The Norman Conquest

by Marc Morris

  Finally, the stern king yielded to the pressure of all these great persons, and, surrendering to paternal duty, became reconciled with his son and his son’s confederates. And by the advice of his chief men he again granted Robert the duchy of Normandy after his death, as he had once before granted it to him … The people of Normandy and Maine welcomed the restoration of peace with rejoicing, for they had been weakened and impoverished by several years of war.

  This reconciliation must have happened shortly before Easter 1080, for that is the first occasion when we see William and Robert together again, witnessing a charter in the company of a great crowd of Norman magnates, in what was no doubt a deliberately contrived show of unity. At long last, the dispute that had threatened to tear the duchy apart was over. By 8 May the news had reached Rome, and the pope wrote a congratulatory letter to Robert, rejoicing that the rift had been repaired, and quoting him some choice passages from Scripture on the subject of filial duty.2

  The end of the dispute meant that William could finally turn his attention to England. He did not return immediately, presumably because (as Orderic implies) there remained much work to be done in restoring peace to Maine and Normandy. But at some point after July, the Conqueror crossed the Channel once more, returning to his kingdom for the first time in over four years.3

  Having been away for so long, William probably returned for no other reason than to make his presence felt, and to satisfy himself that affairs in England had been handled satisfactorily in his absence. Nevertheless, by the summer of 1080 there were at least two urgent items on the agenda, both of which concerned the north. The previous August King Malcolm of Scotland had raided into Northumbria, thus violating the peace agreed at Abernethy seven years earlier. Meanwhile, as recently as May 1080, the bishop of Durham had been murdered. Possibly the two events were connected: Bishop Walcher had been de facto earl of Northumbria since the fall of Waltheof in 1075; it may be that the devastation of the region he was supposed to be defending exposed the weakness of his rule and provoked a plot to end it. According to a long and detailed account by John of Worcester, however, the bishop was brought down by a personal quarrel between two of his servants, one of whom killed the other, thus triggering a bloodfeud which ended badly for all involved. Walcher tried to negotiate with the dead man’s kin, but they opted instead for revenge, slaughtering him and a hundred of his followers at Gateshead as they tried to take refuge in a church. Thus what appears to have started as a feud ended up resembling an out-and-out rebellion, an impression the bishop’s killers reinforced when they went on to Durham and attempted, without success, to capture the city’s castle.4

  Both the Scottish raid and Walcher’s murder cried out for reprisals, and William did not hesitate to inflict them. At some point after July 1080 he dispatched into Northumbria that altogether more strenuous prelate, Odo of Bayeux, who demonstrated what William of Poitiers would no doubt have called his skill in secular affairs by leading an army into the region and laying it to waste. According to Simeon of Durham, Odo killed, maimed and extorted money from the guilty and innocent alike, before helping himself to some of the cathedral’s treasures, including an ornate pastoral staff. Later in the same autumn Robert Curthose was sent on a similar mission into Scotland, as if to demonstrate to King Malcolm that his attempt to make hay during the recent father—son rift had been a shortsighted mistake. Simeon was dismissive of his efforts, but it seems that Robert succeeded in reimposing the terms of the earlier Anglo-Scottish peace. On his return journey he also gave additional substance to Norman rule in the north by establishing a permanent outpost near the site of Walcher’s murder at Gateshead – a ‘new castle’ upon the Tyne.5

  William’s decision to delegate northern affairs to Odo and Robert may indicate that he did not actually return to England until late in the year – the first definite evidence of his having crossed the Channel comes at Christmas, when he appears at Gloucester. This destination was partly traditional: Edward the Confessor had generally celebrated Christmas in the same city, drawn there by the hunting to be had in the nearby Forest of Dean, and the same attraction would have appealed to William, who was notoriously addicted to the joys of the chase. ‘He loved the stags as much as if he were their father’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.6

  Such, indeed, was William’s love of hunting that he imported the very concept of ‘the Forest’ into England – the word occurs for the first time in an English context in the Domesday Book. We tend to think of forests as heavily wooded areas, but originally the term could be applied to land of any sort. It probably derived from the Latin word foris, meaning ‘outside’, for the Forest’s defining aspect was that it was a jurisdiction apart: an expanse of land reserved for the king’s own recreation, with its own rigorously enforced law. ‘He set aside a vast deer preserve and imposed laws concerning it’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. ‘Whoever slew a hart or a hind / Should be made blind.’7

  William caused forests to be made in many places, but the most famous was the one he established in Hampshire, appropriately still known as the New Forest. It was evidently created early in the reign, for the king’s second son, Richard, died there at some point in the late 1060s or early 1070s. Later chroniclers saw this death as divine retribution for the suffering that the forest’s creation had entailed. ‘In past times,’ says John of Worcester, ‘that area was fruitfully planted with churches and people who worshipped the lord. But on King William’s command, men were expelled, homes were cast down, and the land was made habitable only for wild beasts.’ In fact, as historians have long pointed out, the sandy soil of the New Forest could never have supported the kind of densely populated society that the chroniclers imply, and the Domesday Book shows that the greater part of the area – about 75,000 acres – had indeed been uncultivated before 1066. But Domesday also shows that William had added a further 15,000–20,000 acres, an extension which involved the clearance of some twenty villages and a dozen hamlets, containing approximately 2,000 people. The chronicles had exaggerated, but the essence of their story was true.8

  Another reason for the king’s decision to keep Christmas at Gloucester in 1080 would have been the city’s proximity to Wales. In general Wales had proved far less problematic for William than Scotland, largely thanks to the victories of his immediate predecessor. Although the Conqueror may not have cared to acknowledge it, Harold’s success in toppling the all-powerful Gruffudd ap Llywelyn in 1063 had returned Wales to its usual state of disarray, with multiple rulers vying against each other for supremacy. By the time the Normans arrived in the region soon after 1066, much of their work had already been done for them.

  William had created three new earldoms along the border as a means of separating English rebels from potential Welsh allies, and before long their holders were expanding their power westwards. As earl of Shrewsbury Roger of Montgomery had pushed across the ancient frontier of Offa’s Dyke and begun colonizing parts of the Welsh interior, founding a castle and town that he named Montgomery in honour of his home in Normandy, while his men advanced further along the Severn Valley, establishing castles of their own in similar fashion. To the north Earl Hugh of Chester (successor of the short-lived Earl Gerbod) had achieved even greater territorial gains by terrorizing the natives. ‘He went about surrounded by an army instead of a household’, recalls Orderic Vitalis, and as a result ‘wrought great slaughter among the Welsh’. Castles were planted as far west as the River Conwy, and raids conducted further west still, into the heart of Snowdonia.9

  In south Wales, by contrast, a rather different situation had emerged. The earl of Hereford, William fitz Osbern, had also struck hard at the Welsh, crossing the River Wye to establish towns and castles, possibly as bridgeheads for further expansion, but in the event there had hardly been any advance beyond the existing frontier. With so many responsibilities elsewhere, fitz Osbern appears to have decided to reach an accommodation with the local Welsh rulers, recognizing their rights in return for an adm
ission of his superior lordship. After the earl’s death in 1071, the same policy was evidently continued by his son, Roger of Breteuil, for the following year we find Norman knights fighting in the service of the native ruler Caradog ap Gruffudd. Caradog had been a force to reckon with in south-east Wales for some time – the destruction of Harold’s hunting lodge at Portskewett in 1065 had been his handiwork – and saw the Normans as useful allies against his Welsh rivals. In 1072 this alliance enabled him to defeat and kill the king of neighbouring Deheubarth, thereby fulfilling a long-cherished ambition to make himself master of Glamorgan. Such, indeed, was the strength of the understanding between him and his Norman overlord that, in the wake of Roger’s disastrous rebellion of 1075, Caradog received some of the earl’s fugitive supporters into his protection.

  It was Roger’s rebellion that caused the Conqueror to become directly involved in the region, for the earl’s fall meant that his estates were forfeit: from 1075 the king himself held the earldom of Hereford and with it the overlordship of south Wales. Naturally Caradog’s reception of some of the rebels had not gone down well with William, who had sent an army against him to punish the offence. But afterwards the status quo was soon restored and the accommodating relationship was maintained.

  If William went west at the end of 1080 partly to cast a supervisory eye over the affairs of south Wales, subsequent events a short time later caused him to return there in a far more dramatic fashion. At some point in 1081, probably during the early months of the year, the rivalry between the various rulers of Wales culminated in a single great battle. On one side fought Caradog and his Welsh and Norman allies; on the other the kings of Gwynedd and Deheubarth, supported by Irish and Danish mercenaries. They met somewhere to the north of St David’s, on a hill called Mynydd Carn, in a clash that proved bloody and decisive. Caradog and his allies were defeated, and power in south Wales passed to the king of Deheubarth, Rhys ap Tewdwr.

  This upset called for urgent action on William’s part: the king needed to establish over Rhys the same kind of control he had maintained over Caradog. Accordingly, at some point later in the year (possibly as early as the spring), the Conqueror moved into south Wales. Despite its cursory notices in the chronicles, this was clearly a major intervention: William travelled all the way across the country, stopping only when he came to St David’s, the westernmost place in Wales, beyond which there is only the Irish Sea. This destination prompted the native chronicle known as The Brut to describe the royal progress as a pilgrimage; if so, it was a heavily armed one, for the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says ‘the king led levies into Wales’. This was a demonstration of military might, pure and simple, intended to put Rhys in his place and reduce him to client status. On his return journey, William left a permanent reminder of his presence by founding a new town and castle in the ruins of a Roman fort called Cardiff.10

  Besides telling us that William ‘led levies into Wales’, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gives us one further fact about the 1081 expedition by adding that the king ‘there freed many hundreds’. Since we know that some Norman troops had fought and lost alongside Caradog, our first assumption might be that the men the king was liberating were his own. This, however, is a highly unlikely scenario, for the Welsh, like the English, did not hesitate to kill their enemies, even when they had them at their mercy. ‘Trahaern was pierced in the middle until he was on the ground dying, biting the long grass with his teeth, and groping about to come upon his weapons; and Gwcharis the Irishman made bacon of him as of a pig.’ Such is the exultant description of the death of one of Caradog’s allies at the Battle of Mynydd Carn, penned by a Welsh author in the mid-twelfth century. At the same time, it would be inaccurate to say that the Welsh took no prisoners: after the battle, the victorious king of Gwynedd ‘set out towards Arwystli and destroyed and slew the common folk there; and he burned its houses, and bore into captivity its women and maidens’.11

  The Welsh, in other words, took slaves. Here too, of course, they were no different from the English, or for that matter the Scots and the Irish: slavery, slave-raiding and slave-trading were accepted institutions across the whole of the British Isles. In England, nothing had changed in this respect since the days of Cnut. Confining ourselves to reports in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, we see that Godwine sold some of Alfred’s followers for money in 1036; that Harold seized both men and cattle from Somerset on his return from Ireland in 1052, and – lest it be thought that the Godwines were running a family monopoly – that the Northumbrian rebels in 1065 ‘took many hundreds of captives, and carried them off north’. Right up to the eve of the Conquest, the slave trade in England was flourishing. William of Malmesbury, looking back from the 1120s, offers a vivid description of its operation out of the port of Bristol. A full seven centuries before their better-known involvement in the buying and selling of Africans, the merchants of Bristol

  would buy up people from all over England and sell them off to Ireland in the hope of profit, and put up for sale maidservants after toying with them in bed, making them pregnant. You would have groaned to see the files of the wretches of people roped together, young persons of both sexes whose beautiful appearance and youthful innocence might move barbarians to pity, being put up for sale every day.12

  Once upon a time you could have groaned at similar scenes in Normandy too. Back when the Normans had been Norsemen there had been a constant traffic in human cargo from northern France back to Scandinavia, with a thriving slave market in the centre of Rouen. But during the first half of the eleventh century this trade had died out: the last reference to the Rouen market occurs in the late tenth century, and the last references to slavery occur in the 1020s. Traditionally historians have put its disappearance down to economic factors, but more likely it was due to moral objections, as the dukes of Normandy came increasingly under the influence of reforming churchmen. Significantly, the decline of slavery coincides with the rise of chivalry, suggesting that in Normandy and elsewhere in northern France, those in power had come to place a higher value on human life.13

  The attitude of the Normans towards slavery in England shows signs of having been initially ambivalent. William of Poitiers, comparing his hero with Julius Caesar, insists that the Conqueror returned to Normandy in 1067 ‘not bringing a crowd of captives in the Roman fashion’; the Carmen, by contrast, casually (and perhaps ignorantly) states that William seized people as well as cattle at the time of his landing in 1066. Whatever the truth, William’s own attitude is reported to have changed after the arrival in England of his long-term moral tutor, Lanfranc, in 1070. According to William of Malmesbury, it was at the archbishop’s insistence that the king ‘frustrated the schemes of those rascals who had an established practice of selling their slaves into Ireland’, although the Conqueror was reluctant to do so ‘because he enjoyed a share of the profits from this traffic’. Other evidence confirms that Malmesbury was right on both scores. The king’s financial interest is confirmed by the Domesday Book’s description of the slave market at Lewes in Sussex which paid him fourpence for each slave sold. But the so-called Laws of William the Conqueror show that at some point the king nevertheless acted to stop the slave trade, cunningly preserving some profit as he did so. ‘I prohibit the sale of any man by another outside the country,’ says the ninth law in the list, ‘on pain of a fine to be paid in full to me.’14

  Banning the slave trade, of course, was not the same as banning slavery itself: with ten per cent of the population classed as slaves, such a move would have been nigh-on impossible. But banning the slave trade was still immensely significant, and shows that William was in step with the humane thinking of the reformed Church, even if it cost him financially. It is very likely, therefore, that when the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us that on his progress through Wales the king ‘freed many hundreds’, it was speaking of the manumission of slaves: those taken captive in the wake of the recent war, chained, roped or caged in readiness for sale abroad, who unexpectedly found themselves set at lib
erty by a Conqueror.

  As William returned from Wales to England, he almost certainly passed through the town of Chepstow, one of the new boroughs founded soon after the Conquest by William fitz Osbern. Fitz Osbern had founded a priory there, too, and also a castle, raised high on a rocky promontory overlooking the River Wye. As the ditches cut into the cliff at either end of its site suggest, the castle had been established primarily with a view to defence, an outpost established in expectation of trouble. But at some point after he acquired the lordship of Chepstow – perhaps as he passed through in 1081 – the Conqueror ordered a substantial new building to be added: a giant stone hall which seems to have been built with different concerns in mind. The hall, which still stands today, has no obvious defensive advantages, nor the domestic features (kitchens, latrines, etc.) that would indicate it was intended to be used as a residence. What we seem to have is a building designed to serve as a ceremonial space: an audience chamber, perhaps, where the king or his representatives could receive the newly subjugated rulers of Wales (we know from Domesday that Rhys ap Tewdwr had agreed to pay William a tribute of £40 a year). Whatever specific purposes it was intended for, the Conqueror’s magnificent new hall at Chepstow proclaimed the establishment of royal authority in Wales, just as surely as Newcastle upon Tyne advertised its advance into Northumbria.15

  Chepstow was not the only grandiose project of this kind; by 1081 major building work was also underway at two other sites. At Colchester in Essex another stone tower was rising, in this case far larger than its counterpart in Wales (the tower there, which also survives, measures a gargantuan no by 151 feet at base). William’s reasons for commanding the construction of this behemoth remain obscure: apart from his brief post-coronation visit to Barking there is no evidence that the king ever ventured into Essex. Conventional opinion holds that the castle was built as a defence against Viking raids, but this seems unconvincing: the Danes may have raided eastern England after the Conquest, but their activities were concentrated further north, in Norfolk, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. The likeliest explanation for the tower at Colchester is the pull of the past, for it was built on the foundations of an earlier Roman temple. William of Poitiers, as we have seen, draws frequent comparison between the Conqueror and the heroes of Ancient Rome; the king himself, it seems, was keen to make the same connection. At Chepstow, too, the new royal hall had similar Roman resonances, its horizontal band of orange tiles reused from the ruins at nearby Caerwent.16