The Norman Conquest (35 page)

Although he had lived at St Evroult since his childhood, Orderic had not been born in Normandy. ‘I came here from the remote parts of Mercia as a ten-year-old English boy’, he explains at the start of his fifth book. More specifically, he came from Shropshire: as he goes on to tell us, he was born on 16 February 1075, baptized at St Eata’s Church in Atcham, and named after the local priest. At the age of five he was sent to learn his letters in Shrewsbury, before being packed off by his father to St Evroult five years later, ‘an ignorant stranger of another race’. This might seem a strange fate for a Shropshire lad so soon after the Conquest, but it is explained by the fact that his father was a Norman – a priest who had come to England in the wake of William’s victory. We infer that Orderic’s mother (whom he never mentions) must have been English, and it was from her that he derived his identity as an Englishman.
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The fact that he was the product of a mixed, Anglo-Norman
marriage makes Orderic’s thoughts on the Norman Conquest doubly interesting. Like a lot of medieval writers, he copied freely from earlier sources, and his account of the Conquest draws heavily on that of William of Poitiers (it is, indeed, precisely because Orderic acknowledges this debt that we know anything about Poitiers’ own career).
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Sometimes he is content to copy more or less verbatim, losing a word here, inserting a sentence there. At other times he makes more substantial changes, and occasionally he makes it very clear that he has departed from his source material because he disapproves of its anti-English sentiment. On the eve of the Battle of Hastings, for example, Poitiers describes King Harold as ‘a man soiled with lasciviousness, a cruel murderer, resplendent with plundered riches, and an enemy of God and the just’. In Orderic’s version Harold becomes ‘a brave and valiant man, strong and handsome, pleasant in speech, and a good friend to his own followers’.
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Orderic is also uniquely valuable for the years immediately following the Conquest because, sadly, the end of William of Poitiers’ history is lost. We know, thanks to Orderic, that it originally covered the period up to the start of the year 1071, but the only copy that has come down to us breaks off mid-sentence in 1067. Part of the fun of reading Orderic, therefore, is trying to guess where he is copying Poitiers, where he might be adding new information gleaned from other sources, and where his sensibilities as an Englishman have been sufficiently affronted that he has been prompted to offer his own alternative version.

Consider, for instance, the different accounts offered by the two writers of events in England during William’s absence. As we have seen, before his return to Normandy, the newly crowned king had committed the government of England to Odo of Bayeux and William fitz Osbern, respectively based at Dover and Winchester. Shortly before his manuscript breaks off, William of Poitiers ceases his description of his master’s triumphal homecoming and resumes the story in England:

Meanwhile Odo, bishop of Bayeux, and William fitz Osbern were administering their prefectures in the kingdom … They burned with a common desire to keep the Christian people in peace, and deferred readily to each other’s advice. They paid the greatest respect to justice, as the king had admonished, so that fierce men and enemies might be corrected and brought into friendship. The lesser officials were equally zealous in the castles where each had been placed.

Orderic, confronted by this passage, replaced it with his own:

Meanwhile, the English were groaning under the Norman yoke, and suffering oppressions from the proud lords who ignored the king’s injunctions. The petty lords who were guarding the castles oppressed all the native inhabitants of high and low degree, and heaped shameful burdens on them. For Bishop Odo and William fitz Osbern, the king’s vicegerents, were so swollen with pride that they would not deign to hear the reasonable plea of the English or give them impartial judgement. When their men at arms were guilty of plunder and rape they protected them by force, and wreaked their wrath all the more violently upon those who complained of the cruel wrongs they suffered.
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Clearly, not much common ground. The only point on which Poitiers and Orderic seem to agree is that the newcomers were based in castles. The Normans, as we’ve seen, had started digging in from the moment of their arrival. We hear of new fortifications being established at Pevensey, Hastings, Dover, London and Winchester, and we can make a strong circumstantial case for supposing they were also begun at other places, such as Canterbury, Wallingford and Berkhamsted. What form these castles took is a matter of debate. As every schoolchild knows, the common-or-garden model in Norman England was the so-called ‘motte and bailey’ – a giant mound of earth to support a wooden tower, paired with a shallower but more extensive enclosure to house and protect the castle’s other buildings; around three-quarters of all known sites conform to this type. It could be that the Normans were establishing such castles from the first – the Bayeux Tapestry shows men erecting a motte at Hastings, and a motte can still be seen on the site today. But, then again, the Tapestry depicts
every
castle in this way, so it could be that drawing a motte was simply a convenient artistic shorthand. While there are surviving mottes at Canterbury, Wallingford and Berkhamsted, excavation has shown that the one at Winchester was added a few years after the Conquest, and at Pevensey, Dover and London there were
evidently never any mottes at all. Construction on this scale would have required weeks running into months, so it may be that the very earliest Norman castles were simply enclosures (or ‘ringworks’ as they are often termed): the one on Castle Hill near Folkestone is a good example.
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Whatever form they took, the important point – quite obvious from the fact that the Normans felt obliged to build so many from the moment of their arrival – is that castles in England were a new phenomenon. England, for all the woes that it had suffered in the eleventh century, remained a strong, united kingdom. It had not experienced anything like the political fragmentation that had engulfed the principalities of western Europe. Its coinage, its courts and its laws were all part of a long-established royal monopoly, and so too were its fortifications – the
burhs
established by the conquering kings of Wessex in the tenth century. The private dwellings known as
burhgeats,
associated with thegnly status and claimed by some historians to be castles in all but name, were clearly nowhere near as strong and defensible as the true castles we find on the Continent.
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In England we do not read of rebellions based on fortresses, or find the king besieging his greater subjects in their own homes. When English magnates fall from grace they flee into foreign exile, and resist if they can by raising fleets.

The exception that proves the rule is a tiny handful of castles constructed in the years immediately prior to 1051 by some of the French friends of Edward the Confessor. One was apparently built at Clavering in Essex, and three others were built in Herefordshire as part of an attempt (quite unsuccessful) to keep the Welsh at bay. Their novelty is suitably underlined by the fact the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, describing the situation in Herefordshire in 1051, employs the earliest recorded example of the word ‘castle’ in English. The word, like the thing itself, was a foreign import. Beyond this there was nothing in England that could be meaningfully regarded as a castle. As Orderic Vitalis later put it in a justly famous passage, ‘the fortifications that the Normans called castles were scarcely known in the English provinces, and so the English – in spite of their courage and love of fighting – could put up only a weak resistance to their enemies’.
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Consequently, we sense the shock in the English sources when castles suddenly start appearing in large numbers. As in France, so
too in England, their introduction went hand in hand with oppression. The foreigners who built the castle in Hereford, says the Chronicle, ‘inflicted all the injuries and insults they possibly could upon the king’s men in that region’. This may have been because the local population were forced to build them, or because their homes were demolished to make way for them, or simply because they served as bases for soldiers and knights who would ride out each day to cow the surrounding countryside into submission, indulging in the acts of plunder, rape and violence that Orderic Vitalis describes. Orderic’s account of the activities of the Conqueror’s regents during his absence in 1067 accords far better with our English sources than the panegyric of William of Poitiers. ‘Bishop Odo and Earl William were left behind here,’ groans the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘and they built castles far and wide throughout the land, oppressing the unhappy people, and things went ever from bad to worse. When God wills may the end be good!’
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Small wonder, then, that the English, as Orderic puts it, ‘plotted ceaselessly to find some way of shaking off a yoke that was so intolerable and unaccustomed’.
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During the year 1067 we hear of several local risings by the English against their new castle-building overlords. In Herefordshire, one of the most powerful English thegns, the aptly named Eadric the Wild, fought back with some success against the new Norman garrisons installed in those original pre-Conquest castles. According to John of Worcester, they frequently devastated his lands, but whenever they attacked him they lost many of their knights and soldiers. At length, in mid-August, Eadric joined forces with two Welsh kings, Bleddyn and Rhiwallon, with whom he ravaged Herefordshire ‘up to the bridge of the River Lugg’, and ‘brought back great spoil.’
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Around the same time, or perhaps a little later, a potentially more serious rebellion took place in the south-east. The men of Kent, either ‘because they hated the Normans’ (William of Poitiers) or ‘goaded by Norman oppression’ (Orderic Vitalis), sent emissaries across the Channel in an effort to persuade Eustace, count of Boulogne, to help them seize Dover Castle. This might seem a surprising appeal, given their relations in the not too distant past – it was Eustace’s attack on Dover in 1051 that had sparked the great crisis of that year, and the count had also fought for the Normans
at Hastings: he is, indeed, one of the four individuals credited by the
Carmen
with the killing of King Harold. Yet his relations with Normandy were not as close or cordial as this might suggest: in 1053 Eustace had joined the rebellion that had tried to topple William and, when it failed, had been forced to surrender his son as a hostage. At some point in the first half of 1067 the two men had fallen out again, for reasons unknown; Orderic refers simply to jealousy between them, while Poitiers says only that,
were
he to go into details, he would easily convince us that William was in the right. Modern historians tend to assume, in lieu of any better explanation, that the count had been disappointed by the amount of land he had received as reward.

Whatever the reason for the rift, it predisposed Eustace to accept the Kentish offer: he assembled an invasion force and sailed across the Channel at night, intending to take Dover by surprise at dawn. His intelligence was seemingly good, because both Odo of Bayeux and the castle’s commander, Hugh de Montfort, were far away at the time, on the other side of the Thames, and had taken with them most of their troops. The men of Kent were already up in arms, says Poitiers, and would have been joined by rebels from other regions, had the siege lasted as long as two days; but Eustace and his English allies found Dover’s defenders to be more doughty than expected. Rather than wait for more attackers to assemble, the Norman garrison sallied out of the gates and put their foes to flight. Eustace himself, familiar with the terrain, managed to find his way back to a boat and the safety of Boulogne, but many of his men were pursued to the cliffs and plunged to their deaths. The English, meanwhile, scattered in all directions, their plan of replacing one foreign lord with another having come to nothing.
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Lastly there had been trouble in Northumbria. Notionally the north of England remained under the command of Earl Morcar, elected by the northerners themselves in the wake of the successful rebellion against Tostig Godwineson in 1065 (the new earl was at least still in possession of his title in the period immediately after the Conquest). From the very first, however, Morcar had been obliged to share power with others. As we have seen, the 1065 rebellion had been triggered by the murder of Gospatric, head of the house of Bamburgh, and Morcar, mindful of this, had immediately ceded authority above the Tyne to Gospatric’s nephew, Oswulf.

But at the start of 1067, just before his return to Normandy, William had upset this arrangement by granting the earldom of Northumbria, or at the very least its northern half, to a Yorkshire thegn called Copsig. It was an astonishing appointment, for Copsig had previously been Tostig’s lieutenant, and was no less hated in the north than his former master. He had, however, submitted to the Conqueror in a way that Oswulf evidently had not, and by some unknown magic had convinced the king that, when it came to controlling the north, he was the best man for the job. (‘He was’, says William of Poitiers, ‘entirely favourable to the king and supported his cause.’) As it was, the confidence of both parties turned out to be seriously misplaced: within just a few weeks of his arrival in Northumbria, Copsig was ambushed and killed by Oswulf, who personally hacked off his rival’s head. Oswulf might therefore have expected some future day of reckoning with the Conqueror or his regents, but at some point in the autumn of 1067 he too came to an untimely end, run through by the lance of a robber.
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