A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  As in any time of revolution or vast upheaval, it is hardly surprising that the Normans sought to secure the verdict of posterity by establishing permanent monuments to themselves. It generally takes a fire, a war or a revolution to replan any city, and in the longer term there is no more conservative city or nation than one (e.g. Paris or Vienna) that has regularly been replanned. Most of what we today assume to be the age-old symbols of an unaltered past are in reality the visible stone icebergs thrust upwards from periods of profound turmoil and disintegration. Revolutionaries build on a massive scale because they are only too aware of the fragility of human achievement. In much this way, the great buildings of post-Conquest England, today read as symbols of calm endurance, the backdrop to Barchester and the sweet mutterings of church choirs, were in reality shocking statements of the new. Via their imported Caen stone and their massive proportions they proclaimed a new social order and the achievements of a new master race, content to think of itself, and to be thought of, in the most grandiose and epic of terms. The great churches of post-Conquest England were imperial symbols, every bit as politicized and controversial as the hammer and sickle of communist Russia, English post boxes in Ireland, or the mycelium-like spread of MacDonalds and Starbucks across the modern Third World.

  Fashion and Lifestyle

  Other badges came to signify the Normans and their ‘Normanness’, or as they would have called it, in Latin, their ‘Normannitas’. We cannot peep inside the wardrobe of William the Conqueror, though, so far as we can tell, the basic repertoire of clothing, shirts, vests, cloaks, hose for the men, longer more flowing garments for the women, were much the same in England before 1066 as they were in Normandy. The Bayeux Tapestry, our chief source here, nonetheless suggests that there was a quite deliberate distinction between Norman and English ways of dressing hair. Hair itself is a major though often neglected aspect of human history. From the hairy Esau to the smooth Jacob, and from Christ depicted without a beard to the bearded kings and emperors of the twelfth century, shifts in the aesthetics and cultural significance of hair may tell us a lot about more profound social change. Norman men, it is clear, wore their hair short and in a style that today one associates with those too mean or too mad to pay a barber, with the back of the head shaved a long way upwards towards the crown. The Bayeux Tapestry and contemporary Norman chroniclers tell us that the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy wore their hair long, combed and anointed ‘nancy boys’, as one highly idiomatic modern translation of the Song of the Battle of Hastings puts it. Certainly, the Normans regarded long hair as a sign of effeminacy. The court of William the Conqueror’s son, William Rufus, became notorious for allowing its men to grow their hair parted in the middle so that their foreheads were shamefully bared, for encouraging them to wear absurd shoes with pointed toes curling backwards at the tip like scorpion tails, and for dousing the lights so that all manner of crimes might be committed after sunset. We have already encountered the 1102 sanctions against sodomy, enacted two years after William Rufus’ death, and it was almost certainly as a sodomite that the chroniclers sought to portray Rufus, albeit posthumously.

  Like gay-bashing through the ages, this in fact tells us as much about the writers of such reports as it does about those whose deeds they reported. If for the Normans moral corruption was associated with effeminacy (and we need to remember here that women in general were believed tainted with the sin of Eve), then moral strength lay in the masculine and the manly. If jests and absurd dress were the qualities of a sodomite, then only those who took themselves very seriously indeed could hope for redemption. Despite the wealth released by the Norman Conquest, the Normans themselves were not to be tempted into luxury or ease. In their own eyes, they were more Spartans than Romans, Greeks rather than lazy Trojans blinded by Helen’s beauty. Seriousness and a refusal to laugh at oneself are qualities essential to any would-be empire builder. From the Pharoahs to Cecil Rhodes, and from Nebuchadnezzar to Mussolini, the would-be imperial court is a place where laughter has to be concealed behind a scowl and where the absurd has to be accepted, at least in public, with absolute seriousness. Such places also tend to pose very stark alternatives between good and bad, loyalty and treason, the ins and the outs. Time is short, and empires, even on the map, are generally not coloured in shades of beige.

  Norman Empire

  There is no doubt that William the Conqueror, whether by accident or more likely by design, built an empire for himself. By 1066, he had already campaigned on the southern and western frontiers of Normandy, in Maine and Brittany. After 1066, not only did he add England to his conquests, but the Normans continued to press southwards towards the Loire, establishing a frontier against the rival power of the counts of Anjou. William’s son and successor, William Rufus, was to die in 1100 dreaming of a vast campaign of conquest that would carry Norman authority southwards to Aquitaine and Bordeaux. This official record of conquest was only part of a much wider story of heroic Norman endeavour. At almost precisely the same time that the Normans were conquering England or pushing southwards into Maine, groups of exiles, either no longer welcome or unable to prosper at the ducal court, many of them from the frontier regions of southern Normandy, took their ambition elsewhere, to southern Italy where, from the 1050s onwards, they began to carve out what would eventually become the Norman kingdom of Sicily, comprising not just Sicily itself but a large part of mainland Italy, as far north as Naples and the southern hinterlands of Rome. One of the reasons why the Pope was so anxious to appease William the Conqueror, both in 1066 and thereafter, was that on his own back doorstep the papal lands were menaced by the rise of this new Norman power in the south.

  The Norman conquest of southern Italy was guaranteed in 1071, when the Byzantine empire was at last forced to abandon its outpost at Bari, and finally crowned in 1130, when the last of the Norman dukes in Apulia began to style himself not merely as a duke but as King. In the meantime, both from their northern and their new southern lands, the Normans of Normandy, England and Sicily played a glorious part in what was widely portrayed as one of the more glorious episodes in the history of Christendom: the ‘liberation’, after 1095, of the Holy Places of the East, culminating on 15 July 1099 with the capture by the army of the First Crusade of Christ’s own city of Jerusalem. No matter that, like a lot of Norman enterprise, this was a bloody affair, and that the fall of Jerusalem was followed by a massacre, not just of its former Islamic occupiers but of all those members of the population foolish enough to have swallowed their valuables in the hope of preserving them from harm. The crusaders (if reports are to be believed, although these reports are themselves merely copied from the Jewish writer Josephus, describing what the Roman imperial army had done in Jerusalem after its capture in 70 ad) made a large bonfire and reduced the bodies to ash, in the hope of extracting precious metals and jewels from the pyre. Like many such ‘liberations’, the liberation of Jerusalem by the crusaders might be read as something closer to an enslavement of those it supposedly freed. From a Norman perspective, what mattered here was that the Normans had played so prominent a role in yet another great conquest. From Hastings, via Bari to Jerusalem, they were now indisputably the greatest warrior-race that Europe had experienced since the Romans or the Huns.

  And here, of course, hubris began to lurch inexorably towards nemesis. The idea of the Normans as a master race, as we shall see, was a myth no less attractive and no less fictitious than any others of the myths that the now-conquered Anglo-Saxons had once told about themselves. From their reading of Virgil or Caesar, the Normans learned how to behave like imperialists, how to carve out an imperial destiny for themselves. From the very monuments and methods of their success, however, they perhaps acquired that delight in irony and the absurd that has ever afterwards been a central feature of the English sense of humour. To what extent, one wonders, did the Normans themselves ever truly believe in their own invincibility? Seriousness often begets self-mockery and the very richest talent for irony.


  FROM HASTINGS TO HENRY II,

  1066–1154

  The deeds of kings and the plotting of their advisers constitute only one small aspect of human history. We know about such things in a detail and with a clear chronological trajectory that we lack for the broader and deeper transformations within society. Hence the fact that stories of the wars of good and bad kings occupy so prominent a place in books of history: a rule that applies not just to medieval England, but to the Old Testament books of Kings and Chronicles. Throughout the Bible, and hence throughout the Christian Middle Ages, dynastic narrative served to underpin mankind’s understanding of the past. Kingly history cannot be avoided; indeed, deployed wisely it can lend a structure and coherence to the broader canvas of events that might otherwise be lacking.

  The deeds of the kings and queens of Norman England can be briefly told. In many ways they are less significant than the background of conquest and colonization against which they were played out. They carry us, via the last twenty years of William the Conqueror, through the reigns of his sons Robert in Normandy and William Rufus in England, to the death of Henry I, the last of these sons, in 1135 and the accession of a grandson of the Conqueror, Stephen of Blois, in circumstances that led to civil war and the division of England into a series of hostile camps. The civil war of the 1130s and 40s was resolved only in 1154, nearly a century after Hastings, with the accession to the throne of a new dynasty, the Plantagenets, formerly counts of Anjou and hereditary arch-enemies of the dukes of Normandy. In turn, the Plantagenet succession, as we shall see, far from resolving the problems of the first century of Norman rule merely posed further problems of its own.

  Surviving records

  Fundamental to all this were questions raised and never properly resolved by the Conquest after 1066. How were the descendants of William the Conqueror to legitimize their rule and succession when their title to the throne had come to them only through bloodshed and main force? How were such kings to resolve the lopsided realities of a dominion or empire, divided by the Channel, ruled by Normans yet powered by England’s wealth? Our knowledge of events is sketchier than we might wish. Only for William the Conqueror and King Stephen do we have contemporary ‘lives’, and, compared with modern day ideas of biography, both of these leave a great deal to be desired. The ‘Gesta Guillelmi’ or ‘Deeds of William’ by William of Poitiers was written to sanitize William’s part in the violent overthrow of Anglo-Saxon England. In its present state, it breaks off, incomplete, shortly after William’s accession. The ‘Gesta Stephani’ describing the deeds of King Stephen was written to demonstrate the King’s recovery after the disasters of the early years of his reign. The fact that Stephen, far from recovering his reputation, then went on to even more ignominious failure perhaps explains why the author seems thereafter to have abandoned all interest in the King’s cause.

  The only surviving manuscript of William of Poitiers has been lost, burned in the great fire of 1731 that destroyed so much else of the library of Sir Robert Cotton. We need to remember here that our knowledge of the past is based upon small fragments of information, salvaged when the great bulk of medieval writing was destroyed, sometimes by accident, sometimes, as in the Dissolution of the Monasteries of the 1530s, by design. Cotton was one of those antiquaries who set out to salvage what he could from the scatterings of monastic archives. It was into his library, and those of his contemporaries such as Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, that an extraordinary proportion of the surviving chronicle and charter evidences for medieval England were gathered. The accidental burning of a large part of the Cotton library in 1731 destroyed an inestimable quantity of such materials, as can be seen, for example, from the blackened vestiges of Cotton’s copy of Magna Carta, still displayed in the British Library, its seal reduced to a formless lump, like a half-chewed toffee.

  Fortunately, in the world of manuscripts there are always discoveries to be made as well as losses to be reported. Another perhaps much better copy of William of Poitiers’ chronicle, said to have existed in the 1620s, has never been traced and may still lurk, unrecognized, on the shelves of a private library in France. Stranger things have come to light even in the past few years. It used to be believed that both the ‘Vita Edwardi’, our principal source for the life of Edward the Confessor, and the so-called Encomium, a sort of life of King Cnut, survived in single manuscripts, in one case incomplete. Then, within a period of only a few months in 2009, not only did a second complete and indeed extended copy of the ‘Encomium’ emerge from a library in Devon, but a large chunk of the ‘Vita Edwardi’, previously unknown to scholarship, turned up in the British Library, copied out by a sixteenth-century antiquary whose papers had never been properly surveyed. Medieval history is not just about making patterns from small pieces of evidence. It involves hunting down the evidence itself, often to strange or unexpected places.

  For those unfamiliar with such sources, it is important to bear in mind that medieval biography omits an enormous amount that today we would take for granted. It rarely includes dates. It may supply only the briefest and most stylized of descriptions of personality, personal appearance, personal taste or friendships, indeed of all of those qualities that we would today assume essential features of a human life. Sexuality, let alone psychology, lay well beyond the bounds of what biographers could describe. Even if mentioned, most often through the delineation of sexual misdeeds, adultery or fornication, references to the king’s sex life are generally to be read in a moral rather than a literal sense, as an indication of the degree to which a fallible individual failed to heed God’s imperatives. The models for this sort of writing lay partly in the Bible, partly in the work of classical historians, above all of Suetonius, the highly scandalous, highly moralizing biographer of the Roman emperors. As a result, we cannot expect medieval biographies, particularly royal biographies, to supply anything other than the crudest and most distorted of portraits. Even when their details seem authentic, we must take care that they are not simply copied from Suetonius or some account of an Old Testament king.

  A fragmentary account of William the Conqueror, for example, supposedly written by a monk of Caen, tell us that the King was very abstemious in his use of wine and rarely drank more than three times at a meal. This is, in fact, a detail copied directly from Einhard’s Life of the Emperor Charlemagne, and in turn, by Einhard from Suetonius’ life of the Roman Emperor, Augustus. It tells us nothing reliable about the drinking habits of William the Conqueror, though it may potentially tell us a great deal of the imperial models which William and his biographers were keen to ape. For the rest, we depend upon chroniclers such as William of Malmesbury, Orderic Vitalis and Henry of Huntingdon, all of whom had particular axes to grind, all of whom set out to moralize their histories, chiefly by pairing off good against bad kings, and most of whom were writing long after the events they described, in an attempt to explain to themselves and their own bewildered contemporaries how such a cataclysmic event as the Norman Conquest had come to pass. The surviving letters and charters of the kings themselves may sometimes assist us in establishing who was at court, or where exactly the King was, but these charters are rarely dated, leaving even such matters as the King’s day-by-day movements, his ‘itinerary’, largely hidden from us. For the entire period of William I’s reign, for example, from 1066 to his death in 1087, we know the King’s precise whereabouts for only 42 days out of about 7,500.

  William the Conqueror’s first five years as king were spent dealing with the rebellions and invasion scares that convulsed the English after 1066. In 1070, re-enacting his coronation of Christmas 1066, he was crowned King by papal legates, at Easter, the feast of Christ’s rebirth, in an attempt to set a seal of papal approval upon the Conquest. In the same year, at the Council of Winchester, all but one of the surviving English bishops were removed from office, including Stigand, the scandalous archbishop of Canterbury. This paved the way for William to promote Lanfranc as head of the English Church. In 10
72, having put down risings at Peterborough and Ely, William was able to lead a joint land and sea operation against the Scots and their king, Malcolm Canmore, resulting in the so-called peace of Abernethy. Malcolm recognized William as his overlord and surrendered hostages for his future good conduct. In 1068, William had already visited Cornwall, being perhaps the first King of England to do so in the past century, putting down the rebellions that had troubled Exeter and the West Country and appointing a Breton as earl. In 1070 during the harrying of the north, he had built castles at Stafford and Chester intended to offer future protection against the Welsh. In the 1080s, he intervened in disputes between the rival Welsh princes of Morgannwg and Deheubath, personally travelling as far west as St David’s, in theory as a pilgrim, in practice as part of an itinerary intended to emphasize his political authority. His successor, William II, in the 1090s, kept up the pressure on the Scots and Welsh, expelling the local ruler appointed to Cumbria by the Scots king, refounding the Roman garrison town of Carlisle as a new outpost of Norman rule and, on the east coast, pushing his rule as far north as Bamburgh and the Tweed. These were the actions of an imperial regime, extending Norman rule to the furthest corners of what might be regarded as England and beyond.

  Having dealt with the Scots, William I retired to Normandy where he remained for all but a few months of his final years, troubled by disputes in northern France, where Flanders now emerged as an enemy rather than an ally. Maine, on his southern frontier, was only with difficulty restored to Norman control, henceforth disputed by William’s powerful southern neighbours, the counts of Anjou. In 1074, the collapse of a rebellion by Edgar the Aetheling, last of the surviving great-grandsons of King Aethelred, and in the following year, the brutal suppression of the rebellion led by the earls of East Anglia, Hereford and Northumbria, appeared to usher in a new period of stability in England. At Christmas 1075, as if to symbolize the end of the old order, William attended the funeral of Queen Edith, the widow of Edward the Confessor and sister of Harold Godwinson, laid to rest in Westminster Abbey. The execution of Earl Waltheof of Northumbria, however, and the subsequent miracles said to have been worked at his tomb in Crowland Abbey, where he was venerated as a martyr, merely paved the way for yet further Anglo-Norman hostilities. Orderic Vitalis blamed the death of Waltheof, the last of the English earls, for all of King William’s subsequent troubles.