The Norman Conquest (56 page)

But this was all a fiction. In reality, William had succeeded not Edward but Harold, and to do so he had fought the Battle of Hastings, one of the bloodiest encounters in European history. Yet nowhere in the official record is this reality admitted, nor the changes that had taken place as a result. King Harold, for example, is almost totally expunged from the Norman account of the Conquest. Apart from a few writs issued at the very start of the reign, no official document accords him his royal title: he is simply Harold, or Earl Harold. In the Domesday Book his reign has been almost entirely airbrushed from the record, the scribe accidentally alluding to it only twice in two million words. This was not sour grapes but rigorous legal logic. If the Conqueror was the Confessor’s direct heir, it followed that whatever had happened in the twelve months between Edward’s death and William’s accession must have been an aberration.
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The notion that nothing changed in 1066, in short, owes much to a rewriting of history by the Normans themselves. It was precisely
what William wanted us to believe, such was his desire to be regarded as England’s legitimate king. And for a long time historians did believe it. Until quite recently, those who had delved into the Domesday Book emerged greatly impressed by the scale of continuity it appeared to demonstrate, with every Norman newcomer stepping neatly into the space or spaces vacated by his English predecessors. It took the advent of computer-aided analysis to reveal that Domesday’s formulae in fact conceal massive tenurial disruption. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, summing up the Conqueror’s reign, comes closest to recognizing that there was a great gulf between what the Normans said and what they actually did. ‘The louder the talk of law and justice,’ it complains, ‘the greater the injustices they committed.’
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Even if we reject (as some historians still do) the notion that the Norman settlement created a pattern of landholding that was radically different from the one that had existed before, what Domesday demonstrates beyond any question is how totally the Conquest had replaced one ruling elite with another. By 1086 the English were entirely gone from the top of society, supplanted by thousands of foreign newcomers. This transformation had almost certainly not been William’s original intention. His initial hope appears to have been to rule a mixed Anglo-Norman kingdom, much as his predecessor and fellow conqueror, King Cnut, had ruled an Anglo-Danish one. But Cnut had begun his reign by executing those Englishmen whose loyalty he suspected and promoting trustworthy natives in their place. William, by contrast, had exercised clemency after his coronation and consequently found himself facing wave after wave of rebellion. The English knew they were conquered in 1016, but in 1066 they had refused to believe it. As a result they met death and dispossession by stages and degrees, until, eventually and ironically, the Norman Conquest became far more revolutionary than its Danish predecessor. ‘In King William’s twenty-first year’, said Henry of Huntingdon, ‘there was scarcely a noble of English descent in England, but all had been reduced to servitude and lamentation.’
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From this change in the ruling elite, enormous consequences flowed, because the English and the Normans were two quite different peoples. William of Malmesbury, in a famous passage, describes the Battle of Hastings as a fatal day for England, a disaster which had
caused the country to exchange ‘old masters for new’. He then goes on to outline the differences. The English, he says, were abandoned to gluttony and lechery, lax in their Christianity and addicted to wassail. They lived out their lives in small, mean houses, preferring to load their tattooed skin with gold bracelets, eating till they were sick and drinking until they spewed. The Normans, on the other hand, were well dressed to a fault, particular about their food and more obviously religious. A crafty, warlike people, they built great proud buildings in which they lived a life of moderate expense.
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Although narrow in its focus and infected with moral hindsight – the English here are sinners who clearly have it coming – in general this picture of two different cultures convinces. It was not just haircuts that distinguished the English from the Normans, but a whole range of practices and attitudes. Take, for example, warfare. Wherever we look in pre-Conquest England, the emphasis seems to be almost entirely naval. Edward the Confessor defends his people by sailing out from Sandwich every summer, and is appeased by a gift of a great, gilded warship. Taxes are raised on the basis of crew sizes, fleet and army are virtually interchangeable terms. We seem, in short, to be looking at a model that has much in common with contemporary Scandinavia. By way of total contrast, to read the sources for pre-Conquest Normandy is to enter a world dominated by cavalry and castles. Here the prestigious gifts are not ships but horses. Indeed, when ships are eventually needed in 1066, they have to be begged, borrowed or built from scratch.
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Similarly, the fact that the Normans built castles reveals that they had different ideas when it came to lordship, which they had come to equate with control over land. They strove to acquire new estates, built castles to defend them, and endeavoured to transmit them, unbroken, to their successors. So strong did the association between lord and location become, the Normans even started to name themselves after their principal holdings. ‘I, Roger, whom they call Montgomery’ is how the Conqueror’s old friend described himself in a charter of the mid-1040s.
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This desire for land was a matter of huge moment after the Conquest of England. Some of William’s followers, like those of King Cnut, had fought for money and gone home as soon as they had received it. But many thousands of others came wanting land, and ended up staying to create a new colonial society. They settled
across England, tearing up the old tenurial patterns in the process, reorganizing their estates as manors and erecting castles to serve as their administrative centres. Naturally the colonists wanted to govern and control these new lordships according to their own familiar customs, and so further change followed. New baronies developed courts of their own, and sometimes even sheriffs, which stood apart from and cut across the existing English system of shire and hundred courts. New laws were introduced to reflect different attitudes towards inheritance, favouring the firstborn son so that the patrimony remained intact. Toponymic surnames, which had formerly found no place in pre-Conquest England, suddenly appear thereafter. In their determination to carve out new lordships, the Normans treated the surviving English harshly, forcing many men who had formerly held land freely to become rent-paying tenants, often on extremely onerous terms. Frutolf of Michelsberg may have erred somewhat in saying that the Conqueror had killed off the English aristocracy, but his claim that the king had ‘forced the middle ranks into servitude’ comes fairly close to the truth.
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At the same time, another different attitude meant that the fortunes of those at the very bottom of English society were perceptibly improved. Slavery, which was already a thing of the past in Normandy by 1066, had still been going strong in England. Yet by 1086 there had already been a sharp decline: where Domesday allows us to compare figures, the number of slaves has fallen by approximately twenty-five per cent. Historians have generally ascribed this change to economics, pointing out that the Normans, in their quest for cash, preferred to have serfs holding land and paying rent rather than slaves who worked for free but who required housing and feeding. This may have been part of the reason, but another was certainly that some sections of Norman society felt that slavery was morally objectionable. William himself, as we have seen, had banned the slave trade, apparently at Lanfranc’s prompting, and is said to have freed many hundreds on his expedition to Wales. The ban cannot have been wholly effective, since ‘that shameful trade by which in England people used to be sold like animals’ was again condemned in an ecclesiastical council of 1102. Significantly, however, this was the last occasion on which the Church felt it necessary to issue such a prohibition. By the 1130s, slavery was gone from England, and some contemporaries knowingly attributed its absence to the Conquest.
‘After England began to have Norman lords then the English no longer suffered from outsiders that which they had suffered at their own hands’, wrote Lawrence of Durham. ‘In this respect they found foreigners treated them better than they had treated themselves.’
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And this was also true in another respect. With the sole exception of Earl Waltheof, no Englishman was executed as a result of the Conquest. Along with their belief that slavery was wrong, the Normans had introduced the notion that it was better to spare one’s opponents after they had surrendered. The English had been practising political murder right up to the eve of the Conquest, but very quickly thereafter the practice disappears. ‘No man dared to slay another’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, praising William’s law and order policy, ‘no matter what evil the other might have done him.’ The last execution of a nobleman on royal orders took place in 1095, and after Waltheof’s execution in 1076 no earl was executed in England until the early fourteenth century. The Conquest ushered in almost two and a half centuries of chivalric restraint.
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Lastly, the Normans had brought with them their zealous commitment to the reformed Church. ‘The standard of religion, dead everywhere in England, has been raised by their arrival’, wrote William of Malmesbury in the 1120s. ‘You may see everywhere churches in villages, in towns and cities, monasteries rising in a new style of architecture, and with a new devotion our country flourishes.’ The statement that religion was dead everywhere is, of course, an exaggeration. Historians nowadays would point to England’s existing links with Rome in 1066, and argue that the boom in the building of parish churches had begun before the Conquest.
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Yet there can be no doubt that the Normans accelerated these nascent tendencies enormously. William and Lanfranc saw an institution much in need of reform, and set about introducing separate Church courts, archdeacons and Church councils. Practices such as simony and clerical marriage were banned. And Malmesbury’s point about the rising number of religious houses is borne out by the figures. In 1066 there were around sixty monasteries in England, but by 1135 that number had more than quadrupled to stand at somewhere between 250 and 300; in the Confessor’s day there had been around 1,000 English monks and nuns; by Malmesbury’s day there were some four to five times that number. In the north of England, monasticism had been wiped out by the first wave of Viking invasions in the
late ninth century, and there is no sign of any native attempts to reverse this situation in the century before the Conquest. Yet within just a few years of the Norman takeover – very soon after the Harrying – the north witnessed a remarkable religious revival, with monasteries founded or restored at Selby, Jarrow, Whitby, Monkwearmouth, Durham and York. There is no clearer example of how conquerors and reformers marched in step.
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There is, naturally, a counter-argument to all of this. Some would say that all of these new attitudes – towards lordship, slavery, killing and religion – might have been adopted by the English even if the Conquest had not happened. But there we enter the realm of speculation. One can only point out that there is scant evidence of any strong trends in these directions before 1066, and state with certainty that the sudden replacement of one ruling elite by another caused these new ideas to be adopted very quickly. The speed of this change had profound knock-on effects, for these new attitudes were rapidly adopted in Norman England, but not in the Celtic countries to the north and west. Within a generation or two, men like William of Malmesbury were looking with a fresh and critical eye at their Welsh and Scottish neighbours, noting with distaste that they continued to slaughter each other and to seize and trade slaves. The resultant sense of moral superiority would help the English justify their own aggressive colonial enterprises in Britain during the centuries that followed.
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It is easy for us, at the distance of almost a millennium, to assess the Conquest in this way, chalking up dispassionately what was gained and what was lost. The English at the time enjoyed no such luxurious hindsight. To them the Norman takeover seemed an unmitigated disaster – a ‘melancholy havoc for our dear country’, as William of Malmesbury put it. They saw their artistic treasures being looted and taken as spoils to Normandy. They saw the bones and relics of their saints being hidden from view, tossed away or tested by fire. They saw the demolition of churches which, however rude or outdated they seemed to the newcomers, had stood for centuries, in some cases since the first arrival of Christianity. ‘We wretches are destroying the work of the saints, thinking in our insolent pride that we are improving them’, wept Wulfstan of Worcester as he watched the roof being ripped from his old cathedral in 1084. ‘How superior to us was St Oswald, the maker of this
church! How many holy and devout men have served God in this place!’
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Men like Wulfstan also noted with dismay the sudden discontinuation of English as a written language. As we have seen, the king’s writing office abandoned the long-established practice of using English around the year 1070, for the good reason that most men of power by that date were French and therefore could not understand it. From then on Latin became the language of the royal chancery, and English was soon similarly abandoned in monastic scriptoria across the country. To take an obvious example, the C version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ends in 1066, and the D version stops in 1080, leaving only the compilers of the E version to persevere into the twelfth century before the last of them finally put down his pen in 1154.
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know that English would ultimately emerge triumphant, its variety increased by its freedom from written constraints, its vocabulary massively enriched by thousands of French loan-words. But in 1070 all that lay a long way in the future. Contemporary Englishmen saw only that a tradition that stretched back to King Alfred, intended to raise the standard of religion among the laity, was dying before their eyes. After the Conquest, there were no new vernacular prayer books or penitentials of the kind that had existed before, and so a vital bridge between the Church and the people was destroyed. ‘Now that teaching is forsaken, and the folk are lost’, lamented the author of one of the few surviving English poems to be written after 1066. ‘Now there is another people which teaches our folk. And many of our teachers are damned, and our folk with them.’
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