Foundation

by Peter Ackroyd

  9

  Devils and wicked men

  To the victor came the spoils. William set about ordering his new kingdom. He confiscated the estates of his English opponents, particularly of those who had fought against him at Hastings. Some of the English thegns had fled, and others had gone into exile. Just as Canute had done before him, he raised a large sum with a sudden tax. He was greedy, with the appetite of a conqueror. Another sign of his strength rose upon his new lands. Wherever he went, he planted a castle. One was soon built in London itself, on the site of the present Tower.

  He was helped in his enterprise by many survivors of the old regime. William realized, as other foreign conquerors before him, that he needed the experience and knowledge of English administrators. In the first years of his rule he retained the English sheriffs. The monasteries were still being governed by English abbots, despite the fact that two of their number had fought at Hastings. Regenbald, head of the writing office under Edward the Confessor, became William’s chancellor.

  Yet others among the English decided to fight. William’s power did not really prevail beyond the south-east of the country, and Harold’s own immediate family established a base in the south-west at Exeter. They took advantage of William’s absence in Normandy to raise the banner of revolt in 1068. The senior protagonist in this affair was Harold’s mother, Gytha, with the assistance of the Irish and perhaps even of the Danes. Gytha was the aunt of the king of Denmark. William realized the gravity of a rebellion that might embroil the whole of northern and western England and, immediately on his return, he took his army to the walls of Exeter. He laid siege to the city for eighteen days, and in the end Gytha made her escape down the river Exe; the citizens then surrendered.

  This was only a prelude to a much more significant revolt in the northern counties, when in 1069 the English of that region enlisted the help of the Danes to take York. Memories of the Danelaw were still strong. William marched up the country, planting castles wherever he halted. He did not immediately attack York, but employed the tactics he had used against London three years before; he left a trail of destruction across the surrounding lands. This became known as ‘the harrowing of the north’ and consisted of nothing less than the wholesale destruction of the people and the territory in William’s path. He fell upon them as if in a lightning storm. The men and the animals were killed, the crops destroyed, the towns and villages wasted. All the reserves of food were put to the torch, creating widespread famine; 100,000 people were reported to have died. No cultivated land was left between York and Durham, and a century later the ruins of the destruction were still be to be found. The villages of the region were described in the Domesday Book as ‘waste’. Yet the north would rise against William no more. He had created a desert, and called it peace. William is supposed to have confessed on his deathbed that ‘I fell on the English of the northern shires like a ravening lion.’

  In the harrowing of the north William had not behaved as an English king. He had behaved like a tyrant. That is why other local insurrections emerged, and many of the English formed what would now be called guerrilla forces to harass the invaders. 10,000 Normans were attempting to control a country of 3 or 4 million natives, and the only weapons they had at their disposal were those of brute power and terror. Spies and collaborators, punishment beatings and secret murders – the whole panoply of occupation and insurgency – were indispensable. An English chronicler of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Orderic Vitalis, wrote that the English ‘were groaning under the yoke of the Normans, and suffering from the oppressions of proud lords who did not obey the king’s injunctions’. The Norman lords, in other words, were pushing their power to extremes. So, in the first four or five years of Norman rule, there was talk everywhere of revolt. The English rose against William every year between 1067 and 1070.

  One force of rebels has remained notorious because of its association with Hereward. He took refuge in the watery fenland around Ely, from where he launched sporadic but murderous raids against the Normans despatched to capture him. He joined with some Danish forces, who had landed on the coast, to attack Peterborough Abbey ostensibly to save its treasures from the Normans. He and his band were known as silvatici, men of the woods. He was joined on Ely by other leaders of the English revolt, who thus posed a distinct and recognizable threat to William’s regime. For over a year the Norman forces tried, and failed, to dislodge Hereward from the fastness. Some people say that he was compromised by the treachery of the monks of Ely, who pointed to a secret path. It is certainly true that it was only after a prolonged assault, by forces on land and water, that the stronghold was taken and Hereward chased into exile. From this time forward, William appointed only Norman lords and abbots.

  The confiscation of land hitherto held by the English was accelerated. It was an accepted principle that, ultimately, the king possessed the entire land of England. It was his realm. William put this principle into practice. By 1086 only two English barons, Coleswain of Lincoln and Thurkill of Arden, survived; they had retained their position only by enthusiastic collaboration with the new regime. The rest of the great estates went to a small number of Norman magnates, who promised in return to provide knights for the king’s service. England had become a militarized state, supporting an army of occupation.

  The smaller English landowners may have had a better chance of holding their estates, but only at a high price. Many of them became tenants on land they had previously owned. Some of them were roughly treated. Aelric had been a free tenant in Marsh Gibbon, Buckinghamshire, but by 1086 he paid rent to a new Norman lord ‘harshly and wretchedly’. It was said by one chronicler in the early twelfth century, Simeon of Durham, that ‘many men sold themselves into perpetual servitude, provided that they could maintain a certain miserable life’. Other Norman families emigrated to this newfound land of opportunity, and the pattern of colonization persisted well into the twelfth century.

  Other changes can be documented. Novel forms of building were brought into the English landscape, most notably with the castles and the churches. By 1100 all the English cathedrals were either being rebuilt or newly constructed. They were larger, and more massive, than their predecessors; the nave was longer, and the side chapels proliferated. The Normans built well; they gloried in the strength and power of stone. The great round arches, borrowed from Roman pomp, were a sign of their triumphalism. The massive walls, and the ranges of pillars and arcades, tell the same story. The immensity of Durham Cathedral engulfs the wanderer within a great wilderness of towering stone.

  The Norman castles are square masses of masonry, with extraordinarily thick walls and tiny windows. They crush the land beneath them. They are indomitable. They exude an air of gloom and even despair; according to the English chronicler of 1137, they were ‘filled with devils and wicked men’. They were at the same time prisons and fortresses, courthouses and barracks. The English hated them as the strongholds of their oppressors. Yet they are in their own fashion magnificent creations, born out of the will to power and control that the Normans possessed in full measure. It was said in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that William had provided such security in the land that ‘any honest man could travel over his kingdom without injury with his bosom full of gold; and no man dared kill another …’.

  The English landscape was changed in other ways. Hundreds of monasteries were planted across the country. Deer parks and rabbit warrens were created. Great swathes of land came under the jurisdiction of ‘forest law’, a Norman invention, whereby all the fruit and the animals of the field became the property of the king. Anyone who hunted a hart, or a hind, was to be blinded; no one was to chase a wild boar or even a hare; no trees were to be felled, and no firewood was to be gathered. The law covered more than forest and eventually one-third of the country became the preserve of the monarch; the whole of Essex, for example, was enclosed. The New Forest, Epping Forest, Windsor Great Park, and the ‘forests’ of Dartmoor and Exmoor are part of that legacy.<
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  Kings have always loved to hunt. It is an aspect of their power. Alfred hunted wild beasts in the same spirit that he hunted the Danes. Hunting was a way of exercising military skills in a peaceful environment. It created a miniature battleground, where every nerve and sinew was tested. It was, for William, also a form of commerce; venison was expensive meat, and a ready supply from his own lands was highly desirable. Hunting was, and is still in the twenty-first century, a royal duty as well as pastime. Yet ‘forest law’ was another hated imposition upon the English, who had treated the produce of the woods and fields as their own. As always, the poor suffered most from the indulgence of princes.

  A great division was introduced by language. The tongue of the new ruling elite was Norman French, while that of its subjects was of course still English. It used to be believed that for official purposes French entirely displaced the native language; in fact English continued largely to be used as the language of administrative record, together with Latin. But the use of vernacular French by the leaders of the nation did have other consequences. The problems of pronouncing certain English words, for example, turned Snotingham into Nottingham and Dunholm into Durham; Shipton became Skipton and Yarrow became Jarrow.

  By 1110 the number of native names in Winchester had fallen from 70 to 40 per cent; the presence of foreign merchants, attracted by the flourishing English economy, may have played a part here. William even attempted to learn English in order to dispense justice, but it proved too difficult for him. In fact, over the centuries, the language of the law was imbued with words derived from the French – among them ‘contract’, ‘agreement’ and ‘covenant’. The argot that came to be used in the courts was known as ‘Law French’. ‘Master’ and ‘servant’ come from the French. ‘Crime’ and ‘treason’ and ‘felony’ are French, as are ‘money’ and ‘payment’. The language of courtiers was the language of business and of punishment. There was also a difference of appearance between the invaders and the natives; the English wore their hair long, whereas the Normans were short-shaven. But in this, as in so many other ways, the English custom eventually prevailed.

  That is why there are so many continuities throughout the eleventh century, untouched by the events on the surface of the time. English law and administration survived intact. William declared that the laws of Edward the Confessor were to be respected, although he effectively reissued the laws of Canute. The Normans had little, or no, written law. They had everything to learn from the English.

  The thegns were now to be called knights, but their essential purpose as masters and judges of the land remained the same. The names changed, but the institutions did not. The hundred, and the shire, and the tithing, were intact. The sheriffs remained, too, although the later Norman incumbents may have been more exacting upon their shires. The county courts were conducted in the familiar way. The various privileges and customs of the towns and cities were maintained. Taxes or ‘gelds’ were raised in the same way. The system of military service, for general conscripts, was the same. The makers of the coin of the realm were still English; the Normans did not have the skill or expertise. Writs were issued and composed in the familiar manner. The witenagemot, or parliament of principal landholders, retained its ancient form. Wherever we look, we see signs of continuity. That is the essential feature of England. The deep structure of the country remained intact. William was undoubtedly a strong king who imposed his own strength upon the country, but so were Canute and Athelstan.

  Many of the developments that have been described as Norman in fact represented only the acceleration of English custom. Much has been written about Norman feudalism, whereby the nation was bound in a military compact, but most of the constituents of that system were present in England before William’s arrival. The defining principle of feudalism was the act of homage; a man knelt before his lord with his hands outstretched, and the lord took those hands within his. The supplicant, with bowed head and raised hands, resembled a penitent in the act of prayer. He promised to become ‘your man for the tenement I hold of you’ and to ‘bear faith to you of life and members and earthly honour against all other men’ except the king himself. But in England land had always been held in return for military service; the oath may have been different, but the social obligation was unchanged. We know from the English poetry of the eighth century that the lord and his men had always been inseparable. One significant change, however, took place. It had previously been the tradition that, on death, property was inherited by many kinsmen; by the twelfth century, property was bequeathed to a single male heir. All of these things worked together to create the social structure of the country.

  An essential part of that structure was the English Church. William introduced a number of Norman reforms, as well as Norman clergy, in order to bring rigour and order to the religious communities of the country. By 1087 only three of twenty-one abbots were English. Not all of the new abbots were sympathetic to their English inferiors. The abbot of Abingdon refused to keep the feasts of certain English saints on the principle that the English were ‘rustics’. At Glastonbury the new abbot used an armed retinue of Norman archers to shoot down his own monks, protesting against the imposition of a new liturgy. Others were more conciliatory. The abbot of Selby helped to build the first stone church for his community. He dressed in a workman’s cowl, and carried on his shoulders the stone and chalk used for the construction; he received his pay at the end of the week, like the other labourers, and then gave it away to the poor.

  William also appointed an Italian, Lanfranc, as archbishop of Canterbury. Lanfranc had resided at the Norman abbey of Bec, and was already well known to the king. He was one of those learned and pious men, like Anselm and Becket after him, who had a deep and lasting influence upon English life. Lanfranc drew up the first principles of canon law, and William conceded that all spiritual matters should be addressed in ecclesiastical courts. It was under the leadership of Lanfranc that the great cathedrals arose. He was also instrumental in bringing monastic discipline to often recalcitrant English monks. In 1076 he decreed that none of the English clergy would be allowed to marry.

  The pope had blessed William’s invasion, but the new king was not to be in thrall to the pontiff. He was determined to be the master of all his subjects. Was his office not sacred, too? In a divided papal election no victor was to be recognized in England without the king’s permission. No papal letter could be sent to any of the king’s subjects without his knowledge. No papal legate could enter the country without his approval. It was the king who would sanction the appointment of bishops and abbots. The battles between king and pope, or between king and archbishop, would continue for many centuries with an uncertain outcome; they came to a defining crisis only at the time of the Reformation.

  If there is one signal reminder of William’s reign, it is that document originally called ‘The King’s Book’ but more popularly known as Domesday Book because its evidence could no more be evaded than the day of doom. It was a survey of the resources of the realm, unique in Europe but not unusual in England where various national and regional accounts had already been compiled. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle William had ‘deep speech’ with the men of his council and sent officials into every shire to find out ‘what or how much each landholder had in land and livestock, and what it was worth’. The subsequent work was in fact so copious and so detailed, in single columns and double columns of Latin, that it must have made use of earlier records. It comprises two books, one of 475 pages and the other of 413 pages, with some of the capital letters touched with red ink. It describes over 13,000 locations, the vast majority of which survive still. The authors of the Chronicle state that there was not ‘an ox nor a cow nor a pig that was overlooked and not included in the record’. The level of detail is evident in one entry. In Oakley, Buckinghamshire, it was reported that ‘Aelfgyth the maid had half a hide which Godric the sheriff granted her as long as he was sheriff, on condition of her teaching his daughte
r gold embroidery work. This land Robert FitzWalter holds now.’

  The Domesday Book was commissioned by William at Christmas 1085, and was completed a year later; such speed was only possible within an existing administrative system. It was not a Norman, but an English, device. William could not have transferred English land to French magnates, after his invasion, without some existing record of English holdings that has long since been lost. It was in part compiled as documentation and evidence of that transfer, but it was also used as an instrument both for the more efficient raising of taxes and for the more accurate imposition of military service. It seems also to have been instrumental in a fairer distribution of the financial burdens William was placing on the country. He summoned his chief landholders to Salisbury where they swore loyalty to him once more; but now he knew both the extent of their possessions and their annual income. They were reminded that they held their lands directly or indirectly from the sovereign. He was their master. Domesday Book can now be seen in a glass case at the National Archives in Kew.

  We learn from its pages that England consisted of arable land (35 per cent), woodland (15 per cent), pasture (30 per cent), and meadow (1 per cent); the rest was mountain and fen and heath and waste and wild. We learn also that the manor, inherited from the Danes and the Saxons, was the foundation of agrarian and economic life. In its essence it meant a dwelling, and in Domesday several manors are often listed in one village; but by this period it had generally come to mean an estate of land or lands in which the tenants were bound by fealty to one lord. The lord’s land was known as ‘demesne’ land; it might be adjacent to the manor house, or it might be scattered in strips among the fields.

  The free tenants paid him rent for their acreage, and were obliged to help him at the busy times of harvest; the unfree tenants or villeins performed weekly labour service in work such as threshing and winnowing. The terms of this labour were maintained by tradition. Approximately 10 per cent of the population were deemed to be held in slavery, while 14 per cent were described as ‘free men’; the rest of the population were part of a variable range between the two.