The Normans and Their World

by Jack Lindsay

  The worst was now over. William had been able, through the lack of a unified opposition, to apply the methods he had learned in Normandy for tackling pockets of resistance, even though in England the whole thing was on a larger scale. His castle system had proved its worth; and barons or sheriffs must have dealt with many smaller spots of trouble. To leaders he was often mild. Waltheof was pardoned and married Judith, William’s niece; Eadric too was pardoned. In spring 1070 King Sweyn at last joined his fleet in the Humber and sailed down to raid East Anglia. At Easter William had deposed Stigand and bishop Aethelmaer, perhaps no longer trusting any Englishmen; these prelates seem to have been the biggest landowners in the region. The people rose and welcomed the Danes. Sweyn sent Osbern with an army to Ely. Hereward the Exile plundered Peterborough Abbey to stop its treasures falling to a Norman abbot, and took them to Ely. But the Danes had now decided that William was too strong to attack directly; they merely wanted loot and bribes. William offered to let Sweyn sail home unchallenged with the Peterborough treasure. Sweyn accepted but autumn gales dispersed his ships and much of his loot sank. Hereward stayed in Ely.

  Edwin and Morcar chose this unpropitious moment to leave William’s court. Perhaps they feared disclosures about their implication in the uprisings. But both their careers were full of vacillations; and now instead of making for Scotland, Morcar turned to Ely and Edwin was killed by one of his own men. Aethelwine of Durham had also gone to Ely; and there in the Fens the last English stand was made. William invested the resisters by sea and land, and at last drove them out. The leaders were imprisoned, the lesser men mutilated and turned free. Hereward escaped.

  William could now turn his attention to strengthening his north and west frontiers. While he was at Ely, the Scots had been laying waste Lothian. In 1072 he attacked Scotland by sea and land, with Eadric the Wild in his army. Crossing the Forth, he marched into the valley of the Tay, while his fleet followed up the estuary. In these combined operations he must again have been drawing on the experiences of the Normans in Sicily. Malcolm at Abernathy accepted him as overlord and gave his eldest son Duncan as hostage; Edgar went off to Flanders. On the Welsh borders William set up three earldoms with extraordinary franchises to match the problems they had to meet. Hugh of Avranches, earl of Chester in 1071, built an outpost at Ruddlan under his cousin; Robert of Montgomery was earl of Shrewsbury with an outpost at Montgomery. The earls were able to contain the princes of Gwynedd and Powys; the commander of Ruddlan was so powerful that in 1086 he paid £40 ‘for North Wales’, appearing thus in the same role as the native Rhys ap Tewdwr for the south. The third border earldom, that of Hereford, functioned well till the second earl’s disgrace in 1075. Later barons continued with the task of beating Rhys (1093) and strengthening Norman control of the south from the lordships of Brecon and Glamorgan.

  *

  William’s later difficulties came more from discontent among his own followers than from the defeated English. In 1075 three of his earls revolted, having come together at the wedding feast of Ralf of East Anglia and Emma, sister of Roger of Hereford. Waltheof, who had been made earl of Northumbria, was drawn in. The Chronicle bursts into one of its few verse passages. ‘There that Bride-ale led many to bale.’ And, ‘All the Bretons who attended that bridal at Norwich were ruined: some of them were blinded, some of them were exiled, some were brought to shame. So all traitors to the king were laid low.’ The grievances are not clear, though Roger resented the king sending sheriffs to hold pleas on his lands. A number of discontents had been gathering; inevitably when large-scale plundering was going on and gifts and grants of conquered land being made, many men felt they had got too small a share. Orderic says that in 1075 rebels complained that William had not properly honoured those who made his conquest possible; he had ungratefully defrauded those who gave their blood to his cause; he had granted infertile and war-wasted lands to wounded veterans, and then, when they had restocked them, he sometimes gave them away again. Elsewhere, naming some of the leading beneficiaries, he observes that William had created tribunes and centurions out of the meanest Norman soldiers. What happened at Norwich was, however, more than a drunken protest, for Cnut, the Danish king’s brother, appeared off the Northumbrian coast with two hundred ships. But whatever happened, no English support was gained. Too many areas had been depopulated; and the English were not likely to support barons against the central authority, in which their sole hope of any sort of justice now lay. The regents quickly put the revolt down. Ralf got away to Brittany and Roger to Denmark, later returning to be imprisoned and lose his fief. Lanfranc advised Waltheof to throw himself on the mercy of the king, his wife’s uncle; and William at first seemed to take the matter lightly. Then in May 1076 he executed Waltheof, last of the great English earls, at Winchester. Now England had without exception a Norman ruling class.

  The 1075 revolt was said to have led to a ‘purge’ of England from Breton influences; not only did Ralf cease to be earl of Norfolk, but Brian also made way in Cornwall for Robert of Mortain. The Flemings, who had taken over much land in the north, with Gerbod becoming the first earl of Chester in about 1070, also suffered something of an eclipse, since Flanders had become hostile to England from 1067 onwards. Gerbod, after fighting in the battle of Cassel, disappeared from the English scene, his place being filled by Hugh, son of the vicomte Richard of Avranches. Thus the Normans became ever more dominant on the baronial level and much of the union of the invading army was lost. William was doubtless not displeased.

  Northumbria was still a problem. William tried the device of a marcher bishopric under Walcher of Durham. But in 1080 Walcher had to deal with a feud involving his own household; his Norman adviser was entangled in the killing of a descendant of the earls. Walcher offered to clear himself by oath and rode to Gateshead where the crowd chased him into the church, set fire to it, and killed him and his party as they emerged. William built a new castle at Newcastle on Tyne, fostered a strong Breton group in the Honour of Richmond, and did his best to build up the Mowbray interest in the north. No simple administrative solution could be found for the region.

  William was still primarily duke of Normandy. He was in his duchy from February to December 1067, in early 1072, again in early 1073, from April to December 1075, from spring 1076 to summer or autumn 1080 (four years), in summer and autumn 1082, at Easter 1083, in summer 1084, and from summer 1086 till his death on 9 September 1087. He was continually caught up in petty feudal conflicts until at the age of fifty-nine he was fatally injured when fighting the Capetians in the Vexin. In 1069 Maine had shaken off Norman domination, while Fulk le Rechin was getting control of Anjou, and was liable to take advantage of the confused state of Maine to intrude there. Baldwin VI had died in 1070, and his widow was striving to defend her children against his uncle, Robert le Frison. Doubtless through William, she married Osbern of Hereford, who joined her and was killed at Cassel in February 1071. William lost an old friend, and Flanders also went to an enemy. Philip of France, no longer a minor, was friendly to Fulk of Anjou and in 1072 he married Robert’s half-sister. Moreover, he was keen to humble a vassal who had now become a monarch. Normandy was encircled by enemies. While William was in Scotland, Fulk seized Le Mans. William got back to Normandy as soon as possible; Fulk was away and William soon reduced the whole of Maine, transporting Englishmen over the Channel to fight for him. The Chronicle says:

  William led English and French levies oversea and conquered the province of Maine, and the English laid it completely waste. They destroyed the vineyards, burnt down the towns, and completely devastated the countryside, and brought it into subjection to the king. Then they returned home.

  There seems to be a note of pride there. English levies are mentioned before the French ones. But we can hardly sympathize with the English pleasure at finding that, acting under William’s orders, they could be as destructive to other people as the Normans had been to them.

  Under 1074 the Chronicle tells us that Edgar retu
rned from Flanders to Scotland and was received by Malcolm with much ceremony. ‘At the same festival, Philip, king of France, sent a letter to him, bidding him come to him, and he would give him the castle of Montreuil so that he could do daily mischief upon his enemies’ — by sea raids. He seems to have meant to accept the offer; but when he sailed off with great treasure, he met severe storms. His ships were wrecked and he gained shore with difficulty. Malcolm advised him to make his peace with William. ‘And the king revoked the sentence of outlawry against him and all his men,’ and he stayed at William’s court. Philip may have had a finger in the 1075 revolt, and he would have been pleased when Rolf escaped to his border castle at Dol in Brittany. By September 1076 William had invested the castle, but Philip brought up a relief army and drove him off. Such a repulse provoked another Angevin attack on Maine, while the French penetrated the Vexin. The year 1077 ended with patched-up truces and with Philip’s power reaching to the Epte. Family discords erupted to worsen William’s troubles. His son Robert Curthose, short, stocky and dashing, without a trace of his father’s shrewdness, demanded control of Normandy and Maine. When refused, he tried to seize Rouen, then fled with many nobles to Flanders and on to Germany; envoys from Philip and other enemies of William offered him support. The rebels gathered in Gerberoy.

  Robert fought against his father and wounded him in the hand; and his horse was killed under him; and he who brought up another for him — that was Toki, son of Wigod — was immediately killed by a bolt from a crossbow, and many there were killed or taken prisoner; and Robert returned to Flanders (Chronicle).[333]

  Toki was an Englishman. In spring 1080 William made peace with Robert, but his defeat had roused his many wary enemies. Malcolm began depredations again in 1079, and in May 1080 came Walcher’s murder. But a Norman expeditionary force imposed new terms on Malcolm; William was kept in Maine because of fresh attacks by Bretons and Angevins. Somehow battle was averted and a pact was signed. But, back at last in England, William had trouble with a man who had been his staunch supporter, his half-brother Odo. He arrested Odo: why, we do not know. Odo may have been trying to lure knights off to Italy in a bid for the papacy. (Rome was in confusion. In June 1080 Robert Guiscard had knelt before Gregory in homage for lands granted by previous popes; he did not yet know that the emperor Henry IV had deposed Gregory at a council of Lombard and German bishops, who had elected Gilbert of Ravenna as Clement III.) Odo spent the rest of William’s reign in prison. Robert ran off in July 1083 to become again a pawn in King Philip’s plots and plans. Queen Matilda died in November; and William, ageing and obese, heard that another Danish invasion was being prepared by Cnut.

  Using the proceeds of a heavy geld, he took a big mercenary force across the Channel, a force said to have been the largest army yet seen in England. He met some expenses by quartering troops on vassals. The men were drawn from all the western lands north of the Alps; Florence says there were many thousands of archers and footmen from all parts of France. The statement that he quartered them on vassals, ‘each in proportion to the produce of his estate’, suggests a more complete control of the system of services than we would expect; it indeed suggests both the new kind of feudal duties and the old English type of responsibility based on the number of hides held. Probably it was because of the problems raised by such a measure that the Domesday survey was projected. The Chronicle moves straight on from the matter of quartering to tell of an assembly held at Christmas at Gloucester where there took place ‘important deliberations and exhaustive discussions about the land, and how it was peopled, and with what sort of men’. So the decision to make the survey was taken. Orderic stresses its link with the question of manpower, though his description of the work itself is incorrect: ‘He made a survey of the military strength of the kingdom of England, and he discovered 60,000 soldiers, whom he ordered to be made ready whenever need demanded.’ Orderic, who had lived his first ten years in England close to Earl Roger of Montgomery’s household, was sent as an oblate to St Évroult in Normandy in September 1085. It seems unlikely that he would have got the motives of the survey altogether wrong. From his account it follows that if the hidage of an estate were established, so were the attached services.

  The decision to make the survey was indeed an astonishing one and shows what an advanced administrative system was enjoyed by England. Also it shows with what strength William had asserted and established his controls. At Lammastide, 1 August 1086, ‘all the people occupying land who were of any account’ were summoned to Salisbury. ‘All the people’ here must mean all the tenants-in-chief and their main sub-tenants (sometimes called honorial barons and capable of themselves developing into tenants-in-chief). In theory the king needed no fresh oaths of fealty; and William was not trying to cut across the feudal tangle of loyalties by a direct appeal to the lesser lords. Rather, in a moment of great stress, he was striving to grasp something of the totality of the system he had created by his various disparate measures, and was anxious to produce an appearance of solidarity and to draw the whole network closer to himself. Fear of a big Danish attack, the problems of supplying and quartering the huge mercenary army he had gathered at Lanfranc’s advice, interest in how the English settlement had worked out and what forces were at his disposal, the wish to assemble the notables to do him homage afresh: all these factors were interlinked.

  Cnut was murdered and the Danish threat vanished. Edgar, restless, was allowed to leave for Italy. The year 1087 was a disastrous one, with a terrible outburst of disease, followed by great storms and a bad famine. The largest and best part of London was burned down. The Chronicle bursts into a denunciation of Norman rule:

  ...no righteousness was to be found in this land in any man’s heart, except among the monks where they lived virtuously. The king and the leading men were fond, yes too fond, of avarice. They coveted gold and silver, and did not care how sinfully it was obtained as long as it came to them. The king granted his land on the hardest terms and at the highest possible price. If another buyer came and offered more than the first had given, the king would let it go to the man who offered him more. If a third came and offered him still more, the king would make it over to the man who offered him most of all. He did not care at all how wrongfully the reeves got possession of it from wretched men, nor how many illegal acts they did; but the louder the talk of law and justice, the greater the injustices committed. Unjust tolls were levied and many other unlawful acts were committed which are distressing to relate.

  How long the memories of 1087 and William’s behaviour persisted is shown by a passage in Henry of Huntingdon (born about 1180-90), which is also interesting in that it puts the events in England in the wider perspective of Norman expansion:

  For it is the nature [of the Normans] that when they’ve so cast down their enemies as to add no more to their burdens, then they proceed to oppress each other, reducing their own folk with their lands to poverty and devastation. This appears more and more plainly in Normandy, England, Apulia, Calabria, Sicily and Antioch, lands of great fertility which God has subjected to the Normans. In England, therefore, unjust taxes abounded in those days, and abominable customs. All the great folk were so blinded with greed for gold and silver that the poet’s words were true of them: ‘All must needs get and get, while none asks how his gains are gotten.’

  The more talk there was of right, the more acts of unrighteousness; those who were called Justiciaries were the fountainhead of all injustice. Sheriffs and reeves, whose duty was to dispense law and justice, were more savage than the thieves and robbers, and more barbarous than the most barbarous of all. The king himself had farmed out his lands as dearly as he could; he would transfer them to another who offered more, and again to another, ever making light of his own covenant, and greedy of greater gain. So in this year 1087 God sent plagues of sickness and famine upon England, so that he who escaped the fever died of hunger. He sent also tempests and thunder, by which many men were killed, nor did he spare either oxen
or sheep.[334]

  Henry had been brought up in the familia of Robert Bloet, an important prelate who was bishop of London 1093-1123; he was later employed by Alexander of Blois, who succeeded Bloet in the see of Lincoln. He had an independent mind, which is shown in his treatment of the great men of the time; in his Letter to Walter he says, ‘I’ll relate nothing not told before save what is within my own knowledge: the only evidence that can be held authentic.’

  William returned to Normandy. He hoped to take advantage of a county in the Vexin passing by marriage to an ally. Philip’s troops from Mantes advanced into Normandy. William took revenge by treating Mantes as viciously as he had treated York. But as he was entering through the wreckage of fire and rubble, he felt a sharp pain, perhaps a rupture caused by his horse jolting. He had to retire to Rouen, where he grew worse. He was borne to the priory of St Gervais overlooking the city, and the magnates hastened to his death-bed. For several days he lingered. We may discount the edifying speeches and penitences put into his mouth, though, as with so many men of his time, the approach of death may have stirred a sense of guilt for his greed and violence, which had been stoutly resisted through a vigorous lifetime. He inveighed against Robert, still in exile, and wanted Odo excluded from the general amnesty he was to order. (His bitterness against Odo suggests a greater disloyalty on the latter’s part than any known facts warrant.) The barons begged him to be lenient and at last, against his better judgment, he agreed that Odo should be freed and Robert made duke of Normandy, for which he prophesied a sad future. England was to go to his second son, William Rufus, while Henry was to get some £5,000.[335]