A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

  With the Godwine family destroyed, the key players were Stigand, Archbishop of Canterbury, and Aeldred, Archbishop ofYork, together with the two northern earls, Edwin and Morcar, whose levies, had they been on the field at Senlac, might well have changed the outcome of the battle. Keeping them back meant, at least, that they had something to bargain with, or so they must have supposed. Their first instinct was to proclaim Edgar the Atheling, the very last of the old Wessex line – Edmund Ironside’s grandson and Edward the Confessor’s great-nephew – as king. But he was still only a boy, a pawn in the hands of the English rearguard.

  So as soon as his troops recovered their stomachs, William needed to give a practical demonstration of what was to be gained from submission and what would be lost by resistance. The usual swath of fire and plunder was cut through the countryside of southeast England and, not surprisingly, it did the trick. One by one, the great centres of Anglo-Saxon England crumbled – Canterbury, Winchester (where Harold’s sister Edith, Edward the Confessor’s widow, handed him the keys to the city and to the abbey, the necropolis of the Saxon kings). Suddenly, Edwin and Morcar had second thoughts about making the boy Edgar king and departed for their earldoms in the hope of preserving them. Their assumption was that the Norman Conquest would be very much like the Danish: a foreign figurehead would simply co-opt the great men and the governing institutions of Anglo-Saxon England. But there was never the remotest chance that William would actually govern through some sort of political and social fusion of the old and the new, of Saxon and Norman. The elementary condition on which he had been able to mobilize his great army in Normandy in the first place had been that the victors should possess the spoils. And now that the colonization of England required a continuing, heavy presence of men in arms, he fully intended to live up to his bargain and deliver the properties, lands and estates of the English nobles to his own vassals.

  William knew that no conquest worth its name would be secure without the occupation of London, but instead of tackling the city directly he sent his army around it in a green-belt excursion, perhaps with the aim of starving it into surrender if need be. By the time he crossed the Thames at Wallingford, however, Archbishops Stigand and Aeldred, and Edgar the Atheling, were ready to kneel in submission. The last of the Saxon line was now William’s hostage, and there was no one left from the old witan who could possibly lead any kind of concerted resistance. On Christmas Day 1066, Westminster Abbey saw its third royal ceremony within a year: the coronation of King William I. There was an effort to make this a hybrid of Saxon and Norman rites. Read in English by Aeldred ofYork and in French by Geoffrey, Bishop of Coutances, the rite of Dunstan, which had been created for King Edgar’s coronation at Bath in 973, was enacted but with the addition of a rite used for the kings of France – the anointing with the sacred oil, the chrism. Perhaps this, finally, made William the Bastard a legitimate king.

  It was almost a year since Edward the Confessor had made his deathbed prophecy, and perhaps some of those who had been in attendance in Westminster thought that the many thousands of English dead were atonement enough and that the tree of England might now repair itself and grow green again. But the demons had not quite departed. On his coronation day William had prudently posted knights outside the abbey to deal with anyone who was not demonstrating unconfined joy at the great event. When the guards heard the shouts of acclaim from within, the vivats, they concluded that some sort of assault was under way, for which the standard response was to set fire to every building in sight. The historian Orderic Vitalis wrote:

  as the fire spread rapidly through the houses the people who had been rejoicing in the church were thrown into confusion, and a crowd of men and women of every rank and status, compelled by this disaster, rushed out of the church. Only the bishops and clergy along with the monks stayed, terrified, in front of the altar and only just managed to complete the consecration rite over the king who was trembling violently. Nearly everyone else ran towards the raging fire, some to fight bravely against the force of the flames, but more hoping to grab loot for themselves amid such great confusion. The English, believing there was a plot behind something so completely unlooked for, were extremely angry and afterwards held the Normans in suspicion, judging them treacherous.

  After this fiasco, it was not surprising that William was not prepared to take the formal acts of homage offered at his coronation at face value. The fort that would become the Tower of London – a stone castle of unprecedented strength – began to be constructed right after Christmas.

  The debacle of his coronation was the only time anyone would get a glimpse of William ‘pale and trembling’. More often he appeared as the god-like victor: tall – 5 feet 10 inches – red-haired and potent. Around Easter 1067 he felt confident enough to return to Normandy for a triumphal progress through the towns and churches of the duchy. It was an elaborately planned spectacle, with the king departing from Pevensey where he had first set foot on English soil and taking with him, as if the captives of a Roman triumph, a few tame specimens of the Saxon elite: Edgar the Atheling, and the earls Edwin and Morcar.

  The euphoria in Rouen must have made it seem as if the contest for England was over. It was not. William would spend virtually his entire reign stamping on one brushfire rebellion after another – and on both sides of the Channel. During that time almost anyone who had reason, principled or opportunistic, and who had the chance to take up arms against William I, did so: ‘Eadric the Wild’ of Wales, who was said to have married a fairy princess and introduced her to the king (‘Beauty, say hello to Beast, Beast, say hello to Beauty’) but who was more concerned in the real world with holding on to his lands, stolen by a Norman lord; Harold’s sons, who mounted serious raids from Ireland in 1068 in Devon and Somerset; the citizens of Exeter, who held out for eighteen days against a Norman siege and desisted only when allowed to keep their old civic privileges; even some of those who had fought with William at Hastings, such as Eustace of Boulogne, the ravager of Dover, who this time crossed with a troop of knights to defend the town; and Sweyn II of Denmark, who had certainly not abandoned his claim to the throne and who landed with an enormous invasion fleet of 200 ships, occupying large tracts of what had been Viking England in East Anglia and Northumbria.

  By 1069 William was, in fact, facing almost as many headaches as Harold had three years before and, like Harold, had to make pell-mell dashes from one end of the realm to the other. What he must have realized, in these years of grim campaigning, was how much of the British island had remained unconquered with the disposal of the Saxon aristocracy. Wales was so endemically rebellious (as it had been in Godwine’s day) that it needed years of brutal subjugation and colonization with the castles of the Marcher lords before the borderlands were dependably pacified. The long-lived king of Scotland, Malcolm III, was even more audacious, marrying the sister of Edgar the Atheling and treating the fugitive Saxon prince as an honoured guest at his court. At one point William was facing, simultaneously, Danish landings in the east and a Scots invasion from the north. York had opened its gates to Sweyn, greeting him as a liberator, so when William mobilized a formidable army and took it north in 1069, his campaign went well beyond the usual punitive treatment and turned, instead, into a merciless, calculated exercise in slaughter and starvation. Thousands of men and boys were gruesomely butchered, their bodies left to rot on the highways; fields and livestock were destroyed so completely that any survivors of the massacres were bound to die in the great famine and pestilence that followed. ‘I fell on the English of the northern counties like a raving lion,’ the Norman historian Orderic Vitalis has William confess on his deathbed, ‘subjecting them to the calamity of a cruel famine and by so doing . . . became the barbarous murderer of many thousands, young and old, of that fine race of people.’ At the time, though, William’s sentiments did not run to compassion. At Christmas the king made a point of celebrating the nativity amid the burned ruins ofYork.

  After the apocalypse cam
e the castles. William built large numbers of them – some still the timber-and-earth-mound structures, others permanent stone buildings – sited especially inside towns thought to be trouble-spots, such as York, Chester and London. They were citadels of authority in peacetime, engines of terror if need be in times of civil war. Others were erected, in emulation of late Roman Britain, at crucial entrances to the kingdom, at Dover and at Rochester on the Medway. There were, however, some places where the terrain was unsuitable for castles of any kind – the fenland around Ely in East Anglia, for example – and there, in conjunction with the Danish penetration of the waterways, some sort of resistance was possible. Although the legend of Hereward the Wake – the outlaw-thegn who returns to find his family destroyed and his lands in the possession of Normans and becomes the guerrilla of the fens – is, indeed, largely a myth, there was, for a while, an ‘Isle of Refuge’ at Ely, sheltering not only Hereward but also Earl Morcar of Northumbria. Once Sweyn decided to cut his losses, however, and revert to Viking type by being bought off by William, the rebellion was doomed – although not before the rebels had burned down Peterborough Abbey and had had the satisfaction of seeing a causeway built to take Norman troops collapse under its own weight into the bogs. And since there is a Hereward who appears in the Domesday Book as a landholder in the west Midlands, he, too, seems to have come to terms with the Conqueror.

  Piece by piece, then – with terror or with bribery – William was bringing the country into obedience. The last piece fell into place when, in a strategically astounding pincer movement in 1072, he moved against King Malcolm from the Clyde in the west and the Tay in the east, cutting Scotland in two and forcing the Scots king to ditch the Atheling and accept William as the lawful monarch of England. William’s charisma as warlord was potent enough to bring over to his side some of the surviving Saxon nobles like Eadric the Wild, who served him in Scotland and had his lands reinstated. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle even records that Malcolm delivered hostages and swore to be William’s ‘man’ – although whether this meant the crown of Scotland did homage to the king of England was a point that would be debated with blood and for centuries to come.

  Most of the voices describing these events – as those of the events leading to 1066 – belong to the victors: the boastful William of Poitiers or, in a later generation, Wace, sketching the starkest possible contrast between the deceitful, perjured Harold and the noble, betrayed William; the one a felon, the other a paragon. But among the rather nauseating chorus of self-congratulation there is at least one voice that sings off-key and that dares to criticize William and describe the Conquest as it surely was: a ruthlessly calculated, brutally executed act of aggression. The voice is all the more credible because it belongs to someone with a special perspective on the Conquest, having a Norman father and an English mother: the monk Orderic Vitalis. His father had come with William but then had sent the boy back to Normandy, where he had grown up feeling estranged from what was supposed to be his homeland. In the early twelfth century he wrote an account of the war, which in contrast to all the other versions has the reality of blood and ash on every page. And Orderic never minced his words about what he thought of as a colonization. ‘Foreigners,’ he wrote, ‘grew wealthy with the spoils of England while her own sons were either shamefully slain or driven as exiles to wander hopelessly through foreign kingdoms.’

  In other words, Orderic saw what had happened as a trauma. Of course, the trauma was a decapitation rather than a deracination. Not everything in Anglo-Saxon England disappeared after 1066. There were still shires and hundreds and public courts for each of them. If the witan had gone, the Norman king still turned to a council for advice (although in William’s case he was just as likely to ignore it). Unfree peasants – the villeins – continued to labour the required number of days for a lord as the price of being permitted to till a strip of land or keep animals on it. What difference did it make if those lords now went by French rather than Anglo-Saxon names? What was in a name after all?

  A great deal, as it turns out. For the most part the Anglo-Saxon thegns didn’t use surnames at all. When a place-name was added to a Wigod or a Cedric, it simply told you where the man came from. But when the Normans incorporated place-names into their names it was an act of occupation and of possession. They were Roger Beau-Mont or Mont-Gomery, because the place was them and they were the place: they owned it – knights, peasants, mills, woods, swine-pastures, fords and bridges – lock, stock and barrel. And once they got their hands on this nicely packaged property, it was not going to be chopped up again by accidents of death or survival in the family. The Anglo-Saxons thought of their landed estate as just one piece of the thegn’s assets, which might also include precious gems, fine weapons and armour. Taken together, the assets were considered the property of the ‘big’ family: brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, even cousins. When the thegn or his widow died, the assets would be parcelled out among them, a practice that was useful for preserving family peace but bad for preserving its property empire. Preserving the estate intact was an obsession for the Norman nobility. There would be no more sharing the dovecotes with Aunt Aelfrida. Instead, everything would go to a single heir. The kingdom itself was just the largest of these estates. In the old way, a successor would get the nod from a dying king, provided the witan consented to his choice. In the new way, the king gave his realm to his son. End of debate.

  The replacement of a ruling class by foreign-speaking conquerors was not, then, a trivial substitution. The old system of lordship had rested on chains of connection as well as on obligation. A thegn had owed the Saxon king military service because of his status as a land-holder. Under the new order, the count was allowed to hold land only on condition that he appeared in arms. Service was, in effect, his rent. And the Anglo-Saxon thegns, whether ‘royal’ or not, were seldom loftily removed from their tenant farmers, especially the most prosperous ceorls, who might well hold and farm a hide or two. Differences in the timber house, in dress and in speech habits were all a matter of degree rather than kind. In some circumstances the ceorl might even imagine that he could rise, through wealth and marriage, into the class of the thegns themselves. After the Conquest, however, proximity and familiarity were replaced by alienation and impotence and, in all likelihood, a sense of fearfulness, of having the protection of custom ripped away, of being helpless in the face of the exercise of force. It was the difference between the wooden hall and the castle; between the intimate scale of the Saxon chapel and the immense, fortress-like scale of the great Norman cathedrals.

  The great castles and churches that were the visible imprint of the Conquest on England are deceptive in suggesting its monolithic character. Although William had certainly delivered on his promises to transfer the entire estate of the English land-holding classes to his own vassals, this did not preclude the greatest of them from challenging his rule. As conqueror and king he was no more immune from family conspiracies than he had been as duke. At one point, his own eldest son Robert was in rebellion; at another, his half-brother, Odo of Blois, the Bishop of Bayeux, for whom the tapestry had been made, his closest companion and the man he unhesitatingly appointed regent when he travelled abroad, was also involved in a plot, reputedly going so far as to attempt a march on Rome to make himself pope. The Count of Flanders and another Cnut of Denmark all continued to harbour ambitions on his new realm.

  None of this prevented the king from carrying on the business of the kingdom, however. At Christmas 1085 he held court at Gloucester and launched what may be the most extraordinary campaign of his entire reign: the campaign for information. His immediate need was to impose a geld – the land tax he had inherited from the Anglo-Saxon kings, which would pay for the defence of the realm – but the compilation of Domesday Book was much more than a glorified audit. It was a complete inventory of the kingdom up to the Tyne, shire by shire, hundred by hundred: who owned what on the eve of the Conquest and who owned what now; how much it had been worth
then and how much it was worth now. Beyond the immediate pragmatic need for money, William’s instinct – remarkable for someone usually thought of as more or less continually in the saddle – was that knowledge was also power. William the Conqueror was also the first data-base king.

  His servants got him that knowledge at what, in the eleventh century, passed for warp speed. The king, wrote Orderic Vitalis:

  sent his men all over England into every shire and had them find out how many hundred hides there were . . . or what land and cattle the king himself had in the country or what dues he ought to have from the shire. And he had a record made of how much land his archbishops had and his bishops and abbots and earls . . . so very narrowly did he have it investigated that there was no single hide nor indeed [a shame to relate but it seemed no shame to him] . . . was one ox or one cow or one pig left out that was not put down in his record.

  At Old Sarum on Lammas Day in 1086 William was presented with reams of densely packed, cross-referenced information, material that had been gathered first at the local level, then brought to the hundred, and finally compiled by a commission of the shire before being made into the books. Some of that material was taken orally from villeins or priests. But much of it must have been taken from pre-existing written documents like geld-books, and what we usually think of as a monument to the brisk efficiency of Norman government probably owed as much to the advanced information-retrieval machinery left in place by the Anglo-Saxon state. So the world of the older England lingers on, captive ghosts, recorded on the pages of Domesday Book: the thegns, the sheriffs, the hides. And when William was presented with the books, it was as if he had reconquered the kingdom all over again, this time statistically, and thus in a form that no disgruntled motte-and-bailey barons would ever overcome.