This Sceptred Isle

by Christopher Lee

  Details of the preceding and following periods may be found in documents such as Textus Roffensis, which allow us to see the importance of what we could easily describe as ‘civilized behaviour’. It is all too easy to think about these early Middle Ages as an era of the sword, rape, pillage, disease and vicious intrigue. There was, of course, plenty of that too and the idea of settling an argument by ‘wager of battle’ supports the coarser view of the period. But we should read Textus Roffensis or more properly, Textus de Ecclesia Roffensi per Ernulphum episcopum – ‘The Book of the Church of Rochester through Bishop Ernulf’ – as a two-volume memorandum of what was right and what was wrong, what was proper and what was improper. This tells us something we need to know about that period immediately after the Conquest: the debate and open conflict between the English Church and the Normans. The laws and agreements also tell us that Normans and English did indeed compromise on so much that might easily have turned them to civil war. Our earlier observation about differing languages is perfectly represented in this document of more than 200 vellum leaves (in the archive of Rochester Cathedral); Textus Roffensis so often explains that the contrasting Romance language and laws of the invaders could find compromise with the equally established English language and laws.

  The most famous of the books of the Conqueror’s period is Domesday. A contemporary chronicler wrote that the book was to be called Domesday because ‘It spared no man, but judged all men indifferently, as the Lord in that great day will do.’ The idea of Domesday came to William at Christmas in 1085. It is today seen as a book that lists who owned what in Norman England. Even estate agents use the term Domesday to suggest the antiquity of the village in which they’re selling a house. But Domesday was more than a description of the second half of the eleventh century. Domesday is a legal document; it is the most thorough record of lawyers and jurors supplying legal information and is, therefore, a legal text of what was the law of the 1080s, revealing how and why the laws of England moved inexorably to what became Common Law – the legal principles followed by judges by understanding custom and precedent. Domesday was to be William’s last great achievement. The survey, the great reckoning, was born out of crisis at home and abroad. But William of Normandy’s influence was more lasting in England than anywhere else. He changed the way the English lived, the laws that governed them and the course of their history. He did so ruthlessly.

  There was one particular aspect which made his rule different from any that had gone before. It determined the development of feudalism and, in some sense, it applies to this day. William said that whatever loyalty a person had to his immediate lord, his protector, then that person’s allegiance to the monarch must always be greater. His reign was the more remarkable considering the conflicts in his own family and in particular, in Normandy, where his Queen, Matilda, ruled in his absence. However, to some in England he seemed to be spending more and more time in his homeland. For example, between 1077 and 1080, William was not in England at all. The dukes of Normandy were powerful in France and successive French kings were determined to weaken them. The weakness was, not unusually, in family feuding.

  Matilda tried to control the fortunes of Normandy from her seat at Rouen. Their son, Robert, was a feckless, high-spending youth who proved disloyal by conspiring with the French King to unseat his father. Robert eventually stood shoulder to shoulder with Philip of France, but the conflict that was inevitable was between father and son. They met in combat beyond the walls of the castle at Gerberoi. Robert, strong and reckless and little wondering at the significance of the duel charged his father full-tilt and wounded and unhorsed William. If it had not been for one of William’s English knights, Tokig of Walligford, Robert would have slain his father then and there. Instead, there was a temporary truce although that was not the end of conflict for the increasingly tempestuous Robert. He broke with his two brothers, William Rufus and Henry, both of whom would also be King one day. And even when there was reconciliation it was never for long. That was the way of powerful families. The twelfth-century William of Malmesbury (the son of a Norman father and English mother) thought it simply the way of Normans. In his opinion they ‘envy their equals; they wish to vie with their superiors; and they plunder their subjects’. Equally, William of Malmesbury (who was a monk) thought it well that the Normans had revived religion and that ‘you might see churches rise in every village . . . monasteries built after a style unknown before’. But overall, William’s view was that Normans were scheming, often brutal and at the same time civilized, whatever that might have meant at the time. But let us not condemn the Normans as the only brutalizers in eleventh-century Britain.

  In 1080, the Northumbrians killed the Norman Bishop of Durham and, we’re told by one of the chroniclers, another 100 died with him. And in that same year, the Earl of Moray was killed by an army of Scots. These islands were unstable and would have probably been so even without an invasion. Equally, the Conquest engendered powerful interests in opposition to William, often emboldened by his forced absence defending Normandy. For example, the Scottish kings had never accepted the lines drawn between England and Scotland. They defended their prejudice to the death. So did the clique that had survived Harold at Hastings, including Edgar the Æthling, a great survivor who indeed was to outlive William. He was now related by marriage to Malcolm the Bighead, the Scottish King. Malcolm had become King when he beat Macbeth (the real Macbeth) in 1057. He too outlived, and out-harried, William who spent so much time sorting out his family quarrels. As his days grew dim, William agreed that his son William Rufus would succeed him as king of England and that Robert would rule as Duke of Normandy in their homeland. At first the Conqueror refused to make Robert the Duke of Normandy, but the priests pressed the dying King to change his mind. One of the monks at the St Gervase Priory recorded William’s words at the time:

  Since he has disdained to come here himself it is with your witness and the will of God that I shall act. With my testimony I declare that I forgive him all the sins he has committed against me and I grant him the whole Duchy of Normandy. He has learned to take advantage of my leniency and now he has brought down his father’s grey hairs in sorrow to the grave.

  In Book VII of the Historia Ecclesiastica of Orderic Vitalis (1075– c.1142), the author tells of William’s final confession:

  I treated the native inhabitants of the kingdom with unreasonable severity, cruelly oppressed high and low, unjustly disinherited many, and caused the death of thousands by starvation and war, especially in Yorkshire . . . In mad fury I descended on the English of the north like a raging lion, and ordered that their homes and crops with all their equipment and furnishings should be burnt at once and their great flocks and herds of sheep and cattle slaughtered everywhere. So I chastised a great multitude of men and women with the lash of starvation and, alas! was the cruel murderer of many thousands, both young and old, of this fair people.

  William the Conqueror died on 9 September 1087, commending himself to the Virgin Mary. Immediately after the rattle had sounded, the wealthy left to protect their interests. The poorer, or so Orderic claimed, ‘seized the arms, vessels, clothing, linen, and all the royal furnishings, and hurried away leaving the king’s body almost naked on the floor of the house’.

  For those who had lived under Edward the Confessor, then through the spring, summer and early autumn of 1066 under Harold and finally through the two decades of William, it had all been a terrible period. Nothing but conflict and conquest. Nothing but change. The last of the Saxon lords and landowners suffered more than the peasant class. All had to live beneath the rule of a foreign king. There could have been little consolation in the improved bureaucracy of the governing of the country. And England could only look forward to more conflict as the barons played a dangerous game with the division of the Anglo-Norman inheritance between the warring brothers: Robert in Normandy and the new King, William Rufus.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1087–1165

&
nbsp; In 1087 William Rufus became king because his dying father wished it and because one of the most influential men in England, Archbishop Lanfranc, approved. Lanfranc was an Italian who had arrived in Normandy at the monastery of Bec in 1042. He had been responsible for the education of the Conqueror’s sons so, more than anyone, Lanfranc understood William Rufus. Lanfranc’s authority came from the Conqueror himself who made him Archbishop of Canterbury. It was he who rebuilt the great cathedral in that place. Almost no important political decision was taken in England without his approval. Equally, bishops respected their own power as much as an archbishop’s and exercised it. In these times, few expected a transition of power without rebellion and without obvious plotting. The Bishops Odo, Geoffrey and William, along with Earl Roger, harried and ransacked farms and estates of any they thought owned any allegiance to the new king. As The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded:

  The Bishop of Durham did as much damage as he could everywhere in the North, Bishop Odo, who was the instigator of these troubles, went to his earldom in Kent and his men laid waste the lands of the King and the Archbishop, and all the spoil was taken into his castle at Rochester.

  The King promised new and fair tax laws, he promised new hunting rights and almost anything else he could think of. Although there was no way he could, or would, keep these promises, he managed to get a large army on his side and he besieged Rochester Castle. But Odo had escaped, ironically to Pevensey where the Conqueror, his half-brother, had landed in 1066. But, eventually, the King won the day. Bishop Odo and the rest went into exile in Normandy. Odo never came back. He died at Palermo on his way to take part in a Crusade.

  This English rebellion was not simply land grabbing or due to dislike of the King. It was just one episode in the conflict between the sons of the Conqueror. Robert fought William. William fought them all. And Henry, the youngest son, was sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other.

  England at this time was a society governed by ruthlessness, greed and poor kingship. When Lanfranc died, in 1089, there was no longer any restraint on the treacherous instincts of William Rufus. The sons of the Conqueror deserved each other, even if the people deserved something better. This was a family so much at war that at one point, Robert and William joined against their younger brother Henry. But events far from Normandy and Winchester were once more to divert the flow of rivalries.

  In 1096 Robert decided to go on a Crusade, an expensive business. So William played pawnbroker and Robert hocked Normandy to him for 10,000 silver marks. Ironically, thirty-two years after the Battle of Hastings, Robert of Normandy and the still surviving Edgar the Æthling, the great-nephew of Edward the Confessor, joined forces against a common enemy: the Turks at Antioch. Robert led his warriors on land and Edgar commanded a grand fleet. This is really nothing more than an aside, but it is a reminder that history is not simply a string of dates: some characters who at the time appear to have little more than a walk-on part can, and often do, turn up again later in pivotal parts. Kings often play little part in history other than to hold court to the more powerful history-makers. So it was with William II, William Rufus.

  William of Malmesbury wrote that the day before he died, Rufus dreamed that a surgeon was letting his blood and the stream flowed so high that it clouded out the daylight. A monk warned that he should not hunt the next day, but Rufus, having drunk a great deal, did go into the forest. Then came the accident. An attendant called Walter Tirel shot the King with an arrow. William of Malmesbury reported that a few countrymen recovered the body and took it on a cart to the cathedral at Winchester, the blood dripping from it all the way. Three days after the death of Rufus, Henry had seized the Treasury at Winchester and crowned himself King. He needed to take the throne as quickly as he dared while his brother Robert was still away on the Crusade.

  Proving a quick-witted politician, Henry introduced a coronation charter that, among other things, declared that he (Henry) would right all the wrongs of William Rufus’s reign. He needed also to consolidate his rule throughout the islands and, partly for this reason, he married Matilda, the granddaughter of Edmund Ironside, the son of Æthelred the Unready who had been King of England before Cnut. She was, therefore, the niece of the seemingly ever-present Edgar the Ætheling. Good Queen Maud, as Matilda became known, was, more importantly, the daughter of Malcolm Canmore, King of the Scots, who had been killed in England. The marriage did two things: in theory at least, it gave Henry a respectability that was convenient and it neatly tied a knot with the Scottish kings. But for the moment, Henry had a wee family difference. His brother, Robert, wanted his blood. For six years Henry had to defend William the Conqueror’s deathbed promise that he would be King of England. He could not really do that effectively in England itself. He had to fight in Normandy but could not do that until he had properly established his English throne so that it was safe for him to cross the Channel without fear of being usurped while away.

  The two brothers met in battle at Tinchebrai in September 1106. Henry, with an army enhanced with Saxon warriors, vanquished his brother Robert, Duke of Normandy. Robert was imprisoned in England where he would have less chance of raising a rebellion. Henry was not only King of England, he was now in full control of Normandy. Effectively, the administrative capital of Normandy was handed from Rouen to London. There is a footnote to the Battle of Tinchebrai: the Saxons in Henry’s army regarded the battle as revenge for Hastings. It would be an exaggeration to suggest that Tinchebrai was so important that it started the process that would lead to the Hundred Years War, but its significance should not be ignored. Henry did not have a settled kingdom. For example, the Scots, under King David, had driven Henry’s armies as far south as Lancashire. The Scots were perhaps never to be as strong again and when David succeeded his brother, Alexander, as King of all Scotland in 1124, he became an important figure in the holding together of these islands from the north to the south.

  Henry was wise enough to understand that throughout his reign he would have to reflect the changes in his kingdom and so he introduced many long-lasting reforms of existing systems; at the same time, he took nothing, certainly not unity, for granted, especially when tragedy settled on the family.

  On 25 November, Henry’s legitimate son and heir, seventeen-year-old William, was sailing in a vessel called White Ship from Normandy back to England, a frequent enough voyage. In the Seine estuary, the vessel struck a rock. How? Bad weather and, according to some reports, the ship’s company had taken drink. Whatever the reason, William perished. Apart from the personal tragedy, Henry was faced with a dilemma over succession because there was no other natural male heir to the throne. He nominated his daughter, the Empress Matilda (1102–67) although it was never sure that she would succeed. Medieval succession and accession were rarely simple and agreeable affairs. Matilda, like her mother known as Maud, had been married off when she was just eight to the Emperor Henry V in Germany. The Emperor died in 1125 and three years on, the now twenty-six-year-old Matilda married the fourteen-year-old Geoffrey Martel of Anjou. It was not a happy match, but it produced the future Henry II of England and here, in this marriage, was the start of the Plantagenet history of Britain.

  Before his accession much happened, including the Laws of King Henry I. By later standards, these laws were hardly laws at all. Jurisprudence was not contained in an Act of Parliament for there was no such thing. These Laws of Henry I were simply passed to his judges by hand or even by word of mouth. In them there was a clear statement that Edward the Confessor’s memory would be honoured. This was so important to the period and the fogged memory of nostalgia. Henry understood this and did not want to give any impression of breaking with the past, particularly with the ways and the image left by Edward the Confessor. At the time, the Confessor was so blessed in English memory, that it was in this century, the twelfth, that he was canonized. St Edward became the patron saint of the English peoples and remained so until the Hundred Years War.

  We are at one of the
many milestones on the road to Britishness and identity. Henry raised the usefulness of the minor aristocracy by making them middle management administrators and, of course, making certain that the bureaucracy was in place to be administered. For the most part, there basic institutional framework existed even when it was not exploited for any good, never mind that of the commoners. Importantly (and maybe because so much money had to be raised for wars) it was Henry I who developed the Norman idea of the Exchequer, although it was Henry II who put it on a more bureaucratic footing. The name Exchequer comes from the chequered cloth spread on a table to make accounting simpler to follow. Henry I’s officials and sheriffs had to account for income and expenditure twice a year when the Exchequer was audited at Easter and Michaelmas.

  Naturally, the administration of the islands was not the king’s personal task. In Henry I’s time, the secretary of state who made the existing institutions, particularly the financial audit, more efficient was a bishop, Roger of Salisbury (1065–1139), a true son of the Conquest. So powerful and trusted was this bishop, that for three years (1123–6) he ruled England while Henry was abroad, where his daughter Matilda and her husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, were at the centre of a rebellion against him. They both wanted him to give them fortresses and acres to substantiate their claim to the throne on his death. Henry did not, partly because he now preferred Stephen, his nephew. He was in Normandy in December 1135, arguing once more with Matilda, when he died at Lyons-la-Forêt. The distance helped Stephen claim the throne. Henry’s corpse was embalmed and carried to Reading where it was buried in the monastery church of which he had been the most valued patron.