The Battle of Hastings (30 page)

There were widespread outbreaks of opposition, but all were crushed: at Chester, Shrewsbury, Stafford, Montacute, Exeter and elsewhere. Sometimes William dealt with it in person, sometimes men acted for him. The reliability of these troops under such leaders as Count Brian, William fitz Osbern and Robert of Mortain goes far to explain the success of the prolonged period of fighting which brought about the completion of the Conquest.

The final serious thrust of opposition broke out in East Anglia. This will always be associated in our minds with the half legendary personage of Hereward the Wake, identified as a thegn (perhaps a king’s thegn) from Lincolnshire who had held three manors, and who was said to have been outlawed for an earlier attack on a Norman lord. One suggestion is that he had been involved in the northern revolt of 1069.
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Detail can be added to the bones of this story of Hereward only from the twelfth-century poem about his exploits, the
Gesta Herewardi
(Deeds of Hereward), and in this there is difficulty divorcing reliable material from legend. The fact that it was written does suggest a surviving anti-Norman attitude in England. We can say little about Hereward for sure. The rebellion of which he was part was a last throw by the combined surviving English nobles prepared to take up arms against the Normans. It finally broke the northern earls. The Conqueror had offered Edwin marriage to his own daughter. When this had been advised against by some of his courtiers, he had changed his mind, which had brought Edwin to the point of rebellion, with English and Welsh support.

Now Morcar joined the rebellion in Ely in 1071. The rebels had taken to this isolated and difficult area. Ely was then truly an island, surrounded by waters and treacherous marshland. But William approached in force, probably entered the island at Aldreth, and caused the rebels to flee. Morcar submitted, and Hereward escaped.
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The real Hereward disappeared into obscurity - we know nothing more of him at all – but the legendary Hereward grew in stature as the years passed. Morcar was thrown into prison under the guard of Robert de Beaumont, and stayed there for the rest of his life. Orderic says that in trying to raise help to get his brother released, Earl Edwin was killed after being betrayed by his own servants.
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As for Waltheof, son of Siward, he had been given Northamptonshire by the Conqueror, and also William’s niece Judith in marriage in 1070. Orderic says he was handsome and of fine physique. He had no apparent reason to oppose William, having suffered more disappointment before the Conquest than after. Yet he conspired against William in 1075 with two of the newly appointed earls, Roger Montgomery of Hereford and Ralph the Breton of Norwich. Orderic says they spread the message that ‘the man who now calls himself king is unworthy, since he is a bastard … He unjustly invaded the fair kingdom of England and unjustly slew its true heirs … all men hate him and his death would cause great rejoicing.’

The chronicler records that these two approached Waltheof, who was reluctant to join them and refused to take part in rebellion. The earls sought aid from Denmark, rebelled in 1075 and were beaten in battle. Later, Ralph fled to Denmark and then to Brittany. But his men in Norwich suffered: ‘Some of them were blinded/And some banished from the land.’
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Earl Roger was taken prisoner and tried, then cast into prison. When the Conqueror sent him gifts in prison the earl ordered them to be burned, causing William to swear he would never be released. Earl Roger died in fetters.
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If we may trust Orderic, Waltheof was not guilty. Lanfranc later also expressed the view of Waltheof’s innocence. But it did not save him from William’s vengeance against the rebels. According to Orderic, Waltheof was accused of conspiracy by his own wife, Judith. The earl admitted being approached but said he had refused to give support. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
on the other hand implies Waltheof’s guilt in conspiring, and rather oddly says that ‘he accused himself’ and sought pardon.
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Waltheof was imprisoned for a year at Winchester. There were some at court ready to advise that he should be executed. The probable guilt of Waltheof was in failing to reveal the conspiracy of which he was aware.
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For fear of repercussions in Winchester, Earl Waltheof was taken from his prison early in the morning of 31 May 1076. The executioners allowed him to say the Lord’s Prayer, but when he broke into tears before its completion, they would wait no longer and hacked off his head with a sword. According to Orderic, the severed head continued ‘but deliver us from evil. Amen.’
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The body was later exhumed and taken to Crowland for burial.

More trouble for William later in his reign came from his own half-brother, Odo of Bayeux, in whom ‘vices were mingled with virtues’ and who was also brought down for his opposition to the king.
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It was said that Odo sought the papacy for himself, expecting help from the Normans in Sicily and planning to lead a band of knights from England. William scotched the scheme and arrested Odo probably in 1083. One assumes that William’s complaint was that Odo was deserting his duties, but the whole tale has a fishy ring about it, and one suspects some other plotting of Odo’s had come to the Conqueror’s attention. Odo was imprisoned till the end of the reign. He would cause a similar stir after his release against the new king.

William’s reign was hardly a happy one. At no time was he free from cares. His quarrels with his own son, Robert Curthose, were perhaps as hurtful as any of the rebellions listed above. But William had won a throne, and his family retained it. The rebellions were all crushed, the opposition virtually annihilated. The Norman Conquest of England was one of the most complete and efficient conquests in history.

T
HE
C
ONSEQUENCES OF THE
C
ONQUEST

There were immediate effects of the Conquest in England: a new king, a new nobility and ruling class, a rash of castle building, changes in the Church. William began with words of tolerance, and permitted those English who submitted before his coronation to retain their positions and at least some of their lands. But within a decade he had obliterated the higher echelons of the Old English nobility. By the time of the Conqueror’s death, the greater nobility in England was of continental extraction, though English blood often survived through marriage.

The success of the Conquest also fuelled an attitude of the Normans to their own warlike qualities, almost their invincibility. Such views had been growing already, a somewhat distorted idea of a Norman past leading to the present triumph, an idea of themselves as a distinct people rather glossing over the true history of their development, contributing to what has been seen by Ralph Davis as a Norman ‘myth’.
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How far social structure altered after the Conquest is a matter of much controversy, and will always be so. We can but sketch a part of the discussion here. There has been debate over the nature of the settlement which followed the Conquest. Norman and French nobles took over much of the land. Others came in the wake of the Conquest seeking profits, some of whom settled in towns. Differentiating between Normans and English in the documents is a very difficult business, so analysis of the settlement is bound to be imprecise. The general conclusion must be that Normans and other French did come, nobles and their households, soldiers, townsmen, clergy and others, but that the numbers were not enormous. If William intended integration with the native population, a ‘multi-racial settlement’ as one historian has expressed it, then he was to a degree disappointed. Integration followed eventually, but during William’s reign much tension remained between conquered and conquerors.
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The matter of social effects of the Conquest has usually been framed in terms relating to feudalism. We have already hinted that there were similarities in the society of the two regions. Recent historical research tends to emphasise the similarities rather than the differences. Feudalism, as we have said, is a construct of historians rather than a fact of medieval life, and they have made of it rather what they choose: one one thing, one another.

If we ask rather how did society in England change because of the Conquest, we may get a more satisfactory answer than by seeking to know if the Normans introduced feudalism to England. Certainly they did not transplant whole some living organism of society into a land whose old society died out. What occurred was much more of a merging, a new development in itself, fed from both sources.

Knight-service and castles, symptoms of what is generally seen as feudalism, were relatively recent developments in Normandy itself, and much less systematic than once thought. In England already there was a nobility which provided the élite of the military forces and which held land. In Normandy and England there was some land to which military service was attached, and other land to which it was not.

The circumstances of the Conquest, rather than any seeking after social change, provided the main impact. Invasion, conquest, rebellion: it was a time of crisis and insecurity. The Normans inevitably built fortifications quickly and in the style just becoming fashionable at home. That is, they built castles, and in the circumstances mostly cheap and quick ones made of earth and timber. One thing which did change was the function of the fighting men which military service produced. No longer would the English have entirely infantry forces, from now on the élite troops would be cavalry – though like the Normans they would balance the cavalry with good infantry.

The intention was not social change, but sometimes that was the effect. The new lords of the land resided in their new fortifications. In such circumstances military force was required, and often quickly or even permanently for garrisons. The English system was not abandoned, but new elements entered into it. Here and there, quotas of military service were demanded, service in return for the land held, service in garrisons as well as in the field.

It was no more a system in England than it had been or was in Normandy, but it became more systematic in the course of time: arrangements for military service were regulated for peacetime needs as well as for the crisis years after 1066. So that England did become a society where the lords were also the military leadership, and where land-holding entailed providing forces for the king more or less commensurate with the land held – though never in a precise calculation. English society and its military arrangements had been heading in a similar direction, but the changes were more sudden than would otherwise have been the case.

It has not usually been easy to make comment on the fate of the ordinary English subject population. However, recent work has assisted in this matter, and we can see that changes were not always as drastic in all levels of society as might be thought, and that much of the Old English society survived. It has been suggested that the Normans ‘introduced no new systems of agricultural exploitation or estate management’.
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The continuity in the lower ranks of society is much as one might have suspected, but can now be given some satisfactory basis in evidence. It supports the knowledge of continuity in some areas, not least in the retention of English as a language, and at least some aspects of Old English culture. This is not to say that some depression in social terms did not result from the changes. Domesday Book makes clear that many English peasants had to surrender something of their freedom as an accommodation with their new lords. Domesday does not have the whole story and rather minimises English survival, leaving out ‘a whole stratum of free men’.
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Many middling rank families are shown to have survived and even to have done well in the new conditions. The lower levels of royal service were also filled by Englishmen.
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But it is surely also true that, for many, the Conquest was a disaster. A recent article has stressed the ‘catastrophic impact’ upon the minds of the English that must have resulted.
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A very high proportion of the nobility had been killed in the fighting of 1066, perhaps a half, with all the grief which that left behind for families and friends. Some of the women were pushed into unwelcome marriages, some took refuge in nunneries to escape such matches.

The destruction of property and houses for war was considerable. In many towns, such as Cambridge or Exeter, the Normans destroyed entire quarters in order to build new castles. The strength of the new monarchy was demonstrated by the level of taxation which could be enforced. The enforcers were often highly unpopular. We do not need to wait for Robin Hood to find hated sheriffs. It was written of one, Picot, that he was ‘a hungry lion, a ravening wolf, a cunning fox, a dirty pig, an impudent dog’.
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The D chronicler wrote that the Normans ‘built castles far and wide throughout this country, and distressed the wretched folk, and always after that it grew much worse’.
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The harrying of the north brought misery to hundreds who could no longer survive in the devastated region. The Durham chronicler wrote: ‘so great a famine prevailed that men, compelled by hunger, devoured human flesh, that of horses, dogs and cats, and whatever custom abhors … It was horrific to behold human corpses decaying in the houses, the streets and the roads.’
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The chroniclers do not often pass comment on the distress they describe, though giving enough evidence of suffering. However, Orderic Vitalis, who had lived his early boyhood in England and was half-English, thought that the English aided Eustace of Boulogne in rebellion because they were ‘goaded by Norman oppression’. He says that ‘England was exhausted with tribulation after tribulation … fire, rapine, and daily slaughter brought destruction and disaster on the wretched people and utterly laid waste the land’. Of the harrying of the north, he wrote: ‘in consequence so serious a scarcity was felt in England, and so terrible a famine fell upon the humble and defenceless population, that more than 100,000 Christian folk … perished of hunger’.
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