Women
As the rampant biting stallions of the Bayeux Tapestry most splendidly illustrate, this was a violently male society. Historians indeed are hard put to find any role for women within this environment save as heiresses or passive transmitters of cultural memory. The old legend that Duke William’s wife, Matilda, sat at home embroidering the Bayeux Tapestry whilst her men-folk went to war, is no longer credited. The Tapestry itself was probably designed within a monastic environment, St Augustine’s Abbey at Canterbury being the most favoured of the various suggested workshops, planned and in part executed by men rather than women. Even so, to ignore half of the human population merely because they make little impact or noise amidst the record of warfare and kingship would be a foolish dereliction of the historian’s duty. It was via a woman, Emma, the mother of Edward the Confessor, that the Norman claim to the English throne was first transmitted. It was from the circle of another woman, Edith the Confessor’s queen, that we obtain our most detailed record of the Confessor’s reign, the so-called ‘Vita Edwardi’. Women, such as William of Normandy’s daughter, Adela of Blois, played a crucial role in transmitting Norman propaganda to other parts of France, and it was via marriage to English heiresses that at least some of the Norman conquerors laid claim to their new English estates.
The greatest of these heiresses, Matilda, the wife of the Conqueror’s youngest son, the future King Henry I, was not only the great-great-granddaughter of King Aethelred but the daughter of a female saint, Queen Margaret of Scotland (d.1093). Such was the significance of Matilda’s marriage into the Norman ruling dynasty and the consequent merging of the blood of Norman and Saxon kings, that courtiers after 1100 are said to have referred to the King and Queen as Godric and Godgifu, precisely because they affected to behave like the low-born English. It was via the children of Henry and Matilda that the bloodlines of England and Normandy were truly united. Not a drop of English royal blood had flowed in the veins of William of Normandy or of King Henry I. By contrast, Henry I’s daughter and grandsons were the direct descendants not only of Rollo of Normandy but of Alfred, Aethelred and the English kings of yore. Even for those Norman lords who did not marry English heiresses, English women may have played a significant role. It was possibly via English wet nurses, recruited from the middling or lower levels of English-speaking society, that the English language itself was communicated to future generations of bilingual Norman lords.
Buildings
Although Anglo-Saxon England bequeathed some of its language to the Normans, the greatest of its bequests was paid not in words but in cash. The Conquest of 1066, followed by the looting of England and the emptying out of the strong boxes and treasuries of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy released more liquid wealth into the European economy than arguably any single event since the fall of Rome. The barbarians who had toppled the Roman Empire after 450 ad turned their wealth into treasure, into gold and silver objects to be hoarded and admired but for the most part later to be melted down and entirely lost to posterity. The Normans took their spoils in cash, and used the money to buy themselves some of the most impressive and long-lasting monuments ever raised in the history of the world. English tourists today who flock to view the great pyramids of Cairo or the Aztec ruins of Mexico would do well to reflect that on their own back doorstep there are man-made stone structures just as impressive as anything that the ancient civilizations of America or Egypt can boast.
The great cathedrals raised in England after 1066 were built on a scale to dwarf not only the relatively modest stone structures of the Anglo-Saxon Church but even to rival the greatest achievements of Rome. By 1100, a traveller to western Europe, seeking out the longest, widest and tallest stone buildings would have been well advised to book a ticket for England. Listed in terms of length, breadth and volume, the greatest buildings in Christendom were the churches of St Peter and St Paul in Rome, the church of Hagia Sophia in Byzantium, and the Roman Pantheon, at least judged in terms of its height. On the Rhine our tourist could view the massive cathedral at Speyer, constructed as the mausoleum of the Holy Roman emperors of Germany. On the Rhône stood the abbey of Cluny, in some ways the most impressive monastic building ever raised. Thereafter, all of the greatest monuments lay in England, all of them constructed from their foundations upwards in the thirty years since 1066. They included the cathedral churches of Winchester, Ely, Canterbury and Norwich, shortly to be joined by Durham, and by the great abbey of Bury St Edmunds. Norwich and Canterbury were planned to be exactly the same length as the pope’s church of Old St Peter’s in Rome. Winchester and Bury were quite deliberately made longer still. These were buildings on a scale unknown to the Normans before 1066. Indeed, most of the cathedrals of Normandy, even those constructed after the Conquest, could have been fitted twice over into the great nave of Winchester.
This is not to suggest that the Normans of Normandy, as opposed to the Normans now settled in England, reaped no benefits from the conquest of 1066. On the contrary, the duchy experienced an economic miracle. Stone-quarrying in particular became a new boom industry, particularly for the oolitic limestone quarries in the vicinity of Caen. Caen stone could be easily carved and retained the crispness of its carving. It was also a pale shade of whitish cream that clearly appealed to those who built with it. This alone does not explain why Caen stone was imported in such vast quantities into England, not just in the immediate aftermath of 1066 but for more than two centuries thereafter. Caen stone was still being used in the 1180s, for the facing of Henry II’s great keep at Dover Castle, and in the 1270s for Henry III’s rebuilding of Westminster Abbey. The Norman export of stone cannot be explained simply by the lack of high quality native stone in England. On the contrary, Purbeck stone from Dorset or Barnack stone from the vicinity of Peterborough were both perfectly respectable building materials. Rather it seems that the use of imported building materials was a deliberate gesture by the new Norman patrons of the English Church, intended literally to set the conquest in stone.
Wealth Flows into Normandy
As this suggests, wealth flowed in huge quantities from England into Normandy. Much of it, we can assume, was squandered on wine, women and song, as popular after 1066 as after any great military campaign. Even so, a great deal of treasure still came to rest in Normandy. Many of the best and most luxurious Anglo-Saxon manuscripts survive today not in English but in Norman libraries, acquired by Norman monks and their patrons after 1066 and sent back as souvenirs of conquest to the home country. For the Norman economy, we have few reliable statistics, but those we do possess suggest a vast influx of cash into the duchy. Receipts from tolls on the bridge of St-Lô, where the bishop of Coutances constructed a new ‘bourg’ or trading settlement, are said to have increased from 15 livres to 220 in the period between 1048 and 1093.
Without displaying quite that degree of megalomania and vulgarity that led the church builders of England to besiege heaven with their vaults and towers, the Church in Normandy acquired many new buildings and new religious foundations. Large quantities of land in England were given over directly to Norman monasteries or to the greater monastic confederations of the duchy. The abbey of Bec, for example, acquired land in nearly twenty English counties and on several of these estates founded priories directly dependent upon Bec’s rule, from St Neots in Huntingdonshire to Chester on the border with Wales. The significance of this influx of wealth to Normandy can perhaps best be judged by the effects upon the Norman Church, a century and half later, when these English resources were suddenly cut off. The register of Archbishop Odo of Rouen, recording the archbishop’s year by year perambulation of his diocese from the 1240s onwards, provides vivid testimony to the collapsed towers, the leaking roofs and the ruinous state of a large number of religious houses in Normandy that had previously depended upon revenues from their English estates, now difficult or impossible to raise. As for the building programmes undertaken in England, the folie de grandeur of those who undertook them even now threatens t
o bankrupt English Heritage or whatever other public body is entrusted with the care and upkeep of the greater cathedrals raised on the spoils of the Conquest. A rationalist would no doubt have had them all pulled down and something more convenient, and less expensive to heat and light, raised in their place. Precisely these sorts of plan were entertained by the Cromwellians of the 1640s, who did indeed draw up a scheme for the demolition of Winchester Cathedral, in some ways the whitest elephant of them all.
Wealth and Rents in England
The release of hoarded wealth after 1066 allowed the Norman conquerors to indulge the most lavish and in some cases megalomaniac of schemes. In England, although Domesday Book suggests that some areas of the country may have suffered heavily as a result of plunder and destruction, most obviously after the harrying of the north in 1070, which Orderic Vitalis tells us was accompanied by a deliberate policy of famine and depopulation probably no less violent than that attempted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks of the 1920s in the Ukraine; by 1086 even in parts of the north, some estates were rendering higher rents than they had paid twenty years before. No doubt this was in part the result of an increasingly predatory style of lordship. The Norman newcomers were able to extract rents and services which their Anglo-Saxon predecessors had been unable or reluctant to demand. Above all, they tended to rent out their land for money rather than exploiting it directly. There is an entire technical vocabulary that historians employ for this process, but in essence we are dealing here with the renting out of resources to farmers who paid an annual cash fee or ‘farm’ for the land that they cultivated, rather than with the direct exploitation of a landlord’s resources, his ‘demesne’. Most lords retained some sort of demesne, sometimes hundreds or even thousands of acres, but the majority of land, both of the barons and the Church, was farmed for cash. The effect here was to ensure that the Normans had the necessary cash resources, from their rents and from the profits of war, to invest in new ventures, not just in the great cathedrals and monasteries but in such commercial enterprises as mills and tanneries, mineral extraction and iron works.
In Normandy, the mill was one of the great symbols of lordly authority, with a monopoly over the milling of all or nearly all of the grain grown by the neighbouring peasantry and hence the right to charge heavily for the flour that constituted the chief staple of peasant diet. Other lordly monopolies included the right to control clearance of waste land on the fringes of the cultivated zone, a process known as ‘assarting’, from the French ‘essarter’, to grub up. Lords also extracted labour services from the peasants on their land, so many days a week a year of work on the lord’s demesne, and fixed dues such as the ‘heriot’, the best beast payable when the son of a peasant inherited his father’s lands, or ‘merchet’, the right to payment when the peasant’s daughter married and thereby deprived the lord of that portion of her future labour now devoted to her husband’s family. Depending upon the extent of such services owed, the peasant was regarded as more or less free, ranging from the semi-slave condition of peasants forbidden to leave their lands, to the relatively free peasantry of the Danelaw regions of Lincolnshire and East Anglia, where the peasant not only possessed the right to buy and sell land but to leave it should he wish.
Peasant Life
Much debate surrounds the degree to which the Norman Conquest impacted upon peasant life, and a lot of this writing has been influenced by more recent political debates. The old story, for example, that the Normans introduced the concept of the ‘lord’s first night’, the right to deflower all peasant virgins at the time of their marriage, is little more than an eighteenth-century libel, broadcast by the enemies of lordly privilege on the eve of the French Revolution to blacken the reputation of the old regime. It would in fact be possible to argue that the conditions of large numbers of peasants improved as a result of the Norman Conquest. Henceforth, outright enslavement of prisoners or captives like brute animals was forbidden by the Church. These rulings were first enacted, ironically enough, at the same Council of Westminster in 1102 which saw the introduction to England of draconian legislation against sodomy. As this suggests, one set of freedoms is generally gained only at the expense of another. The romanticized, Tolkienesque idea of the Anglo-Saxon peasant living in close proximity and joshing sympathy with his social betters, the sort of peasants of whom Trollope or Tolstoy would have approved, is very largely a myth. There were massive social divisions before 1066, however much the Church might attempt to gloss over the gulf by describing those who toiled, those who prayed and those who fought, the three orders of society, as parts of an indivisible and symbiotic whole. Even so, after the Conquest there was an increase in lordly privilege, an increasingly legalistic definition of social standing, and a rush towards the identification of lordly privileges and perquisites that undoubtedly depressed the standing and prospects of as much as ninety-five per cent of the population.
Villeinage, serfdom, the peasant economy, became a legal as well as a human reality, hedged about with new restrictions and obligations that bonded the peasant to his land and made escape from the manor or from the condition of serfdom increasingly difficult. Sir Walter Scott, whose Ivanhoe supplies perhaps the most powerful nineteenth-century vision of post-Conquest England, was indulging in gross exaggeration when he portrayed his English peasants after 1066 choked with massive metal collars as the symbol of their slavery. The good old English lords of Ivanhoe are portrayed oafishly drinking themselves to death whilst a new generation of brutal and domineering Normans, the Reginald Front-de-Boeufs of the Conquest, lord it over a cowering and conquered land. Scott was influenced here by events of his own day, by a romanticized vision of the symbiosis of Scotland’s lords and peasants, by the experience of Napoleonic conquest that gave the French a less than perfect name as imperialists, and by his loathing for a cosmopolitan and urban conformity that he saw corroding the old verities of locality, place and position. Medieval history has sometimes been written by radical reformers, seeking to parody the iniquities of the present in the brutalities of the past, sometimes by political conservatives, such as Scott, keen to contrast the good old days with present day inequality and ruin. Neither party is likely to do full justice to the reality of the past.
As in more recent times, after 1066 the withering away of liberties and the sharpening of social divisions between haves and have-nots went hand in hand with a general upsurge in prosperity. The most prosperous times are often those that witness the greatest erosion of the liberties of the many faced with the privilege of the few. It is another general rule of agrarian economies, not least of the Ukraine after the great famine of the 1920s, or most of western Europe after the terrible trans-continental wars of the 1640s, 1750s, 1800s or 1940s, that agriculture recovers relatively rapidly even after the most severe looting or conquest. Livestock or seed grain may be stolen or driven away, barns may be burned and the harvest ruined, but the land itself abides. All that is required for its recultivation is sufficient new investment, and this is generally forthcoming from the profits of conquest, no matter who wins the war. The Conquest, for all the obligations it placed upon peasants to remain bonded to their land, did little or nothing to stifle social mobility or to deter economic migration.
Towns
Towns, already a feature of the Anglo-Saxon landscape, not least as a result of King Alfred’s deliberate encouragement of walled ‘burhs’ such as Oxford or Wallingford as outposts of West Saxon defence against the Danes, did not cease their expansion after 1066. On the contrary, the forced wanderings of many hundreds of dispossessed Anglo-Saxon landlords, the chaos and disruption of the rebellions and disturbances in places as widely dispersed as Ely or Exeter, all contributed to the likelihood that many thousands of peasants would uproot themselves and seek refuge and a new life in the town.
Rather like the Third World cities of today, the towns of the Middle Ages were towns within towns. On the one hand stood the privileged townspeople or ‘burgesses’, renting or owning their
own burgages or stalls and houses, in legal terms regarded as free men and women. On the other stood the migrant workers, the incomers and those on the fringes of society, often resented by the established population. The slums of Dickensian London, the tenements of early twentieth-century Glasgow, or indeed the modern shanty towns of Calcultta, Rio or Istanbul give us some idea of the degree to which the official picture of a city and its population often fails to account for the vast numbers of people settled on its semi-legal margins. To this extent, attempts to use official records such as Domesday to calculate the population either of towns or villages are little more than educated guesswork. Migrants and economic refugees very rarely impact upon such statistics. What must be apparent is that England, after 1066, was thrown into turmoil, not merely for a year or two as William established his rule, but for most of the period up to 1086 when the Domesday survey at last allows us to view the scene, to some extent with the dust now settled upon it. To this extent, the Conquest provoked perhaps the greatest hiatus in English history before the social disintegration brought about by the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485 Page 12
