice-age, and the remains of Roman military encampments still litter the English, Welsh and Northumbrian countryside. In the 1050s, one of the consequences of Edward the Confessor’s encouragement of Normans at his court was the building of castles, by the Norman Oswin Pentecost in Herefordshire and by Ralph the Staller in Essex, with Eustace of Boulogne probably planning one at Dover, all of them powerful symbols of foreign authority within regions theoretically controlled by the Godwin family. As for forests, hunting was the great joy of the young Edward the Confessor, and large parts of England, including the Mendip Hills, were probably already regarded as special royal hunting reserves even before 1066.
The Normans after 1066 nonetheless vastly extended the reach of both castles and forests. Even before the Battle of Hastings, with the construction of a castle on the Sussex coast, William introduced a new concept to the English: a baronial or royal fortress established not just in towns or cities but across the English landscape, defensible in time of war, and capable of serving as a centre of baronial law and tax gathering. This, the dungeons and dragons view of the castle, is one side of the coin. Certainly, some castles were places of fear and torture. But the shadows cast by castles were not always dark. In time of war, the castle could serve to shelter the local population, not just to terrorize them. It could also serve as a symbol of sophistication and cosmopolitan taste, not merely as a brutal reminder of Norman violence. The White Tower, now the oldest structure within the Tower of London, or Colchester Castle, or, slightly later, Norwich Castle built around 1100, were amongst the largest and most impressive buildings raised anywhere in medieval Europe. They served as administrative centres and as symbols of authority. Colchester Castle, for example, was deliberately founded on the ruins of the Roman temple of Claudius, reusing a site and materials originally intended to celebrate Caesar’s successor as imperial conqueror of the English, its walls banded with darker and lighter layers of masonry in a deliberate echo of the imperial walls of Rome and Constantinople. Nearby, the King’s steward Eudo Dapifer established a new monastery, one of the largest and richest Benedictine houses founded anywhere in northern Europe after 1066, described specifically in one of its early charters as a ‘basilica’, literally as a church worthy of a ‘basileus’ or emperor. The Roman military camp at York, reputedly the spot where Constantine first declared his intention to rule as sole Roman emperor, was itself incorporated within the precincts of York Minster.
Castles undoubtedly performed a military function, serving as outposts of lordly or royal authority, impregnable shards of resistance buried deep in the flanks of any army attempting to advance across country, guarding towns, cities and the greater roads and river crossings. But not all were principally of military significance. Many were intended to symbolize power, even when left ungarrisoned, as at Corfe Cas
tle in Dorset, or to serve as lordly residences, posed in a carefully planned landscape. At Castle Acre, for example, one of the principal residences of the Warenne family, the castle itself was built in conjunction with a priory of monks, imported from distant Cluny on the Rhône, and with a park and pleasure grounds surrounding it, as part of a deliberately planned landscape of lordship. Nearby Castle Rising, symbolizing the rise to power of the Aubigny family, was sited on a false crest above the Babingley river, chosen not for military or defensive purposes but for display, dangerously vulnerable to higher ground to the south, but impressively visible both from the sea and by all traffic up and down the river, its keep built in deliberate imitation of the great royal castle at Norwich, itself one of the most impressive stone structures then existing in northern Europe.
Castles such as Arundel or Belvoir or Alnick still impress the spectator, even today, because their sites were selected precisely in order to strike awe into the minds of those who viewed them. So spectacular was the site of Belvoir, that the family which built it, natives of Brittany, chose to use an image of their massive new stone keep on the seal that they employed to authenticate their letters and charters. If we imagine a visitor to England, tacking up the Channel from Sussex to the Thames, the sight from sea first of Pevensey, then Hastings, then Dover, then Richborough, Reculver and Rochester, would have evoked an extraordinary and potent combination of Norman Romanesque combined with more ancient classically Roman architectural monuments, for the most part on a scale that even the kings of France or the Holy Roman emperors of Germany would have been hard put to match. No wonder, then, that the building of castles, by the King and by his barons, was one of the changes after 1066 seared into the memory of the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, whose fellow Englishmen and other semi-slave labour would have been required in vast numbers to raise the earth mounds on which such structures rested, and to hew the stones from which their massive walls and keeps were constructed. These were public works, built from the sweat and toil of the defeated English, proclaiming the Normans as the new imperial master race.
In the shadow of the castle stretched the forest. What changed after 1066 was not the royal or aristocratic taste for hunting. Hunting, and the deliberate, often highly ritualized taking of life, had always been a royal sport, be it in ancient Babylon, where the lions’ den in which Daniel was accommodated implies huntsmen to capture the lions, or Judea where King David could compare himself to a partridge hunted upon the mountains (1 Samuel 26:20). Edward the Confessor had probably passed a great deal of his time in the 1050s and 60s hunting in the ancestral parks of the West Saxon kings, and as early as the reign of Cnut not only had hunting in the king’s parks been forbidden to all save the King and his guests, but certain wild creatures – whales, porpoise and sturgeon for example – were recognized as lordly perquisites, reserved for the table of king or earl. It was not merely the King’s right but his duty to shed blood. Capital punishment, into the twentieth century, remained one of the crown’s particular concerns, so that the possibility of the King or Queen’s pardon, from a very early date, certainly by the twelfth century, became a regular aspect of the last days of those condemned to death for homicide. Kings who did not hunt or who refused to shed blood shirked one of the greater obligations of royalty, as teachers in the schools of Paris were later to declare.
What changed after 1066 was not the significance or regularity of the king’s hunt but the environment in which it took place and perhaps the procedures of the hunt itself. Large parts of the country, by no means all of them thickly wooded, were set aside from the ordinary laws of England and declared to be ‘forest’: a newly defined legal concept that came to denote a region in which the preservation of the king’s beasts was the overriding concern. Within such regions, no one might cut green trees and plants, the vert, in which wild beasts lived, or clear waste land and cultivate it, or keep hunting dogs or in any way injure the wildlife, the venison of the forest, under pain of the most draconian punishments, such as cutting off hands or feet and other judicial mutilation. In all likelihood these legal restrictions already applied, before 1066, albeit in slightly modified form, to the greater ducal forests of Normandy. The effect in England was drastically to reduce the proportion of the population entitled to hunt or consume game, from hares and herons to foxes and deer. The hunting of such creatures was now restricted by law to a tiny elite.
Not surprisingly, as successive kings placed more and more of England under forest jurisdiction, the King’s foresters and forest laws became one of the more blatant and resented symbols of raw royal power. It is remarkable how many of the saints venerated by Englishmen in the twelfth century earned their reputation for sanctity in part by resisting the power of foresters. St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, who saved the life of a hare from pursuing hounds is matched in this respect by St Hugh, bishop of Lincoln in the 1180s, who kept a pet swan at his manor of Stowe, thereby taming and possessing one of the most regal of wild birds, and who regularly ignored royal prohibitions to excommunicate the king’s foresters guilty of pillage and worse. In the meantime, the creation by the Norman kings of vast wastelands known as forests, policed and set about with the cruellest of punishments, was not only resented by those who inhabited or owned land in such regions, but was regarded as one of the greater sins of pride to which the Norman conquest had given rise.
The creation of the New Forest, for example, not only forced the expulsion and resettlement of large numbers of peasants previously bonded to land now set aside for the king’s deer, but ensured that many of those who held manors within this region, the bishop and monks of Winchester for example, could not properly exploit such land, clear new fields or extend the area under cultivation without incurring heavy fines for their encroachments upon the vert. Not surprisingly, the fact that two of William the Conqueror’s sons, Richard in the 1080s, and William Rufus in 1100, himself King of England, met their deaths as a result of hunting accidents in the New Forest, Richard in a fall from his horse, Rufus shot with a crossbow bolt fired at a deer, was widely interpreted as God’s vengeance. The Normans were punished for their pride by the death of a king and a king’s son in the thick of the English greenwood. Robin Hood, that archetype of the English rebel, cocking a snook at Frenchified sheriffs, was in good company in doing so from the depths of the forest, making his home and his dinner from the vert and venison theoretically reserved for a foreign elite.
Into these forests and in the shadow of their castles, the Normans introduced new and exotic creatures not previously known to the English. Pigs fattened on forest acorns became a far more common element of upper-class diet, clearly reflecting a particular Norman taste for pork. Pea hens and peacocks, already shown in the Bayeux Tapestry as a feature of Duke William’s court in Normandy, now screeched raucously across the lordly English countryside. Fallow deer, smaller than the native red deer, were introduced to the woods, to begin with as something almost as exotic as llamas or ostriches to the modern millionaire. They came ultimately from Turkey, perhaps via the Norman colony in Sicily, and seem to have been introduced to England long before they arrived in France or other parts of northern Europe. The bishop of Norwich, a Norman named Herbert Losinga, wrote a bitter letter of complaint when his own fallow deer, apparently a single specimen, fell victim to local poachers. Rabbits, known to the Romans but thereafter apparently hunted to extinction in England, were reintroduced from Normandy, although perhaps not in large numbers until later in the twelfth century. The word ‘warren’ is a Norman import and the warren itself was carefully protected, with special warreners to guard it and terriers trained to control its rapidly multiplying population. In regions of sand or marginal soil, rabbits bred for their fur as much as for their meat henceforward became a common feature of the English landscape, so common indeed as to be virtually invisible to archaeologists. Those excavating early rabbit warrens have sometimes published their findings as if they were investigating not man-made rabbit burrows but ritua
l labyrinths or even the burial chambers of prehistoric midgets.
Jews
After 1066, the human population was also leavened with exotic new imports, if not with anything quite so bizarre as two-foot bunny-men. The Anglo-Saxon world knew of the Jews only through the Old Testament, there being no Jewish settlement in England. After 1066, perhaps in the last decade of the eleventh century, Jews previously settled in Rouen and other parts of Normandy were deliberately transported to England and settled in English towns under the direct supervision of Norman lords. The Jews of this new Diaspora were victims of a particular paradox within Christian society. The Bible laid down strict prohibitions against usury, the lending of money or goods at interest, rules which the Jews had long observed and which Christians, as the heirs to the Old Testament, themselves sought to emulate. Such prohibitions did not, however, extend to loans made between members of one religious confession and another, so that, even in the strictest application of theory, a Jew might charge interest on loans made to a Christian just as a Christian might charge interest when lending to a Jew. As a result, moneylending very quickly became a Jewish speciality, as essential as it was unpopular in a world in which the ready availability of credit was a precondition for economic success.
Furthermore, since the Jews were the focus of millenarian beliefs, their conversion to Christianity being awaited as a sign foretelling the end of days, and since there was a sense, expressed by the Pope himself, that the Jewish community must be protected rather than destroyed, if only so that the Jews might serve as a reminder of the fate that awaited all of those foolish enough to deny the divinity of Christ, Jews in England as in Normandy were placed under the direct authority and protection of the King. From this it was only a short step to the royal taxation and exploitation of the Jews, with royal officials demanding the right to collect the arrears of debts owed to the King’s Jews, meanwhile actively discouraging the Jews from engaging in any enterprise save for moneylending. Within a century of the Norman Conquest, the so-called Exchequer of the Jews was a major source of revenue to the English crown, with massive though for the most part unspecified sums of money being collected from the debts of such plutocratic Jewish money lenders as Aaron of Lincoln or Isaac, son of the Rabbi Josce of York.
A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485 Page 11