by Ed West
The territory protected by a castle was called a detroit, or district, which comes from Latin distringere, to coerce, and anyone who controlled a castle was effectively independent. William’s age was known as “feudal anarchy,” because power rested largely with relatively small baronial warlords who held a castle. It was this period more than any other when powerful barons were able to inflict horror on their peasantry, Europe being far more violent in the eleventh century than the fourteenth or fifteenth.
The Normans are, in particular, associated with the concept of feudalism, although something similar existed already in England, and historians dislike the term. Feudalism denotes a hierarchy in which everyone was bound by some form of pledge to a more powerful man above him, with the king at the top. When people knelt before their lord to do homage they said “Lord, I become your man” and then received a kiss on the mouth. Often the lords would act as godfathers to the children of their vassals, swearing to guard the child from the Devil and protect them for seven years “from water, fire, horse’s foot, and hound’s tooth.”
In return the lord would say to his underling “You are mine” or “you exist through me” and “You are my man and your duty is to do my will.” From the eleventh century a knight had to swear: “I will not attack the Church, her lands or her stores; I will not attack priests or monks or their escorts, should they be unarmed themselves.” Knights also “promised especial aid to noble women, widows and nuns travelling alone,” and, since this system developed in France, “wine merchants.”13
Under this system legitimate sons and nephews were generally sent to the household of a social superior, so that the sons of castellans—lords who owned castles—would live with the duke, while the castellans took in the sons of knights.14 Afterward they might live with their adoptive father and marry one of his relatives. Even quite young children might be sent into the household of another, in order to strengthen bonds in a society low in trust, and this system lasted, in England at least, into the early modern era.
Feudalism brought duties and privileges, some of which were ceremonial; so for example a small landholder in Kent had the role of “holding the king’s head in the boat” when he crossed the Channel in bad weather (although there is no mention of whether he had the honor of wiping up the sick, too).15 More fiercely fought over were roles at the coronation, symbolizing a family’s importance, which is why Piers Gaveston’s hijacking of Edward’s enthronement grievously insulted so many people.
William the Bastard’s invasion most likely did not introduce feudalism, but it did bring a new elite, the Conquest seeing the largest exchange of land in English history; just eleven barons were given a quarter of England, another quarter of which went to the monarch with just 5 percent remaining in the hands of the natives. Naturally with baronial power came rivalries and jealousies that would dominate the next four centuries.
The Norman Conquest would also introduce, or encode, a system that we today call chivalry. The word comes from the French for horseman, chevalier, and describes a warrior code for knights (as they are called in English) that later came to encompass rules for war, especially the treatment of aristocratic prisoners. Although the Anglo-Saxons were in many ways more cultured than the Normans—they had a far more sophisticated native literature, for instance—their politics were also far more violent. Ethelred’s court featured numerous murders and blindings, while William executed just one nobleman, the last to die this way in England for 250 years. William even abolished capital punishment, although his son reintroduced it.
The main rule of chivalry concerned the treatment of noble prisoners, but it later also encompassed ideas about the treatment of women and children. This code only began to collapse with Edward I and his son, culminating with the viciousness of the War of the Roses, where captured prisoners were routinely beheaded—while perversely ordinary soldiers were far better treated.
THE HILL TRIBES
Resistance to the Normans was most fierce in the north, which was harder to conquer and also more feud-ridden. Cospig, William’s appointee in the north, had immediately used his new position to try to kill a rival, Osulf, but Osulf escaped and raised an army and a month later surprised Cospig, who ran for a local church. Osulf set fire to the building and so forced him out and killed him.
At the start of the decade the leading northern magnate had been Earl Siward of Northumbria, who when told his son had been killed in battle with the Scots at the Battle of the Seven Sleepers in 1054, asked if the wounds were on the front or back. When informed the former, he replied: “I rejoice, for I would not deem any other death worthy for myself or my son.” Siward was said to have become Earl of Huntingdon after killing the previous holder of that title over a tiny infringement, the man brushing past him on a bridge.
Siward had died before the invasion but his surviving son Waltheof was involved in the 1069 uprising, which began with the massacre of a Norman garrison in Durham. Soon northern rebels were joined by Sweyn of Denmark, the people of the north seeing the Danes as their own blood. William headed north and crushed the uprising with great brutality, leaving at least one hundred thousand dead; one Norman knight even went home in disgust at the atrocities his people had committed. The half-Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis wrote that William “commended that all crops and herds, chattels and food of every kind should be brought together and burned to ashes with consuming fire.”16 Afterward many peasants sold themselves into slavery or joined bands of outlaws, while the roads were littered with decaying bodies and wolves came down from the hills for the feast. The rebel leader Cospatric submitted in 1070 and William spared him, most likely on the advice of one of his minor barons, William de Percy, who had recently come over and was in the army that had headed north. Percy was put in charge of Topliffe, the post between two regions of north Yorkshire and Durham, and had to police the Wensleydale area, which was notorious for desperados and killers.
Rebellion also continued in the fenlands of eastern England. In Westeros the Crannogmen live in the southernmost part of the north: “Their homes are reed-thatched huts, built on stilts or on floating islands made of bundles of reeds, and they live by catching fish and frogs. From their fen fastnesses they can harass anyone who passes across the narrow causeway of the Neck.”17 Crannogs is a word in Irish and Scots Gaelic for an artificial island in a lake, which in northern Britain have been built since the Neolithic period. In Westeros, the Crannogmen take part in guerrilla warfare, their homeland hard to pacify, and in real life one of the most difficult parts of the realm to tame was East Anglia, marshy country in which outlaws often disappeared. In particular, the Isle of Ely was “impenetrably surrounded on all sides by meres and fens, accessible only in one place, where a very narrow track affords the scantiest of entries.”18 It could only be reached by boat, and it was here that the fen dwellers led by an outlaw called Hereward the Wake continued resistance for the longest.
Hereward had returned from the continent after 1066 to find Normans had occupied his estate, killed his brother and put his head on a spike outside.19 After a protracted guerrilla campaign he was finally surrounded, perhaps betrayed by a monk who revealed the way to the fens—or the Normans used a witch. Hereward eventually fades into memory, his fate a mystery. Outlaws continued to live in this marshy country for many centuries, however, and only much later was the Fenland drained, and the region became prosperous due its trade links with the Netherlands. Later still it would become the heartland of Puritanism and would provide the vast bulk of colonists to New England.
As with the Valyrians and Andals, the invaders married native females, and by the 1170s it was observed that it was hard to tell the English and Normans apart. Yet the north did not recover for many centuries, and until the thirteenth century northerners “griev[ed] through want of a king of their own, and of the liberty they once enjoyed.” The Norman domination of the conquered Saxons proved lasting as even in 1800, three-quarters of a millennia after Harold was fatefull
y struck down, people with Norman surnames were eight times as likely as the general population to be Members of Parliament.20
The rightful heir to the House of Wessex, Ethelred the Unready’s great-grandson Edgar the Atheling, had been a mere boy in 1066, but had been a figurehead in the later northern rebellion. However, on the advice of his brother-in-law, the king of Scotland, he had finally submitted to William and eventually ended up commanding a fleet manned by the Varangian Guard. He died “penniless, unmarried and childless,” but William’s son Henry I would marry his niece Edith, so uniting the Norman and Saxon houses.
*Later the people who ran Falaise Castle would sell tickets to visit the room from which Robert spied the mother of the Conqueror. The room in question was only built during the reign of William’s son, but that doesn’t seem to have bothered anyone, and today the small town has a fountain sculpture celebrating the event. France has a lot of pretty towns in competition, so who can blame them?
*There is a similar situation in the invasion of Westeros by the Valyrians, where Aegon drew out one of the kings, Ardilac, who should have remained in his city but was drawn out by the mistreatment of his vassals.
*As well as giving us “You’re Beautiful,” Blunt may have prevented World War III in 1999 when he apparently refused an order to attack an airport in Kosovo that the Russians had seized.
23
THE DEATH OF KINGS
Any man who must say “I am King” is no true king at all.
—TYWIN LANNISTER
What later became known as the War of the Roses had its origins a century earlier in the reign of Richard II, an unstable and violent individual whose erratic, paranoid behavior was his undoing. By the time the war for the throne was over, three more kings had suffered violent deaths and most of the noblemen of England were corpses. Game of Thrones sometimes seems to go heavy on killing off characters, but the reality is that the fatality rates for England’s aristocrats was very similar. Over a dozen princes died in the conflict and some fifty members of the higher aristocracy—around half of the total—were either killed in battle or executed. Among some families, such as the Percys and Beauforts, the casualty rate was extremely high: five generations of Percy heirs died violently, and four Percy brothers out of six died in battle within just four years. The Courtenay family suffered a similar rate. With the Beauforts, all four brothers of one generation died in the violence, and the legitimate line ceased to exist.
The powerful magnates fighting for the Houses of York or Lancaster could call on the services of men who would fight under their banner—a Falcon and Fetterlock for Richard of York, or the Sun in Splendour for his son Edward. As in Westeros, this was in part a battle between north and south, although in real life it was the Lancastrians who controlled much of the north and the Yorkists (despite the name) whose stronghold was London, close to the family seat of King’s Langley Palace in Hertfordshire. On top of the main conflict between the Yorks and Lancasters, there were various other regional houses fighting over land and status. In the far north the Nevilles fought the Percys and in the south-west the Courtenays and Bonvilles battled for supremacy; some families, in particular the Nevilles, were also split between different branches, old disputes over land and titles that spilled over into bloodshed as war erupted in 1455.
The seeds of the conflict were sown in the year 1399 with a king whose thirst for revenge had alienated the leading noblemen of the realm. As he entered the city of London during those last weeks of the tumultuous fourteenth century, King Richard II would have been greeted by the intense smells of the people living there, of livestock, rotting vegetables, fish remains, and feces. The city was overcrowded and squalid, and even with the plague killing so many, it still contained over one hundred overpopulated parishes. Outside the walls the king would have seen the carcasses of animals lying in the street; within he would have been overpowered by the odor and sight of rubbish in the narrow alleys and cobbled streets, the stagnant water lying in buckets in the event of fire. Greeting newcomers on the junction of Watling Street, the main road from the north-west, and Tyburn Road, the major route to the west, was the Tyburn Tree, from where his grandfather had hanged Roger Mortimer.
In the capital, King Richard was jeered and pelted by the populace, and placed in the Tower of London, the fortress built by his ancestor William the Conqueror three centuries earlier. Now his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, heir to the Duke of Lancaster, arrived at that same place where as children in 1381 they had both hid from a murderous mob, now the head of a group of rebel magnates. A list of charges was read out, among them the murder of two leading magnates, Woodstock and Arundel. Soon four of Richard’s associates were tied to horses and dragged through the city, before being beheaded.
The king knew his fate would be similar and was filled with anguish. No more is heard from the monarch, but Shakespeare would put into Richard II’s mouth words that remain timeless:
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings;
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed;
Some poison’d by their wives: some sleeping kill’d;
All murder’d: for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court and there the antic sits (Act 3, Scene 2)
As always, Shakespeare’s peerless prose captured an essential and eternal truth, for a recent study of 1,600 European monarchs from the year 600 onwards showed that one in seven died violently at the hands of rivals or in battle: “Calculated as a homicide rate per ruler-year, the risk of being killed amounts to 1,003 per 100,000, making ‘monarch’ the most dangerous occupation known in criminological research.”1
In A Storm of Swords, Ser Barristan Selmy talks of Rhaegar Targaryen, son of the mad king Aerys: “He liked to sleep in the ruined hall, beneath the moon and stars, and whenever he came back he would bring a song. When you heard him play his high harp with the silver strings and sing of twilights and tears and the death of kings, you could not but feel that he was singing of himself and those he loved.” Richard, too, would become a pitiful monster, and his death a tragedy.
The boy-ruler was a sort of mixture of Aerys and Joffrey. As with the Mad King, he had shown promise in his youth, but was driven half-mad by the various rebellions and machinations of his leading lords, his paranoia eventually becoming self-fulfilling. Aerys had arrested Brandon Stark and when his father came to negotiate for him, as agreed, had him arrested too, and executed both; likewise, Richard II had invited a rival to a banquet and had him put to death. And Richard, like Aerys, would end his life violently.
Like the other men of his family Richard was tall, at six feet, with a sharp nose and round face, but with his long blond hair and rosy cheeks he appeared quite feminine. As a boy, King Richard had no military experience and became “drunk on majesty,” a brat and a “spiteful, vengeful king.”2 Just as Joffrey demanded that people “kneel before your king,” so Richard, in love with his own divine power, would force subjects to kneel before him three times in the manner of an oriental despot. Eventually the leading barons were pushed too far, and yet to overthrow a monarch was a great and heinous act, and one that men dreaded to take for fear of what it might bring. And with good reason, for this was the start of a great tragedy.
Richard had been born in the English-controlled region of Gascony, the last king of England to have French as his first language, and as a young boy was taken to live at the palace at Kennington where his father lived out his last, sick years. Raised without any boys of his own age, the lonely prince grew to trust only his former tutor Sir Simon Burley, and his much older half-brothers John and Thomas Holland, as well as Robert de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, who had been raised in the royal household.
The Holland brothers had a sinister air and were later implicated in several brutal acts; John Holland had killed Ralph
Stafford, the eighteen-year-old son of the Earl of Stafford, after an argument between their retainers. Richard, incensed, pledged to punish his brother but went back on his word and lost the backing of the Stafford clan. Such violence between retainers was common, even among the clergy; in 1384, when the Bishop of Exeter refused to let the Archbishop of Canterbury visit his diocese, three household esquires forced the archbishop’s messenger to eat the wax seal of the letter he was carrying. Some of the archbishop’s men later got revenge by seizing one of the bishop’s entourage and making him eat his own shoes.
As a young man Richard had been given De Regimini Principum, written by the thirteenth century archbishop Giles of Rome, which proposed a new idea, that of the divine right of kings. Just as Joffrey believes it was “primitive” that lords had their own armies, so now this new theory of monarchical absolute power seemed the more modern idea. Once barons and lords had almost total control of the area around their castles, but with the development of sophisticated states capable of raising large amounts of money through taxation, and with large-scale archery and then gunpowder, kings now had the money and men to crush small warlords. Absolutism was the future—but for a young man it was a toxic and enticing idea.
Richard is the first English king of which we have a royal portrait—the first that resembles what we imagine of “Renaissance art”—and it is almost entirely gold, showing him carrying a gold sceptre and sat in a chair in front of a gold wall. He also commissioned the Wilton Diptych, which showed him beside St Edward, St Edmund, and St John, as well as the Virgin Mary. Richard was also the first king to use the royal “we,” and to insist on being called “your majesty” rather than “my lord.”
