The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  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 beha
viour 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.

  William had always been intending to attack the city of Mantes which had previously belonged to Normandy. But legend has it that the King of France made a cruel joke about William’s grossness which got to his ears. The size of his stomach by now was indeed making it hard for him to keep in his saddle and he no longer got about as he had in his younger days. At Rouen, confined to his palace, the duke heard Philip of France’s mocking bon mot: ‘The King of England keeps his bed like a woman after she has had a baby.’ William sent a deceptively mild message in return. ‘Tell Philip that when I go to Mass after the confinement, I’ll make him an offering of 100,000 candles.’ A month later he had surrounded Mantes. Then he set fire to it–a hundred thousand candles indeed.

  This gesture proved William’s undoing. His horse stumbled on an ember and threw him so badly that he suffered fatal internal injuries. Watching over his deathbed was William’s favourite son Henry, later to become Henry I. His calculating and legalistic tendencies were always appreciated by a father who had similar qualities. But meanwhile the Duke of Normandy’s stout son William Rufus, named for his red hair and red face, the heir to the English throne, had immediately hightailed it to England to make sure no Anglo-Saxon seized the crown before he did.

  William II (1087–1100)

  The reign of William Rufus was a very different affair from his father’s. Superficially he resembled him in so far as he was a fearless and victorious warrior and strong king. He was adroit enough to make himself popular among the English by freeing important English leaders like Morcar. He added to his French possessions, and was even more of a threat to the Welsh and Scottish kingdoms than the Conqueror had been. He defeated and killed Malcolm Canmore, King of the Scots, who was constantly invading England, and in 1092 he reconquered Cumberland, formerly an independent principality founded by the Strathclyde Welsh. Carlisle became an English city, and obtained its own bishop in the next reign. At William Rufus’ cosmopolitan court the abacus was used for the first time to calculate what was owed the king. During his reign the construction of Durham Cathedral began, the first western European building to use ribbed vaulting for the roof.

  But it soon became clear that the new king was a poor version of his great father. He was a greedy man who had none of the sense of fairness which had informed his father, harsh though he was. Although he built Westminster Hall in 1097 as the place where he and his advisers could mete out justice, William Rufus’ judgements were generally rather self-interested. Lacking his father’s self-discipline and continence, the new king was always in need of money to finance his extravagant lifestyle. Aided and abetted by an equally unscrupulous minor Norman clerk named Ranulf, who soon became his justiciar (or chief minister), a term used for the first time in English history, William Rufus was soon causing the country to groan under his demands. Ranulf was nicknamed Flambard, because, reported the monk Ordericus Vitalis, ‘like a devouring flame he tormented the people, and turned the daily chants of the Church into lamentation’. He encouraged the king to swell his coffers by interpreting the Domesday Book information more stringently, especially in relation to the monasteries, to which they felt the old regime’s inspectors had been too lenient.

  Thanks to Flambard’s low but ingenious mind the two introduced new ways of making the country yield more gold for the king than ever before. Feudal dues that William I had demanded only where the estate could bear them were used to enrich the king at the expense of his barons. As with death duties today, feudal law stipulated that on the death of an important landowner or tenant-in-chief a ‘relief’ or tax was payable to the king before the heir could inherit his father’s estate. These were now demanded without mercy. Under William Rufus the property of minors supposedly in the king’s safekeeping until they came of age were run to rack and ruin or their woods cut down and sold for the king’s profit. Heiresses were married against their will to cronies of the king.

  In 1088, a year after he succeeded to the throne, William II’s strenuous demands provoked an unsuccessful rising by his tenants-in-chief in the name of his weaker brother Robert, who was now ruling Normandy. Led by the king’s half-uncle Odo of Bayeux, these barons made the revolt an excuse to terrorize the country. Alarmed at their strength William cleverly defeated them by promising the humbler people of England that the forest laws would be less harshly enforced and some of the more stringent taxes lifted, with the result that those who had no wish to be at the mercy of marauding armed horsemen supported the king. Subsequently many of the most important tenants-in-chief lost their lands and were banished overseas. In 1095, however, a new rebellion broke out, led by Robert de Mowbray, the Earl of Northumberland and directed against the king’s tyranny. This too was unsuccessful. Even so, William failed to make de Mowbray s
urrender his castle of Bamburgh, so he ruthlessly built alongside it a new castle which became known as Malvoisin or Evil Neighbour. When eventually de Mowbray was forced to leave the castle, the soldiers of Malvoisin pounced and captured him. This was the last challenge to the king during his reign.

  Because of William Rufus’ strong-armed approach to his tenants-in-chief, many of the Norman adventurers who still had that Viking zest to conquer decided to try their luck beyond the king’s reach by invading Wales and seizing land from the Welsh princes. Like the palatine earls they became a law unto themselves. These marcher lordships became the equivalent of little independent countries, run from the local castle–an economical way of using the energies of Norman knights, whose educational training was for warfare. They also had the advantage of keeping down the Welsh. From this period date the lordships of Montgomery, Brecon and Pembroke.

  Not only did William Rufus antagonize the great barons. He also shocked and disgusted the English by his treatment of the Church, which he delighted in mocking from the decadent environs of his court. On Archbishop Lanfranc’s death the king refused for four years to appoint a new incumbent at Canterbury. This remissness, instigated by Ranulf Flambard, enabled him to benefit from the right of regale, by which all the rents of the wealthy archdiocese came into the king’s hands for as long as the see remained vacant. It was only because William became extremely ill unexpectedly and came to believe that he was on the point of death that he was frightened into good behaviour and agreed to appoint the best possible candidate for the archbishopric.