by Michael Wood
I inform you that I will be a grateful lord and a faithful observer of God’s rights and just secular law. I have borne in mind the letters and messages which Archbishop Lifing brought me from Rome from the Pope, that I should everywhere exalt God’s praise and suppress wrong and establish full security by that power which it has pleased God to give me … Now I thank Almighty God for his help and his mercy, that I have so settled the great dangers which were approaching us.
Canute’s First Law Code
Here too the hand of Wulfstan is apparent, and we cannot but think that the Archbishop, sitting in his library in Worcester writing his treatises on just kingship, was relieved to have a young king to whom he could be father-figure at such a formative stage. Treason of the clerks? Hardly: merely another intriguing insight into how the Catholic Church shaped the barbarian kings of the west in the Dark Ages. Canute after all was a man to fear. A man who cut off ears and noses for no reason, killed Ethelred’s child, Eadwig, and executed all the major secular leaders he did not trust. But the Church’s influence was such that he became respected and admired as a king who was just, who was a conscious emulator of the great West-Saxon kings, a pious man who endowed the Church. The picture of him in the New Minster charter sums it up: the big tough flaxen-haired young Viking (only about 20 when he became king), former ‘terrorist’ turned the Lord’s Anointed, it shows how easily he could move from the world of Scandinavian paganism to that of Christian European kingship. Indeed in 1027 he went on a pilgrimage to Rome, walking in the footsteps of Offa and Alfred. It may seem difficult to reconcile the two sides of Canute, but in him there is much that is characteristic of medieval kingship. Remember Alcuin’s strictures about the great Offa: thinkers like Alfred were rare indeed, and the Church could never exact much more than formal demonstrations of piety from most kings. For most Dark Age kings had the inclinations of spoilt children (like Ethelred himself) and their moral sense was unrefined. Canute, you may say, was a brutal, hypocritical opportunist. But he was a second generation Christian only. His father, Swein, had hardly been Christian at all, and Canute was brought up in a world unused to Christian standards such as Alfred would have recognised.
Canute listened to his advisers assiduously, especially to Wulfstan whose pen produced Canute’s laws, and who clearly directed Canute’s ideas of kingship (‘He was loved as a brother, honoured as a father and frequently summoned to the highest affairs of the realm, as being the most learned of councillors,’ says the Ely account of Wulfstan’s relationship with the king). Canute was not, people would have said, un-raed. Hence the enduring English myth of Canute commanding the waves to go back. In fact, far from a sign of folly, the point of the story was to prove the king’s sense and humility, showing flattering courtiers that even the greatest king cannot control the waves, that earthly authority has its limits.
RETURN TO ASHINGDON
There is a final scene in our story which brings these strands together. In the summer of 1020 Canute journeyed to Ashingdon with his leaders and with Archbishop Wulfstan and other bishops, abbots and monks. There, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, he consecrated ‘a church built of stone and lime for the souls of those men who had been slain there’. Canute’s church still stands on the hilltop at Ashingdon, with part of its original fabric, and in the little churchyard a silver penny of the king, an arrowhead and fragments of badly corroded chain mail have been found. It is perhaps not stretching the imagination too much to picture our anonymous chronicler present at Ashingdon with the Bishop of London at the dedication ceremony by Canute and Wulfstan. His chronicle ended with the triumph of Canute: perhaps he felt there was nothing more to say. What would that bitter and ironic observer have made of the events that day on the ‘hill of ash trees’? The man who had claimed to write for ‘the whole nation of the English’? He would, I suspect, have sympathised with a much later writer:
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation
To puff and look important and to say: –
‘Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you
We will therefore pay you cash to go away’.
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
RUDYARD KIPLING Dane-geld (AD 980–1016)
NINE
WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR
Without the Normans what had it ever been? A gluttonous race of Jutes and Angles capable of no great combinations; lumbering about in potbellied equanimity; not dreaming of heroic toil and silence and endurance, such as lead to the high places of the Universe …
Thomas Carlyle Frederick the Great
THE NORMAN CONQUEST of 1066 is the most famous event in British history. And no event has provoked more controversy. It has been viewed both as England’s most lamentable defeat, and as the foundation of her greatness. In the seventeenth century when the Levellers argued about fundamental rights in the English Revolution, their starting point was what they perceived to be ‘the Norman yoke’, the ordinary Englishman’s loss of liberty at the Conquest. In the era of Gladstonian liberalism and nationalism an even more highly coloured version of this theme painted the English witan as the origin of Parliament and ‘the spirit which dictated the Petition of Right as the same which gathered all England round the banners of Godwin … [and] for which Harold died on the field … the martyr of England’ (E. A. Freeman).
At the centre of these events is perhaps the most remarkable figure in the whole period, William the Conqueror. These days it is fashionable to attribute decisive historical transformations to the underlying social and economic currents in civilisations, not to events and individuals. But without William’s personal force, his implacable drive, there would undoubtedly have been no Norman Conquest and that peculiar amalgam of the Anglo-Saxon and the European in English culture might never have been. But although he is the most famous king in English history, William’s career in Normandy up to 1066 is still completely unknown to the general reader.
The questions we have set ourselves here are simple ones. First, what was the nature of the Norman dukedom before 1066? In other words, how was it that this small duchy on the fringe of the French kingdom was able to conquer Europe’s oldest kingdom, and one of her richest? Then, second, what actually happened in 1066? Was the battle of Hastings a simple triumph of the technologically advanced over the older and more conservative culture? The naïve and backward English bowing to the hard reality of ‘modern’ warfare and political mastery? And after the Conquest, what was Domesday Book and what impact did the Normans have on the ordinary Englishman?
NORMANDY: ‘A BAND OF PIRATES’
Normandy in the tenth and early eleventh centuries was a Viking province. Its dukes were called Duces Northmannorum – leaders, or later dukes, of the Northmen. Its origins lay in 911 when the Frankish king, Charles the Simple, struck a deal which settled a small Viking army in the old Frankish archdiocese of Rouen. The leader of the Vikings, known to Norman sources as Rollo, was probably the same man who appears in Norse sagas as Rolf Ganger, a famous Norwegian Viking. The agreement bears many resemblances to Alfred the Great’s pact with Guthrum after his victory at Edington. Rollo had been defeated below the walls of Chartres, and, so tradition asserted, Charles met Rollo in a formal interview at Sainte-Clair-sur-Epte, rather like Alfred and Guthrum at Aller. Here too Christianity was part of the bargain. As a token of his new status, as a dux under the Frankish king, Rollo accepted baptism at the hands of the Archbishop of Rouen.
Initially Rollo’s territory seems to have been confined to an area no more than thirty miles in diameter in the Seine valley above Rouen, centring around Les Andeleys, where the later castle of Richard the Lionheart stands today. Rouen itself soon came under Norman control, and in the next generation their power expanded to the sea coast and as far west as the Cotentin, taking in
what was to become the heartland of William’s family, Bayeux, Caen and Falaise.
With such antecedents it is astonishing that by 1066 the Norman duchy should have been famed throughout western Europe for the extent and quality of its church and monastic life. As late as 996 their duke was referred to by the neighbouring French as ‘a pirate chief’ (ie a Viking) and around 1004 the grandfather of William the Conqueror welcomed into Rouen a Viking army which had been plundering in north-west France. But we also know from the chronicler Dudo of St Quentin that by 1025 Viking speech had died out in Rouen, although it still persisted in the more traditional centre of Bayeux. Indeed Adamar of Chabannes found that in 1030 he could emphasise how quickly the new settlers had assimilated Frankish culture, civilisation and language. And so, despite the survival of some Scandinavian traditions, when William and his followers came to England in 1066, they were French in speech, dress, culture and political ideas.
WILLIAM’S BIRTH AND EARLY CAREER
William the Conqueror was born in 1027 or 1028, the bastard son of Robert I, sixth duke of Normandy. His mother was Herleve, a tanner’s daughter from Falaise, and father and mother were probably only teenagers at the time of William’s birth. The whole of his early life was conditioned by his bastardy. When his father died in 1035 he became Duke of Normandy, though still a boy. On the horrors of the next few years much has been written, and certainly the dreadful experiences of his boyhood and early teens help to explain why, as a mature man, William was surpassingly harsh, ruthless and unlovable, a man who never showed emotion in his life save on two occasions (his coronation at Westminster Abbey in 1066 after the Conquest when he ‘trembled violently’; and his deathbed when he shed tears).
In those early years the court was a nest of vipers; his guardians nearly all perished by murder or poisoning; he himself frequently had to be rushed from his home at night to be hidden from violence. Most of his life was spent in violence and war, and war seems to have brought out a brutal streak in this uncompromising, forceful man. Harsh, rapacious, courageous, possessed of tremendous physical stature and strength, he had that unique gift of being able to make even the most hard-faced men around him do what he wished, ‘fluent and persuasive, being skilled at all time in making clear his will’, as a contemporary said.
VAL-ÈS-DUNES AND VARAVILLE
At the age of twenty he was threatened by the most serious rebellion of his life. A group of leading nobles gathered round William’s cousin and rose in armed revolt. The young duke however was able to ask assistance from his nominal lord, the French king Henry I, who came in person to help him. At Val-ès-Dunes near Caen the rebels were scattered. William had tasted battle and shown his military skill for the first time.
In 1053 a larger coalition of his foes tried again to crush him. By now King Henry seems to have changed his attitude to William; perhaps the growing military strength and independence of Normandy had become a threat. At any rate Henry attempted to defeat William and add the duchy to the French kingdom. In 1054 a French army marched into Normandy in a two-pronged attack, one force devastating along the Seine while the other struck into the Norman heartland. Once again they underestimated William’s skill in war, and his ruthlessness. Hearing that the northern French army was feasting in the town of Mortemer north of Rouen, William fell on the French at dawn and completely surprised them, setting fire to the town and wiping out their armed force. Panicked by the disaster, Henry withdrew.
In 1057 the last French effort to overcome William met with a humiliating defeat at Varaville east of Caen, where king Henry was forced to watch his advance guard being systematically destroyed by the Norman duke, who had cut it off on the west bank of the river Dives. Varaville set the seal on William’s consolidation of the duchy, and remarkably the time span between that victory and the Conquest of England was a mere nine years.
NORMAN MILITARY POWER – ‘MODERN’ WARFARE
A number of factors had made these impressive victories possible, and were just as important in 1066. The Norman aristocracy which after 1047 provided William with such solid backing was perhaps the most remarkable secular aristocracy of the early middle ages. Families like Grandmesnil, Tosny, Beaumont were to dominate later English history. Some of the most famous names, Warenne, Fitz Osbern, Montgomery, were all young men like William in the wars of the early 1050s, and they and their retinues provided the military force which the duke led to England in 1066: a ‘tightly knit group of politically motivated men’ they stood to gain most in William’s eventual conquest. Their society was ‘feudal’, a social organisation based on the holding of a unit of land in return for a stated service, normally military, with a relationship of homage existing between the overlord and the holder of the land, called a fief. Feudal society rested on the backs of the peasantry, but essentially it was about military service on the part of an aristocratic élite. Its characteristic products are knights and castles.
The knight was the essential element of William’s military power. In 1066 the Norman feudal force was a kind of New Model Army, crop headed, mounted on trained, bred horses, heavily equipped, clad in chain mail; used to fighting on horseback with throwing and jabbing lances and cutting swords; accustomed to operating in squadrons, to act in concert, to respond to the movement of flags, to use archer cover; expert and ruthless in breaking up and routing a defeated host; practised in devastation as one of the arts of war. Such a force contrasted with the royal expeditionary force of the Anglo-Saxons, which although dependent on not dissimilar forms of lordship was in the main a ‘national’ army whose backbone (apart from mercenaries) was the thegnhood, and which, though it rode to war, fought in the traditional Anglo-Saxon way, in the ‘shield wall’, the dense lines of heavily armed infantry.
The Normans were also becoming masters of the art of digging fortifications, although the exact nature of these before 1066 has not yet been decided by archaeology. It has been suggested that the famous motte and bailey layout of the Norman castle – with a keep on a steep mound and a circular outer ditch – only developed under the pressure of the campaigns for the Conquest. But there are many references to castle building in Normandy before 1066, and it is safest to believe that the motte was already a feature of Norman warfare.
It was certainly a highly effective means of waging war. It was through the castle that William had built up his feudal power within his own duchy, and also the way he had extended and consolidated his power in his frontier zones. Unlike Alfred’s burhs, these were purely military in function, bases for the annexation of territory and the cowing of recalcitrant populations, and this is how they would be used in England. Unlikeable the Normans may have been to their neighbours, but as a great Anglo-Saxonist has commented, ‘politically they were masters of their world’.
THE ENGLISH CONNECTION
Why did William invade England in 1066? The antecedents lie back in the troubled reign of Ethelred the Unready.
There had long been connections between Normandy and Anglo-Saxon England. For example, Norman writers give details of Athelstan’s friendly relations with Duke William ‘Longsword’ in the 930s. But the marriage of Ethelred to Emma, the daughter of Duke Richard I of Normandy, put the connection on an altogether more intimate basis. In his early boyhood, when Canute ruled in England, William may have met the exiled sons of Ethelred at his father’s court. In fact it was in the Norman court more than anywhere that the claims of Emma and Ethelred’s children, the athelings Edward and Alfred, were kept alive. It was during this period that Edward’s sister, Goda, was married to William’s ally Dreux, count of the Vexin, and the Norman writer William of Jumièges claims that William’s father actually contemplated an invasion of England on Edward’s behalf. And so, when the atheling Edward (the future Confessor) was invited back to England as king in 1042, and hence the old line of Wessex restored, it must have been viewed by Edward for one as a victory for the Norman connection. From then on the Normans, under William, must have felt especially tied to
the English royal family, and in particular to King Edward. Similarly, for his part Edward showed a strong partiality to Normans in his administration. Norman clerks appear in his household early in his reign, and he was soon introducing Norman bishops into England, notably Robert, Abbot of Jumièges, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1051. In the same year William himself may have visited Edward in England, and though that is uncertain, there seems little doubt that by 1051 the childless and chaste Edward had designated William as his heir. The crown was not in fact an Anglo-Saxon king’s to give, but such a designation would have carried much weight given the ties of kinship. There was however a rival for the throne whose family had already shown their ambition to succeed Edward. This man, the other great protagonist in 1066, was Harold, son of Earl Godwin of Wessex.
THE GODWIN CLAN: PATRIOTS OR NOUVEAUX RICHES?
Despite the Danish names he gave some of his sons, Earl Godwin seems to have been English in origin, son of that Wulfnoth who deserted Ethelred the Unready in 1008. The family therefore had sprung only from the moderate thegnly class. While still a young man Godwin had shown himself adept at going with the tide: he became one of Canute’s right-hand men and rose to a position of tremendous wealth and power, concentrating virtually the whole of southern England into his family’s control. That his ambitions lay further seems clear. When Edward’s brother the atheling Alfred returned to England in 1036 he had been brutally murdered, a crime for which Norman propaganda later (and probably rightly) made Godwin responsible. After an unsuccessful rebellion and exile in 1051, Godwin returned to England in triumph the next year and the family’s position of influence over Edward the Confessor was confirmed in 1053 when Godwin’s son Harold succeeded to the earldom of Wessex. Subsequently Harold’s brothers Gyrth and Leofwine received the earldoms of East Anglia and Middlesex, and Tosti the great province of Northumbria. By the early 1060s they were the dominant power in English politics. Harold is described as Dux Anglorum, ‘chief of the English’, at this time, and along with his brother Tosti led a combined land and sea attack on the Welsh in 1063 which culminated in a crushing English victory. Not since the ‘army leader’ Aelfhere of Mercia in Edgar’s time had there been such a powerful clan. These developments must have been of great concern to William and his supporters since the Godwins were irrevocably opposed to a Norman succession in England. In 1057, the year of Varaville, the exiled atheling Edward, son of Edmund Ironside and nephew of the childless Edward the Confessor, was brought back to England, and when he died in suspicious circumstances William must have realised that Harold Godwinson intended to be king. In the next years Anglo-Norman relations crystallised into an individual rivalry between (as Professor Douglas calls them) ‘two of the most remarkable personalities of eleventh-century Europe’.
