The Battle of Hastings

by Jim Bradbury

  William’s reign was hardly a happy one. At no time was he free from cares. His quarrels with his own son, Robert Curthose, were perhaps as hurtful as any of the rebellions listed above. But William had won a throne, and his family retained it. The rebellions were all crushed, the opposition virtually annihilated. The Norman Conquest of England was one of the most complete and efficient conquests in history.

  THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE CONQUEST

  There were immediate effects of the Conquest in England: a new king, a new nobility and ruling class, a rash of castle building, changes in the Church. William began with words of tolerance, and permitted those English who submitted before his coronation to retain their positions and at least some of their lands. But within a decade he had obliterated the higher echelons of the Old English nobility. By the time of the Conqueror’s death, the greater nobility in England was of continental extraction, though English blood often survived through marriage.

  The success of the Conquest also fuelled an attitude of the Normans to their own warlike qualities, almost their invincibility. Such views had been growing already, a somewhat distorted idea of a Norman past leading to the present triumph, an idea of themselves as a distinct people rather glossing over the true history of their development, contributing to what has been seen by Ralph Davis as a Norman ‘myth’.55

  How far social structure altered after the Conquest is a matter of much controversy, and will always be so. We can but sketch a part of the discussion here. There has been debate over the nature of the settlement which followed the Conquest. Norman and French nobles took over much of the land. Others came in the wake of the Conquest seeking profits, some of whom settled in towns. Differentiating between Normans and English in the documents is a very difficult business, so analysis of the settlement is bound to be imprecise. The general conclusion must be that Normans and other French did come, nobles and their households, soldiers, townsmen, clergy and others, but that the numbers were not enormous. If William intended integration with the native population, a ‘multi-racial settlement’ as one historian has expressed it, then he was to a degree disappointed. Integration followed eventually, but during William’s reign much tension remained between conquered and conquerors.56

  The matter of social effects of the Conquest has usually been framed in terms relating to feudalism. We have already hinted that there were similarities in the society of the two regions. Recent historical research tends to emphasise the similarities rather than the differences. Feudalism, as we have said, is a construct of historians rather than a fact of medieval life, and they have made of it rather what they choose: one one thing, one another.

  If we ask rather how did society in England change because of the Conquest, we may get a more satisfactory answer than by seeking to know if the Normans introduced feudalism to England. Certainly they did not transplant whole some living organism of society into a land whose old society died out. What occurred was much more of a merging, a new development in itself, fed from both sources.

  Knight-service and castles, symptoms of what is generally seen as feudalism, were relatively recent developments in Normandy itself, and much less systematic than once thought. In England already there was a nobility which provided the élite of the military forces and which held land. In Normandy and England there was some land to which military service was attached, and other land to which it was not.

  The circumstances of the Conquest, rather than any seeking after social change, provided the main impact. Invasion, conquest, rebellion: it was a time of crisis and insecurity. The Normans inevitably built fortifications quickly and in the style just becoming fashionable at home. That is, they built castles, and in the circumstances mostly cheap and quick ones made of earth and timber. One thing which did change was the function of the fighting men which military service produced. No longer would the English have entirely infantry forces, from now on the élite troops would be cavalry – though like the Normans they would balance the cavalry with good infantry.

  The intention was not social change, but sometimes that was the effect. The new lords of the land resided in their new fortifications. In such circumstances military force was required, and often quickly or even permanently for garrisons. The English system was not abandoned, but new elements entered into it. Here and there, quotas of military service were demanded, service in return for the land held, service in garrisons as well as in the field.

  It was no more a system in England than it had been or was in Normandy, but it became more systematic in the course of time: arrangements for military service were regulated for peacetime needs as well as for the crisis years after 1066. So that England did become a society where the lords were also the military leadership, and where land-holding entailed providing forces for the king more or less commensurate with the land held – though never in a precise calculation. English society and its military arrangements had been heading in a similar direction, but the changes were more sudden than would otherwise have been the case.

  It has not usually been easy to make comment on the fate of the ordinary English subject population. However, recent work has assisted in this matter, and we can see that changes were not always as drastic in all levels of society as might be thought, and that much of the Old English society survived. It has been suggested that the Normans ‘introduced no new systems of agricultural exploitation or estate management’.57

  The continuity in the lower ranks of society is much as one might have suspected, but can now be given some satisfactory basis in evidence. It supports the knowledge of continuity in some areas, not least in the retention of English as a language, and at least some aspects of Old English culture. This is not to say that some depression in social terms did not result from the changes. Domesday Book makes clear that many English peasants had to surrender something of their freedom as an accommodation with their new lords. Domesday does not have the whole story and rather minimises English survival, leaving out ‘a whole stratum of free men’.58 Many middling rank families are shown to have survived and even to have done well in the new conditions. The lower levels of royal service were also filled by Englishmen.59

  But it is surely also true that, for many, the Conquest was a disaster. A recent article has stressed the ‘catastrophic impact’ upon the minds of the English that must have resulted.60 A very high proportion of the nobility had been killed in the fighting of 1066, perhaps a half, with all the grief which that left behind for families and friends. Some of the women were pushed into unwelcome marriages, some took refuge in nunneries to escape such matches.

  The destruction of property and houses for war was considerable. In many towns, such as Cambridge or Exeter, the Normans destroyed entire quarters in order to build new castles. The strength of the new monarchy was demonstrated by the level of taxation which could be enforced. The enforcers were often highly unpopular. We do not need to wait for Robin Hood to find hated sheriffs. It was written of one, Picot, that he was ‘a hungry lion, a ravening wolf, a cunning fox, a dirty pig, an impudent dog’.61

  The D chronicler wrote that the Normans ‘built castles far and wide throughout this country, and distressed the wretched folk, and always after that it grew much worse’.62 The harrying of the north brought misery to hundreds who could no longer survive in the devastated region. The Durham chronicler wrote: ‘so great a famine prevailed that men, compelled by hunger, devoured human flesh, that of horses, dogs and cats, and whatever custom abhors … It was horrific to behold human corpses decaying in the houses, the streets and the roads.’63

  The chroniclers do not often pass comment on the distress they describe, though giving enough evidence of suffering. However, Orderic Vitalis, who had lived his early boyhood in England and was half-English, thought that the English aided Eustace of Boulogne in rebellion because they were ‘goaded by Norman oppression’. He says that ‘England was exhausted with tribulation after tribulation … fire, rapine, and daily slaughter brought destruction and disast
er on the wretched people and utterly laid waste the land’. Of the harrying of the north, he wrote: ‘in consequence so serious a scarcity was felt in England, and so terrible a famine fell upon the humble and defenceless population, that more than 100,000 Christian folk … perished of hunger’.64

  The change in the Church, if not so drastic as the changes in the nobility in terms of method, was as complete in terms of effect for the greater prelates. In the words of Barlow, ‘the English Church had come under new management’. English bishops were allowed to continue, but on their deaths were replaced by a continental group. By 1073 the bishops included eight Normans, four Lotharingians, one Italian and only two Englishmen; by 1087 there were eleven Normans and one Englishman. The change in the abbeys was not quite so drastic, but a similar process was observed in most of the greater houses, continental abbots replacing English predecessors.

  Stigand was permitted to hang on until 1070, partly because of his submission. But in 1070 he was removed and replaced by Lanfranc as Archbishop of Canterbury. Lanfranc was not Norman, but he had received preferment in the Norman Church before the Conquest. He was a leading figure in the Church, a thinker, writer, teacher and reformer and a great Archbishop of Canterbury. But he was a whole-hearted supporter of the Conqueror’s regime.

  Lanfranc also introduced Church reforms, with which he was already associated on the continent, into England. Such changes would no doubt have come into England without the Conquest in time, and we need not disparage the state of the Old English church. But as events turned, a number of significant reforms were introduced through the new episcopate and under the aegis of the new king.

  It was also an age of great church building, and somewhat accidental that hundreds of the new stone churches either replaced older English buildings, or survived better than they did. There was also a centralising policy for episcopal sees. Where existing centres were in small and remote places they were often moved to a more urban and central position: Elmham to Thetford, Selsey to Chichester, Lichfield to Chester. This was a trend which had begun before the Conquest.

  Leading churchmen played a major role in the Conqueror’s administration, and it is not surprising that they should keep their continental ways. This must be one reason that the documentation of government, in particular the charters, reverted to Latin from Old English. Again, one need not attack the state of English government, it is simply that the Conquest brought certain changes with it. Both England and Normandy had reasonable systems before 1066, and both contributed something to the Anglo-Norman state which emerged. But one cannot deny that the Conquest brought change which would not otherwise have occurred in the form it did.

  Thus shires and hundreds and many other English institutions survived, but would there, for example, ever have been a Domesday Book had there not been a Norman Conquest? The answer is surely no. The English system could have produced such a work, and its contents owed a great deal to existing English practice and methods, but there would have been no need for quite such a document without the Conquest and no driving force behind it without the Conqueror. Thus we possess one of the great records from the eleventh century, an absolute godsend to historians, a fund of all sorts of information.

  In conclusion, we may ask what were the main political effects of the Conquest? They are mostly obvious but this does not make them any the less important. For a start, there was a new king and this would soon be seen as the beginning of a new dynasty – to such an extent that a thirteenth-century king would be known as Edward I, disregarding the rule of the Old English monarchs of that name. The Conqueror made some claims about his right by descent, but it was right by force which everyone recognised.

  The Conquest had brought a new line to the throne. And for centuries, in some ways even till now, that has meant a king (or queen) of England who would not have been on the throne but for the events of 1066. More immediately, William’s reign in England was followed by that of his two sons, William II Rufus (1087–1100) and Henry I (1100–35); then by his grandson, Stephen (1135–54) and his great-grandson, Henry II (1154–89). For all the changes and problems of succession which the period 1066 to 1189 covered, it is still true that William’s line ruled in England, and of course would continue so to do.

  Kings of England and Dukes of Normandy.

  The imposition of a French nobility also had its effects. The new lords of England belonged to families which mainly held considerable lands across the sea. For some time, this would cause a new situation in English politics, and obviously affected the English nobility’s attitude to continental affairs. Out of this, as well as out of succession disputes, came an interweaving of affairs in kingdom and duchy. The two stayed tied in political matters for centuries. William as duke of Normandy conquered England in 1066; his son Henry I as king of England conquered Normandy in 1106.

  It is probably true that the Conquest had some influence on the greater unity of England and on the dominance of England over its British neighbours. But both developments had begun before, and neither had dramatic improvement at once. It has reasonably been argued that despite the harrying, indeed partly because of it, the north was not truly ruled from the south for many years to come.65 Northern separatism remained a factor in English politics long after William’s death. But it is probably true that the English magnates lost something of their powers relative to the king. No Anglo-Norman earl would quite equate in status to, say, Godwin of Wessex. The powers of earls diminished somewhat and the powers of royal authority within the earldoms increased.

  The link between England and Normandy brought even more dramatic enlargement to the rulers of England in time. Henry of Anjou, son of the Empress Matilda, inherited Anjou from his father; Normandy from his mother, but made possible by his father’s conquest of it; and soon England. By various means he became lord of all western France, and what we know as the Angevin Empire was born. Out of that came inevitable conflict with the Capetian kings of France: the losses under King John, the revival in the later Middle Ages in the first stages of the Hundred Years’ War. Not until the fifteenth century was this conflict truly determined, so that France as we know it would emerge, and the English crown would be shorn of nearly all its hold on continental lands.

  In some sense, all of this came about because of Hastings and the Norman Conquest. Indeed, it would not be untrue to suggest that English history from 1066 until now is a consequence of the battle of Hastings. It would not otherwise have been as it has been. It truly was a great and significant battle: it changed a crown, it changed a nation, and it deserves its reputation as one of the few occasions and dates which everyone remembers. If I decided the dates of national holidays, 14 October would be one of them.

  Notes

  1. William of Poitiers, ed. Foreville, p. 210; N. Hooper, ‘Edgar the Aetheling: Anglo-Saxon prince, rebel and crusader’, Anglo-Saxon England, xiv, 1985, pp. 197–214.

  2. Bayeux Tapestry, pl. 71–2.

  3. William of Poitiers, ed. Foreville, p. 210.

  4. Thorpe (ed.), The Bayeux Tapestry, p. 54.

  5. Orderic Vitalis, ed. Chibnall, ii, p. 178.

  6. William of Poitiers, ed. Foreville, p. 204; Thorpe (ed.), The Bayeux Tapestry, p. 54.

  7. Swanton, Three Lives of the Last Englishmen, p. 13.

  8. Orderic Vitalis, ed. Chibnall, ii, p. 180.

  9. Orderic Vitalis, ed. Chibnall, ii, p. 180.

  10. William of Poitiers, ed. Foreville, p. 212: ‘ad Fractam Turrim’.

  11. Orderic Vitalis, ed. Chibnall, ii, p. 180.

  12. Whitelock et al. (eds), Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, p. 144; Cubbins (ed.), Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, p. 80.

  13. Orderic Vitalis, ed. Chibnall, ii, p. 182.

  14. J. Beeler, Warfare in England, 1066–1189, New York, 1966, pp. 25–33.

  15. F.H. Baring, ‘The Conqueror’s footprints in Domesday’, EHR, xiii, 1898, pp. 17–25; Baring, Domesday Tables; G.H. Fowler, ‘The devastation of Bedfordshire and the neighbouring counties in 106
5 and 1066’, Archaeologia, lxxii, 1922, pp. 41–50; D. Butler, 1066: the Story of a Year, London, 1966; A.M. Davies, ‘Eleventh century Buckinghamshire’, Records of Buckinghamshire, x, 1916, pp. 69–74; and J. Bradbury, ‘An introduction to the Buckinghamshire Domesday’, in A. Williams and R.W.H. Erskine (eds), The Buckinghamshire Domesday, London, 1988, p. 32. The idea goes back beyond Baring in origin, see J.J.N. Palmer, ‘The Conqueror’s footprints’. Palmer puts damaging questions against the Baring thesis, but does not draw the full conclusions, and has missed my 1988 comments.

  16. R. Welldon Finn, The Norman Conquest and its Effects upon the Economy, London, 1971, p. 19.

  17. William of Poitiers, ed. Foreville, p. 220.

  18. J. Nelson, ‘The rites of the conqueror’, ANS, 1981.

  19. Orderic Vitalis, ed. Chibnall, ii, p. 182–4.

  20. William of Poitiers, ed. Foreville, p. 230.

  21. Orderic Vitalis, ed. Chibnall, ii, p. 194.

  22. Orderic Vitalis, ed. Chibnall, ii, p. 218.

  23. Orderic Vitalis, ed. Chibnall, ii, p. 196.

  24. Baudri de Bourgueil, ed. Abrahams, p. 196.

  25. Orderic Vitalis, ed. Chibnall, ii, p. 196.

  26. William of Poitiers, ed. Foreville, p. 264.

  27. William of Poitiers, ed. Foreville, p. 266.

  28. Orderic Vitalis, ed. Chibnall, ii, p. 204–6.

  29. William of Poitiers, ed. Foreville, pp. 268–70.