A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  Preparations for Invasion

  In Normandy, meanwhile, the preparations for invasion involved an immense expense of money and effort. Alliances with other French lords had to be negotiated to secure an army sufficient to the task. One modern commentator has calculated that an army the size of William’s represented a logistic miracle. Allowing for 10–15,000 men, and 2–3,000 horses, the force that waited throughout August and early September on the estuary of the river Dives to the north of Caen would have consumed a phenomenal quantity of grain and other foodstuffs. Had the troops slept in tents, then these alone would have required the hides of 36,000 calves and the labour of countless tanners and leather workers. The horses would have produced 700,000 gallons of urine and 5 million tons of dung. We seem to be back in the world of the tannery, far from the more exalted claims that were advanced on William’s behalf and a long way from the shadow of the papal banner under which William’s army is supposed to have marched. Even if we treat these figures as inflated or wildly speculative, the sheer scale of the operation cannot be ignored. That there was indeed an epic quality to William’s preparations is suggested by the Life of William by William of Poitiers, which deliberately echoes the words of both Julius Caesar and Virgil in its account of William’s Channel crossing, here likened to the expedition of Caesar to conquer Britain, and to Aeneas’ flight from Troy to Rome, to the foundation of a new world order.

  An even more ancient myth may have been present in William’s own mind. In June 1066, shortly before embarking for England, William had offered his own infant daughter, Cecilia, as a nun at the newly dedicated abbey of La Trinité, Caen. Was he thinking here, perhaps, of the sacrifice of a daughter by an earlier king, by Agamemnon of his daughter Iphigenia, intended to supplicate the Greeks and hence to supply a wind to speed the Greek expedition against Troy? If so, then by associating himself with the Greeks, outraged by the abduction of Helen, William not only broadcast his own sense of injury against the treacherous King Harold but trumped even Virgil in his appeal to classical mythology. Aeneas had founded Rome as an exile from ravaged Troy. William would be the new Agamemnon, precursor to the exploits of Alexander, fit conqueror not just of Troy or Rome but of the entire known world.

  Medieval rulers were rarely blind to the classical footsteps in which they trod, or blithely unconscious of the epic nature of their deeds, and the Norman Conquest of England was certainly an expedition of epic scale. Having mustered his army in early summer, and camped at the mouth of the river Dives for over a month, presumably on the river’s now vanished inland gulf, protected from attack by sea, some say waiting for a wind, others for news that Harold’s fleet had dispersed or been diverted northwards, William moved his army to St-Valéry on the Somme and from there set sail on the evening of 27 September, hoping that a night-time crossing would enable his fleet to slip past whatever English force was waiting for them in the Channel. Once again, it was surely no mere coincidence that his landing at Pevensey took place on 28 September, the vigil of the feast day of Michaelmas, commemorating the same warrior Saint Michael, the scourge of Satan, whom Edward the Confessor had honoured thirty years before, while in exile in Normandy, in the hope of Norman support to secure him the English throne.

  The Normans in England

  The ensuing campaign, in so far as there was one, can be briefly told. William immediately embarked on a scorched-earth policy, harrying and foraging as was the general rule for medieval warfare, burning villages, terrorizing the local population, advertising his own position and at the same time assembling the sort of resources in food and provender that would be required to maintain his vast army should the enemy refuse immediately to engage. The harvest was newly gathered in, so resources were not hard to find. But the prospects, if the English held back, were not propitious. A Norman occupation of Sussex might dent Harold’s pride, not least because his own family stemmed from precisely that part of England, but would not in itself have delivered a fatal blow to the English state. By contrast, the chances that William’s army could be held together for any period of time without proper supplies and without engaging the enemy, were slim indeed. Even the greatest warriors have to eat, and no lord in the eleventh century could afford to leave his own estates unprotected for long, especially at harvest time when the pickings were richest. The Norman army was now in entirely foreign territory. Very few, even of its leaders, had any experience of England. Without the benefit of Ordnance Survey maps or signposts, they would have depended entirely upon local spies and intelligence-gathering, but the local people no more spoke French than William’s soldiers could read Anglo-Saxon.

  William moved east towards Hastings, building a temporary castle at Hastings itself, positioning his own army across the main road to London. Hastings was already a major centre of English naval operations, and its occupation was to some extent equivalent to the later seventeenth-century Dutch burning of the Medway dockyards. But this in itself was not sufficient to provoke Harold to battle. Rather, hubris persuaded Harold, having just marched his army southwards from Yorkshire, to leave the safety of London and immediately embark upon another campaign, risking the third pitched battle in three weeks. Perhaps precisely because battle was so rare, and because Stamford Bridge had proved so total a victory, Harold, the experienced commander of more than a decade of warfare in Wales, believed himself invincible.

  The Battle of Hastings

  Given the number of books describing the Battle of Hastings in the minutest of detail, it may come as a disappointment to learn that the vast majority of our ‘facts’ concerning the battle are nothing of the sort. The Bayeux Tapestry, combined with the account by William of Poitiers and the Latin ‘Song of the Battle of Hastings’, generally attributed to Guy, bishop of Amiens, and written very shortly after 1066, give us the main gist of the action but surprisingly little specific detail. We cannot even be sure of the ground or the extent to which the battlefield has been altered out of all recognition since October 1066. One of the more important contemporary accounts, by William of Jumièges, threatens to overturn all traditional understanding of the battle by claiming that Harold was killed early in the day, rather than at the battle’s final climax. Nonetheless, if the high altar of Battle Abbey was indeed built on the site of Harold’s final stand, then we can assume that the two armies faced one another across a shallow valley, with Harold and his shield wall of housecarls and axemen to the north, blocking the road to London. It is clear that William was obliged to take the offensive and that the first charges by both cavalry and infantry failed to strike home. The cavalry charge misfired to such an extent that the Bretons on the Norman flank panicked and came close to causing a rout. We should remember here that the Bretons were traditional enemies of the Normans, and they enlisted in 1066 as temporary allies only from mutual self-interest. It would have been perfectly natural for Norman writers to have blamed the Bretons for any failings in their own attack.

  The English may have sought to exploit the disorder caused by poor discipline within the French army by pursuing the fleeing horsemen, allowing William to launch a second attack against the now weakened English defences. Rumours circulated that William himself had been killed, but he was deftly able to reassure his troops by raising the visor of his helmet, a scene very clearly shown on the Bayeux Tapestry. Had the stakes not been so high, and had the French the possibility of a retreat to recoup their strength, then it is possible that the battle might have ended at this point, as an inconclusive draw. Desperation alone drove William on to a final attack upon the English position which now, at the very end of the day, began to crumble.

  Harold was killed still fighting in the shield wall. Precisely how will never be known. The Bayeux Tapestry famously shows him, or someone near to him, blinded by an arrow in the eye, but this detail was not necessarily recorded in the Tapestry when it was first embroidered. It may be the result of repairs and restitching as recently as the eighteenth century. Several twelfth-century chroniclers, incl
uding the Norman poet Wace, refer to Harold’s blinding. Wace, writing in the 1170s, had almost certainly seen the Tapestry in his role as a canon of Bayeux, but, like modern commentators, he may have misinterpreted the Tapestry’s meaning, already a century old by the time that he saw it, which in any case seems to show merely that Harold was blinded, not killed, by the arrow. The blinding, indeed, may be yet another Biblical echo, of the story of the Hebrew King Zedekiah, blinded by Nebuchadnezzar for violating an oath of fealty, thereby, like Harold after him, bringing destruction upon himself and his people. The ‘Song of Hastings’ and most twelfth-century accounts state that Harold was killed by the sword, the ‘Song’ paying particular attention to the three French knights who in company with William of Normandy butchered his body. With night falling, the Normans found themselves victorious by sheer desperate persistence.

  Around them lay the dead and dying. Before the discovery of penicillin, even a flesh wound could prove fatal. Internal injuries or anything that risked peritonitis or blood-poisoning were more likely to kill than to be cured. The physical effects of several hours of head-on violence, in which two groups of heavily armed men sought to bash the life out of one another with sharp pieces of metal, are difficult for us to imagine, in spite of Hollywood images of gore and guts. The psychological consequences are perhaps easier for us to grasp. Some modern writers suggest that medieval men came, if not from a different species, then certainly from a different psychological universe. Emotions such as anger and grief, or such physical states as exhaustion or jubilation, they say, might have been experienced and expressed in quite different ways a thousand years ago. Much of this sort of writing reeks of poppycock. We must never shut our ears to the differently pitched voices of the past, but no more must we close off our capacity for emotional engagement with humanity’s common experience. The dehumanized, unemotional history of which some modern historians dream, the desire to assess the past as if it were a set of data to be graphed and computed, seems to be an utterly inadequate response to events such as the Battle of Hastings.

  First after the battle came a sense of relief for William’s army. A victory had been won that to those still living seemed epic in its proportions. This was no ordinary battle, and the victors were well aware of the fact. Most chroniclers in northern Europe, from the Loire to the Elbe, recorded the events at Hastings in some way. After the relief came exhaustion. William’s army seems to have halted in Sussex for a full two weeks. The assumption has been that they were waiting for what remained of the Anglo-Saxon leadership to offer their surrender. In reality, sheer exhaustion combined with the after-effects of anxiety, injury and disease provides a more likely explanation. A large number of the Norman army had been killed. The dead had to be buried. There were many arrangements to be made. Eyewitnesses to another bloody victory, at Waterloo in June 1815, report a similar sense of aftershock, anticlimax and grief. Perhaps already William himself had begun to fall ill. Dysentry as a result of weeks of insanitary camp life and almost unbearable tension might explain the sickness that now gripped the army as a whole. Disease might also, to the medieval mind, symbolize sin and its consequences. Certainly, whatever rejoicing took place on the evening of 14 October would have been tempered with a sense of the need to give thanks to God.

  William is said to have pledged the battlefield itself to religion, even before the battle began. The site was subsequently given to the monks of Marmoutier on the Loire, on the understanding that they would found there an abbey to commemorate the day’s events. Within a few years, penance was officially imposed upon all of those who had fought at Hastings. We know the precise terms here, and they speak of a Norman army as much bewildered by its own success as boastful of its victories. For every man that he had slain in the battle (and we might note here that Hastings was already being described not just as a battle but as ‘The Great Battle’), the killer was to fast on bread and water for a year; for every man struck but not necessarily killed, forty days of penance; for everyone not sure of the number that they had slain, a day of penance for every week remaining to them for the rest of their lives. Those who fought motivated only by greed were to be treated as murderers, sentenced to three years of fasting. No doubt there were many at Hastings who had kept no exact tally of the number they had killed or wounded, or who were not entirely sure, even in their own minds, whether they had fought for personal gain or for the glory of God. To such people, perhaps the majority of William’s army, the battle was a great victory, but a victory earned only at peril to their immortal souls. Summing up the guilt and bloodshed of Hastings, a monk of the monastery later founded on the battle site reported that ‘the fields were covered with corpses, and all around the only colour to meet the gaze was blood red. It looked as if a river of blood filled the valleys.’ The blood shed at Hastings was to stain the next four centuries of English history.

  NORMAN ENGLAND

  William the Conqueror

  Everyone knows, or thinks they know, what happened as a result of the Battle of Hastings. The Norman Conquest of 1066 ushered in a century of Anglo-Norman rule, in which William of Normandy, his sons and grandson, established a powerful feudal monarchy in England. For the first time since the Romans departed, England was brought into direct conjunction with continental Europe. French became the dominant language of the court and of an aristocracy itself now more French than English. Ruthless Anglo-Norman efficiency triumphed over the ramshackle ‘mucking along’ of Anglo-Saxon England. This is the gist of the matter. In reality, however, each part of this equation could be deconstructed and disproved.

  Norman Conquest?

  What happened at Hastings was not a ‘Conquest’ but merely a Norman victory in battle followed by the coronation of William as King of England on Christmas Day 1066. Christmas, the festival of Christ’s nativity, was an appropriate date for the birth of a new monarchy and all the more appropriate given that it had been on Christmas Day, in the year 800, that Charlemagne, King of the Franks had chosen to be crowned not just as King but as Emperor (the origin of the so-called ‘Holy Roman Empire’, successor, after a hiatus of more than 300 years, to the vanished western empire of Rome). Once again there was a self-consciousness about Norman actions in 1066 that speaks volumes about their sense of treading in the footsteps of the great. William’s Christmas coronation was undoubtedly a significant event. In all likelihood it served as the final climax of the Bayeux Tapestry, now sadly mutilated at its further edge, but originally perhaps recounting the story of the Normans, from an image of Edward the Confessor enthroned and issuing instructions to Harold, via the coronation of Harold near its centre, through to the coronation of William in the aftermath of the great battle.

  Yet coronation, even a coronation on Christmas Day, was a long way from Conquest. The English had lost one king, Harold, widely regarded as a usurper, only to acquire another whose usurpation had been even more sudden, more public and more violent. William was a foreigner, a bastard, and some would say a murderer. No less than Macbeth, whose real historical exploits had only recently erupted upon the stage of Scottish history, his path to the throne had been drenched in blood. Even in territorial terms, as a result of Hastings William controlled little English land save for those parts of Sussex and Kent through which his army had marched during the past three months. Like Swein after 1013, or Cnut after 1016, he might have been expected to temper invasion with accommodation. The English earls would retain their lands, now serving a Norman king rather than a Danish or an English one. The royal court would become a bilingual Anglo-Norman affair, closely linked to northern France, just as after 1016 the court of Cnut had looked as much to Scandinavian as to native English affairs. England itself would endure. Regime change would not provoke any more permanent upheaval. To this extent, there was a Norman coronation in 1066, but no Conquest. Conquest only came afterwards and was to occupy William and his men for at least a decade after the Battle of Hastings. Hastings itself, and the events of 1066, are known to us in
a detail quite remarkable by the standards of medieval reportage. The events of the later 1060s and 70s, by contrast, still remain largely mysterious. We can write the history of the Norman invasion with some confidence. That of the Conquest remains conjectural and still hotly disputed.

  Feudalism

  Whatever the schoolbooks may claim, William did not introduce feudalism into England, let alone ‘feudal’ monarchy. ‘Feudalism’ is a modern rather than a medieval concept, invented in the eighteenth century and from the start invested with a pejorative meaning, intended not merely to describe but to castigate a system of lordly privilege and peasant subjection already, by the 1750s, on the eve of passing away. The French revolutionaries after 1789 proclaimed the destruction of feudalism to be one of their principal intentions. Even today, those invested with the French Légion d’honneur swear an oath in which they proclaim their determination ‘to combat any enterprise which strives to reintroduce the feudal regime, and the titles and qualities which were its attributes’. In this scenario, feudalism is as far removed from the sort of strong and centralized monarchy that William of Normandy introduced into England as Socialism is from the policies of most Socialists. By scooping up not only the traditional lands of the English kings and queens, the so-called royal ‘demesne’, but also the lands of the vastly wealthy Godwin family and their supporters, in the aftermath of Hastings William laid the foundations of a royal estate that entirely eclipsed the wealth and power of any ruler of Anglo-Saxon England before 1066, rivalling indeed the sort of accumulated spoils of conquest to which Julius Caesar or the Roman emperors of antiquity had laid claim.