The Norman Conquest (54 page)

But if the barons gained much from the bargain, the king gained more. It is a matter of huge moment that William regarded every landowner in England as holding their land from him, either directly as a tenant-in-chief or indirectly as the tenant of an intermediate lord, for the kings of pre-Conquest England had enjoyed no such monopoly. Before 1066, as we’ve seen, lordship and landholding did not automatically go together; the king was landlord to some men but not to others, and some land was held of no lord at all. The same was also true, albeit to a lesser extent, of Normandy. Despite strenuous efforts by William himself to extend his seigneurial rights in the duchy prior to 1066, he enjoyed nothing like total superiority. It was the circumstances of the Conquest itself that meant that William was able in England to construct a new system from scratch. By treating all land as forfeit at the time of his accession, the king had been able to create an aristocracy bound in every case by strict terms of service, and similarly strict terms were imposed on the lands of the English Church.

The most visible type of service that the king expected was, of course, military service – that his tenants would supply him with the requisite number of knights when he demanded. But the relationship of lord and man gave William other rights too; rights which might be regarded as equally if not more valuable. When, for example, a tenant-in-chief died, his heir was obliged to pay the king a substantial sum of money (known as a relief) in order to enter into his inheritance. If the heir happened to be underage, as was often the case, the king took both him and the estate into his guardianship (wardship), enjoying the profits of the estate for the duration. If the heir happened to be female, the king had the right to arrange her marriage, and the same was true when a tenant-in-chief left a widow. Similar rights existed in the case of the Church: on the death of an abbot or bishop, the estates and revenues of his abbacy or bishopric were seized into the king’s hands until a replacement was appointed (which, since the king also controlled the appointment process, might be a long time).

These rights, known to historians as ‘feudal incidents’, gave the person who exercised them enormous power. Not only did they hand him sizeable sums of money on a regular basis (nothing is so
reliable as a tax on death); they also allowed him to shape the inheritance patterns of his tenants, by selling the wardships or marriages of heirs to men he wished to promote. Such rights had existed on the Continent prior to the Conquest, but their value varied according to two factors: the extent to which a lord’s authority was acknowledged, and, within that, the extent of a lord’s knowledge about the size and distribution of his tenant’s estates.

This knowledge was precisely what Domesday gave to William. Thanks to the Conquest he had become the ultimate lord of every man in England; thanks to the survey he knew exactly who owned what and where it was located. The principle that all tenure began and ended with the king defines the very structure of the Domesday Book. Every county has its own chapter, and every chapter begins by listing the king’s own lands in the shire. It then proceeds to list the lands of others – bishops, earls, barons, abbots – all of whom are described as holding their lands from the king. If a landowner died or, God help him, rebelled, the king’s ministers could quickly indentify his estates, no matter how scattered they might be, and send in the sheriffs to seize them.
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This, then, seems to have been the purpose of the Domesday Book. It was a charter of confirmation for the landowners, giving them the security of title to their estates acquired by the rough and ready processes of conquest. It was also, simultaneously, a directory for royal administrators, enabling them to see at a glance who owned what, and giving them the ability to seize and deliver lands, and to charge accordingly. It was a powerful tool – a weapon, even – for an already powerful king, allowing him to exploit what has been called ‘the most powerful royal lordship in medieval Europe’. Even the most determined critics of the concept of feudalism have to concede that England after the Conquest constitutes an exception to their arguments, coming close to matching the idealized model.
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Of course, the Domesday Book did not exist at the time of the Salisbury ceremony. The commissioners had worked flat out to get the circuit returns completed – each surviving example is the work of many hands. Great Domesday, by contrast, is the work of a single scribe. Probably working at Winchester, this anonymous individual performed the Herculean task of collating and condensing the data from the returns, with the aim of reducing it to a single volume. Most likely he started soon after the August assembly had ended:
despite recent controversy on the subject of its date, there can be no doubt that the Conqueror himself commanded the book’s creation. A twelfth-century chronicler at Worcester, adding to the account of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, concluded’ the king ordered that all should be written in one volume, and that volume should be placed in his treasury at Winchester’.
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It is important to emphasize that the Domesday Book, for all its importance to both kings and scholars of the future, was probably just one output of the Domesday Survey. It gave William and his successors the means to manage their aristocracy more effectively than any other rulers in Europe, and to profit handsomely from this arrangement, but it did nothing to solve the pressing financial crisis that confronted the Conqueror in 1086. William needed money immediately, in sums of a magnitude that could be raised only by levying a national tax. It seems very likely that the other function of the Domesday Survey was to gather information with a view to reforming the geld. The king’s desperate need for funds is shown by the fact that, while the Domesday Survey was in progress, royal tax collectors were also touring the country, exacting yet another punitive geld at the rate of 6 shillings per hide. Rounding off his description of the inquiry, the bishop of Hereford recalled how ‘the land was vexed with much violence arising from the collection of royal taxes’.
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Violence; mass assemblies; the continuing threat of foreign invasion; mercenary troops billeted in every town and city; a nation waiting nervously on the brink: 1086 was in so many respects a terrible and portentous year, it is no wonder that people associated the king’s great survey with God’s Day of Judgement. ‘This same year was very disastrous’, concludes the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,

and a very vexatious and anxious year throughout England, because of a pestilence among the livestock; and corn and fruits were at a standstill. It is difficult for anyone to realize what great misfortune was caused by the weather; so violent was the thunder and lightning that many were killed. Things steadily went from bad to worse for everybody. May God Almighty remedy it when it shall be His will!

And yet, by the time of the great assembly at Salisbury, the storm clouds had providentially cleared. Shortly before the ceremony on
1 August, news must have reached England that Cnut IV was dead. The Danish king had died on 10 July, murdered in church by his own rebellious nobles. His sudden passing meant that the threat of invasion was finally lifted. England was safe.
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But Normandy was not. During William’s stay in England there had been some encouraging news from the duchy – notably in the case of the viscount of Le Mans, who had abandoned his stand at St Suzanne, crossed the Channel and made his peace. Developments elsewhere, however, were deeply disturbing. Cnut was dead but his ally, the count of Flanders, remained very much alive and unlikely to abandon his hostility. Robert Curthose had returned from his wanderings and was once again at the court of the king of France, ready to make trouble. Suddenly freed from his English crisis, the king moved swiftly. After taking as much additional money from his subjects as he could, says the Chronicle, he left Salisbury for the Isle of Wight, and from there sailed back to Normandy.

Meanwhile the single scribe responsible for making the Domesday Book sat down to his monumental task, condensing the information from the circuit returns to make the master volume. From the amount of work involved, experts have calculated that he must have persevered for at least a year. But as the end of his labours approached, with six circuits done and only one remaining, he suddenly put down his pen, leaving the final return unredacted. Hence nine centuries later we have Great Domesday Book in its unfinished state, and the original circuit return for the eastern counties – Little Domesday Book.
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Why the scribe stopped is anyone’s guess: one plausible theory is that he did so because he heard the king was dead.

19

Death and Judgement

A
lthough we cannot say for certain how tall he was or what he looked like, it is hard to think of William the Conqueror as anything other than a formidable figure. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes him as ‘a man of great wisdom and power, surpassing in honour and strength all those who had gone before him, and stern beyond measure to those who opposed his will’. Another contemporary source suggests that his voice was harsh, and William of Malmesbury tells us that he used it to good effect, employing colourful oaths ‘so that the mere roar of his open mouth might somehow strike terror into the minds of his audience’.
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After his return to Normandy in 1086, however, it appears that such theatrics were not having the desired effect. William was by this stage in his late fifties, which made him old by contemporary standards. He was also, according to Orderic Vitalis, extremely fat – a condition not uncommon among medieval aristocrats later in life, as the exercise of hunting failed to counteract the quantities of venison consumed. Moreover, William’s military reputation on the Continent had been nothing to brag about in recent years, following his defeats at Dol and Gerberoy. The king may have rushed home to defend his duchy from attack, but in the event his physical presence proved to be no deterrent.
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Trouble began in the Vexin, a region on Normandy’s eastern border which had served as a buffer with France until Philip I had fortuitously acquired it ten years earlier. At some point in 1087, presumably on the French king’s instructions, his garrison in the town of Mantes went on the offensive and made repeated raids into
Normandy. According to Orderic, whose account looks to be very well informed, they overran the diocese of Evreux, harrying the countryside, driving off cattle and seizing prisoners. They grew bold in their arrogance, he says, and taunted the Normans.
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And, if we believe William of Malmesbury, the cruellest taunt of all came from the lips of King Philip. ‘The king of England lies in Rouen,’ he allegedly joked, ‘keeping his bed like a woman who’s just had a baby.’ William, the chronicler explains, had been confined to his capital for some time, on account of his stomach, for which he had taken a drug. Generally historians have understood this remark to refer simply to the Conqueror’s obesity, but the mention of confinement, bed rest and medicine make it sound as if the king was physically ailing. It may have been knowledge of this, above all, that had caused his enemies to start snapping at his heels.

But Philip’s insult, says Malmesbury, eventually reached William’s own ears, and stirred him into action. ‘When I go to Mass after my lying in,’ he swore, ‘I will offer a hundred thousand candles on his behalf.’ This was a grim joke on the part of either the king or the chronicler, for towards the end of July 1087 William assembled an army and invaded the Vexin, setting fire to the fields, vineyards and orchards as he went. His principal target was Mantes, the town from which the recent French raids had been launched, and this too was put to the torch. The castle was burnt down, as were countless houses and churches. A great many people perished in the consuming flames, says Orderic, and notoriously (for several other chroniclers mention it) at least one of them was a religious recluse.

Inevitably, therefore, some monastic writers saw what subsequently happened to the Conqueror as divine retribution. ‘A cruel deed he had done’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘but a crueller fate befell him. How crueller? He fell sick and suffered terribly.’ According to William of Malmesbury, some people said that the king was injured when his horse jumped a ditch, driving the front of its saddle into his overhanging stomach, but Malmesbury himself follows Orderic in stating that William succumbed to heat exhaustion caused by the flames and the warm summer weather. Quite possibly, since he appears to have been suffering since before the campaign’s outset, William was simply beset by the return of his earlier illness. Whatever the cause, suddenly in great pain, he sounded the retreat and retired to Rouen.
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Back in the capital, it soon became clear that the Conqueror was dying, and all his doctors could do was try to minimize his discomfort. Orderic provides a long but gripping account of the king’s final days, which he claims to have carefully investigated and truthfully described. Rouen, he says, was a crowded and noisy city, and so at his own command William was carried beyond its walls to the church of St Gervase which stood on a hill to the west. There he lingered for the rest of the summer, suffering terrible agonies but retaining the power of speech. ‘I was brought up in arms from childhood’, he groaned, ‘and am deeply stained with all the blood I have shed.’ These are, of course, Orderic’s words rather than William’s, but both statements are incontestably true. The king accordingly spent many hours confessing his sins to the bishops, abbots and monks who stood by his bedside, endeavouring to wash clean his soul. For the same reason he also commanded that his treasure be distributed among the poor and divided up among various churches, specifying precise sums for each, and paying particular attention to rebuilding the ones he had recently burnt down in Mantes. Finally he attempted to please God by ordering the release of all the prisoners in his custody – a list which included Earl Morcar and Earl Roger, Siward Barn, and even King Harold’s brother, Wulfnoth, handed over as a hostage as long ago as 1051 and held captive ever since. The only exception to this general amnesty was Odo of Bayeux, whom William insisted was still too great a threat to be at liberty. But after incessant pleading by his other half-brother, Robert of Mortain, as well as various other Norman magnates, the king eventually relented, and Odo was also set free.
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