The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (16 page)

In August 1086 William considered that the process of settling England in the Norman way had been completed. He called an assembly at Salisbury of all the chief landowners in the country and the smaller barons who held land from the tenants-in-chief. Although not every single landowner could attend, a significant number were there, and each swore a personal oath of allegiance to William, on his knees before his king, who held the man’s hands between his own. This was the remarkable innovation of William the Conqueror and demonstrated the exceptional nature of English feudalism, that all were made aware that they owed their loyalty to the king above their immediate liege lord.

The extraordinary scene on Salisbury Plain of all the landowners in England kneeling before the by now extremely corpulent figure of the Norman king represented a triumphant climax to the Norman Conquest. The rebellions had all petered out and the Danes had finally abandoned their claim to the throne, their last attempt at an invasion being the year before. William had pushed back the frontier with Wales, built a castle at Cardiff and made the Welsh princes and the Scottish king do homage to him or risk further warfare and damage to their countries. All of this was an indication of the strength of the Norman hold on England, and it should also remind us that William had brought peace to England. Most of the English might be in a disadvantaged position, but the fact was that for almost a century England had been at the mercy of powerful foreign invaders. By the 1070s she was the protected centrepiece of a great transcontinental empire as widespread as Cnut’s had been. Unlike Cnut’s, however, William’s empire tore England away from her Scandinavian and Germanic roots. With great consequences for her future she was thrust back into the heart of Latin civilization and the traditions of scholarship which stretched from Roman times.

Nevertheless, for all the positive long-term effects of the Conquest, whatever their circumstances, most Englishmen and women suffered under the Normans. One of the most dramatic effects of Norman rule was the gradual enserfment of the free English tenant farmers, who in 1066 consisted of almost half the population. They who for centuries had played an important part in local government in the hundred and shire court were by 1200 denied access to the king’s courts because they were no longer allowed to call themselves freemen. The term villein had come to mean a serf who was tied to his lord’s domain by the services he performed for him, whose disputes could be judged only in the manorial court. Thus although under the Normans the Saxon practice of slavery died out, because Norman ecclesiastics found it offensive, for 40 per cent of Englishmen and women their freedom was greatly curtailed. Under the Normans the manor court slowly replaced the ancient hundred court, and the lord of the manor alone now decided what previously had been decided by a group of small farmers and landowners together.

Most English saints’ days were suppressed by the new Norman priests, while English went into temporary abeyance as a written language. Whereas poetry and histories like
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
had been written in Old English, books in Norman England were now written in French, as that was the language of the court.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
itself, which had been written in monasteries since Alfred’s time, falls silent by the mid-twelfth century. For the next hundred years English went underground, becoming the language of the uneducated.

Even their native forests were taken away from the English, owing to William’s passion for hunting. Until the Conquest, firewood and wild game from the vast forests still covering the country had been a traditionally free source of fuel and food. But William introduced laws forbidding the use of bows and arrows within them, and the presence of hunting dogs. Anyone who cut firewood from the forest or poached deer might be blinded, mutilated or executed. ‘He loved the tall stags as if he were their father,’ declared
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
.

To make matters worse the Conqueror destroyed churches and towns in Hampshire over a distance of thirty miles in order to create what we still call the New Forest, though it is now 900 years old. Deer roamed while people starved. William’s new forest laws incurred much hatred among the English, but his love of hunting made him unwilling to proceed in his usual cautious fashion. He turned the forests all over England into royal reserves that only he and his friends could hunt in.

William the Conqueror’s tendency was to scatter the manors of his chief men all over the country to prevent regional loyalties becoming a threat. However, for the dangerous border lands with Wales and Scotland this arrangement was modified. For many centuries they would be in a state of perpetual warfare. On the marcher lands, so called because they marched with the Welsh frontier, lords like Roger de Montmorency were allowed to own huge estates concentrated in one area. There the local landowner was responsible for what was in effect a private army keeping the Welsh at bay. These territories were known as the palatine earldoms, and their rulers were far more like the independent barons of Normandy. But once again William’s subtle mind saw a way of cutting down on the power of the palatine earls: where possible he made churchmen palatine rulers. The most famous of these was the Prince Bishop of Durham. By Norman law priests were forbidden to marry and have children, so they could not become a dynastic threat to the eminence of the king’s own family.

The last great change the Norman Conquest brought to England was the reform of the English Church. One of the justifications for the Norman invasion had been the Godwins’ abuses. Having obtained the papal blessing for the Conquest William had to fall in with the wishes of the papacy, which under the direction of Pope Gregory VII (formerly known as Hildebrand, archdeacon of Rome) had embarked on a hard-hitting programme of reforms. In any case they corresponded to the Duke of Normandy’s own austere disposition. William was a deeply religious man and disapproved of corruption. But he waited until the country was quiet before removing the illegitimate Stigand, who had used his influence among the English to secure a peaceful acceptance of the Conquest.

From Normandy William imported his friend the great churchman Lanfranc, Abbot of Caen, to become Archbishop of Canterbury. Lanfranc made a great many changes to the Church organization. In recognition of population shifts, the residences of English bishops were transferred to what had become the leading towns of dioceses–with the Bishop of Lichfield, for example, moving to Chester–and Lanfranc replaced the slack English clergy with the better-trained Normans, thereby depriving the English of parish priests who spoke their own language. Lanfranc was an Italian lawyer who had attended the law school of Pavia and who very late in life had been seized by the religious impulse. He had made the monastery at Bec in Normandy one of the great centres of religious learning of the eleventh century. Possessed of a subtle mind to match his master’s, he reformed the practices of the English Church along Hildebrandine lines. One of Gregory’s VII’s profound beliefs was that the priest should be better behaved than other men–in view of his high calling he should adhere to a more exacting law than ordinary people. Corrupt practices such as simony–that is, selling pardons for sins–were no longer permitted. He insisted on a return to the ideal of celibacy in the clergy. The priest’s wife and children, who had been a common sight in every village, were seen no more.

The marking out of the clergy as a separate caste meant that the Norman Conquest put an end to the seamless robe of government between king and churchmen that had prevailed in Anglo-Saxon England–although priests and clerks continued to serve until the sixteenth century as what were in effect civil servants. Bishops no longer presided over the shire courts as they had under Anglo-Saxon kings. The Church obtained her own courts from William, with jurisdiction to try men in holy orders, disputes over marriage, and any spiritual matters.

Two systems of law thus developed side by side in England. Canon law, practised in the ecclesiastical or Church courts, contrasted strongly with what became known in the thirteenth century as the common law, which was by and large ancient English custom. Canon law derived from the principles of Roman law, which had continued to be studied at centres of learning such as Pavia on the continent where Lanfranc himself had been trained. And it was canon law in which the Church clerks, who until the sixteenth century would provide the trained minds essential for the nascent English civil service, were educated.

In contrast English common law had always had a common-sense aspect to it, since it had always been adjudicated by tenant farmers. It was never particularly precise in legal terms. That imprecision was increased by the fact that the justice meted out by the early Norman kings from what became called the King’s Bench was at first fairly informal. It was decided after a discussion with whatever baron happened to be attending court at the time. Members of the royal council or Curia Regis might send clerks into the counties and there take evidence from the sheriff about a dispute which would be deliberated on locally or perhaps brought back to London for a meeting of the Council.

The higher level of education enjoyed by the Church’s trained clerks was useful to the Normans in an infinite number of ways. But one feature of the far-reaching Hildebrandine reforms was less pleasing to William. Pope Gregory’s belief in the superiority of the clergy to the ordinary man led him to make repeated attempts to liberate the Church from the power of the secular or earthly ruler, by ending their right to confer on bishops and abbots the ring and staff which were their badges of office. He had already clashed with the emperor Henry IV over this principle in the struggle known as the Investiture Contest which rocked Germany and Italy for nearly fifty years.

In William Pope Gregory believed he had a captive ruler. Gregory claimed that not only should the Duke of Normandy abandon the episcopal investiture ceremonies but he should do homage to the pope: the duke’s appeal to the Church Curia to support his invasion of England was an implicit acknowledgement of the jurisdiction of the papal court. In a typically ingenious and complicated piece of exposition the best legal minds in Rome further sought to argue that since England had previously paid a tax to Rome known as Peter’s Pence this proved that England had previously been the vassal of Rome.

But William the Conqueror was far too shrewd to be caught by Pope Gregory. Just as with the Norman barons he had every intention of limiting the Church’s power. In a brief note to Rome he let it be known that he would pay Peter’s Pence, which he acknowledged had been in arrears for some time, but that the ancient custom of the English kings prevented him doing homage as the pope’s vassal. From then on William did very much as he pleased. He gave orders that no pope should be recognized in England until the king himself had done so. Church councils were not to pass laws without the king’s express permission; likewise papal bulls and missives from the pope to the people were to be distributed only when the king had decided that he approved of the content.

The pope generally tolerated William’s behaviour because he advanced the cause of the Church much more than he damaged it, not least in the way he used the clergy as clerks to handle the increasing amounts of government business. He therefore allowed William to invest English bishops with their badges of office even though the German emperor was not permitted to do so. For her part the Church, as one of the most important underlying forces which kept society together, promoted Norman government among the English people.

Owing to the Conqueror’s alliance with the Church the Normans were tremendous builders of churches and abbeys. Many of England’s most famous cathedrals were begun or built just after the Conquest. During the 1070s, Canterbury Cathedral was rebuilt, and Lincoln Cathedral and Old Sarum Cathedral, which lies in ruins above the town of Salisbury, begun. Huge stone churches which looked more like fortresses, in the style called Romanesque that the Normans introduced, sprang up all over England. Romanesque churches, which had little or no decoration other than chevron cross-hatching, were characterized by immensely thick pillars, rounded arches and a very long nave. Visible a long way off, they dominated the landscape almost as much as the Norman castles. The next decade saw the grey stone Norman cathedrals rise at Ely, Worcester and Gloucester. Tewkesbury Abbey was also built, and the cathedrals at St Albans and Rochester were restored.

At the same time the Normans pushed on with their equally distinctive programme of castle-building. In the process they knocked down most Saxon country houses, which is why so few remain. In their place they erected strong forbidding castles in the Norman fashion, some in stone. Towns and commerce likewise flourished under the influence of the energetic Normans, who like their Viking ancestors were keen traders. Jewish merchants returned to England after an absence of 600 years, having left with the Romans.

Despite the sufferings of the Saxon The Chapel of St John built around 1080 in the White people, the Normans had found plenty about England which they admired enough to want to adapt, particularly the Anglo-Saxon political institutions. Within a generation mixed marriages between Normans and Saxons, especially Saxon heiresses, were common. One of the most famous Conquest artefacts, the Bayeux Tapestry, is of entirely English workmanship, even though it was commissioned by William’s half-brother, the Norman Bishop Odo. It shows the high level of artistry in tapestry-making in England and was probably sewn in Canterbury. Two hundred and fifty feet long by twenty feet wide, full of verve and drama, it is also a subtle depiction of the story of the Conquest. As such it is one of England’s most important pieces of historical evidence.

In 1087, the year after the Domesday Book was completed, the mighty duke returned to Normandy for what turned out to be his last campaign. He died attempting to conquer a disputed area of land, the county of Maine, which abuts Normandy. Twenty years before at the time of Hastings the King of France had been weak. But by 1087 a new king, Philip I, was on the throne. This mischief-maker was delighted to help William’s eldest son Robert, the heir to Normandy, stir up trouble against a father who gave him no responsibility, who kept the reins of power firmly in his own hands, and who, to punish him, had deliberately arranged for the kingdom of England to be inherited by his son William Rufus. Now there was open warfare between the conqueror and the French king.