The Norman Conquest (47 page)

At the same time, Robert’s territorial dominance within this well-defined area is not quite total, because it is interrupted in one or two places by estates held by other Norman newcomers – men who have acquired their lands on the principal of tenurial succession. The obvious inference is that these men were given their lands first, and Robert’s grant has been made afterwards. We appear, in short, to be looking at a situation where Robert has been assigned an area of territory, demarcated by administrative boundaries, and told ‘take whatever’s left’.
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This is a scenario we see repeated elsewhere in England: large blocks of territory, granted out on the principle of ‘whatever’s left’. It is particularly noticeable in the counties of the north Midlands and beyond – the areas largely untouched by the first wave of Norman settlement. Precise dating of the creation of these lordships is impossible, but the evidence suggests that several of the lords who held in this way were in place by around 1080, and we have seen that straightforward succession on the earlier model appears to have continued up to 1073–4. At some point between these two dates, someone decided on a radical change of policy.
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The most obvious candidate for making such a decision is the Conqueror himself – after all, the distribution of land is about as important a task as one can imagine. If so, the likeliest time for the change would have been the last weeks of 1075 or the early months
of 1076, when we known that William was in England to deal with the revolt of the earls and its aftermath. That revolt, like its predecessors, meant more major confiscations as earls Roger, Ralph and Waltheof were dispossessed. At the same time, the decision to grant out land on a different basis may have been due to other factors. If William had been doling out the property of Englishmen on the basis of strict succession for almost a decade, by the mid-1070s there can have been few great estates left with which to reward loyal followers. Also, those followers may have preferred to have the kind of compact territories established immediately after the Conquest, rather than the various manors of an English predecessor, which were often scattered across several counties. But the change may simply have been dictated by politics and pragmatism. By the mid-1070s, William was increasingly embroiled in events on the Continent, and may have decided that grants needed to be made, once again, on the basis of security, rather than in deference to existing patterns of English landholding. If England was in the hands of reliable men, William’s own hands would be free to fight battles elsewhere.

The alternative, of course, is that this change in policy was caused by a change in personnel at the top. It is just conceivable that the switch to territorial grants was the brainchild of Bishop Odo, acting in his capacity as regent. This, after all, was the basis on which his own lordship of Kent had been created, and we know from other evidence that he had wide-ranging powers to decide on matters of landholding. At the very least Odo must have been responsible for implementing the new policy, and in some cases we can see that the recipients of territorial grants in the north were drawn from the ranks of his own followers.
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By the mid-1070s William and Odo were not the only ones granting out lands. Just as the king or his regent granted out territory to men who had served them well, so too these men began in turn to grant it out to their dependants. This process – modern historians call it ‘subinfeudation’ – is not well documented, especially in the case of laymen. Orderic Vitalis provides a vague description of how Roger of Montgomery distributed positions of authority in Shropshire to his ‘brave and loyal men’.
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However, since the monasteries had been informed in or around 1070 that they too would have to supply the king with a set number of knights, we find better
descriptions in the pages of monastic chronicles. The Abingdon Chronicle records how, in the initial years of his rule, the new Norman abbot, Adelelm, ‘securely protected the monastery entrusted to him with a band of armed knights’:

At first indeed, he used paid troops for this. But after the attacks had died down, and when it was noted by royal edict in the annual records how many knights might be demanded from bishoprics, and how many from abbeys, if by chance compelling need arose, the abbot then granted manors from the possessions of the church to his followers (who had previously been retained by gifts), laying down for each the terms of subordination for his manor.
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For lay lords, especially if they had received a generous grant of land from the king, distributing a portion of it among their followers made good sense, for it was probably more cost-effective than maintaining such men permanently within a baronial household. For the monasteries and bishops the incentive was probably even stronger, for accommodating a troop of knights was not only ruinously expensive but highly disruptive. Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester, recalls William of Malmesbury, was obliged to maintain an array of knights that drained his resources, and stayed up late in his hall, drinking and brawling into the night.
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The quid pro quo for a grant of land was that the recipient would furnish the donor with military service. One of the earliest charters enshrining such an arrangement, by which Robert Losinga, the Norman bishop of Hereford, gave land to a knight called Roger fitz Walter, is helpfully explicit. ‘Previously the said bishop held this land as his own demesne and for the sustenance of the church’, it says at one point, ‘but the bishop, by the counsel of his vassals, gave [Roger] this same land in return for a promise that he would serve the bishop with two knights, as his father did, whenever the need arose.’
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In many cases, as we’ve seen, the king also required his tenants to supply men to guard his castles, and, again, the same expectation existed between a lord and his own subtenants. Whether he had simply stepped into the tenurial shoes of an English predecessor, or received a block of territory that paid no regard to previous landowning patterns, the first act of a new Norman lord was invariably
to establish a castle. If it were the former case, he might well choose to erect the earthworks over his predecessor’s existing residence; several Norman mottes have proved on excavation to be built on top of Anglo-Saxon halls.
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Equally – and especially in the case of those who received territorial grants – he might plant the castle wherever he chose in order to assert his lordship. The point of a castle was to dominate the surrounding countryside – to control road and water routes for economic and military purposes – and to protect its Norman occupants. Some territorial lordships are specifically referred to in the Domesday Book as ‘castleries’, indicating that the entire district was arranged around the castle at its centre. In other cases this is evident from the way a lordship has been organized. At Richmond in Yorkshire, for example, we can see that lands were granted out in such a way that castle-guard was performed on a rota basis, each subtenant serving for a period of two months, so that the castle was kept in a permanent state of defensive readiness.
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Described in this way, the Norman settlement and colonization of England can sound like a fairly orderly process: the king grants land to his leading men in return for military service; they keep some themselves and distribute the rest to others. There is disruption and upheaval at a local level as castles are built, especially if these castles are the centre of new territorial lordships. Yet the impression of order remains, both in the way land is distributed and the way that new patterns of landholding are imposed.

It is without doubt a misleading impression, for it masks the considerable chaos and confusion that the process of settlement entailed. Obviously, the fact that land was granted out on two different principles meant that there was huge potential for conflict between incoming Norman lords, with some claiming all the land with a certain administrative district, and others insisting that they held particular manors within it as the heirs of English predecessors. But this confusion was magnified many times over owing to the complicated nature of Old English lordship. In pre-Conquest England, a man could be bound to a lord in a number of different ways; he
might
hold land from him, but then again he might not. In some cases a lord could have jurisdiction over certain men but not be their landlord. In other cases, the lord-man relationship could be one of ‘commendation’, a tie which was purely personal, and
had neither tenurial nor jurisdictional content. Some land was held of no lord at all, which explains the frequent statement in the Domesday Book that a particular Englishman ‘could go with his land where he wished’. In Normandy, by contrast, the tenurial bond was much stronger. Although land and lordship did not automatically go together, the general assumption was that they should, because the trend had been in this direction for many decades. Hence there was ample scope for confusion and disagreement after 1066 when the Normans encountered the tangled strands of English lordship. An aggressive newcomer, for example, might try to treat men who had merely been commended to his predecessor, or under his predecessor’s jurisdiction, as if they were his tenants; in so doing, he would provoke not only protests from the men themselves, but also opposition from other Normans who regarded their rights of lordship to be superior.
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So the Normans interpreted (or, rather, wilfully misinterpreted) the rights of their English predecessors in their own interests and pushed them as hard as possible. They also, in many cases, simply grabbed whatever they could. There is abundant evidence to show that, while much land was given out by the king and entered into legally, a considerable amount was acquired by less legitimate methods – extortion, intimidation and violence. In certain areas of the country – the east Midlands and East Anglia – the Domesday Book shows no clear pattern of land-distribution, which has been interpreted as indicating that the Norman settlement in these regions was something of a free-for-all. More concretely, Domesday also preserves the testimony of local jurors that certain Normans had helped themselves. Take, for instance, Richard fitz Gilbert. A longstanding friend of the Conqueror (he was the son of William’s ill-fated guardian, Count Gilbert), Richard was rewarded soon after the Conquest with a large, territorial lordship based on Tonbridge in Kent – he erected the mighty motte-and-bailey castle that still dominates the town today, and later styled himself ‘Richard of Tonbridge’. But, in the years that followed, he continued to extend and add to his lordship at every available opportunity. Domesday jurors swore in 1086 that he had illegally seized three manors in neighbouring Surrey, while a compensation package later agreed by his son reveals that Richard had also relieved the monks of Rochester of several properties in the same county.
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Confronted by a figure like Richard fitz Gilbert – who, by 1086, was one of the ten richest men in the kingdom – to whom could a dispossessed Englishman turn? Of old he might have appealed to the king’s representative in the shire – the ‘shire reeve’, or sheriff. After all, sheriffs had been introduced during the reign of Æthelred the Unready as a means of checking the influence of the king’s mightier servants, the earls. But, since the Conquest, the English sheriffs had been for the most part swept away and replaced by Norman newcomers. Like the men they supplanted, these Normans tended to be men of very modest backgrounds but, by comparison with their English predecessors, they seemed altogether more determined to raise themselves higher. And, with the earls themselves gone, who was going to stop them? Plentiful evidence exists to show that, when it came to land and landholding, the supposed gamekeepers were the worst poachers of all. As Henry of Huntingdon later put it, ‘the sheriffs and reeves, whose function it was to preserve justice and legality, were fiercer than thieves or robbers, and more savage to all than the most savage’. Every monastic house seems to have suffered at the hands of its local sheriff. According to William of Malmesbury, the new Norman sheriff of Worcester, Urse d’Abetôt, planted his castle so close to Worcester Cathedral priory that its ditch cut through the monk’s cemetery (provoking a celebrated put-down from Ealdred, the city’s erstwhile bishop: ‘Thou art called Urse – have thee God’s curse!’). The monks of Ely, meanwhile, had it even worse, since their support for Hereward the Wake and his fellow fenland rebels earned them lasting royal displeasure. Many local Normans seem to have assumed thereafter that it was open season on the abbey’s estates, and none more so than Picot the Sheriff. Such was the scale of his appropriations from Ely that the monks remembered him in the twelfth century as ‘a hungry lion, a roving wolf, a crafty fox, a filthy pig, a shameless dog’.
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The tide of complaint from the monastic chronicles gives the impression that the Church suffered far more than the laity, but in actual fact this is likely to be the reverse of the truth. The Church certainly suffered but, being blessed with institutional continuity and possessed of copious documentation, armed with the spiritual weapon of excommunication and having access to friends in high places, including the king and the pope, senior churchmen were often able to obtain redress if their rights were violated. In 1077, for example, King William himself
wrote to his leading magnates in England (Richard fitz Gilbert is among the addressees), requiring them and the sheriffs to return any Church property they had seized by intimidation or violence.
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