The Norman Conquest (50 page)

This kind of architecture gives us a good indication of the way William perceived himself by the time of his triumphant return to England in 1080–1 – a great king, on a par with German and Roman emperors. Here was a man safeguarding his gains, defining his borders, and proclaiming his achievement. It was probably during the course of this visit that he decided to reform the country’s minting practices, sweeping away the elaborate English system by which the weight of the coinage had been periodically altered, and introducing instead a heavier type of coin, the weight of which would thereafter remain fixed
(steor
in Old English, from which we get ‘sterling’). At Gloucester at Christmas 1080 he had ceremoniously worn his crown, and he did so again on his visit to Winchester at Whitsun.
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Orderic Vitalis provides us with a glimpse of the king’s court at this very moment, revealing something of its grandeur. The chronicler describes how Mainer, the then abbot of St Evroult, crossed to England in 1081 and went to Winchester. He was well received by the king and his magnates, all of whom were happy to make gifts to St Evroult because of the immense wealth that had come to them as a result of the Conquest. William confirmed these gifts to the
abbey in a charter, which provides us with the names of some of those present. Besides the king, who marked his name with a cross, were the names and crosses of his sons, Robert and William, followed by those of two great earls, Roger of Montgomery and Hugh of Chester, while among the host of other barons we see William of Breteuil, son of William fitz Osbern, reminding us that the rift between the king and the younger generation had been healed. It is a portrait of power, but also one of a kingdom finally at peace. The abbot had gone to England, says Orderic, ‘taking advantage of a tranquil time’.
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But that tranquil time would not last much longer. A similar image of the king’s court is provided by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which describes how the Conqueror kept great state in less benign terms:

He wore his crown three times a year as often as he was in England; at Easter at Winchester, at Whitsun at Westminster, at Christmas at Gloucester. On these occasions all the great men of England were assembled about him – archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, thegns and knights. He was so stern and relentless a man that no one dared to aught against his will. Earls who resisted his will he held in bondage. Bishops he deprived of their sees and abbots of their abbacies, while rebellious thegns he cast into prison.

Finally his own brother he did not spare. His name was Odo. He was a powerful bishop in Normandy, and Bayeux was his episcopal see; he was the foremost man in England after the king. He had an earldom in England, and was master of the land when the king was in Normandy. William put him in prison.
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18

Domesday

T
he Anglo-Saxon Chronicle begins its account of the year 1082 with a startling thunderbolt. ‘In this year,’ it says, ‘the king arrested Bishop Odo’. Having startled us, however, the anonymous author, our only contemporary informant, leaves us entirely in the dark, adding only ‘and in this year there was great famine’ before moving on briskly to deal with the events of 1083.

Thus, in order to discover why William arrested Odo, we are forced to rely on the reports of chroniclers writing forty or fifty years later. Some of these writers declared that the king had discovered his half-brother was planning to usurp the throne. One pointed to Odo’s oppressive record as England’s regent, while others believed that the bishop was arrested because he was plotting to make himself pope.

On the face of it, this third story might seem to be the most farfetched, given what we know of Odo’s character and the high standards set by the reformed papacy. But by this date the reform movement had run into grave difficulties. The death of Pope Alexander II in 1073 had led to the succession of Gregory VII, a firebrand reformer who took an uncompromising view of the relationship between lay rulers and the Church. His insistence on the supremacy of papal authority had led quickly to a bitter conflict with the king of Germany, Henry IV: Gregory had twice excommunicated Henry and declared him deposed; the king had responded in kind, declaring the pope unfit to hold office and nominating a rival to rule in his place. Their quarrel had divided opinion right across Europe.

Set against this background, the story that Odo was aiming at the papacy starts to seem more credible. It also draws strength from being told by three chroniclers, whose differing accounts show that they were written independently. According to Orderic Vitalis, the bishop purchased a palace in Rome, decorated it sumptuously, and secured the support of several leading Roman families by scattering lavish gifts. William of Malmesbury claimed that Odo advanced his cause by stuffing the wallets of pilgrims with letters and coin. Whatever the precise means, it is not hard to believe that Odo, a man possessed of enormous wealth and power as well as apparently limitless ambition, may well have tried to advance himself as a compromise candidate in the struggle for St Peter’s throne.
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But what may have seemed a logical career move to Odo appeared otherwise to his elder half-brother. William was far from being a staunch supporter of Gregory VII. Relations between them had started well enough, for in 1066 Gregory, then a cardinal, had been one of the principal cheerleaders for the Norman invasion of England. But latterly their friendship had been dented by the pope’s attempt to call in this debt by asserting that England was a papal fief for which William owed homage – a claim that the king had naturally rejected. Gregory had also fallen out with Lanfranc over the latter’s repeated refusal to visit him in Rome, even to the extent of threatening to suspend the archbishop from office. Yet despite these tensions there had been no serious rift. In a letter to two French bishops in 1081, Gregory had praised William as a pious ruler who supported the Church and governed his subjects with peace and justice. (‘Although in certain matters he does not comport himself as devoutly as we might hope,’ the pope admitted, ‘he has shown himself more worthy of approbation and honour than other kings.’) Similarly, when Gregory was eventually ousted from office by Henry IV in 1084, Lanfranc still refused to denigrate him, and replied angrily to a partisan letter from one of Henry’s supporters which did so.
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It is highly unlikely, therefore, that either William or Lanfranc would have given their backing to a plan to unseat Gregory in 1082 and replace him with Bishop Odo. Whatever their views on Gregory, both were firm supporters of the reform movement and could hardly have believed that Odo would make a suitable supreme pontiff. But papal politics and questions of suitability aside, there was another more important reason for objecting to the plan. According to both
Orderic and William of Malmesbury, Odo had been determined to back up his bid by leaving England with a large force of distinguished knights – Orderic names Earl Hugh of Chester among their number. ‘They resolved to abandon the great estates they possessed in western parts and took an oath to accompany the bishop to lands beyond the Po.’ The Conqueror, when he learned of this intention, naturally took a very dim view. The knights he had planted on English soil were
his
knights – his security against further insurrection or foreign invasion, whose removal might very well imperil his grip on the kingdom. And so, says Orderic, the king, who was in Normandy during the first part of 1082, quickly crossed to England and took his brother by surprise. Odo, who was making ready to sail from the Isle of Wight, was seized and put on trial.

Orderic’s account here cannot be taken entirely at face value. William
did
cross to England in the autumn of 1082, but he cannot have arrested his brother immediately, for the two men are found in each other’s company later that year, witnessing a charter in Wiltshire. Nor can we place too much trust in the long speech that Orderic attributes to William during the trial, in which Odo is denounced primarily for his oppression of the English. Nevertheless, that something like this did take place after William’s return is proved by its brief but emphatic mention in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Orderic reports the conclusion of the trial in dramatic terms, telling us that none of the magnates assembled in the king’s hall dared to lay hands on the accused, forcing William to carry out the arrest himself. When Odo protested (ironically, giving his alleged ambition) that as a bishop he could be tried only by the pope, the king reportedly replied that he was not condemning a bishop but arresting an earl (a line that finds its way into other accounts – Malmesbury attributes it to Lanfranc). However it happened, Odo was taken across the Channel and imprisoned in the ducal castle at Rouen.
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Odo’s betrayal – as William must have regarded it – was the first of several family disasters to overtake the king in a short space of time. Soon after his return to Normandy in 1083, his wife, Queen Matilda, fell sick, and eventually died on 2 November. This can have been nothing other than a devastating blow for William, for their marriage had clearly been based on love and trust – there is no other way to account for his consistent reliance on her to act as his regent in both
England and Normandy. Unlike almost every other eleventh-century ruler William had no bastard children and no reported infidelities – at least no credible ones. William of Malmesbury recorded the scandalous rumour that, after his accession as king, the Conqueror had ‘wallowed in the embraces of a priest’s daughter’, but dismissed the story as lunacy: after all, it concluded with Matilda having her rival hamstrung and William vengefully beating the queen to death with a horse’s bridle. In reality, says Malmesbury, the royal couple had a minor falling-out in their later years over the support she had secretly supplied to Robert Curthose during his rebellion. ‘But that this occasioned no lessening of their affection as man and wife he himself made clear; for when she died … he gave her a most splendid funeral, and showed by many days of the deepest mourning how much he missed the love of her whom he had lost.’ Matilda was buried in Caen, in the abbey of Holy Trinity she had founded over twenty years earlier. Her tombstone, complete with its original carved epitaph, can still be seen in front of the high altar.
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Not long after the loss of his wife, William was hit by a third personal crisis when Robert Curthose once again went into exile. The exact cause of their renewed estrangement is unknown, but its occurrence so soon after Matilda’s death is surely significant. Orderic says that despite their earlier rapprochement the king had continued to pour abuse on his son, frequently reproaching him in public for his perceived failings; elsewhere he says that Robert was angry with his father ‘for some silly reasons’. Whatever the cause, it did not have the same disastrous effect as their earlier quarrel, since on this occasion Robert was followed into exile by only a few companions. William of Malmesbury says that he went off to Italy, intending to marry the countess of Tuscany, and hoping to secure support against his father. It may be that he also toured other regions to the same end: Orderic at one point mentions visits to sympathetic lords in Germany, Aquitaine and Gascony. But if on this occasion Robert posed no immediate military threat, his departure must still have occasioned great uncertainty, not least with regard to the succession in both Normandy and England. William made no public moves to disinherit his eldest son or to promote his younger brothers; but from 1084 William Rufus assumes Robert’s place in the witness-lists to royal and ducal charters.
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The Conqueror thus suffered three successive blows that struck
very close to home: the imprisonment of Odo, the death of Matilda and the renewed rift with Robert. These losses and betrayals must have taken their toll on him, and left him perhaps feeling increasingly isolated. Apart from anything else, these had been the figures he had relied upon to act as his regents. At the same time, there is no sign that William’s family problems from 1082 to 1084 triggered any wider crisis across his dominions. Robert may have hoped to stage a comeback, but chronicle reports depict him as a wandering exile, lacking friends and funds. His former allies, for example, the king of France and the count of Anjou, appear to have lent him no material support; the peace agreed with France in 1079 seems to have held good, while in 1082 William had struck a similar truce with Anjou that reportedly lasted until the end of his life. The only problem the king faced in the wake of Robert’s departure was in Maine, after the viscount of Le Mans rebelled and seized the castle of St Suzanne on the county’s southern border. In 1084 William set about besieging it with customary speed and vigour.
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Some way into the siege, however, the king delegated its prosecution to others, and returned to Normandy to deal with what Orderic calls ‘great matters’. What these were the chronicler does not specify, but we may suppose they involved the intelligence William received in 1085 about a planned invasion of England by the king of Denmark.
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This was, of course, hardly a new development, for the prospect of Scandinavian invasion had hung over William’s reign from the very beginning, and Danish fleets had twice crossed to England, only to return home with very little to show for their efforts. In 1085, however, the threat seemed altogether more serious. Five years earlier Denmark had witnessed the accession of a new King Cnut, a man seemingly determined to repeat the victories of his illustrious namesake. One of the many sons of the late Swein Estrithson, Cnut IV had been among the captains his father had sent to England in 1069 and 1075, leading fleets that contemporaries estimated at 300 and 200 ships. But once he wore the Danish crown himself, the new king became bent on something even bigger. ‘With his former failures in mind’, says William of Malmesbury, ‘Cnut prepared a fleet of a thousand ships or more (so I’ve heard) for the invasion of England.’ Even if we dismiss this as hearsay, there is no difficulty in believing that on this occasion the forces being assembled were
much larger than before, for the Danish king was not acting alone. ‘In this year’, said the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘people said and declared for a fact that Cnut, king of Denmark, son of King Swein, was setting out in this direction and meant to conquer this country with the help of Robert, count of Flanders’. Some years earlier Cnut had married Robert’s daughter, Adela. According to William of Malmesbury, the count had assembled a further 600 ships in readiness for the planned invasion.
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