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

by Simon Schama

  So although they were distinct events, the two ceremonial moments at Old Sarum defined post-Conquest England and its monarchy in a perfectly complementary way. First was the oath, taken by all the magnates, nobles and gentlemen (on the eve of yet another campaign): ‘and all the people occupying land who were of any account whatsoever in England, whosoever’s vassals they might be . . . all submitting to him and swore oaths of allegiance that they would be faithful to him against all other men.’ But then there was The Book, from which, should it ever be necessary, William would have the information to coerce, fine or confiscate, should any of his own vassals waver in their loyalty. For centuries afterwards the strength of government in England was this partnership (never easy or uncomplicated) between the power of the landed classes and the authority of the state; the guardians of the green acres and the keepers of the knowledge. And between them, posing as a neutral, professing to understand each of their concerns, was the eternal umpire: the sovereign.

  One might suppose that William would now be satisfied to let this hybrid system of ‘Anglo-Norman’ governance work of its own accord, especially since the perennial threat of a Danish invasion had ended with the murder of Cnut IV in 1086. Ironically, the last coinage that he minted bore the same hopeful inscription as Harold’s: PAX (peace). And William was much given to long crown-wearings, sitting in silent regal splendour, the image of majesty – very like the way Harold is shown holding court in the Tapestry. But William’s threshold of irritation still remained, as it always had been, extremely low. All the king of France had to do was to cross the border between his kingdom and the duchy of Normandy, into disputed territory, to invite a fierce response. William, now in his late fifties and run to fat, rode again and burned again with an enthusiasm undimmed by the advancing years. The town of Mantes, near the Norman-French border, was so comprehensively torched that it is archaeologically impossible to find any building that dates from before William’s wrath, which was visited on it in 1087. But perhaps this last devastation was one too many. He was riding through the smouldering wreckage of the town when, according to one chronicle, something hot – a piece of beam perhaps – fell away from a roof in front of the king’s horse, making it buck and throwing William violently against the high pommel at the front of the saddle. The corpulent William’s girth now presented a large soft object to the puncturing pommel. Some internal organ – probably the spleen – was ruptured. The Conqueror began to haemorrhage.

  William was taken to the priory of St Gervais in Rouen. His chancellor and councillors arrived post-haste, some in consternation, some already in vulture mode. OfWilliam’s old campaigning circle only Robert of Mortain, his half-brother, was among those who expressed their concern. The other half-brother, Odo of Bayeux, was in prison. The king’s oldest son, Robert Short-Hose (Curthose), was an enemy, even though William had given him the duchy of Normandy. England had been awarded to his second son, William Rufus, who, probably on his father’s unsentimental advice, returned at speed to England to secure his inheritance. The third son, Henry – who would become Henry I – got something to which he was especially partial: money.

  At the very end Orderic Vitalis puts into William’s mouth an extraordinary deathbed confession, so completely out of character that it seems, on the face of it, utterly incredible. But Orderic, then in Caen, was in a position to know. So perhaps William did, in extremis, have a qualm of conscience if not the all-out spasm of guilt that Orderic gives him as he refused to appoint any heir:

  for I did not attain that high honour by hereditary right but wrested it from the perjured King Harold in a desperate battle, with much effusion of blood, and it was by the slaughter and banishment of his adherents that I subjugated England to my rule. I have persecuted its native inhabitants beyond all reason. Whether noble or commons I have cruelly oppressed them; many I have unjustly disinherited . . . Having therefore made my way to the throne of that kingdom by so many crimes I dare not leave it to anyone but God alone.

  If he did say anything remotely like this, no one paid any attention, any more than they had attended to what Edward the Confessor had to say on his deathbed. Once William had gone, in the early hours of the morning of 9 September 1087, the great bell of Rouen Cathedral tolling, a scene of shocking indignity took place. ‘Some of the attendants,’ Orderic wrote, ‘behaved as though they had lost their wits. Nevertheless the wealthiest of them mounted their horses and departed in haste to secure their property. While the inferior attendants, observing that their masters had disappeared, laid hands on the arms, linen, plate and royal furniture and hastened away leaving the corpse almost naked on the floor of the cell.’

  As for his old antagonist, Harold Godwineson, he certainly did not remain buried on the beach facing the Channel. Rumours abounded in the years after the battle that he had actually escaped and was living out his days as a hermit – some said in Cheshire or in the remote fastness of ancient Britain, Wales – but another story is much more likely to be close to the truth. At some point when it was safe, the female survivors of the family took his remains and had them interred at one of the many religious houses of which Harold had been patron: Waltham Abbey in Essex. If the accusations of being a ‘despoiler of the Church’ and a grievous perjurer had been enough to persuade the pope that Harold was notorious enough to be cast out and overthrown, they did not seem to have much effect on the monks of Waltham, who secretly buried him and prayed for his soul. Somewhere, then, beneath the columns and arches of the Romanesque church, a handsome specimen of post-Conquest architecture, is the last Anglo-Saxon king, literally part of the foundations of Norman England.

  CHAPTER 3

  SOVEREIGNTY UNBOUND?

  THE IDEA OF Britain was born in a fabulous reverie. The dreamer was Geoffrey of Monmouth – Galfridus Monemutensis as he signed himself – who, around 1136, completed his History of the Kings of Britain. Like Britain, Geoffrey was himself a hybrid: probably a Breton, but born in Wales and raised in the aggressively Norman culture of the Marches, the borderlands that were colonized by the Norman nobility. But Geoffrey was also a cultural product of medieval Oxford, where, he claimed, an archdeacon Walter had given him ‘an ancient book in the British [meaning Welsh] tongue’ on which he based his own Latin history. Geoffrey’s ambition was to plant the roots of Britain deep in the worlds that mattered most to him: classical antiquity and Celtic mythology. So, according to his history, Britain, ‘the best of islands’, a country of five races, had been first civilized by Brutus, the grandson of Aeneas, the Trojan prince who had founded Rome. Brutus’s northern Tiber was the Thames, and on its banks he had, apparently, established Troia Nova, New Troy, destined to be the capital of a great multi-national empire. After his death, Brutus’s sons, Locrinus, Kamber and Albanactus, had divided the island among them, creating, respectively, Loegria (England), Kambria (Wales) and Albany (Scotland).

  Much of Geoffrey’s History, however – and by far the most famous part – was devoted to the epic of a British hero, prophesied by the Welsh magician, Merlin. That dauntless champion had liberated the country from the plague of the barbarian Saxons, invited into Britain by the tyrant Vortigern following the departure of the Romans. Vortigern had built a tower, which repeatedly subsided, baffling his counsellors until Merlin enlightened them that the tower had been precariously constructed directly above a subterranean pool in which slept two dragons. Thus sank the state of Britain, its roots gnawed by monsters, until Arthur, the son of Utherpendragon, arose to rebuild the country on the firm foundations of Christian chivalry and martial courage. Once the Saxons were expelled from the length and breadth of England, Arthur turned his attention to the Picts and the Irish, who were subdued in short order. York, the target of their devastation, was rebuilt to the greater glory of God. Men of distinction now flocked to his court, where ‘even a man of noblest birth thought nothing of himself unless he wore his arms and dressed in the same way as Arthur’s knights. At last, the fame of Arthur’s generosity and
bravery spread to the very ends of the earth.’ At the height of his reign, Arthur extended his power to encompass an entire northern empire, stretching from Scandinavia to Gaul and out into the wide, chill sea to Iceland. At Caerleon-at-Usk, in the most ancient heart of Britain, a thousand ermine-clad noblemen assembled before Arthur and Guinevere and celebrated in tournaments and feasting the Britain that had become the centre of the world, a country that ‘reached such a sophistication that it excelled all other kingdoms in its affluence, the richness of its ornaments, and the courteous behaviour of its population’. Such idylls, Geoffrey the expert fabulist knew, are beautiful because they are mortal. In the end, Arthur’s golden age must be ended by the treachery of his nephew, Mordred, and Britain thrown back into the murky misery of paganism.

  The History of the Kings of Britain was, of course, an outrageous fantasy, but by the time its author, now known as Geoffrey Arthur, became the second Bishop of St Asaph (in what is now Denbighshire) in 1152, his manuscript had already reached the wide readership that would endure for centuries. Geoffrey had learned about Arthur from his patron, Robert, Earl of Gloucester, who, in turn, had been told the story by another protégé, the librarian of Malmesbury Abbey. The librarian had visited Glastonbury Abbey, where the Benedictine monks were convinced that the hero’s body lay somewhere on the premises, although just precisely where they could not say. Geoffrey understood that the times called for heroic romance and an epic of wise governance, not least because Robert of Gloucester was a combatant in the civil war that was then tearing the country apart. That war was bitterly and unrelentingly fought for nearly twenty years between rival grandchildren of William the Conqueror. On the one side (supported by the Earl of Gloucester) was Matilda, the daughter ofWilliam’s son, Henry. On the other side was Stephen of Blois, the son of his daughter, Adela.

  When William I died in 1087 it might have seemed, on the face of it, that the Anglo-Norman state created by the Conquest had settled down. Theoretically, post-Domesday government had the potential to be a finely tuned tool of sovereignty: Anglo-Saxon administrative and legal experience married to Norman military force. In reality, the exercise of power could be shockingly crude. Between the death of the Conqueror and the accession of Henry II in 1154, no monarch could hope for acceptance without first seizing the royal treasury at Winchester, and the ostensibly dignified process of succession was reduced to a smash-and-grab operation: smash your rival and grab the gold. This is why William I’s designated heir, his second surviving son, William Rufus, rode at high speed from Rouen once he decided his father was not long for the world. Likewise, coronations were high-speed affairs, cobbled together under the auspices of whichever senior cleric happened to oblige. But even with the loot under lock and key and the head duly anointed, securing the throne and running the government required political skills that William II (Rufus) in particular conspicuously lacked. Much of his reign was spent in attempting to extract taxes from his tenants-in-chief to pay for wars on the Welsh and Scottish borders and in alienating the Church by promoting court favourites into bishoprics. When he was killed in a hunting party by a stray arrow in 1100 (as his oldest brother, Richard, had died before him), not everyone thought his death was accidental.

  Accompanying William II on the hunt was his brother Henry, the youngest of the Conqueror’s sons, who, at the fatal moment, found himself nicely placed in the New Forest, a conveniently short gallop from the treasury at Winchester. A few days later the Bishop of London had crowned him Henry I, thus denying the throne (again) to the oldest surviving brother, Robert Curthose. To shore up his shaky claim, Henry did something even cleverer. Six days after his coronation, on 11 August, he married Matilda, the daughter of Malcolm III, king of Scotland, whose own queen was directly descended from the royal house ofWessex. Their children, then, would have both Saxon and Norman blood in them and so, Henry must have hoped, would have a double claim on the allegiance of the English. But although he managed his Anglo-Norman inheritance expertly for thirty-five years and fathered twenty illegitimate children, Henry’s hopes for posterity came to grief. His first wife died in 1118. His sole surviving legitimate son, William, was drowned in the wreck of the White Ship in 1120, together with the flower of the Norman nobility, silks amid the seaweed. A late second marriage produced no heirs, which left Henry’s daughter, Matilda, as his only possible direct heir. At his royal council of Christmas 1126 Henry bound the leading bishops, abbots and lords to honour her as his successor.

  Needless to say, after Henry died in Normandy in 1135, eating the lampreys his physician had expressly forbidden, the first-to-Winchester axiom superseded any of those promises, and the first-to-Winchester was not Matilda but Henry’s nephew, Stephen of Blois, the son ofWilliam the Conqueror’s formidable daughter, Adela. Although Dover and Canterbury refused to admit him as king, London opened its doors to Stephen. Many of the nobles who rallied to him excused their disavowal of Matilda by claiming that Henry I had changed his mind before he died and that, in any case, their allegiance had been conditional on the princess not contracting a foreign marriage. But Matilda, who had been the wife of the German Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, had been remarried after his death in 1125 to Count Geoffrey of Anjou. This, too, was meant as a diplomatic masterstroke on Henry I’s part, uniting the traditionally hostile duchies of Normandy and Anjou. But many of the Anglo-Norman nobility remained more hostile than reconciled. Matilda had one great champion in England, the most powerful and politically intelligent of Henry I’s many bastards, Robert, Earl of Gloucester. Without doubt, the timing of the appearance of the History a year later (in 1136), with its cautionary tale of the anarchy that followed the division of the kingdom by old King Leir, was not fortuitous. No one reading that famous story could possibly have missed the analogy between Matilda and the good daughter Cordeilia who, unlike Shakespeare’s tragic heroine, survived, after fighting great battles, to reign over the kingdom.

  Matilda, who made it known that, as long as she lived, she should be addressed as ‘Empress’, had little of Cordeilia’s winning humility. After slogging her way to London, she managed to alienate almost everyone of importance in the kingdom, opening a long, gruelling period of siege and counter-siege. And while the monarchy was losing authority, the barons were taking it. Dependent on local support to tilt the balance against their rival, each side in the civil war was prepared to let the magnates of the shires do what they wished – build castles, create private armies, carry outvendettas against personal enemies, torch their manors – as long as it hurt the other side. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle remembered this as the tempus werre, the ‘time of war’.

  Every great man built himself castles and held them against the king . . . they sorely burdened the unhappy people of the country with forced labour and when the castles were built, they filled them with devils and wicked men . . . By night and by day they seized those whom they believed had any wealth to get their gold and silver, they put them in prison and tortured them . . . they hung them up by their feet and smoked them with foul smoke . . . when the wretched people had no more to give, they plundered and burned all the villages . . . the wretched people perished with hunger . . . never did a country endure greater misery.

  This, in the end, was the legacy ofWilliam the Conqueror: chaos, carnage, famine, extortion; every jumped-up baron a kingling in his own shire; William’s grandchildren banging away at each other while the realm fell apart. Somehow, however, this mayhem generated a line of rulers who, for better or worse, redefined sovereignty in England. War was their vocation and power their obsession, but in the course of pursuing it they managed to reinvent government. That reinvention was so forceful that it provoked, in turn, furious campaigns of opposition that would set the limits on the power of the medieval state. The Angevins – the children and grandchildren of Matilda and Geoffrey of Anjou – were the alpha and omega of our history: at once insatiably ambitious and ostensibly in control of a vast empire, stretching from the Pyrenees to the Cheviots,
but also vulnerable to family jealousies and territorial over-reach. What their intelligence and energy built, their passions and their immoderation destroyed. To their many enemies they were, literally, fiendish. A story was told about an earlier Count of Anjou whose bride, Melusine, had flown, shrieking, out of the window, thus unmasking herself as the daughter of Satan. But demonic or not, for a generation the Angevins were the masters of everything that counted in Christendom.

  The marriage between Matilda and her second husband, Geoffrey of Anjou, was famously unhappy. She spoke German, retained her imperial airs (and honorific title of Empress) and was twenty-six. He had been reared as the flower of chivalry, spoke French and was fifteen. But it didn’t need happiness to produce heirs, and in 1133 Matilda bore her husband a son, named Henry after both her father and first husband. The red-haired child, running about among the hounds, was the living embodiment of Henry I’s strategic vision: of the creation of a cross-Channel superstate beside which the kings of France would be reduced to puny impotence. As this boy Henry ‘Plantagenet’ (known for the Counts of Anjou’s chivalric badge of the yellow broom, the Planta Genesta) grew, it became evident that he had inherited steely physical courage and a foul temper from his mother, and razor-sharp political intelligence from his father. But the quality that everyone who ever met Henry II remembered most vividly – his fidgety energy – was all his own. As both child and adolescent he showed up in England on his mother’s behalf no fewer than three times – when he was nine, fourteen and sixteen – to show the Anjou-Plantagenet flag of the red cross on a white field. At Carlisle on Whit Sunday in 1148 Henry was knighted by David I of Scotland, submitting to rituals of Arthurian solemnity: a purifying bath, the laying on of a golden tunic, the presentation of a shield painted with his personal device and the acceptance of a sword, preferably very old and curiously engraved.