A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  These troubles took a predictable and familiar form. The question of succession and legitimacy had long loomed over English history, from the death of Aethelred in 1016, through to Edward the Confessor’s failure to nominate an heir in the 1050s and 60s. In 1078, the same issue re-emerged, this time as a result of quarrels within the family of William the Conqueror. William had at least four sons, one of whom died young, killed, as we have seen, in a hunting accident widely interpreted as God’s punishment for Norman pride. The eldest of the sons, Robert known as ‘Curthose’ (‘short legs’ or ‘short stockings’), had been promised the succession to the duchy of Normandy from at least 1063, aged only thirteen. With his father refusing to relinquish control over Normandy’s affairs, Robert increasingly considered himself cheated of his rightful position and authority. In 1078, he rebelled, so Orderic Vitalis tells us as the result of a family quarrel in which his younger brothers, William Rufus and Henry, playing dice in a room above Robert’s lodgings, jokingly urinated on Robert and his attendants. Henry was only ten years old at the time, Rufus eighteen. We seem to be here in the same sort of ‘broken society’ of binge drinking adolescents that modern politicians claim to be so anxious to ‘heal’. Like many absurd family quarrels, this one had serious consequences. In the ensuing family war, Robert personally wounded his father in a skirmish fought outside Gerberoy to the north-west of Beauvais. William was only saved through the intervention of an Englishman, Toki of Wallingford, a remarkable instance of the way in which a Norman king could now trust to the loyalty of the very people that he had met and defeated in battle less than twenty years earlier.

  Although relations between William and Robert were thereafter patched up, tensions between father and son were widely reported by contemporaries and never entirely resolved. After 1084, Robert once again broke with his family and spent the next three years, through to his father’s death in 1087, as an exile from Normandy. Such dissension was only increased in 1082 when William arrested and imprisoned his half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, accused of plotting to succeed as king or even of attempting to buy himself the papal throne in Rome. The purchase of holy office, associated with the New Testament sinner Simon Magus mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, in the eleventh century had come to be seen as the most serious of crimes: simony, a sin which cried out for a root and branch reform of the Church’s affairs. The fact that Odo was accused not just of simony but specifically of attempting to use simony to gain the papal throne suggests a deliberate campaign of propaganda against him and the raking up of the most outrageous charges that any enemy could devise. Meanwhile, William’s arrest of Odo, the man responsible for commissioning the Bayeux Tapestry, still today the most optimistic and forthright statement of the Norman claim to the English throne, is a fitting symbol of the slide of William’s family towards disputation and the politics of revenge.

  Death of William the Conqueror

  The Conqueror died in 1087, as the result of a riding accident. In his final years William is reputed to have grown enormously fat. Assaulting the French town of Mantes, on the frontier between Normandy and France, he slipped in his saddle. The pommel rode up into his distended stomach, and he suffered fatal internal injuries. On his deathbed, although displaying traditional pious regard for the redemption of his soul, he failed to make any definite provision for the succession. As a result, there was yet another succession crisis, the first of many still to come. Between 1066 and 1216, a period of 150 years, no king of England came to the throne as the first born son of his predecessor, and not until 1272 did the succession of such a firstborn son occur in peacetime and apparently without dispute.

  William Rufus

  From the events of 1087, the Conqueror’s second son, William known as Rufus, the ‘red’, emerged with the greatest of the spoils. Crossing immediately to England and with the assistance of Archbishop Lanfranc, Rufus seized the treasury at Winchester and had himself crowned King in Westminster Abbey. Robert Curthose, still in disgrace and therefore absent from his father’s deathbed, found himself deprived of the larger part of his potential inheritance. The outcome was warfare between Robert as Duke of Normandy and Rufus as King of England. The vastly superior financial resources of England enabled Rufus to root Robert out of Normandy, at first under threat of military conquest, thereafter by the liberal disbursement of cash. After 1096, and in return for a massive payment of 10,000 marks, Rufus bought out Robert’s claim to Normandy. Robert himself used the money, itself an indication of the vast superiority of English over Norman wealth, to raise an army for the First Crusade. In theory, his arrangements with Rufus were set to last for three years. In practice, it was not expected that Robert would return from the East. As both parties were aware, Robert’s grandfather, the father of William the Conqueror, had embarked for Jerusalem in the 1030s and had never come back. In Robert’s case, however, not only did the First Crusade lend him enormous prestige but, returning via the Norman colony in southern Italy, it brought him a wife. The wife in turn brought him a son and heir, and a very considerable dowry with which once again to finance war against his brothers.

  Henry I

  Henry, the youngest of these brothers, and the only one of the Conqueror’s sons conceived after 1066 and hence born ‘in the purple’ as the son of a ruling king of England, had meanwhile outmanoeuvred Robert. In October 1100, hunting in the New Forest, William Rufus was accidentally shot through the heart by an arrow fired by one of his fellow huntsmen. Quite who fired the shot was never resolved, although most people blamed Walter Tirel, lord of Poix near Amiens. Attempts to expose a conspiracy have enjoyed little support. Henry, Rufus’ younger brother, was an unpleasant, ambitious and libidinous young man, but even he is unlikely to have stooped to fratricide. This did not mean that he was above scheming or making the very most of a God-sent opportunity. Without even waiting for Rufus to be buried, Henry rode pell-mell for Winchester to grab the family treasury, and then to London where he was crowned in Westminster Abbey only three days later, not, as was customary, by the Archbishop of Canterbury, but by the relatively junior bishop of London. His speed here, and the fact that he immediately issued a ‘coronation charter’, promising to revoke various of the more serious abuses of Rufus’ regime, indicate the panic of the moment. There was still no agreed procedure for royal succession and the victor in any succession dispute was likely to be the person closest to the scene of the late King’s death, with the fastest horses and the speediest access to the royal treasury.

  Henry’s seizure of the throne of England was a coup d’état just as dramatic and controversial as Rufus’ accession thirteen years earlier. Once again, Robert Curthose was deprived of what he believed to be his right. For the next twenty years, a large part of Henry’s energy was to be devoted to warfare, first against Curthose, then, following Curthose’s defeat and capture in the Battle of Tinchebrai in 1106, against William ‘Clito’ (‘the heir’), Curthose’s son. Clito was aged only four when his father disappeared into captivity but thereafter, backed by Henry’s principal enemies, King Louis VI of France and the counts of Anjou and Flanders, he emerged as the focal point for resistance to Henry’s rule. In 1119, at the Battle of Brémule on the frontiers between Normandy and the Ile-de-France, Henry defeated Louis VI. Clito fled from the battlefield, abandoning even his war horse, later returned to him by Henry I, fully equipped, as a gesture of deliberate and chivalric condescension. In return for peace and the freeing of Robert Curthose, Clito now offered to set out for Jerusalem with his father, and, this time, not return. The offer was refused. Instead, the death of Henry I’s only son, accidentally drowned in 1120, and the outbreak of yet further rebellion in Normandy, once again placed Clito, now in his early twenties, at the head of a coalition of rebels. As before, however, Henry’s superiority both in resources and generalship, led to the rebels’ defeat in battle, at Bourgtheroulde in 1124.

  Refusing any suggestion that he now recognize Clito as his heir, Henry I declared that the th
rone of England and, with it, rule over Normandy should pass to his daughter Matilda, married to Geoffrey of Anjou, son of Count Fulk, in a gesture intended to end hostilities between Normandy and Anjou. Clito protested, and for a while seemed to have gained the advantage, when the murder of Count Charles of Flanders and interventions by Louis VI as overlord to the Flemings, led to Clito being appointed Count Charles’ heir. News of Charles’ murder in Bruges is said to have reached London only two days after the event, giving some idea of the possible speed of communications across the Channel. As a grandson of Matilda of Flanders, the wife of William the Conqueror, Clito had at least some hereditary claim to the Flemish succession. With Flemish wealth and Flemish knights to back him, all seemed set for a major onslaught upon Normandy. Instead, Clito’s mishandling of his new authority, and the emergence of a rival claimant, Thierry of Alsace, backed by the financial support of Henry I led to civil war in Flanders, and in July 1128 to Clito’s death, assaulting Thierry’s castle at Aalst. Clito died childless. His father, Robert, outlived virtually every other member of his family, dying, still in captivity at Cardiff Castle, in February 1134, aged well over eighty. Robert had spent nearly thirty years in prison in relative comfort, writing poetry and learning Welsh, the futility of these pursuits signalling that essential lack of ruthlessness which had led to his being passed over as England’s king. Twenty months later, he was followed to the grave by Henry I, his younger brother and the last of the Conqueror’s sons.

  Family Quarrels

  All told then, from the 1070s through to the 1130s, the wealth and energy of the kings of England was devoted principally to warfare and foreign alliances and specifically to warfare provoked by family quarrels, fought out in Normandy and dragging in broad coalitions of northern French noblemen, from Flanders to Anjou, and from the kings of France to the counts of Alsace. An inestimable quantity of English silver and human life was expended in a quarrel provoked originally by a couple of teenagers urinating on their elder brother. There was a great deal more to the reigns of both Rufus and Henry I than just this narrative of family squabbling, but not surprisingly their contemporaries looked to moral or cosmic explanations to explain the turmoil. Both the Bible and classical antiquity are full of the contentions of sons against fathers, of brother against brother, and of the moral causes that were believed to explain such sickness within the body politic. To those seeking explanations, the rebellions of Curthose and the fact that the ruling family was increasingly given over to internal squabbling could only be interpreted as proof of the illegitimacy of Norman claims in England; fit punishment for the violent usurpation with which William the Conqueror had despoiled the Anglo-Saxons. In turn, this carries us back to another overriding theme in English history after 1066, the guilt that the Conquest had inspired.

  The Norman Myth

  As so often in human history, the apparent pride and arrogance of an imperial people masked deep-rooted anxiety as to the justifications for empire. Superficially, after 1066 the Normans seemed to be riding high. Not just in England but in southern Italy, and from the 1090s, in the Holy Land and Jerusalem itself, they carved a swathe across Christendom that their rivals and contemporaries regarded as little short of incredible. Like the Huns in the fifth century, or the armies of Charlemagne in the eighth, the Normans seemed to have erupted into human history fully formed and invincible. Beneath this veneer of invincibility and racial superiority, however, there were more troubling and complex realities. The Normans sought to present themselves as a master race of warriors, unbeatable in war, the chosen people of God. This, the so-called ‘Norman Myth’, was questioned even at the time and ever afterwards has fuelled the speculation of historians. In reality, the Normans had never constituted a race or a single bloodline. Like most other European tribal allegiances, with the possible and bizarre exception of the Basques, they comprised a mixture of Viking, Gallo-Roman and Frankish elements even before they emerged onto the historical stage. Their culture was the adopted Latin Christianity of Rome, and even their language was borrowed from France with only a small smattering of Scandinavian loan words, often for the technicalities of the sea by which the Vikings had first come south.

  The Christian culture of which they made so much, and by which they claimed their status as a chosen people of God, was itself compiled from a kaleidoscopic palette of Lombard, Lotharingian, Burgundian and Roman elements, as foreign churchmen, none more famous than Lanfranc, the first ‘Norman’ archbishop of Canterbury, were welcomed to the ducal court. Even the building style that they came to adopt in England after 1066, was not a truly native Norman style, but acquired, like the Norman war horse, in part from Spain, in part from Lotharingia and the German imperial lands of the north. Just as the Normans ransacked the libraries of conquered England for their most precious Anglo-Saxon books, so the books that they themselves introduced were for the most part copied not from Norman exemplars but from other centres of learning. The works of St Augustine, acquired by the new Norman cathedral at Sarum (later Salisbury) were copied from exemplars supplied from Flanders and Lotharingia, not from Normandy.

  In learning, in building, even in their warfare, where, after 1066, at their battles such as Tinchebrai or Brémule they adopted King Harold’s technique of riding to battle but fighting on foot, the Normans were the most brazen and parasitical of plagiarists. Their greatest thinkers, first the Italian Lanfranc, then the equally Italian Anselm, were outsiders. As with the later American acclamation of immigrant intellectuals and artists, from Rachmaninov to Einstein, it was as if the Normans lacked confidence in their own native talent. Like the British imperialists of the nineteenth century who insisted that their greatest musicians all have German or Italian names, as if no one named Smith or Jones could compete with a Hallé or a Melba, the Normans may have harboured something of a chip on their shoulder about their relative lack of cultural sophistication. Normannitas or Normanness was chiefly something related to warfare and the ability to win battles. Real culture, the Normans seem to have felt, was to be found somewhere other than Normandy itself.

  So far so good. Most modern historians have been happy to puncture the ‘Norman Myth’. Deeper than this, however, the Normans after 1066 experienced real problems over the definition of authority. In recent years, it has become fashionable to suggest that their lack of confidence led them increasingly to resort to law and to legal arguments as a means of legitimizing their conquests. Law and law-making, which were to emerge as vital themes in the history of twelfth-century England, were pursued by the first generation of Norman settlers as a means of discovering legal justifications for the violent seizure of English land. One such justification could be obtained from the canon law of the Church, which sanctioned succession blessed from one generation to another in the way, for example, that bishops succeeded bishops, tracing their origins back to the first apostles and hence to Christ as their first originator. In this way, perhaps instructed by Archbishop Lanfranc, William the Conqueror deliberately presented himself as the legally nominated successor to the Anglo-Saxon kings and specifically to Edward the Confessor as his ‘antecessor’ or immediate predecessor.

  This is all very well. However, there is actually precious little evidence that the early Norman kings saw themselves as law-makers as opposed to law-keepers. It was the laws of Cnut that were supposedly renewed by both Edward the Confessor and William the Conqueror, and even the so-called ‘Laws of Henry I’ turn out, on inspection, not to be newly forged statutes but a procedural guide, perhaps written at a very local level, for one of the bailiffs of the hundreds of the county of Surrey, as to how existing laws might best be administered. Rather than fortify their claim with jurisprudential justifications, the Normans possessed a far simpler and more easily understood explanation for their victory, as an act of God. God had sanctioned the Normans as conquerors to purge the sins of the English, and perhaps specifically the failings of the English Church. God had permitted the Normans to seize England, just as the cr
usaders subsequently laid claim to Jerusalem, and just as in centuries gone by the Romans or the Arab conquerors of much of the known world had claimed their lands, by right of conquest.

  God, Normans and Anglo-Saxons

  God remained a potent force in English law for many centuries still to come. He is named in the opening clauses of Magna Carta as the first beneficiary to whom King John granted his charter, and his activities, even into the nineteenth century, have led to wranglings in English law courts over what precise instruments God was accustomed to use in his dealings with mankind. If a man were killed by a bull, a falling tree or a mill-wheel, for example, even as late as the 1840s, such animals or objects were in theory to be confiscated by the crown as ‘deodands’, God’s gifts and the instruments of divine wrath. Bulls and mill-wheels are clearly a great deal more costly to replace than dead trees, but there was no real attempt to do away with medieval legal practice until the invention of the railway train and the consequent risk that such expensive machinery might be confiscated or made liable to a massive fine every time that it accidentally flattened a pedestrian. As a result, deodands are now a thing of the past, although insurance companies continue to exclude ‘Acts of God’ from virtually every policy that they issue. Even in our modern and largely godless world, God remains part of the equation of man’s dealing with nature and the law. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, God’s footsteps in the garden of humanity were far more readily detected.