A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  The Normans had conquered because God wished them to. As with all such simple formulas, there were nonetheless major problems that emerged from this very simplicity. To begin with, if God was on the side of the Normans, then he could just as easily turn against them. Any defeat in battle, any sign that a Norman king was no longer victorious in his wars, could be interpreted as proof of the loss of divine favour and hence lend support to rebels or the discontented keen to undermine royal authority. In short, anyone who lives by the claim that his victories signal divine favour is likely to perish by evidence that he is no longer victorious. Beyond this, there arose the nagging question of why God should wish a particular king or people to prosper. Medieval Christianity was founded upon a keen and imminent sense of the approaching end of days. It would surely not be long before God began to pack up the theatre of human history and initiated that process, described in the New Testament Book of Revelation, by which signs and wonders would foretell the imminent Apocalypse. Just such signs and wonders were looked for around the year 1000, that great millennial milestone in human history. When the year 1000 passed more or less without event, and then the decade of the 1030s, marking the thousandth anniversary of Christ’s crucifixion, and then the 1070s, marking the thousandth anniversary of the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, some began to wonder whether humanity would enjoy a much longer lease of life. One reason for the upsurge of learning and for the new intellectual optimism of the twelfth century was quite possibly the realization that humanity was no longer doomed to imminent destruction or condemned to the power of Satan. At the same time, there were others who continued to look for signs of the imminent second coming of Christ. Few such signs were written up in gaudier or larger letters than the Norman Conquest of England followed very shortly thereafter by the Norman Conquest of southern Italy (in the process defeating the Byzantine empire, the eastern empire of Rome) and then the truly apocalyptic liberation of Jerusalem in 1099, once again won largely through the strength of Norman arms.

  It was widely believed that the Apocalypse, when it came, would begin in Jerusalem, and in particular at the site of Christ’s crucifixion and burial, marked since the fourth century by the church of the Holy Sepulchre. Hence the popularity of copies of the Holy Sepulchre across Europe. One of them was even built in the fenland town of Cambridge, at this time a dreary port dominated by a Norman castle, itself controlled by a particularly tyrannical Norman sheriff named Picot (described by nearby monks as ‘a ravenous lion, a prowling wolf, a cunning fox, a filthy pig and a shameless dog’, which rather overdo the animal metaphors). Here a local guild of pilgrims built themselves a round church in deliberate though inaccurate imitation of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The Cambridge Round Church still stands. What though did the reconquest of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre foretell? If those who reconquered it were agents of a divine power, was that power itself for good or for evil? Were the conquests of the Normans won through the power of God or of Satan? Indeed, to what extent were the Normans, and their pride, infernal rather than agents of the divine?

  This was an age of Christian knighthood and consequently of attempts by the Church to control violence, certain sorts of violence (such as the Crusade) being sanctioned, other sorts (such as indiscriminate pillage) being forbidden, most notably through the so-called ‘Truce’ or ‘Peace of God’ movement which enacted legislation to forbid certain types of armed conflict and to limit the periods of the year in which fighting could take place. William the Conqueror introduced the Peace of God to Normandy and strove, so far as we can tell, throughout his reign both in Normandy and England to be presented as a Christian warrior, aware of the new customs governing warfare, themselves fast crystallizing into what would later be known as a ‘chivalric code’. As instruments of God, however, were the Normans to be accounted a blessing, like the Christian armies of Charlemagne, or a curse, like the Huns of the fifth century or the Mongols of the thirteenth? Were the Normans themselves blessed or cursed by God?

  The answer to this question would clearly be determined by the Church. Hence it was vital to the image of Conqueror and Conquest that the Church be brought under Norman control. At least to begin with, it was by no means clear that such control would be achieved. As after the fall of Rome, when the Church had served as a repository of Roman imperial memory, preserving Roman traditions of literacy, administration and even of late imperial dress and diet, in the midst of barbarian military triumph, it was quite possible that the English Church after 1066 would retreat into its own past, not only urging the victors to penance but demanding that the vanquished repent of the sin which self-evidently explained the speed and violence with which they had been conquered. Even though its highest positions, as bishop or abbot were henceforth reserved for Frenchmen, the Church offered one of the few remaining opportunities for the sons and daughters of Anglo-Saxon landowners dispossessed by the Conquest to enjoy a high-status lifestyle. Such men and women joined communities of monks and nuns which themselves were exclusively and self-consciously English and which, on occasion, could explode in outrage against foreign abbots or bishops. At Glastonbury, for example, three monks were killed and eighteen wounded in a riot brought about when the new Norman abbot attempted to force them to abandon their own traditions of singing for a style of Gregorian chant pioneered in Dijon and favoured in Normandy. The new Norman abbot of Abingdon sat at table with his friends mocking the Anglo-Saxon saints whose relics the abbey housed. He was punished immediately afterwards, much to the satisfaction of the local English chronicler, being found dead in the lavatory.

  To begin with, at least, the Church served as a mausoleum of Englishness, and it is no coincidence that it was English monks or clergy who offered some of the most trenchant criticisms of the new Norman regime. Englishmen seeking explanations for 1066, such as Eadmer, a monk at Canterbury, or Henry, archdeacon of Huntingdon, used their pens as weapons to revenge themselves on their new Norman masters. To the half-English, half-Norman William of Malmesbury, there could be little doubt that the Norman Conquest was God’s punishment for English pride and specifically for two failings still familiar themes today: the drunkenness of the English, and their willingness to sink vast sums of money into sub-prime housing stock. According to William, the English ‘passed entire nights and days in drinking parties’ and ‘consumed their whole substance in mean and despicable houses, unlike the Normans and French, who live frugally in noble and splendid mansions’. Not surprisingly, after 1066 there was a vast upsurge both in the quantity and the quality of historical writing produced in English monasteries. Where previously the English Church had depended on Flemish monks to write its history, historical writing now became one of the great exports of England. Once again there are modern parallels here, to the way, for example, in which some of the best writing about international affairs since 1945 has been produced by English historians, unable any longer to celebrate a British empire, yet controlling the means by which other empires, American, Russian or Chinese, are perceived. In just such a way, English monks now controlled access both to the English and to the Norman past.

  Yet even in this rewriting of the English past there were the first signs of accommodation between conquered and conquerors. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History was widely regarded as the greatest work of Latin history written by any Englishman before 1066. Not surprisingly perhaps, as a celebration of the Anglo-Saxon past, it enjoyed an extraordinary vogue after 1066, newly made copies of this very large book finding their way into libraries across England and northern France. But copying was more than an act of nostalgia. It led to imitation and imitation in turn leads to innovation. In the north of England, where monasticism had virtually expired in the centuries between Bede and Edward the Confessor, Bede’s History was used as a blueprint for the refoundation and implantation of monastic houses by the Normans after 1066. The new monastic communities established in such places as Durham, Hexham, Whitby and York, represent a sort of retro-fashionable redis
covery of the world of Bede.

  Not only this, but the decision, after 1070, to refound many of the English dioceses and to move them from small Anglo-Saxon sites into larger towns or monasteries itself owed something to the perception that the English Church as celebrated by Bede was pre-eminently a church ruled by monks. In 1066, only three of the fifteen English bishoprics were served by monastic chapters (Canterbury, Winchester and Worcester). By the time that Ely was selected as the site of a new fenland diocese in 1109, there were a further six monastic cathedrals established (Durham, Bath, Chester/Coventry, Rochester and Ely). Various of the traditions that Bede declared to be peculiarly English, in particular the daily celebration of Mass, were widely adopted by the English Church after 1066, no doubt in a deliberate effort to stress continuity with the past. In just this way, the new Norman church hierarchy came enthusiastically to adopt such peculiar English observances as the feast of the Conception of the Virgin Mary (8 December), supposedly celebrating the immaculate conception of Jesus’ mother. Elsewhere in Europe, the doctrine of the immaculate conception of Mary (the idea that, through the operation of the Holy Spirit, not only Christ, but Mary herself was born without sin) was less than enthusiastically received. The great Cistercian polemicist, St Bernard of Clairvaux, for example, declared the very idea of Mary’s immaculate conception to be impudent and new-fangled nonsense. It was not fully accepted as Catholic dogma until 1854. In England, however, within living memory of the Conquest of 1066, Norman abbots such as Anselm at Bury St Edmunds or Osbert of Clare at Westminster helped preserve what they regarded as a peculiarly English devotion. Even before 1100, Norman barons with lands in England were already beginning to make awards not just to their own religious foundations in Normandy or England, but to established pre-Conquest English monasteries such as Bury St Edmunds or Ely. Some were even choosing to be buried in English churches rather than in their native Norman soil. After about 1100, such Anglo-Norman patronage of English monks and burial in English rather than Norman graves became the rule rather than the exception.

  This change in attitudes, from hostility against the English Church towards admiration and deliberate emulation, can most clearly be signposted from Norman approaches to the old English saints. The very first generation of Norman church leaders did their best, as with Abbot Ethelelm at Abingdon, to ridicule the English saints, to purge the church calendar of their feast days and to consign their relics to the obscurity of a box in the attic. Within less than a generation this attitude had changed to one of acceptance and open celebration. The new and magnificent monastic cathedral built on the great rock above the river Wear at Durham was consciously planned as a monument to the cult of the English St Cuthbert. At Canterbury, the Norman cathedral was dedicated to the Holy Trinity, that most cosmopolitan and least nationalistic of cults, yet the relics of the old English saints Dunstan and Alphege were deliberately assigned altars in the east end, flanking the high altar of the Trinity. The same generation of English monks who in their historical writing sought explanations for the horrors of Conquest was now called upon to rewrite the old English legends of the saints, producing updated versions now rebranded for cults directed towards an Anglo-Norman rather than an exclusively English audience. In the process, a large number of these hagiographical makeovers sought to stress the close relations that had always existed between saints and the King, indirectly legitimizing William the Conqueror’s role within the Church by emphasizing the degree to which his Anglo-Saxon predecessors had dealt with the Anglo-Saxon saints.

  Archbishop Lanfranc

  As this suggests, after 1066 William the Conqueror and his sons did their utmost to assert their control over an institution, the Church, vital not only to the self-image that they conveyed to the outside world but to the salvation of their own eternal souls. The chief instrument of royal policy here was the first of the post-Conquest archbishops of Canterbury, Lanfranc. In 1075, at a Church council held in London, it was Lanfranc who sought to issue new legislation for the disciplining and reform of the English Church, and it was undoubtedly through Lanfranc’s diplomacy that England and King William were able to stand aloof from the convulsions of the papal–imperial dispute that shook the rest of Europe throughout the 1070s and 80s. At his Council of London in 1075, Lanfranc issued statutes that appeared to treat the late Anglo-Saxon Church as a hopeless cause, sunk so deep in corruption that only root and branch reform could save it. Bishoprics were moved at will, so that in due course the former see of Dorchester-on-Thames was relocated one hundred miles further north to Lincoln, the bishopric of Sherborne was translated to a new royal compound at Sarum, and in due course the former see of East Anglia, so obscure that even its precise location before 1066 remains disputed, was moved into Norwich. In each case, a powerful royal castle loomed over the newly constructed cathedral, at Sarum in such close proximity that the cathedral’s canons were later to complain that they could not enter their building without permission from the King’s soldiers.

  Yet even this drastic shake-up was not conducted without a thought for the Anglo-Saxon past. At Norwich, for example, the focal point of the cathedral became precisely the bishop’s ‘cathedra’ or throne, an Anglo-Saxon object, supposedly the stone chair carved for the seventh-century St Felix, first Christian missionary to the East Angles, now translated into the new building as the cathedral’s most precious relic. Others of Lanfranc’s rulings at the Council of London might suggest that the Anglo-Saxon Church was abandoned to superstition and to semi-pagan customs such as the use of animal bones to ward off cattle plague, or divination and the prediction of future events, henceforth placed under the strictest of prohibitions as works of the Devil. A series of notes preserved in a manuscript in Cambridge nonetheless reveals that Lanfranc, like all post-Conquest bishops and archbishops blessed in Canterbury Cathedral, was invited to conduct precisely such an act of divination, opening the Gospels at random at the time of his consecration, to see what a particular scriptural passage might foretell of his future rule. Lanfranc’s passage came from Luke (11:41), ‘Give alms and behold all things are clean unto you.’ Odo of Bayeux, that most treacherous of the Conqueror’s half-brothers, can hardly have been pleased to find his own prognostic taken from Christ’s words about Judas (Matthew 26:23): ‘He that dippeth his hand with me in the dish shall betray me.’

  In some senses, Lanfranc sought to pose as a harsh discipli-narian. He played a leading role, as the King’s vice-regent, in the suppression of rebellion in 1075, and for the monks of his own cathedral church at Canterbury he issued constitutions intended to do away with former abuses such as the risk that older monks might take advantage of child or teenage novices making their way by night, without candles, through the monastic dormitories. There is a deliberately militaristic caste to the metaphors in Lanfranc’s letters, offering to do battle against Satan and to employ the shield of righteousness against the sword of iniquity, a reminder that Lanfranc himself was the agent of a military dictator. Even the ablutions of the Canterbury monks were subjected by Lanfranc to a new sort of military discipline, with as many privies supplied for the monastic community as there were monks then established in the convent, the apparent intention being that each monk should not only pray, eat and sleep, but conduct his other bodily functions in concert with his fellows. Not even the most senna pod-obsessed of preparatory-school headmasters could have imagined so disciplined a community. Yet as this extraordinary boom in lavatories should remind us, the period after 1066 was one in which the sheer number of monks increased out of all recognition. Over such a body of potentially unruly Englishmen, many of them recent entrants with only a bare minimum of religious instruction, it was only right that severe discipline be maintained.

  Moreover, like all great monastic leaders, Lanfranc was prepared to temper discipline with forbearance. So many women had fled to nunneries to escape the Norman Conquest that the nunneries themselves struggled to cope with the influx. This great flight to religion has generally be
en presented as an attempt by Anglo-Saxon women to escape from forced marriages. In fact we now know enough about the practices of victorious armies, not least in Berlin in 1945 or Bosnia in the 1990s, to appreciate that it was not so much marriage as rape that was feared. Lanfranc was willing to relax the religious vows made by such women to a life for which they had no proper vocation. The most famous of these reluctant nuns was herself a member of the former West Saxon royal dynasty. Matilda, the daughter of Malcolm III, King of Scots, via his marriage to the English princess Margaret, a granddaughter of Edmund Ironside, had been entrusted, probably in the late 1080s, to the rough discipline of her aunt, Christina, a nun at Romsey in Hampshire. Either at Romsey or at Wilton, Matilda was compelled to dress as a nun even though she never officially took vows and despite the fact that this was strongly disapproved of by her father, who is said to have torn the veil from her hair. Almost certainly she was veiled to escape the attentions of King William Rufus, who soon came calling at Wilton, pretending that he had entered the cloister only to admire the rose bushes and other flowering shrubs. Rufus, who never married and who was allegedly not a ladies’ man, was not the only suitor to appreciate the potential advantage of marrying an English princess with dynastic links to both the West Saxon and the Scottish thrones. In the end, and after an official ecclesiastical process had released her from her religious profession, Matilda was married not to Rufus but to his younger brother, King Henry I.