Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (18 page)

With the north apparently settled, William and Matilda returned to Normandy in late 1068. But it proved to be a lull before a far greater storm. Early in 1069, the Northumbrians rose against Earl Robert; took Durham Castle; murdered the earl and slaughtered the garrison. Most ominously, having been joined by the exiles in Scotland, Edgar the Æthling and Earl Gospatric, they took York, where, with the agreement of the citizens, Edgar was proclaimed king. At the same time, aid was solicited from King Swein of Denmark, who still persisted with his own claim to the English throne.

This was even worse than the Northumbrian revolt of 1065. Then, the Northumbrians had chosen their own earl; now they had elected their own king. Once more, William made a lightning march to York and took the rebels unawares. He captured and sacked the city, not sparing the Minster, and then, after refortifying and regarrisoning it, returned south.

But the leaders had escaped and were still at large when the Danish fleet landed in the Humber in September 1069. The Danes and the English rebels, who now included Earl Waltheof, joined forces and on 20 September captured York, where they demolished William’s castles and slaughtered the French garrison. It was the third time that the city had changed hands within the year. And William had to set out on his third northern expedition to recover it. He was determined that it should be his last.

First, he came to terms with the Danes. Lacking the ships to attack their fleet, William bought them off with a Danegeld, in return for which they promised to leave before Easter. This distraction out of the way, he turned to settle accounts with his own subjects. Once again, his weapon was terror. But this time the scale was infinitely larger. On his march north through Yorkshire, he systematically ravaged the countryside: destroying crops, killing livestock and burning villages. He reached York in time for Christmas. The city was a ruin, but William kept the feast with his accustomed splendour and wore the crown and regalia which had been brought up specially from the treasury at Winchester. The north, he was determined, should know who was king, even if he were king of a wasteland.

After the celebrations, the destruction was carried still further north, far into Durham. Eighteen years later, the countryside still bore the scars and the Domesday Book describes dozens of villages between York and Durham as
wasta
(‘waste’). ‘Waste’ is a technical term. It does not necessarily mean that the land had been devastated; rather, that it was uninhabited, uncultivated and hence untaxable. This technical distinction is important. But it was William’s actions that had made so much of the north
wasta
in whatever sense of the term. And, in so doing, he had killed tens of thousands by the sword, starvation and disease.

The Harrying of the North, as it became known, shocked an unshockable age. Even the twelfth-century chronicler Oderic Vitalis, an Anglo-Norman and a self-consciously balanced writer, is unreserved in his condemnation:

Never did William such cruelty; to his lasting disgrace, he yielded to his worst impulse, and set no bounds to his fury, condemning the innocent and the guilty to a common fate.

‘I assert’, Oderic concluded, ‘that such barbarous homicide could not pass unpunished’ – by God, if not by man.

But, whatever its morality, the terror achieved its purpose. The north would not trouble William again.

III

The centre of resistance now shifted south to the Fenlands of East Anglia. Its many monasteries, such as Peterborough and Ely, saw themselves as guardians of Anglo-Saxon faith and culture; while the landscape of marshes and islets, criss-crossed by a watery maze of rivers, streams and meres, provided ideal territory for guerrilla warfare. The leader of the Fenland revolt was a local
thegn
, Hereward, who was joined by a large and shifting coalition. His first allies in 1070 were the Danes, who had broken their promise to return home. Hereward joined forces with them to sack Peterborough and to strip it of its treasures to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Frenchman Thorold, whom William had appointed abbot. This sacrilegious attack, by an Englishman on a great English monastery, opened up a gulf between last-ditchers, like Hereward, and more cautious compromisers, like the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, himself a monk of Peterborough, who denounced ‘Hereward and his gang’.

All members of the Anglo-Saxon elite faced a similar choice. Their eventual decision must have depended on personal circumstance, family connection and even chance. But, by and large, administrators, like the Anglo-Saxon chronicler himself, who ‘lived sometime in [William’s] court’, chose compromise, as did the financiers and moneyers, while the political aristocracy joined Hereward in the last ditch. In the course of 1071 both the Mercian brothers, Earls Edwin and Morkere, renounced their allegiance and went underground, ‘roam[ing] at random in woods and in fields’. Edwin was ‘treacherously slain by his own men’ on his way to Scotland, but Morkere made it ‘by ship’ to Hereward’s last redoubt in the heavily fortified monastery of Ely. There he was joined by the rump of Northumbrian resistance, led by Bishop Æthelwine of Durham, who came ‘with many hundred men’. William now launched an all-out amphibious assault. Ely was blockaded to the north by ships, while, to the west, the land attack took place along a specially built, two-mile-long causeway. Trapped, most of the rebels surrendered. Morkere was imprisoned for life; Æthelwine was deprived of his bishopric and sent to the monastery of Abingdon, where he soon died, while the lesser rebels were imprisoned, blinded or had limbs amputated ‘as [William] thought proper’. Only Hereward and the diehards refused to bow the knee; instead Hereward ‘led [them] out triumphantly’ – to escape no one knows where and to live in legend for ever.

With the fall of Ely and the extinguishing of the last spark of English resistance, William was free to turn against Scotland. Malcolm III owed his very throne to Edward the Confessor. Moreover, in 1069 he had married Margaret, sister of Edgar the Æthling. She was a powerful character, who became a force in Scottish politics in her own right. For all these reasons, Malcolm had been happy to offer protection and occasional assistance to English refugees from William. William now determined to close this back door into his kingdom. In 1072, he led a joint naval and military expedition to Scotland. At first, Malcolm retreated before William. But, beyond the Forth, the two kings met on the borders of Perthshire and Fife and agreed the Peace of Abernethy. Malcolm became William’s vassal; surrendered hostages and, almost certainly, agreed to stop supporting his brother-in-law, Edgar the Æthling.

But the process of disengagement was handled slowly and with due regard to decorum. Edgar returned to Scotland in 1074 from his then place of exile in Flanders. He was given a warm reception by the king and queen but was encouraged to seek a reconciliation with William. Edgar did as he was advised and William graciously accepted his overtures. Loaded with gifts, Edgar was then dispatched to William in Normandy. ‘William received him with much pomp, and he was there afterwards in his court, enjoying such rights as he confirmed to him by law.’

At least Edgar’s cage was golden.

It remained only for William to take over the English Church and Normanize it as completely as the English state. This, of course, was a battle which had to be fought with spiritual weapons. But William proved as adept at deploying these as fire and sword. Back in 1066, he had begun by a determined campaign to win papal support for his claim to the English throne. William’s arguments were given a mixed reception in Rome, as Hildebrand, then an archdeacon and a leading figure of the papal court, reminded the king in a subsequent letter:

I believe it is known to you, most excellent son, how great was the love I have always borne you … and how active I have shown myself in your affairs; above all, how diligently I laboured for your advancement to royal rank. In consequence I suffered dire calumny through certain brethren insinuating that by such partisanship I gave sanction for the perpetration of great slaughter.

The premonitions of the ‘certain brethren’ were of course right. Nevertheless, the then pope, Alexander II (1061–73), was persuaded to give William’s expedition his blessing and to equip it with a papal banner.

And the pope proved equally accommodating after William’s victory by sending two cardinal-legates to oversee the reform of the English Church. The legates arrived in England in the spring of 1070 and were met by William, fresh from the Harrying of the North, at Winchester. There they celebrated Easter and the king and legates presided jointly over a council of the English Church. It began with William receiving – like the Carolingians but uniquely for an English king – a second, papal, coronation at the hands of the legates. Then the business of reform began. King and pope saw this differently. For the papacy, it was a question of removing unworthy bishops and abbots, who were incompetent, sexually incontinent or owed their appointment to anti-popes. For William, it was simpler: he wanted to get rid of politically unreliable Englishmen from high ecclesiastical office. Fortunately, the two different objectives coincided in practice, and when the council was over only two Englishmen retained bishoprics: one, Wulfstan of Worcester, would become a saint; the other, Siward of Rochester, was senile.

A second council, held at Whitsuntide, started to fill the resulting vacancies. William’s favourite churchman, Lanfranc of Bec, was made archbishop of Canterbury in place of the deprived, disgraced and now imprisoned Stigand; while York, left vacant by Archbishop Ealdred’s death in 1069, was given to Thomas, a canon of Bayeux, who was doubly qualified as both a former pupil of Lanfranc and a protégé of Bishop Odo.

There is no doubt that Lanfranc and the rest were infinitely superior as churchmen to those they replaced. But it is also the case that they were outsiders, with an outsider’s indifference or even hostility to native customs and traditions. Buildings that the Anglo-Saxons thought venerable they saw merely as old-fashioned; locations that were sanctified by memory and the experience of countless English generations were merely inconvenient. The result was a wholesale relocation and rebuilding that transformed both the physical and the organizational fabric of the English Church. The seats of one third of English bishops were moved, from the countryside into thrusting towns. And everywhere, with the Norman fondness for glossy and grandiloquent structures, new buildings replaced old. The fate of Ely is typical. Within ten years of Hereward’s final defeat and disappearance into legend, there was a Norman abbot at Ely and work had started on the building of the present vast church, whose massive walls and piers seem to crush out even the memory of revolt and transform the last centre of Anglo-Saxon resistance to William into an eloquent symbol of the Conquest and the permanence of Norman power. Work at Lincoln, whither the see of Dorchester had been transferred, started a decade earlier in the 1070s, while the foundations of Durham were ceremonially laid on 11 August 1093, after the Anglo-Saxon church had been entirely demolished the previous year.

We think of cathedrals as noble monuments to God and the Christian faith. Norman cathedrals, however, were ecclesiastical versions of Norman castles: at once centres of Norman administration, advertisements for a new, Norman, way of life, and monuments to the permanence of Norman power. Above all, they were visible proof that God was on King William’s side.

IV

The 1070s were the nadir of England and the English. It was, wrote Henry of Huntingdon, who was himself half-English, an insult to be called English; William, despairing of his new subjects, abandoned his attempts to learn their language; while God Himself, it seemed, had ‘ordered that they should no longer be a people’ (
iam populum non esse iusserit
).

But, at the same time, there were signs of movement in the opposite direction. These eddying currents find their clearest expression in the so-called Bride’s Ale revolt of 1075. The revolt took its name from the fact that it was planned at the marriage of Earl Ralph of East Anglia to the sister of Earl Roger of Hereford. It was a marriage at the highest level of the Anglo-Norman elite: Roger was the son of William’s closest aristocratic ally, William fitzOsbern; Ralph, the son and heir of one of Edward the Confessor’s Breton favourites, Ralph ‘the Staller’, while it was William himself who had arranged the match. Nevertheless, at the marriage feast at Norwich talk quickly turned to treason: there was ‘Earl Roger and Earl Waltheof and bishops and abbots; who there resolved that they would drive the king out of England’. Earls Roger and Ralph were the prime movers and both tried to raise their earldoms against the king. But neither enjoyed much success and Ralph, in particular, confronted a remarkably hostile coalition: ‘the castlemen that were in England and also the people of the land came against him, and prevented him from doing anything’. In other words Normans (‘castlemen’) and Englishmen (‘the people of the land’) had joined together in the king’s name against an Anglo-Norman earl. The revolt now collapsed. Ralph succeeded in fleeing abroad while Roger was captured and imprisoned for life. But William’s full vengeance was saved for the Englishman, Earl Waltheof.

Waltheof ’s career was a switchback. Youngest son of Earl Seward of Northumbria, he had been an enthusiastic participant in the northern revolt, and, at the battle of York, had personally slaughtered many of the Norman garrison, ‘cutting off their heads one by one as they entered the gate’. Nevertheless, he was pardoned by William, who then went to great lengths to keep his loyalty. He gave him his father’s earldom of Northumbria, as well as the earldom of Huntingdon, which he had been granted by the Confessor; he even gave him his niece, Judith, as his wife. In the face of such generosity, Waltheof ’s participation in the Bride’s Ale revolt, hesitant and quickly regretted though it seems to have been, was unforgivable. He was beheaded at Winchester on 31 May 1076 and reburied at Crowland Abbey, where, as with the victims of earlier Anglo-Saxon political deaths, a popular cult quickly developed at his tomb.