Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (21 page)

It was at Whitsuntide, 29 May 1099, that William ‘held his court the first time in his new building at Westminster’. Apart from ceremony, the principal item of business was the conferment of the great bishopric of Durham on Ranulf Flambard. The appointment was probably Ranulf ’s reward for having steered the king’s massive building programme to a successful conclusion. But, like Flambard himself, it was deeply unpopular.

Flambard was William’s chief minister, ‘who had long directed and governed his counsels over all England’. As such, he was widely blamed for William’s exactions and oppressive government. He was also, though a churchman himself, directly responsible for the king’s sustained plundering of the Church. He kept bishoprics and abbacies vacant for long periods; seized the revenues to the king’s use, and farmed the lands to his own profit. At Ely Ranulf did not even wait for the incumbent to die; instead, he took advantage of the last days of the aged Abbot Simeon to pension off the monks and take the surplus for the king (and himself).

But the most outrageous case was at Canterbury itself. Archbishop Lanfranc had died only two years after crowning William. Thereafter the see, with its vast revenues, had been kept vacant for four years. And it was only filled in 1093 thanks to the king’s dangerous illness at Gloucester, when he ‘was so sick, that he was by all reported dead’. Frightened by this brush with death, William decided to make amends by appointing Anselm as archbishop.

Anselm, a distinguished philosopher who had been Lanfranc’s pupil and successor as abbot of Bec, was regarded as the natural choice. But the appointment turned out to be deeply unsatisfactory for both king and archbishop. Anselm had all the academic’s unworldliness and refusal to compromise; while William, once he had recovered from his fright, was aggressive and unyielding in turn. Even the conditions of Anselm’s appointment were subject to dispute and, within two years, William was intriguing at Rome to have Anselm deprived. The attempt failed; indeed, William, for once, was outsmarted and was manoeuvred into recognizing Urban II as pope without the quid pro quo of getting rid of his troublesome archbishop. But it was only a matter of time and in 1097 Anselm, finding his position impossible, went into exile. There he remained for the rest of the reign while the revenues from Canterbury fell once more into William’s hands.

IV

William, like almost all kings in the Middle Ages and for long after, was a passionate huntsman. There was nothing new in this; Edward the Confessor, as we have seen, had been similarly addicted. First, Edward would attend divine service; then he would devote himself, equally assiduously, to the chase:

He took much pleasure in hawks and birds of that kind which were brought before him and was really delighted by the baying and scrambling of the hounds.

To provide for such sport, Edward and his Anglo-Saxon predecessors had created special royal game reserves, such as Kingswood in the Kentish Weald, or Woodstock Chase in Oxfordshire.

But for the Normans these relatively modest provisions were nothing like enough and they introduced two major changes, both of which are associated with the imported Norman-French word
forêt
(‘forest’). First, they enormously extended the area of the game reserves. The most notorious example is the New Forest in Hampshire. William I, it seems, found some 75,000 acres of almost deserted upland and rough country; added a further 15–20,000 acres of inhabited and cultivated land, and expelled some five hundred families as a precaution against poaching. And the New Forest was only one of many. At their maximum extent in the twelfth century, the Royal Forests covered almost a third of England; they stretched in a broad band from Lincolnshire to Oxfordshire, and included the whole of the county of Essex.

The second change was to subject this hugely extended area to a separate jurisdiction known as Forest Law. This had been the practice in Carolingian France and it had been adapted by the dukes for their own purposes in Normandy. But it seems to have been entirely unknown in Anglo-Saxon England and its importation,
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
makes clear, was one of the most deplorable aspects of the Conqueror’s rule:

He made many deer-parks; and he established laws therewith; so that whosoever slew a hart, or a hind, should be deprived of his eyesight. As he forbade men to kill the harts, so also the boars; and he loved the tall deer as if he were their father.

The results were unpopular among all classes; ‘his rich men bemoaned it, and the poor men shuddered at it’. For everyone was affected. The rich found their own sport curtailed; the poor lost a useful source of food and saw their crops damaged; while churchmen disapproved both of the savagery of the laws and of the excessive commitment to sport which they represented. But there was a broader issue too. For the Laws were hated, above all, because they were perceived to be arbitrary. They were a product merely of the king’s will and they served only his pleasure. In other words, they were ‘un-English’. They were also the most vivid reminder that England was a conquered country, whose land, people and resources were the spoils of the victor to use or abuse as he wished.

Naturally, when William II made his bid for English support in 1088, an undertaking to abolish or moderate the Forest Laws was given a prominent place. But, equally naturally, the promise was forgotten when William’s hour of need passed. Instead, he proved as ruthless a Nimrod as his father.

But in 1100 the hunter became the hunted. Late in the afternoon on 2 August the king was hunting in the New Forest near Brockenhurst with a small party that included his younger brother, Henry. One of the hunts-men, Walter Tirel, lord of Poix in Ponthieu, appeared to aim at a stag but instead hit the king with his arrow. William died instantly. There followed immediate panic – real or staged – and the party rode off, abandoning the body. It was left to a passing peasant to bundle it in a cart and bring it to Winchester, where it was hastily buried beneath the tower. Meanwhile, Tirel had fled abroad while Henry had ridden to Winchester, seized the Treasury and, on 3 August, had himself chosen king.

Was the death accident or design? There have been suggestions of a conspiracy by the great family of Clare, with Tirel, whose wife was a Clare, as the hit-man. Two members of the family were in the hunting party on the fatal day and, subsequently, they were treated with marked favour by Henry. But there are no more substantial clues. What matters instead is the old rule of
cui bono?
– ‘who gains?’ And the man who gained most from the death, clearly, was Henry. If he did not plan it, he exploited it with the cool skill which was to be a marked feature of his rule.

By this time, Henry was thirty-two. He was the Conqueror’s youngest son; he was also the most ‘English’, being conceived, born and knighted in England. His status as a prince, or king’s son, from birth also seems to have affected his upbringing. There is little sign, for example, that either his father or his brothers received any but the most elementary instruction: they were swordsmen first and penmen scarcely at all. Henry, on the other hand, was given the sophisticated education (at least for a layman) that led to his later nickname of ‘Beauclerk’:

He was [writes his contemporary, William of Malmesbury] early instructed in the liberal arts and so thoroughly imbibed the sweets of learning that no warlike disturbance and no pressure of business could erase them from his noble mind.

‘His learning,’ William concluded, ‘though obtained by snatches, assisted him much in the science of government.’

The evidence of this more reflective, calculating approach to kingship was quickly apparent. For Henry had seized the throne by means of a
coup d’état
, perhaps even by fratricide. His actions were palliated, no doubt, by William’s widespread unpopularity. Even so, he badly needed legitimacy.

His first step was to bring forward his coronation. Normally, coronations took place on a great feast of the Church. Henry, however, could not wait. Instead, immediately after his election as king by an impromptu
witan
at Winchester – ‘the statesmen that were then nigh on hand’ – on Friday, 3 August, he rode post-haste to London and was crowned in the Abbey on the Sunday by Maurice, bishop of London. From the death of one king to the crowning of another had taken a mere four days.

Nevertheless, it was time enough for Henry to introduce an important modification to the coronation service. As we have seen, since at least the time of Edgar, English kings had sworn an oath at their coronation. The oath took a fixed form and was regarded by both king and people as defining the essence of good royal government. Twenty years after his own coronation, for instance, Edward the Confessor quoted his oath, more or less verbatim, in a charter. Henry, however, decided to go beyond the traditional form. He would not only promise to govern well; he would also renounce the bad government of his father and brother. This turned, and was clearly intended to turn, the oath from a promise into a manifesto.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, alert as always to the ‘constitutional’ implications of events, notes the change with precision:

On the Sunday … before the altar at Westminster, he promised God and all the people to annul all the unrighteous acts that took place in his brother’s time, and to maintain the best laws that were valid in any king’s day before him.

Only once these promises were made was Henry crowned and given a general homage, in which ‘all this land submitted to him, and swore oaths, and became his men’.

The oath, of course, was oral – though the king and the bishop must each have read from a written text. Henry’s other innovation was to issue a version of this text as a Coronation Charter. There was something in it for everyone. The Church traditionally came first and the first clause of the Charter duly promised to end Rufus’s policy of ecclesiastical plunder. It began sonorously, with the king’s solemn, general undertaking to ‘make free the Church of God’. Then each of Rufus’s specific methods of extortion was renounced.

In fact, Henry, even in the short time available to him, had already begun to translate his words into action. Of the three bishoprics that were in the king’s hands, he filled one on the very day of his election by giving the diocese of Winchester, vacant since 1098, to the chancellor, William Gifford. At Canterbury, likewise, the vacancy was quickly ended when the king, with the advice of his council, wrote letters of recall to Archbishop Anselm. And it was the same with the vacant abbeys, which included five out of the six richest. Nor was the scandal ever repeated.

Then the concerns of Henry’s lay subjects were addressed. The aristocracy was promised security of inheritance; while everyone would benefit from Henry’s renunciation of the
monetagium
, or levy on the coining of silver pennies. But it was Henry’s promise to moderate the
murdrum
(‘murder’) fine which most struck a chord with the ordinary people.

The
murdrum
fine had been introduced by the Conqueror to try to protect his Norman followers from assassination by the disaffected English. It assumed that every murdered body was that of a Norman, unless it could be proved otherwise. If the proof were not forthcoming, a heavy fine was levied on the whole community where the body had been found. The principle of collective reprisals – the resort of occupying forces throughout the ages – was odious and the
murdrum
fine was linked with the Forest Laws as a badge of English oppression.

Henry’s promise to tackle the issue was therefore a popular one. In the event, the grievance was mitigated rather than abolished. Nevertheless, a welcome signal of a return to normalcy had been given.

And it was this, really, that was the underlying purpose of the Charter. ‘I abolish’, the king swore, ‘all the evil practices with which the realm was unjustly oppressed.’ In their place, he undertook to ‘restore to you the law of King Edward’. Strictly speaking, Edward the Confessor, unlike many of his predecessors, including, most recently, Cnut, had issued no law code. Instead ‘the law of King Edward’ was taken to mean the totality of all Anglo-Saxon law in force in 1066. This corpus was now researched by Henry’s legal scholars and, with judicious modifications, was used to provide the basis of the Common Law that, henceforth, would be the law of England. And, though it was formulated by an Anglo-Norman legal establishment, this was, self-consciously, a native, English law.

But the Charter did not only look back to the legal status quo ante of 1066 or to the settlement of 1014. It was also rich in implications for the future. It was reissued by all subsequent twelfth-century kings and it was incorporated, almost word for word, into Magna Carta. But there was one grievance which Henry, as keen a huntsman as any of his house, could not bring himself to address. ‘I have retained’, Clause 10 declared baldly, ‘the Forests in my own hands as my father did before me.’ Even here, however, the naked arbitrariness of the Conqueror’s legislation is cloaked with the claim that the retention of the Forests had been agreed ‘by the common council of my barons’.

Just as important were the personal changes of 1100. William’s hated minister, Ranulf Flambard, was thrown in the Tower. And Henry decided to get married; indeed, he may even have fallen in love. The woman in question was Edith, daughter of Malcolm III of Scotland and St Margaret and niece of Edgar the Æthling. She had been brought up at Romsey Abbey, an aristocratic establishment, where her aunt Christina was a nun. There she had had many suitors and, though not professed, had worn the veil to keep them off.

But Henry was different. It was clearly Edith’s pleasure to marry him; it was also her duty since, by the marriage, the House of Wessex would be restored to the throne of England. Henry, who revered his wife’s fourteen generations of royal blood, saw the union in a similar light. As did all other observers, led by the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, who rejoiced that she was ‘of the right royal race of England’. On 11 November they were married ‘with much pomp at Westminster’ by Anselm himself and Matilda, as she was known after her marriage, was anointed and crowned queen in the same ceremony. Three years later a son was born. He was christened William, after his Norman grandfather, the Conqueror; but surnamed Æthling, after his Anglo-Saxon royal blood. The cloven tree trunk of the Confessor’s dream had, it seemed, knitted up and borne green leaf again.