1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  The home-wrecking was not confined to brownfield sites, either. Deciding that the New Forest needed a bit of a makeover, William evicted 2,000 people from its villages, so that the 75,000-acre expanse of woodland would form a giant hunting playground, empty of all human construction. Similar operations were carried out in forests all over England, and terrible punishments were imposed on Anglo-Saxons who dared to replace their destroyed or stolen crops by eating one of the new King’s royal deer, hares or hedgehogs – the penalty for poaching any animals was castration or amputation of hands and feet.

  In the meantime, while his men were out demolishing houses and ethnically cleansing forests, William himself was busy doing admin, having taken on the exhausting task of confiscating some 1,422 manors that had previously belonged to Edward the Confessor and the Godwin family, as well as all the land in England that his men had completely ravaged, presumably on the grounds that its owners had let it fall into disrepair.

  He was also amassing hoards of gold, jewels, cloth and other treasures, so that when he nipped back to Normandy in 1067 to see his wife and count his beached whales, even the snooty Parisians who saw William and his entourage were, in Zumthor’s words, ‘dazzled by the beauty of their clothing, which was embroidered with gold’.

  William was careful to repay his investors – especially God. On the site of the Battle of Hastings, he built an abbey to give thanks for his victory, bluntly dubbing it Battle so that the Anglo-Saxons would never forget why it was there. And if you drive around Normandy today, you cannot fail to notice how many small towns have immense abbeys and cathedrals, all paid for with English money.

  William’s brother, Odo, was the Bishop of Bayeux. He can be seen in the tapestry, riding into battle brandishing a heavy mace instead of a spear or sword – churchmen were only allowed to bash enemies’ brains out, not stab them, which would apparently have been ungodly. Thanks to Odo’s willingness to smash skulls in the service of his brother and the Lord, he amassed a fortune which would, in today’s money, have been worth an estimated £55 billion. He lavished much of this wealth on himself, but also a fair portion on a state-of-the-art cathedral that rises up from the centre of the small Norman market town of Bayeux like a gold brick on a pile of pebbles.

  Other Norman churchmen received lesser, albeit substantial, windfalls. Jesus might once have said something about rich men having less chance of getting into heaven than a camel had of passing through the eye of a needle, but the Norman Church didn’t need to worry about that – they now had enough cash to make giant needles.

  Step 5: From Hastings to Domesday

  The new King William had a lot less time than modern royals to go to nightclubs and do charity work – he had to charge up and down the country telling the English to behave themselves. In 1067 alone, there were revolts in Northumbria, Hereford, Exeter and the vital port of Dover, which was very nearly recaptured from the Normans.

  This rebellion in Dover was led by one Eustace of Boulogne, who had fought in William’s army at Hastings and then changed sides, probably hoping to rally Anglo-Saxon support for his own claim to the English throne – he was the brother-in-law of Edward the Confessor. William forgave Eustace and allowed him to return to the Norman fold, because he needed all the allies he could get – in 1069, for example, Harold’s mother Gytha and his widow Edith, who were still a bit peeved about those 1,422 manors they’d lost, invaded Devon, and it took all of the Franco-Norman forces in the southwest to repel them.

  The North also did its bit to annoy William. In January 1069, the citizens of Durham killed the Norman occupiers (who had recently done a fair amount of massacring themselves). A few days later, York did the same thing, forcing William to come all the way up to Yorkshire in person to chase off the rebels and oversee the building of a new castle.

  In September of the same year, a Danish force sailed up the Humber, supporting the claim of Edgar the Atheling to the English throne. Edgar and the Danes took York, with the unwitting aid of the Norman occupiers, who accidentally destroyed much of the city and their own forces when they set fire to the houses around the castle in an attempt to deprive the attackers of wood for siege machines.

  William’s words when he heard that his own men had burnt the brand-new castle he’d had built are not recorded, but suffice it to say that he was very angry at these developments, so much so that the poor messengers who brought him the news of events in York were, as the French historian Paul Zumthor puts it, ‘mutilated’. Given that William frequently went in for punishments like castration, hand removal and blinding, it’s not pleasant to imagine what this might mean.

  The King rode north again to sort out his new York problem. However, once he’d done this, he then had to go and deal with another revolt in Stafford, and as soon as his back was turned, there was another uprising in York, forcing William to gallop up there a third time, only to find that the rebels had done a disappearing act.

  By now, William was very, very angry at these Anglo-Saxons who – just like Harold – kept breaking their oaths of allegiance to him, and he gave orders for a war crime that would today be punished by having the perpetrator locked away for several years in a comfortable prison complex in The Hague.

  William told his army to kill and destroy everyone and everything in a band of territory running from Lancaster to York, from the North Sea to the Irish Sea, an area 180 kilometres by 70 kilometres. Exact records of the number of dead and displaced are hard to find, but chroniclers tell of whole villages preferring to hide in the forest and starve to death rather than face the swords of the Conqueror’s stormtroopers. The destruction was so massive and complete that the north of England remained a total wasteland for fifty years.*

  With so many people swearing oaths and then betraying him, William’s land-grabbing was getting terribly complicated. Disputes over who owned what, and who owed the rent from which lands to whom, became so frequent that in 1085, William summoned his best lawyers and accountants to an investment counselling conference in Gloucester. Even though almost everyone in England owed him a percentage of their income, he was really keen to know who they were and exactly what they earned, so that they couldn’t cheat him.

  The answer the advisers came up with was that he should make a list of every bit of property, including human slaves – the serfs – in England. The resulting Domesday Book was as nerdy and completist as a trainspotter’s travel diaries.

  In early 1086, surveyors were sent out, and when they had finished collecting their data, the information was double-checked by more surveyors. As well as being a register of everyone’s land, belongings and wealth, it also set the information out in feudal order, listing every fiscal debt, from the smallest landowners and absentee lords right up to King William himself.

  The book’s name, given to it in the twelfth century, points to the sheer scale and importance of the project. There was so much information in there that people compared it to the Book of Life, the catalogue of deeds that God would consult when deciding everyone’s fate on Judgement Day.

  And all this for a man who almost certainly couldn’t read. Perhaps William got a kick out of the sheer size of his pile of account books. Or maybe, now that he was almost sixty, he enjoyed having excerpts read to him at bedtime, to bring back memories of his younger conquering days.

  ‘Wait a minute. Bury St Edmunds, where’s that?’

  ‘You ransacked it on your way to Stafford, sire.’

  ‘Ah yes. And where’s this Chester you mentioned?’

  ‘You ransacked it on your way to Lancaster, sire,’ etc., etc.

  The surveyors probably did their best to conceal the fact that there were gaps in the data, especially regarding property in London and the far North, which were troublesome areas where surveyors didn’t like to ask too many questions.

  ‘Didn’t I ransack a place called York? Why is that not in the book?’

  ‘York, sire? Oh no, no such town. Are you sure you read the signpost correctly
? Or did you perhaps order the town to be completely obliterated?’

  Another omission is even more revealing. Wine was the favourite drink of the Normans and especially of their Frankish colleagues, and forty-six vineyards are listed in the survey. However, according to the Domesday Book, only one of them (at Rayleigh Castle in Essex) was yielding a harvest. As William might have said, ‘Mon arse.’ Wine stocks were clearly not being listed by the Domesday surveyors, who seem to have been accepting liquid bribes to leave them out of the listings.

  In any case, William didn’t have much time to enjoy his bedtime storybook, because he died in September 1087, soon after the survey was completed. And he did so in a way befitting a King of England – while bashing the French.

  King Philippe I of the Franks had attacked Vexin, the part of Normandy that lies just northwest of Paris, and when William sent out messengers warning him to back off, Philippe, feeling confident now that the Conqueror was old and rather plump, replied, ‘When is the fat man going to have his baby?’

  Despite his twenty-one years on the English throne, William still hadn’t acquired a sense of humour, especially where jokes about himself were concerned, so he decided to go and burn something French. His troops were storming the town of Mantes, just outside Paris, and William was enjoying a canter through its charred streets when, legend has it, his horse trod on a fallen beam, and he tumbled to the ground, causing himself serious internal injury.

  It took him six weeks of terrible abdominal suffering to die, the pain no doubt made worse by the fact that his French doctors kept turning him over and trying to stuff plants up his backside – the aerodynamic, easy-to-insert suppository had not yet been invented.

  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the year-by-year historical annals written by Anglo-Saxon scribes, has a lot of fun with William’s obituary. A long insulting poem lists the hardship the Conqueror imposed in England:

  His people he did bleed

  Not from any need

  Into avarice he did fall

  And loved greed above all.

  The monk writing the Chronicle even brings heavenly wrath to bear against William, saying that he died after destroying Mantes ‘and all the holy churches in the city’. The chronicler laments that ‘two holy men who served God were burnt to death’, and then describes with some relish how William subsequently suffered horribly and died, so that ‘he who had been a powerful king and lord of many lands now held no more than seven feet of earth’. It is the unmistakable sound of an English last laugh being had.

  And the English probably weren’t the only ones sniggering …

  William is victim of an elaborate stitch-up

  The French often refer to the Bayeux Tapestry as ‘la tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde’, implying that the work was overseen by William’s wife. This is almost certainly wrong, though, and the name probably resulted from a kind of sexist assumption that embroidery must emanate from a woman rather than a butch man. Some say that it was commissioned by William’s brother Odo, largely on the basis that he and his close followers feature in the action and that the tapestry was first rediscovered in Odo’s abbey at Bayeux – though this last argument is a little like saying that a pharaoh’s sarcophagus was made in England because it is in the British Museum.

  As we have already seen, the tapestry is open to a less pro-William interpretation than the one given by the present-day Normans in Bayeux – there is the reference to Harold as ‘Rex’, for example, and the heartrending scenes of Norman pillaging when they first land in England. As well as this, the tapestry shows Harold as a brave man, rescuing Normans from drowning near the Mont-Saint-Michel while he was William’s hostage, and depicts his coronation being performed by an archbishop, thereby giving it divine approval.

  It has been suggested that this pro-Harold sentiment was put there by the Anglo-Saxon seamstresses, but there is strong evidence that the anti-Norman propaganda in the tapestry went much deeper than this.

  One of the many books about the true origins of this mysterious work of art, Andrew Bridgeford’s 1066: The Hidden History of the Bayeux Tapestry, argues convincingly that the whole idea of the embroidery was to mount a subtle attack on William and the Normans. Bridgeford suggests that the tapestry was in fact commissioned by a disgruntled Frenchman called Eustace of Boulogne – the man mentioned above for leading an anti-William rebellion in Dover. Eustace had far more royal European blood in him than the ex-Viking William – he was a descendant of Charlemagne, the legendary King of the Franks who had reigned over much of France, Germany and Italy, and had also been married to Godgifu, the daughter of King Edward the Confessor. In theory, Eustace was therefore a prime candidate for the English throne, and was no doubt peeved that William had got his hands on it.

  This, Bridgeford says, might explain why the tapestry’s captions refer to the invaders as ‘Franci’ – not only did Eustace want to underline the fact that William had non-Norman troops but he was also pointing the finger at his own Frankish ancestry. And talking of pointing fingers, the tapestry also depicts Eustace at the heart of the action during the Battle of Hastings, when he points to William as the Conqueror raises his helmet to show that he is still alive. Bridgeford suggests that this ingenious piece of pictorial sabotage was organized by Kentish monks (near Dover, where Eustace led his rebellion), and presented to Odo as a gift, supposedly flattering him and his royal brother, but in reality undermining their claim to be the rightful lords of England.

  If this is true – and we will never be completely sure – the tapestry is like a bitter French laugh echoing down through the centuries. Only one fact is indisputable: William himself never got the joke, otherwise Eustace, the monks and the seamstresses would have been forced to eat the tapestry before having the lengths of cloth forcibly pulled out of their backsides and set on fire. William was that kind of guy.

  Parlez-vous English?

  Not everyone in eleventh-century England was completely anti-William. Even the sulking Anglo-Saxon chronicler had to admit that his reign hadn’t been all bad. ‘One must not forget the peace that he brought to this land,’ he says, ‘so that all men of property might travel safely throughout the kingdom.’ By building castles to keep the Anglo-Saxons under control, and having his troops on more or less permanent alert, William had imposed stability on the country, or at least on those parts of it that he didn’t trash completely. Once the initial massacring was over, life expectancy rose in England. True, taxes were high, especially for farmers unfortunate enough to have an absentee landlord as greedy as William’s brother Odo. But as we saw earlier, it was quite a relief to know that you might just survive long enough to bring in your harvest, even if you were going to give most of the income to a fat Norman bishop. And in the long term, England as a nation was a definite winner, because the Norman Conquest kick-started the culture that the French now mistakenly call ‘Anglo-Saxon’.

  As of 1066, the invaders’ French-based dialect became the official language of conquered England, and it would be spoken by the Kings of England and all the ruling classes for the next 300 years or so. But the Anglo-Saxon peasants were too numerous and uneducated to have a new language imposed on them, and in any case the average Anglo-Saxon only ever used Franco-Norman words in order to sell his wares to a nobleman or beg a soldier not to castrate him for killing a hedgehog.

  For their part, the conquerors generally refused or failed to learn the losers’ language (William tried and gave up). Amongst themselves the invaders developed a Franco-Norman pidgin that was a blend of their various regional dialects – a new patois that dispensed with many of the fiddly grammatical complexities that ‘pure’ French, the language of the Franks, would keep for centuries longer.

  Gradually, as we will see in later chapters, Anglo-Saxon and Franco-Norman came into closer contact, and the linguistic survival techniques on both sides led to the emergence of a supple, adaptable language in which you could invent or half-borrow words and didn’t have to worry so much abou
t whether your sentences had the right verb endings or respected certain strict rules of word order and style (as this sentence proves). The result was the earliest form of what would become English.

  All of which goes to show that the Norman Conquest was as important linguistically as the moment when the first amphibians crawled out of the swamp and on to land. Anyone who has ever got bogged down in the mire of modern-day French grammar will appreciate how liberating English is. Jealous of our freedom, French grammarians will tell you that English is an impure, bastard language. They’re right, and the hilarious thing is, it owes its creation to William, a Norman bastard born on what is today French soil.

  The beginning of the end (of the beginning)

  All in all, then, far from being the triumph of France over England, the Norman Conquest was really bad news for the French. William’s invasion smashed the old Anglo-Saxon order, but founded a new nation that would outgrow its initial status as a Norman colony and become a fiercely independent force in Europe. What’s more, in doing so, William had deprived a deserving Frankish (French) candidate, Eustace of Boulogne, of the English throne.

  As William lay dying in agony from wounds sustained in an anti-Parisian war, he would probably have gained some solace if he’d known that, in creating England, he had sown the seeds of a whole millennium of pain for the French.

  Thanks to his Anglo-French parents, King Henry II of England already possessed Anjou and Normandy. And after he wooed away the French King’s landowning wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, England could officially lord it over more than half of France.