Queen of the Conqueror: The Life of Matilda, Wife of William I (22 page)

Her father owed the kingdom of England to her.
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If, as the evidence suggests, Matilda was pregnant during the weeks leading up to her husband’s invasion of England—arguably the most crucial moment of their reign—then, given her belief in the mystical arts, she might well have consulted soothsayers at court on the significance of the pregnancy and how she might use it to ensure a favorable outcome. As Godfrey implies in his poem, the safe delivery of the child thus became inextricably linked with the successful conquest of England.
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Whatever her reason for remaining so long in Normandy, it did mean that Matilda was not present to witness the brutal early months of William’s reign. After being crowned, he was formally referred to as “the great and peacegiving King,” something that his new subjects would have found deeply ironic.
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The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
describes the mercilessness of William’s regime, which butchered thousands of Englishmen, laid vast swaths of land to waste, and imposed “stiff” taxes and other strictures upon the beleaguered natives. Any who dared to defy him were either mutilated or put to death. The twelfth-century chronicler John of Worcester describes how William punished his recalcitrant subjects “by gouging out their eyes or cutting off their hands.”
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The English commentators clearly believed that the Norman invasion was a punishment from God for their manifold sins. “They built castles widely throughout this nation, and oppressed the wretched people; and afterwards it always grew very much worse. When God wills, may the end be good.”
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The prospect of assimilation between the conquerors and conquered looked bleak indeed. The Norman Conquest was the second successful invasion of England in the eleventh century, the first being led by the Danes in 1013–16. The latter had been overthrown by the native English less than thirty years later, and it remained a strong possibility that the Normans would be ousted in similar fashion.
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The invading Normans presented a stark contrast to the people of
England. They certainly looked very different, with their clean-shaven faces giving them the appearance more of priests than of fighting men. They were also “well-dressed to a fault.” It was with a mixture of curiosity and scorn that they regarded the “long-haired denizens of England” with their mustaches and “skin tattooed with coloured patterns.” William of Poitiers derided “the long-haired sons of the northern lands,” who appeared rough and ill-kempt next to the neatly cropped style of the Normans. According to Malmesbury, their appearance was mirrored by their uncivilized ways, which included “eating till they were sick and drinking till they spewed”—although he admitted that the conquering army inherited these bad habits.
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In religion, at least, the Normans were in accord with their new subjects. The Saxon were Christians who now found themselves in the hands of one of the most devout Christian peoples in Europe. Malmesbury claims that the Conquest greatly enhanced the religious life of the English: “you may see everywhere churches in villages, in towns and cities monasteries rising in a new style of architecture; and with new devotion our country flourishes.”
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Great Romanesque churches were erected across the country, becoming as much a sign of Norman preeminence as the imposing castles with which William and his men would later stamp their authority. As in the political sphere, the higher ecclesiastical offices were now held by Normans, and the English clerics were gradually (or in some cases, summarily) ousted from their positions.

The new king personified his race’s emerging piety, but he also symbolized its strident self-confidence, which was viewed as arrogance by resentful Saxon subjects. He trusted none of the English nobles who had survived Hastings and the campaigns that followed. To be fair, they had done little to earn his trust, proving all too ready to rebel against him—“behaviour which so exasperated his ferocity that he deprived the more powerful among them first of their revenues, then of their lands, and some even of their lives.”
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William’s privileged inner sanctum, then, was dominated by Normans. Odo of Bayeux, Roger of Montgomery, Roger de Beaumont, Robert of Mortain, Alan of Brittany, Geoffrey of Coutances, Earl Hugh of Chester, Richard fitzGilbert, and William of Warenne seem to have been the most active in his government, judging from the frequency of their witness marks on the charters. Almost all of
these “wise and eloquent men,” as Orderic described them, had served the royal couple ever since their marriage, and some even before that time.
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Their loyalty was richly rewarded with large estates, honors, and titles. As well as the relentlessly acquisitive Odo, William’s other half-brother, Robert of Mortain, and his close associate Roger of Montgomery also profited from a share of the spoils after 1066.

William was not alone in his disdain for the English people. Lanfranc, still one of his closest advisers, felt such an aversion toward them that he begged to be excused from the post of archbishop of Canterbury when it was offered to him by William and a convention of powerful ecclesiastics. “I pleaded failing strength and personal unworthiness, but to no purpose; the excuse that the language was unknown and the native races barbarous weighed nothing with them either.” Neither did his opinion of the English improve after he was obliged to take up the office. He complained to Pope Alexander II: “Now I endure daily so many troubles and vexations and such spiritual starvation of nearly anything that is good; I am continually hearing, seeing and experiencing so much unrest among different people, such distress and injuries, such hardness of heart, greed and dishonesty, such a decline in holy Church, that I am weary of my life.”
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For all of his determination to sweep away every remnant of the Saxon regime, England’s new king found himself conforming to at least some of it. For example, William himself recognized that the English system of government was more sophisticated than that of his dukedom. Within this system, the king was assisted by the witan council. This William adapted, albeit under a different name (the
curia regis
), and he would surely have retained many of the existing personnel if they had not proved so rebellious. His kingship was much as Edward the Confessor’s had been, superior only in the formidable military power that supported it.

At a local level, the system of government more closely mirrored that of Normandy. Instead of
comtes
and
vicomtes
there were earls and sheriffs, but the function they performed was essentially the same. They were responsible for the collection of royal revenues, acted as executants of royal justice, held castles on behalf of the king, and played an important financial role. The key difference was the degree of autonomy these men
had. In Edward the Confessor’s time, the kingdom had been divided into earldoms, and each earl had enjoyed immense power. They thus constituted a threat to royal authority, and the king was often subject to their will. All of this changed with the accession of William the Conqueror. He replaced any surviving Saxon incumbents with Norman men whose loyalty was proven and who were firmly under his control.

One of William’s first acts after the Battle of Hastings was to reassure Londoners that they would have the same rights of inheritance that they had enjoyed in Edward’s day. Upon the death of a father, his child would inherit his estate, with no interference from the crown. As a rare gesture of conciliation on the part of the arrogant and all-powerful new king, this offered some reassurance. However, in practice, the heavy casualties suffered by vast swaths of the native landowning classes at Hastings and the battles that followed made this privilege of dubious value. It certainly did little to stop the major social revolution that took place between 1066 and 1100, during which the great majority of Saxon estates fell into Norman hands.

The contemporary chronicler Abbot Ingulphus, of Croyland Abbey in Lincolnshire, abhorred this situation. “So inveterately did the Normans at this period detest the English, that whatever the amount of their merits might be, they were excluded from all dignities; and foreigners, who were far less fitted, be they of any other nation whatever under heaven, would have been gladly chosen instead of them.”
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A powerful inner ring of high-ranking Normans, related by ties of blood and loyalty to the royal court, came to control nearly a quarter of the landed wealth of England. William himself controlled a fifth, and the church and remaining barons almost half between them. Even Orderic Vitalis was forced to admit that “foreigners grew wealthy with the spoils of England, whilst her own sons were either shamefully slain or driven as exiles to wander hopelessly through foreign kingdoms.”
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Rather than curtailing her husband’s excesses, Matilda initially joined in. She ordered the abbey of Abingdon, the loyalty of which was questionable, as it had been closely affiliated to the Godwine family, to send her a selection of precious ornaments. The monks duly obliged, but upon receiving their treasure, she declared it inadequate and demanded richer items.
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With wealth came corruption, and many of the Normans who had profited from their lord’s generosity “arrogantly abused their authority and mercilessly slaughtered the native people.”
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As scores of English abbots were ousted from their posts and replaced by greedy, tyrannical men, the same corruption spread to the country’s religious life. Orderic Vitalis observes: “Between such shepherds and the flocks committed to their keeping existed such harmony as you would find between wolves and helpless sheep.”
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There seemed to be no end to the Norman oppression. New laws were introduced that were heavily weighted against the native population, while even the humblest followers of the Conqueror were protected. If any of them was attacked by a Saxon, the perpetrator faced a considerable fine. By contrast, the attempted murder of a native Englishman would go unpunished if the attacker was a Norman.

The revolution did not end there. In almost every sphere of life, the customs and traditions of old England were gradually swept away by the new ruling class. Referring to the disdain with which the conquerors viewed the traditional English ceremony for conferring knighthoods, Ingulphus lamented: “And not only in this custom, but in many others as well, did the Normans effect a change.”
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Even the native language was systematically eroded. The conquering Normans may have learned sufficient English to administer their newly acquired estates, but otherwise they spoke Latin and French, and these now became the dominant languages of the ruling and upper clerical classes. “The very language even they abhorred with such intensity, that the laws of the land and the statutes of the English kings were treated of in the Latin tongue,” observed Ingulphus, “and even in the very schools, the rudiments of grammar were imparted to the children in French and not in English. The English mode of writing was also abandoned, and the French manner adopted in charters and in all books.”
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Before long, all government business was transacted in Latin rather than English. William himself had made a rather halfhearted attempt to learn English so that he could understand his new subjects without the aid of an interpreter, but he soon gave up. Orderic Vitalis excuses this failing on the grounds of William’s “advancing age” and “the distractions of his many duties,” but it is difficult to imagine that he tried very hard.
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The gradual erosion of their language was one of the most tangible losses suffered by the native English people. If the Normans had been a civilized and diplomatic race, this might have been easier to bear. As it was, their leader epitomized the often shockingly rude, even barbarous manners of the conquering regime, which made a mockery of the ancient chivalric values cherished by the Saxons. In the early years at least, William’s English court lacked the refinements of the former royal and noble households. Nor was the flowering of intellectual life that had begun before the Conquest sustained. Instead, the brutish, boorish people of the new regime seemed to derive all their pleasure from the cruelty of their military exploits. Even the great Norman castles that later sprang up across the country were, in their earliest incarnation, little more than ugly barracks thrown up as a temporary means of defense against the intransigent natives.