Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (19 page)

The drama of Waltheof ’s execution, the pathos of his position as the last surviving English earl and his posthumous reputation for sanctity have conspired to obscure the real significance of the Bride’s Ale revolt. It was
not
the last stand of the English. On the contrary. The English, or at least some lesser East Anglian landowners, had been actively loyal to William. Instead, the threat to the king was Norman. It came from within the Norman establishment; and its motives seemed to have been characteristically Norman as well.

For what had apparently outraged Earl Roger was that the king’s sheriffs had been holding pleas in his lands. The office of sheriff had first appeared in the early eleventh century. The sheriff acted as immediate deputy to the earl; he was also the king’s direct representative in the shire, presiding in the Shire Court and supervising the collection of the
geld
and the dues from the royal estates. The office had become necessary with the creation of the great earldoms of Cnut’s reign, which embraced many counties and turned their holders into figures of central, even more than local, politics. In Normandy, as we have seen, the aristocracy had got control of the equivalent office of
vicomte
in the reign of William’s father, Duke Robert. But in England, the king kept it firmly in his grasp – and no king more firmly than William.

All this makes it important to understand what changed in the socio-political structure of England, and what did not, with the Norman Conquest. There was, indisputably, a revolution in the aristocracy, by which a native Anglo-Saxon elite was replaced, almost entirely, by a foreign, Norman-French ruling class. These newcomers brought with them a new language, new values and new attitudes. But did these importations include what historians call ‘feudalism’? For the great Victorian scholars, such as Stubbs and Freeman, it was axiomatic that they did: English feudalism was a Norman invention. More recent scholars reject this idea. They point out that Anglo-Saxon England, as King Alfred’s works alone make clear, was fully familiar with the idea of ‘lordship’. The earls acknowledged the king as their lord, probably in a formal ceremony of homage; the
thegns
, in turn, were the ‘men’ or vassals of the earls, and so on down the social scale. And each relationship of lord and vassal involved the granting of land by the lord in return for the supply of troops by the vassal.

In this sense of the word ‘feudalism’, little of substance changed at the Conquest. Noble estates, it is true, probably became larger. In part, this was a matter of necessity, since the Norman military innovations of the castle and the mounted knight were more expensive than their Anglo-Saxon equivalents. But it was also a question of opportunity, since, with the mass expropriation of the Anglo-Saxon elite, there was so much land to distribute among such a comparatively small group of people. This exceptionally rapid and wholesale turnover of land, and the fact that it took place in a foreign and often hostile environment, also meant that practices which had developed piecemeal and over time in Normandy became more explicit and schematic in England.

All of this, however, is far from the ‘Feudal Revolution’ imagined by the Victorians. Nevertheless, they were right, I think, to insist that something
had
changed. For feudalism has another sense. It is not simply the hierarchical ordering of society as a chain of lords and vassals; it is also the displacement of ‘state’ structures by ‘feudal’ ones – so that, for example, lords take over royal powers of justice and taxation. This tendency was present, too, in Anglo-Saxon England, as, once again, King Alfred’s writings bear witness. But in England, unlike France, the tendency was resisted, and resisted effectively, by the king.

But the Conquest made this resistance much harder. For it introduced, and lavishly endowed, a French ruling class who had a very high opinion of French practices in government, as in everything else, and a very low one of English. Hence Earl Roger’s rebellion against William. And hence the increasing difficulties William had with the new Norman elites and with his own family most of all. The English found themselves caught in the middle. But for most the choice was easy. They would support the king, even a Norman king, against a feudal noble, especially a Norman one. And it was this occasional, mutually self-interested, alliance between king and people against a foreign aristocracy that marks the beginning of the English recovery from the shame of defeat and dispossession.

Chapter 7
Sons of Conquest

William II

WILLIAM HAD THREE SONS
who survived to maturity: Robert ‘Curthose’, born in about 1053; William, born in 1060–5, and Henry, born in 1068. Robert, the most personally attractive of the siblings, had been acknowledged as heir of Normandy while still a boy. But his father was reluctant to allow him any real power. Robert was also jealous of the favour William showed to his second son and namesake, William ‘Rufus’. Finally, there was a clash of personalities between father and eldest son: between the driven, ruthless king, and the brave, charming, dissolute prince. These are not qualities calculated to impress historians. But they did make Robert a hero for many of the younger members of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy. They also ensured that his career exemplified the dangerous, egotistical factiousness which the Normans brought with them to England.

I

The quarrel between father and son became open in 1078, and early the following year they met in battle at the castle of Gerberoi on the southeastern frontier of Normandy. The two fought in personal combat and Robert wounded William in the hand. William’s horse was also killed under him. But an English
thegn
, Toki, the son of Wigot of Wallingford, brought him another. Toki had, almost certainly, saved William’s life – but at the cost of his own, as he was killed on the spot.

William and Robert soon patched up an agreement. But the dispute flared up again and in 1084 William banished his son from his domains. Meanwhile, other members of the family were drawn into the quarrel. Queen Matilda tried to protect Robert and mediate between him and his father. She got little thanks from William, who threatened to blind one of her servants who had acted as intermediary with Robert. She died in 1083, and William made a great show of grief, which may have been sincere. Matilda had been one of his principal coadjutors in government; the other was his brilliant, ebullient half-brother Odo. But Odo, too, leaned to Robert, and in 1083 William had Odo arrested. At his trial, Odo protested that as bishop of Bayeux he was exempt from William’s jurisdiction. William retorted that he respected his sanctity as bishop but was trying him as earl of Kent. The earl-bishop was condemned and imprisoned.

These family quarrels offered a field day to William’s many enemies: France, Anjou and Scotland. Even the Danes joined in, and in 1085 Cnut, son of King Swein, threatened an invasion of England in alliance with the count of Flanders. William was in Normandy when the news arrived and his response was characteristically vigorous:

He went into England with so large an army of horse and foot, from France and Brittany, as never before sought this land; so that men wondered how this land could feed all that force. But the king left the army to shift for themselves through all this land among his subjects, who fed them, each according to his quota of land.

In the event, after dissension in his own ranks prevented Cnut from launching the attack, William stood part of his mercenary army down, but kept the rest on stand-by over winter.

This security scare and the resulting difficulties in billeting troops formed the background to the most extraordinary administrative achievement of the reign: the great survey known as the Domesday Book. The decision to launch the survey was taken at a great council (as the
witan
was now known), which met at Gloucester immediately after Christmas:

The king [had] a large meeting, and very deep consultation with his council about this land; how it was occupied and by what sort of men.

Once the scope of the survey was agreed, groups of commissioners were dispatched to cover all England south of the Rivers Ribble and Tees. They proceeded county by county, finding out who held what land, now and in 1066; what the estate was worth, again in 1066 and 1086; its assessment for the
geld
; the number of peasants who worked it and with how many ploughs; its stock of animals and its other amenities such as mills. Each individual landowner or his representative was interrogated and the information they supplied checked with the juries of the Shire and Hundred Courts. But it did not end there since, in some areas at least, second groups of commissioners were sent out to control the work of the first. These were deliberately chosen from men with no local connections who could be expected to operate without fear or favour.

Finally, the information was collated and written up fair for presentation to the king: ‘Little Domesday’, which deals with the East Anglian counties of Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, and ‘Great Domesday’, which covers the rest and is beautifully written and elaborately rubricated (highlighted in red) for ease of reference.

And all this was done in a mere seven months.

The result astonished contemporaries. ‘There was not one single hide,’ the Anglo-Saxon chronicler writes, ‘nor yard of land, nay, moreover (it is shameful to tell, though [William] thought it no shame to do it), nor even an ox, nor a cow, nor a swine was there left, that was not set down.’ And it still astonishes. It is a tribute to the Anglo-Saxon systems of local administration and national taxation, on the one hand, and to Norman energy, ambition and efficiency, on the other. Above all, it represents the closing chapter of the Conquest. The chaotic turnover of land ownership of the last twenty years was now over, it signalled; instead, an entry in the Domesday Book would represent secure title, both then and for ever.

All this is no doubt true. But it is the Anglo-Saxon chronicler who goes further and grasps the essential. For he sees Domesday as a product of William’s covetousness. The king had devoted the best years of his life to the acquisition of England, while the means he had used to get and keep it had risked his immortal soul. Now, at last, it was his and Domesday enabled him to hold it, literally, in his hands.

The survey was presented to the king on Lammas Day, 1 August 1086, at the great court held at Old Sarum in Wiltshire. The court was attended, not only by the council and the magnates, but also by ‘all the landsmen [landowners] that were of any account over all England’. And there they all, each and every one, performed homage to the king. It was an extraordinary scene, and the Anglo-Saxon chronicler describes it with the precision of an eyewitness:

They all bowed themselves before him, and became his men, and swore him oaths of allegiance that they would against all other men be faithful to him.

At first sight, this mass act of feudal homage looks like the ultimate Normanization of English politics. But the appearance is deceptive. For at Salisbury William received the oaths, not only of his own immediate vassals, or tenants-in-chief as they would later be called, but also of their tenants and sub-tenants as well. This looked forward to the idea of liege homage but it also looked back to the practice – which was as old as Alfred’s time at least – of every free man swearing an oath to the king in the Hundred Courts. The result was to give English feudalism a decidedly English twist.

William left for Normandy immediately after the Oath of Salisbury. It was to be his last visit to England, and he left in typical fashion, having first exacted a heavy
geld
. The money was needed to finance William’s struggle with the king of France, Philip I, who had taken advantage of the quarrels within William’s family to try to cut his over-mighty vassal down to size. William’s campaign went well, and in August 1087 he captured Mantes. The lightly defended town was sacked and fired, and many of the inhabitants, including two especially venerated hermits, perished in the flames.

This calculated use of terror was, as we have often seen, business as usual for William. But this time something went wrong. William’s horse bolted in the chaos of the burning town and he was struck hard in his now-protuberant stomach by the pommel of his saddle. He was carried to Rouen, where he lay for three weeks. He remained lucid throughout and was expected to recover. But in early September his condition deteriorated and on the 9th he died.

The Anglo-Saxon chronicler honoured the dead king with a magnifi-cent obituary. It is based on personal knowledge – ‘we who often looked upon him’ – and it is nuanced and balanced. The chronicler praised his wisdom and wealth, which were very great; his piety, which built and endowed so many monasteries; his dignity, which manifested itself in the crown-wearings which took place three times a year when he was in England; his force of will, which brooked no opposition, and struck down bishops, abbots and earls and even his own brother Odo. But, above all, he admired his harsh yet equitable justice, which brought peace and tranquillity to a distracted kingdom. To set against all these qualities, however, were William’s vices: his insatiable covetousness, his inordinate pride and his addiction to hunting, which, for his mere pleasure, inflicted so much suffering on his subjects.

The chronicler extenuates none of these faults. But, finally and justly, he acknowledges William’s stature as England’s greatest king: ‘he truly reigned over England’, he concluded, and was ‘more splendid and powerful than any of his predecessors’.

From an Englishman, this was high praise indeed.

But great king of England though he was, William remained a Norman at heart. As he requested, his body was taken for burial to the Norman abbey of St Etienne at Caen; all the bishops and abbots of Normandy were present at the ceremony, and the sermon was preached by the Norman bishop of Evreux. But a final hitch occurred. As the manner of his death makes clear, William had grown very fat in his later years. But his sarcophagus, probably made long before, took no account of the fact and some force was needed to fit the body in. The result was described by the Anglo-Norman monk, Oderic Vitalis: ‘the swollen bowels burst, and an intolerable stench assailed the nostrils of the bystanders and the whole crowd’. Not even the clouds of incense could mask it and the service was rushed to a conclusion.