by Tom Holland
Not that, in a society as loot-hungry as that of the Normans, an oath of loyalty to an eight-year-old could be taken for granted – nor was it. The years of William’s minority would long be remembered in Normandy as a time of violence and cruelty exceptional even by the standards of what had gone before. Rival warlords, with no one to leash them in, found themselves free to indulge all their most razor-clawed instincts. Nothing more brutally illustrated what might be at stake than the fashion, one bred of increasingly savage and incessant feuding, for abducting rivals, even from wedding feasts, and subjecting them to horrific mutilations. Blindings were particularly popular; castrations too. As well they might have been: for those who aimed to found a flourishing dynasty naturally had to look to neuter the competition. Meanwhile, “forgetful of their loyalties, many Normans set about piling up mounds of earth, and then constructing fortified strongholds on them for themselves.”
As it had done in the southern princedoms, so now in Normandy, a sudden rash of castles served as the surest symptom of a spreading anarchy. “Plots began to be hatched, and rebellions, and all the duchy was ablaze with fire.”11 As for William himself, he was soon inured to the spectacle of slaughter: two of his guardians were hacked down in quick succession; his tutor as well; and a steward, on one particularly alarming occasion, murdered in the very room in which the young duke lay asleep. Yet even as blood from the victim’s slit throat spilled across the flagstones, William could feel relief as well as horror: for he at least had been spared. The feuding that resulted in the assassination of so many appointed to his household never had him as its object. Violence-shadowed the years of his childhood certainly were; but throughout them all he retained his hold on the title that had been bequeathed to him, and him alone, by his father: the Duke of Normandy.
To see how much more perilous things might have been for him had Robert fathered a brood of heirs with different women, and left behind a tangled succession, William had only to look across the Channel. There, with a determination that marked her out as a true member of the Norman ducal clan, Queen Emma was engaged in a frantic power struggle of her own. Like Normandy, England had recently been thrown into a state of crisis: for in the autumn of 1035, at around the same time that the news had reached Emma of her nephew’s death in Nicaea, the man who had previously guaranteed her rank for her, her second husband, the great Canute, was being laid within his own coffin. Solemnly, before their marriage, he had sworn an oath that he would “never set up the son of any other woman to rule after him”;12 but no sooner had he breathed his last than Harold, Aelfgifu’s younger son, was moving in on the English throne. Not for nothing, it seemed, was the young prince nicknamed “Harefoot” – and Emma, certainly, had found herself left behind in the dust. Her own son by Canute, Harthacanute, was absent in Scandinavia; nor, despite her increasingly frantic summons, was he willing to abandon his inheritance there, for the Norwegians were in revolt, and with such success that their new king, Magnus, had begun to menace Denmark itself.
By 1036, Harefoot’s grip on England was tightening. Emma, having first barricaded herself inside Winchester in an effort to keep Wessex at least secure for her son, then tried spreading rumours that the usurper was not Canute’s son at all, but a bastard who had been smuggled into the hated Aelfgifu’s bed. Next, after that tactic had failed to draw blood, she dispatched an urgent appeal for assistance to Edward and Alfred, her two sons by Ethelred – which was, if anything, an even more shameless throw. Emma had seen neither of them for twenty years. Throughout the whole of Canute’s reign, they had been living as exiles in Normandy – quite forgotten and unlamented, so it had always seemed, by their hard-nosed mother, the queen.
And not by her alone. Edward might have been crown prince of the House of Cerdic – but there was little enthusiasm among the kingdom’s power brokers for the restoration of its native dynasty to the throne. Much had changed since the time of Ethelred. Canute had made sure to promote a new breed of earl to the rule of England. Such men owed nothing to the Cerdicingas. Indeed, the highest flying of them all, an English lord of previously obscure family by the name of Godwin, had good reasons for bearing a personal grudge against Ethelred’s line: for back in the darkest days of the Viking assaults on England, he had witnessed his father unjustly accused of treason by the old king, and driven into exile. A salutary demonstration, no doubt, of the need always to keep on the right side of the powerful – and Godwin himself, in his own relations with royalty, certainly always made sure to swim with the tide. Smooth, prudent and opportunistic, he had duly succeeded in keeping afloat even amid the tempest-rack of the Danish subjugation of England – and to such effect that he had ended up with an earldom, and Canute’s own sister-in-law, Gytha, as a wife. By the time Emma dispatched her summons to Normandy, begging her two sons to come and join her, Godwin held the rank of the Earl of Wessex, no less. Many of the lands that had once belonged to Ethelred were now his. The ships that patrolled the Channel, the troops that guarded the south coast – most were his as well. And Emma’s two sons, landing in England, duly ran straight into Godwin’s men.
Who gave them a thoroughly bruising reception. Edward, greeted in his ancestral homeland as though he were nothing more blue-blooded than a common pirate, was soon scarpering back to Normandy, his tail between his legs. Alfred, crossing southern England in a frantic attempt to reach his mother, was intercepted by Godwin’s men, handed over to Harefoot in chains, and blinded. So brutal were the mutilations inflicted on him that the wretched prince died soon afterwards of the wounds. The following year, having finally been driven out of Winchester by Harefoot’s agents, Emma escaped to Flanders, there to endure a bleak and wintry exile. Implacable still in the pursuit of her vendettas, she had no sooner arrived than she was putting about a story that it was Harefoot who had sent the fateful letter to her sons, and that her own seal on it had been a forgery. Edward, at any rate, was less than convinced. In 1038, when Emma summoned him to join her in Bruges, he refused. Even the perils of life in Normandy, it appeared, were preferable to his mother.
A grim and sordid episode – and to the young Duke William, whose reluctant guest Edward remained, a most instructive one. Certainly, it would have confirmed for him the stern lesson that his ancestors had always taught their young: that to be a prince was nothing, if not also a conqueror. William, unlike his father, did not shrink from the harsh destiny to which this bound him, but rather embraced it. He had been well instructed in what it took to be a leader of the Norman people. His ambition, one that everyone with a care for his education had worked tirelessly to inculcate, was to fashion himself anew, to become a being forged out of steel. Such, indeed, was the labour of transformation that all those Normans who aspired to greatness were obliged to take upon themselves. Even girls, as they played in a castle’s stables or ran around its courtyard, were being raised within a world of sweat and iron – and childhood, for their brothers, was all a preparation for war. “Arms and horses and the exercises of hunting and hawking: such are the delights of a Norman.”13 The delights, perhaps – but also, far more crucially, the means of putting him to ceaseless test.
For only if a young man were prepared to risk death in the pursuit of some savage forest beast, or to practise with his sword all the hours of a day, or to perform prodigies of horsemanship, might he hope to win for himself that sweetest of felicities: the approbation of his fellows. Rank could be reckoned nothing without this. True of every lord, it was especially true of the duke. From his earliest days, William had been surrounded by his kinsmen. Amid all the shocks and convulsions of his childhood, they had been perhaps the only constant. “Nurri,” they were termed: young men “nourished” by William’s side, his brothers-in-arms, and more than brothers. Sharers in his upbringing, they too were being raised as carnivores through gruelling training.
No longer were the arts of killing the simple matter they had once been, back in the days of Rollo’s war bands. To handle a lance properly while in the
saddle, whether throwing it or couching it below the arm, in the most up-to-date and lethal manner, with all a horseman’s weight behind it: here was a skill that might take years to perfect. Other martial disciplines, even more essential, even more cutting-edge, were an even greater challenge to master. It was a telling tribute, then, to the education received by William and his companions, that one of them, his closest friend, William fitz Osbern, would emerge as the acknowledged master of castle-building. Fulk Nerra, poisoner of Duke Robert though he might have been, had his heirs in Normandy as well as in Anjou. The strategy that he had pioneered, of using castles as instruments of aggression, was one that might almost have been designed to appeal to the eager wolf pack growing up around the Norman duke. Attack, spoliation, conquest: fitting pursuits for warrior lords.
And yet, for William himself, not the only ones. If war was his primary duty, then he did not forget that he had a duty as well to give his people peace. Naturally, he saw no contradiction between these twin vocations: for it would only ever be as a warlord that he could hope to stamp his will on his turbulent people. Master of a race of predators, he had no choice save to establish himself as the most lethal predator of all. “For discipline the Normans with justice and firmness, and they will prove themselves men of great valour, who press invincibly to the fore in arduous undertakings and, proving their strength, fight resolutely to overcome all enemies. But without such rule they tear each other to pieces and destroy themselves – for they hanker after rebellion, cherish sedition, and are ready for any treachery.”14
William could have no doubt, then, even as he devoted himself to the practice of war, that he was performing God’s work. No doubt either that Providence, fulfilling its mysterious designs through seeming accidents and twists of fate, might serve to demonstrate that God in turn was working for him. Indeed, as an illustration of how heaven’s blessings might fall unexpectedly upon the head of a deserving prince, he had only to track the fortunes of a long-term guest at his own court. If the fiasco of Edward’s first return to England had confirmed for William the priceless value of a metalled fist, then its conclusion would serve to teach some very different lessons. That the wicked might be overthrown. That the favoured of God might be granted a sudden opportunity to raise themselves up on to a throne. That a man might travel from Normandy to England and become a king.
Four years had passed since the fatal blinding of Edward’s brother. Then abruptly, in March 1040, Harold Harefoot, the man chiefly responsible for the atrocity, died. Three months later, Harthacanute, Canute’s remaining son, landed in Kent, accompanied by sixty ships and Emma, his gloating mother. True, he hardly came trailing clouds of glory: for back in Denmark, he had been obliged to abandon Norway for good and agree, as the price for securing a peace treaty, that should he die without an heir, then the Norwegian king Magnus would succeed to his various kingdoms. Nevertheless, despite Harthacanute’s less than triumphant record, there was no one in England to oppose him; and the new King of England, just to rub this in, immediately ordered his half-brother’s corpse dug up, dragged through a sewer and then dumped into the Thames. The following year, he invited his other half-brother, Edward, to return from Normandy. Clearly, it could only have been the hand of God which had prompted Harthacanute to take this unexpected step: for in June 1042, as he drank at a wedding feast, “he suddenly fell to the earth with an awful convulsion; and those who were close by took hold of him, and he spoke no word afterwards, but passed away.”15
The way now stood open, rather to the surprise of everyone, for the restoration to the English throne of its ancient royal line. Prominent in the ranks of enthusiasts for Edward’s claim was none other than that seasoned weathervane, Earl Godwin. Coolly abandoning his loyalty to the house of Canute, and smoothing over his involvement in the death of the wretched Alfred, the Earl of Wessex moved quickly to build bridges. The other earls of England were soon brought to agree with him. Certainly, there was no one who thought to make any mention of the claim of Magnus of Norway. On Easter Day 1043, Edward was duly crowned and anointed king. Two years later, on 23 January 1045, at the age of forty, he was married for the first time. His youthful queen, Edith, was beautiful, skilled at embroidery, fluent in five languages – and the daughter of Earl Godwin.
A moving demonstration of reconciliation, undertaken for the good of the English people, and well befitting a Christian king? Certainly, in years to come, Edward would indeed come to be hailed as a model of saintly piety: as “the Confessor.” Yet the truth was that he did not lack for vindictiveness. Upon his own mother, for instance, he inflicted a thoroughly public disgrace: the confiscation of all her treasure, and temporary banishment from the court. But then Emma – despite rumours that had her conspiring with King Magnus – had already been de-fanged for good. Nothing remained for her, following her son’s accession, save to wither in obscurity and wait for death. The contrast with Earl Godwin could hardly have been more striking. He retained, even after Edward’s coronation, the status that he had held before it: that of king-maker. And perhaps, in due course, in the wake of his daughter’s brilliant marriage, that of grandfather to a king.
To any ambitious prince, then, the startling turnaround in Edward’s fortunes offered warning as well as inspiration. Across the Channel, Emma’s great-nephew would have marked with interest the lesson of her fall, and of the wedding of King Edward to the Lady Edith. As well he might have done – for William was coming of age. The resolution implanted and fostered within him, never to live in anyone’s shadow, never to tolerate a rival, always to conquer, “shone brilliantly and clearly in him”16 – and was ready at last to be tested upon the stage of the duchy itself. In 1047, confronted by a rebellion led by his own cousin, the young duke rode out to battle for the first time, and emerged from the resulting mêlée bloodily and heroically triumphant. Then, returning from the campaign, he set about ramming home his victory by dismantling a number of illegally raised castles. That same year, in an even more pointed measure, he presided over a council at Caen, and proclaimed the Peace of God. Not that there had been any role in it for uppity peasants – nor even for uppity bishops. In Normandy, no one was to be permitted to rival, still less challenge, the authority of William himself. “For who can possibly argue that a good prince should tolerate rebellious brigands?”17 In time, bringing order where there had been anarchy, the Peace of God would indeed be imposed across the duchy – to the greater glory, however, not of the Church, nor even of the saints, but of the duke alone. The Truce would hold – except when William was minded to break it. The Normans would lay down their weapons – except when wielding them in William’s cause. Peace would be brought to Normandy – and war to William’s neighbours.
But which neighbours, and at what cost to them? Here were questions that still remained to be answered.
Land-Waster
January 1045: the month of the marriage between King Edward and the Lady Edith – and of a second royal wedding. A strange symmetry: for the two grooms had long shared numerous correspondences. Like Edward, Harald Sigardurson belonged to a dynasty that had been toppled by Canute; like Edward, he had fled into exile; and like Edward, he had spent many decades preparing for the moment when he could at last reclaim his patrimony. Both men, in due course, would find their destinies fatefully intertwined – as would the family of Godwin too.
The eastern frontier of Christendom
Yet the marriage of the second prince was being held not in England, nor anywhere near it, but far towards the rising of the sun, on the margin of interminably spreading forests, amid wastes so impossibly distant that the learned had once reckoned them the prison of Gog and Magog. It was a mark of the times, indeed, that an ancient Christian people such as the English could find themselves embroiled in the affairs of anywhere so remote. Even among the Northmen the vastness of the landmass that stretched eastwards of the Baltic was capable of inspiring a shudder. “Sweden the Great,” they termed it – or “Sweden the Cold.”
Giants lived there, it was reported, and dwarfs, and men with mouths between their nipples who never spoke but only barked, “and also beasts and dragons of enormous size.”18 Yet the Northmen, a people incorrigibly adventurous, had never been ones to shrink from the rumour of terrors. Already, as early as 650, a Swedish explorer of the Baltic had won for himself the sonorous title of “Far-Reacher”; and there were many, over the succeeding centuries, who had followed in his wake. Beating their way up the rivers that flowed into the Gulf of Finland, gliding across icy lakes, straining as they bore their vessels overland past churning rapids, they had ventured ever further southwards, until at length, borne along widening currents, the Northmen had found themselves debouching into the warm waters of the South, the Black Sea and the Caspian, with easy passage onwards to fabulous cities rich in silks and gold. The seeming wilderness of Sweden the Great had proved itself in truth the very opposite: a land of opportunity. No less than the surging waters of the Atlantic, mighty rivers such as the Dnieper and the Volga had served the Northmen as highways to adventure and betterment. “Like men they journeyed for distant treasure.”19 Onwards, swelling the gold rush, the crews of their ships had pressed. Tirelessly, their oars had dipped and flashed. No wonder that the natives, watching them from the banks, had referred to them simply as “rowers” – as the “Rus.”20
