The Norman Conquest (42 page)

The failure of the earls’ rebellion reduced them to the status of fugitives; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says evocatively that the brothers ‘travelled aimlessly in woods and moors’, and at length, says John of Worcester, they elected to go their separate ways. Eadwine went north, intending to reach Scotland and the other English exiles; Morcar went east to join the rebellion at Ely. It seems very likely, judging from the proximity of their lands in Lincolnshire, that Morcar counted Hereward among his commended men. If so, the outlaw was one of the few men on whom the earl could still count.
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The flight of Eadwine and Morcar and the latter’s arrival at Ely were probably the crucial factors that decided William to return to England in 1071 in order to deal with the revolt personally. Sadly we are extremely poorly informed about the king’s movements during this particular year, so we cannot say precisely when this
happened. Nor do we have any precise account of the military action that ensued. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, followed closely by John of Worcester, says that William called out both naval and land forces in order to mount an attack from all directions: ships were used to blockade the island on its eastern, seaward side, while to the west his army constructed a causeway or pontoon bridge to enable an assault across the marshes.
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When it comes to the details of the assault, however, our reliable sources are unforthcoming. According to the
Gesta Herewardi,
the Normans made several attempts to storm the island but on each occasion were driven back by the superior military skill of Hereward and his followers. By way of total contrast, another twelfth-century source, the
Liber Eliensis,
would have us believe that the Normans, led by William himself, mounted an entirely successful attack across the bridge and put the defenders to flight. There is little to be said for either of these two accounts: the
Gesta
is compromised by its determination to entertain its audience and to cast Hereward in a favourable light, while the
Liber
is simply a horrendous Frankenstein’s monster of a text, stitched together from bits and pieces of other chronicles wrenched out of their original context. Its account of the storming of Ely is interesting only because it seems to draw on the lost ending of William of Poitiers. (Who else would start their account by seeking to assure us that Eadwine and Morcar had never enjoyed greater favour and honour than they had received at William’s court?) It may be, therefore, that there is something to be said for the story that the Normans mounted a successful attack.’
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The
Liber
apart, however, our sources agree that the siege was ended by an English surrender. ‘The king took their ships and weapons and plenty of money’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘and did as he pleased with the men.’ Bishop Æthelwine was placed in custody at the abbey of Abingdon, where he died the following winter. Earl Morcar was also held in captivity for the rest of his life, a sentence that lasted far longer. As for the others who submitted to William, says John of Worcester, ‘some he imprisoned, some he allowed to go free – after their hands had been cut off and their eyes gouged out’. The only figure of note to escape these punishments was Hereward, who refused to surrender, and contrived a remarkable escape, stealing away undetected through the Fens with those who wished to go with him. ‘He led them out valiantly’,
says the contemporary D Chronicle, demonstrating that Hereward’s heroism was not merely the product of later legend.
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Orderic Vitalis, when he read William of Poitiers’ account of the fall of Ely, rejected it entirely. Morcar, he maintains, had been doing no harm to the king, who had tricked him into surrendering with false promises of peace and friendship. Orderic goes on to tell us that Earl Eadwine, when he heard the news of Ely’s fall, vowed to continue the fight, and spent six months touring England, Wales and Scotland in search of the support that would help him free his brother. But here Orderic is almost certainly wrong, relating a legendary pro-Mercian version of the story that may have been circulating for some time. Other more closely contemporary sources, such as the Chronicle, suggest that even before the siege of Ely had started, Eadwine was dead. The theme common to all accounts is treachery. ‘Three brothers who were his most intimate servants betrayed him to the Normans’, says Orderic, in what sounds like a passage borrowed from an epic poem. The earl, we are told, was caught beside a rising tidal stream which prevented his escape, and killed along with his small band of followers, ‘all fighting desperately to the last’. So ended the house of Leofric, brought down by those they had failed to protect, who could see no further hope in resisting the Normans.
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15

Aliens and Natives

W
ith the benefit of hindsight, we can see that the surrender of Ely and the fall of earls Eadwine and Morcar constitute an important milestone in the history of the Norman Conquest; from that time on, there were no English rebellions of any consequence. But King William, surveying the situation in the immediate wake of the revolt, enjoyed no such long-term perspective. Ely represented another region tamed, another royal castle established, and another costly garrison installed, while the fall of the Mercian brothers meant another massive windfall of land, the most substantial since the eclipse of the Godwines five years earlier. Yet the struggle for England’s security was not over, for there was still one problem that the Conqueror felt compelled to address.
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Where had the majority of the rebels originated from, besides Ely itself? In which direction had Eadwine been fleeing before he was overtaken? Where, above all, did the last remaining representative of the English royal line still lurk, biding his time in the hope of better circumstances? The answer, of course, was Scotland, and the court of King Malcolm. The Scottish king, an irritant from the first, had recently compounded his offence by harrying northern England as far as Durham, and also by marrying Margaret, the sister of Edgar Ætheling. In retrospect the threat posed by Edgar and his supporters might seem negligible but, again, this was by no means obvious to contemporaries. After all, the story of the Conquest is not short of sudden reversals of fortune, and young men in apparently hopeless situations bestirring themselves to greatness.
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William therefore decided to nip this potential plot line in the bud,
and in the summer of 1072 launched an invasion of Scotland. This was a bold undertaking, for it meant waging war a long way from his power base in southern England. Only one previous English king – the mighty Athelstan in
AD
934 – had ever ventured so far north. It must have been one of the great campaigns of William’s military career, yet we know virtually nothing about it. William of Poitiers, who doubtless could have furnished us with a gripping account, stopped his story at the fall of Ely. Orderic Vitalis, who had followed Poitiers closely up to this point, becomes chronologically rudderless thereafter, and makes no mention of these events. All we have to go on are a few short sentences in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and some supplementary facts from John of Worcester. Like Athelstan before him, William invaded using naval and land levies, blockading the Scottish coast with his ships and personally leading an army across the River Forth. The Chronicle, with its characteristically dismissive turn of phrase, comments ‘he found nothing there that they were any better for’. Presumably the king engaged in the normal business of devastating the countryside until eventually his opponent decided to submit. Malcolm came to meet the Conqueror at Abernethy, near the Firth of Tay, swore to become his vassal and gave him hostages – including, it seems, his eldest son, Duncan. Beyond this we are ignorant of the terms agreed, but they must have included a promise on Malcolm’s part to stop sheltering English exiles. We hear nothing of Edgar Ætheling at this time, but it seems most likely that he fled at the news of his enemy’s advance. The next time we have news of him we find he is living in Flanders.
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Having put Malcolm in his place and sent the ætheling scurrying, William returned south. As he did so he took steps to improve the security of northern England. The previous year he had appointed the Lotharingian priest, Walcher, to be the new bishop of Durham, and now as he passed through the city the king built a castle, right beside the cathedral, for the bishop’s greater protection. Clearly William was mindful of the fate of Robert Cumin and his men, massacred in Durham almost four years earlier, for at this same moment he deprived Cumin’s English successor, Gospatric, of the earldom of Northumbria. Allowing Gospatric to retain his lands and title after his submission in January 1070 had evidently been an act of political expediency. Now the king was able to exert a more direct influence in the north, he could afford to dispense with a man whose loyalty had always seemed dubious. Gospatric was condemned for
having participated in the massacre of the Norman garrisons at York in September 1069, and also for having been complicit in the attack on Durham at the start of the same year. Presumably he was sentenced
in absentia,
for such charges would surely have merited indefinite detention; he avoided this fate by fleeing in the first instance to Scotland, but Malcolm must have made it clear that he was no longer in a position to receive luckless Englishmen, and so the earl followed the ætheling into Flemish exile.
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One might assume that Gospatric’s removal owed something to a growing prejudice on William’s part against Englishmen in general, but this was clearly not the case, for the earl was replaced by a member of his own family. Waltheof, a younger member of the house of Bamburgh, was in one respect well qualified to govern the north, for he was the surviving son of Earl Siward, the pugnacious earl of Northumbria appointed by King Cnut, and Ælfflaed, the granddaughter of Earl Uhtred; that is, the fruit of a union that had been arranged to nurture peace between the Bamburgh dynasty and the Danes of York. A teenager at the time of his father’s death in 1055, Waltheof had been passed over in favour of Tostig Godwineson but compensated a few years later with a smaller earldom in the east Midlands.
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Because of his youth, however, Waltheof had made no impact on politics prior to 1066 – he first enters the story the following year, when several chroniclers noticed him among the hostages that the Conqueror took home to Normandy. During this time he must have worked hard to win William’s trust and affection (he appears as a witness to a ducal charter, unlike his fellow hostages Eadwine and Morcar).
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Indeed, the strength of Waltheof’s friendship with William can be gauged by the fact it survived his subsequent involvement in the English rebellion of 1069. After his submission at the start of the following year, the earl was not merely forgiven but shown greater favour, being married at some point thereafter to the king’s niece, Judith. This really was a unique distinction – one recalls that a similar match promised to Earl Eadwine had never taken place – and underlines the esteem and confidence in which Waltheof continued to be held. With family connections to both the English house of Bamburgh and the new Norman dynasty, he must have seemed the best possible candidate to serve as the new earl of Northumbria: an Anglo-Norman magnate in the truest sense, who might act as a bridge between the two peoples.
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With the security of the north seemingly in better shape, William focused his attention on the Continent, where problems had been multiplying for some time. As the flight of his enemies to Flanders suggests, relations between Normandy and her north-eastern neighbour had recently taken a turn for the worse. The cordiality established by William’s marriage to Matilda had survived the death of her father, Baldwin V, in 1067, but had been thrown into doubt by the untimely death of his son, Baldwin VI, just three years later. A bitter succession dispute had erupted in 1070 and the Normans had backed the losing candidate. William had weighed in on the side of primogeniture, supporting the younger Baldwin’s teenage son, Arnulf. But victory had gone to the late count’s brother, Robert, who defeated and killed his rival at the Battle of Cassel in February the following year. It was a double blow for William, for to deal with Flanders he had dispatched his most trusted lieutenant, William fitz Osbern, and the earl had also been among the fallen. Thus the king not only found himself suddenly having to worry about a hostile power on Normandy’s border, he was also left mourning the loss of one of his closest advisers, a friend since his earliest youth and one of the principal architects of the Norman Conquest.
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Nor was it just Flanders. In almost every other significant quarter, the fortuitous conditions that had obtained during the previous decade – conditions without which the conquest of England would scarcely have been feasible – had become far less clement. In the spring of 1069, for example, there had been a rebellion against Norman rule in Maine, with the citizens of Le Mans driving out William’s garrisons. By itself this must have seemed bad enough, occurring as it did at a time when the king was wholly preoccupied with crushing rebellion in England. It was made much worse, however, by the reviving political fortunes of both Anjou and France. Both powers had been in eclipse for several years following the almost simultaneous deaths of Geoffrey Martel and Henry I in the autumn of 1060 – in Anjou’s case because of a disputed succession, and in France’s case because its new king was only a child. A decade on, however, and the eclipse had ended. The struggle in Anjou had been resolved decisively in favour of a new count, Fulk Réchin, after he defeated and imprisoned the rival contender, his brother. In France, meanwhile, the new king, Philip I, had emerged from the political
tutelage of his mother (Anna of Kiev, who had given him his unusual Greek name), and was consciously pursuing the anti-Norman policy developed by his father. In 1072 Philip, now turned twenty, nailed his colours firmly to the mast by marrying Bertha, the half-sister of Robert of Flanders. In the same year, the rebels in Maine appealed to Fulk of Anjou for help, and the count responded by invading and occupying the county. It was as if the clock had been turned back twenty years: on every side Normandy was menaced by enemies.
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