Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (17 page)

I

William the Conqueror is perhaps the greatest man to have sat on the throne of England; he is certainly one of the most unpleasant. He was covetous, cruel, puritanical, invincibly convinced of his own righteousness and always ready to use terror as a weapon of first, rather than last, resort. He was also deeply pious and sure that God was on his side.

And the extraordinary course of his career gave him every reason for this belief.

William was born around the turn of the year 1027–8 in Falaise, Normandy. His father, Robert, was younger brother of Duke Richard III of Normandy and his mother, Herleva, was the daughter of a furrier or skinner. Six months later, Richard was dead, some said of poison, and Robert succeeded him as duke. Robert was not an effective ruler. During his reign the great Norman landed families seized the leading offices in the ducal household and made them hereditary. They likewise took over the local position of
vicomte
or sheriff. This last was especially important. Since the
vicomte
controlled the local administration of finance and justice, it meant that the duke was losing control of his dukedom – just as his own independence vis-à-vis the king of France was a symptom of the fragmentation of the kingdom into a series of largely independent territorial principalities.

Robert’s personal life was more successful. He and Herleva never married but their relationship was close, perhaps even loving, and Robert always treated William as his son. Shortly before he left on pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1035, he had the Norman magnates swear fealty to William as his heir and had the bequest confirmed by his overlord, Henry I, king of France. Robert never returned from his pilgrimage, and later in 1035, William succeeded as duke. He was still only in his eighth year.

Predictably, his minority was troubled. Two of his guardians were killed; his steward, Osbern, was murdered in the duke’s bedchamber as William slept, and in 1047 he was saved from deposition only by the personal intervention of King Henry I, who joined with William to defeat the rebels in battle at Val-ès-Dunes.

William was twenty and his victory marked his coming of age. He was now his own man and he quickly made his mark. In about 1050 he married Matilda, daughter of Count Baldwin V of Flanders; in 1051 he was apparently offered the throne of England by Edward the Confessor, and in the following year he was strong enough to go on the offensive against his enemies. These were headed by Count Geoffrey Martel of Anjou, who in 1051 conquered the county of Maine. This made him William’s immediate neighbour with, thanks to the revolt of the lord of the castles of Alençon and Domfront, a back door into Normandy itself. William resolved to close it. Geoffrey backed off from battle and William was able to pick the disputed castles off, beginning with the lightly defended Alençon. The defenders beat pelts on the walls in mocking reference to William’s birth. Once he had captured the place, William retaliated by cutting off their hands and feet. Domfront then surrendered without a struggle.

William had got what he wanted. But, in so doing, he had aroused a fear and loathing that he was never able to shake off. The immediate result was a
renversement d’alliances
in northern France, as Count Geoffrey and King Henry, hitherto inveterate enemies, went into alliance against the upstart. Two invasions of Normandy took place which William had difficulty in fighting off. But in 1060 both Geoffrey and Henry died and were succeeded, respectively, by a weakling and a minor. William never looked back from this extraordinary stroke of luck, which gave him a free hand in France and, it turned out, in England. He seized the county of Maine in 1062, claiming, as he was to do in England, that the late count had nominated him as his heir if he died childless. Then in 1064 he launched a successful attack on Brittany, in which, as we have seen, Earl Harold of Wessex had distinguished himself. Finally, in 1066, he won the battle of Hastings.

But winning the battle was not the same as winning England. To do that would take seven more years of almost continuous, often bloody fighting, and would involve an almost complete reversal of political strategy.

In the immediate aftermath of Hastings, it was far from clear that all was lost for the English: William had only a toehold on the south coast and only a tiny proportion of the available manpower had been thrown against him. The problem, essentially, was one of leadership. The Godwins had monopolized political power. But, between them, the two battles of Stamford Bridge and Hastings had wiped them out. The Mercian earls, Edwin and Morkere, survived, as did Earl Waltheof, the son of Siward of Northumbria. But the two former had been bloodied by Harold Hardrada and Tostig and were, in any case, more used to an oppositionist role against the Godwin hegemony than to leadership in their own right.

Archbishop Ealdred of York stepped into the breach. He had played a leading part in bringing back the family of Edward the Exile to England and now, together with the leading citizens of London, he sought to have Edward’s surviving son, the fifteen-year-old Edgar the Æthling, nominated king, ‘as he was quite natural to them’. Following this lead, Earls ‘Edwin and Morkere promised that they would fight with them’. It was a moment for decisive action. Instead, as
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
bitterly observed, ‘the more prompt the business should ever be, so was it from day to day the later and worse’.

And they faced an opponent, of course, who was both ruthless and a master of timing. After the battle, William had returned to his fortified camp at Hastings to wait and see whether the English would submit. When they did not, he first marched to the old Godwin manor of Southwark at the southern end of London Bridge. But the City held out and he decided that his forces, which probably numbered only about seven thousand men, were not strong enough for a frontal assault on London. Instead, he resorted to his favourite weapon of terror. Riding in a swift arc round London, from the south to the north-west, he ‘ravaged all the country that he overran’. After a few days of this, the demoralized English leadership had had enough and made their formal submission to William twenty-eight miles north-west of London at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire:

where Archbishop Ealdred came to meet [William], with child Edgar, and Earls Edwin and Morkere, and all the best men from London: who submitted them for need, when the most harm was done.

It was a grim parody of the usual recognition ceremony by the
witan
.

Why had English morale collapsed so quickly and so completely? The explanation seems to be that the shattering defeat at Hastings was taken as God’s judgement on the nation’s sins. The possibility, after all, had always been latent in Bede’s providential history of the Anglo-Saxon people. The Britons had forfeited their territory to the invaders, he explained, because of their sins. Now, clearly, it was the turn of the English to be deprived by the Normans for
their
wrongdoing. Hence the surprisingly unrancorous verdict of
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
that ‘the Frenchmen gained the field of battle [at Hastings], as God granted them for the sins of the nation’.

How long this mood of resigned submissiveness would last was, of course, another matter.

Nevertheless, the Anglo-Saxon tradition of consensual monarchy still had some life left in it. Once again, it was Archbishop Ealdred who tried to rescue something from the wreck in William’s coronation as king of England. This took place on Christmas Day 1066 in the Confessor’s abbey at Westminster with Ealdred himself as the principal celebrant:

Archbishop Ealdred hallowed him king … and gave him possession with the books of Christ, and also swore him, ere he would set the crown on his head, that he would so well govern this nation as any before him best did, if they would be faithful to him.

Seen in this light, William’s coronation becomes another contract between king and people, as had been agreed by the last foreign conqueror, Cnut, at the Oxford
witan
of 1018.

Maybe William, who was always vehement in his assertion that he was the true heir of his ‘kinsman’, Edward the Confessor, sincerely shared in these hopes. But the confusion which surrounded the remaining ceremonies of the coronation highlighted the difficulties in the way. After William had sworn the oath, Ealdred in English and Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances in French asked the people whether they would have William for their king. The loud acclamations that followed alarmed the troops guarding the Abbey and, as a precaution, they fired the surrounding houses. Much of the congregation, panicking in turn, rushed out of the church, leaving the clergy and the king, who is described as trembling from head to foot, to conclude the ceremony.

These events were sufficient to remind William of the dangers of remaining in London, exposed to the ‘fickleness of the vast and fierce populace’. Soon after the coronation, he withdrew to Barking, at a safe distance to the east of the City. And thence, in March 1067, he returned to Normandy to spend the remainder of the year celebrating his victory. Along with vast spoils, William took with him (nominally as guests but in reality as hostages) most of the surviving English political elite, including Archbishop Stigand, Edgar the Æthling and Earls Edwin, Morkere and Waltheof. In their place, William left a wholly Norman government, headed by two of his closest associates: Bishop Odo of Bayeux, who was his half-brother by Herleva’s subsequent marriage to Herluin de Conteville, and William fitzOsbern, one of the leading Norman magnates. And Odo and fitzOsbern lost no time in giving England the firm slap of Norman-style government: they ‘wrought castles widely through this country’,
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
reported, ‘and harassed the miserable people’.

II

One of William’s first acts in England had been to build a castle to secure his camp at Hastings. The scene is vividly represented in the Bayeux Tapestry. William sits in council with his two half-brothers, Bishop Odo and Robert, count of Mortain. The latter issues the order to build the castle. Workmen, with picks and shovels, throw up the pudding-shaped
motte
or mound, which is crowned with a wooded stockade. The motte was one essential feature of the castle. The other was the
bailey
or stockaded enclosure at the foot of the motte.

These motte-and-bailey castles, like the mounted knights and archers who had won Hastings, were another mark of the Normans’ military superiority. They were standardized, quick and easy to build using forced labour and the plentiful supplies of local timber; and, above all, they were effective.

On his march to London after the battle of Hastings, William strengthened the fortifications of Dover and, from his residence at Barking, he used the first weeks of 1067 to supervise the construction of another castle at London, to the south-east of the City on the site of the present Tower. William’s first two English castles, at Hastings and Dover, were designed to secure his communications with Normandy; his third, at London, was intended to overawe the capital city. Now Odo from his base at Dover, and Robert from his at Norwich, were building more.

Anglo-Saxon England had seen nothing like them. The
burhs
, or fortified towns, were designed to protect the people. The motte-and-bailey castles were there to intimidate them. And they did. With their raw earth and wood, set in a tree-denuded landscape, each was the symbol of a profoundly alien military occupation.

But, despite the castles and the heavy-handedness of William’s two regents, the prospects for Anglo-Norman cooperation still seemed reasonably good when William returned to England on 6 December 1067, in time to celebrate the feast of Christmas in his new kingdom. Early in the new year, there was a little local difficulty at Exeter, where Harold’s mother, Gytha, had taken refuge with her household. The town held out against the king for two weeks, despite William’s typical tactic of having a hostage blinded within sight of the walls, and the defenders inflicted heavy casualties on William’s troops. Nevertheless, they were granted easy terms: yet another castle was built; otherwise, William wanted to show that life could return to normal under his rule.

Indeed, by April William felt secure enough to bring his wife Matilda to England. And, on Whit Sunday, 11 May 1068, ‘Archbishop Ealdred hallowed her for queen at Westminster’. William’s reunion with Matilda was evidently a happy one and their youngest son, the future Henry I, was born within the year. The political climate equally seemed set fair. The court that gathered for the coronation was unusually full and it was evenly balanced between Norman and English magnates.

But, within a few months, this fair weather turned to foul and any hopes for an Anglo-Norman state were dead. In the course of the summer, some of the most distinguished English elite chose exile: Harold’s mother, Gytha, ‘and the wives of many good men with her’, went to St Omer in Flanders; while Edgar the Æthling with his mother Agatha and sisters Margaret and Christina took refuge in Scotland at the court of Malcolm III. But others turned to rebellion: Earls Edwin and Morkere rose in the Midlands and Gospatric in Northumbria, where William had made him earl. Both their motives and strategy are obscure. And William, as usual, moved too fast for whatever plans they may have had to mature. First he advanced to Nottingham. This cut Edwin and Morkere off from their northern allies and they had no choice but to surrender. Then William marched to York, at which point Gospatric and ‘the best men’ fled to join Edgar in Scotland. Finally the king returned south via Lincoln. And everywhere he went he built a castle, as
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
reports:

He went to Nottingham, and wrought there a castle; and so advanced to York, and there wrought two castles; and the same at Lincoln and everywhere in that quarter.

Most ambitiously of all, he set up a Norman, Robert de Commines, as earl of Northumbria, with another new castle at Durham.