A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  As this implies, the Church had a major role to play as mediator between Norman and English identities after 1066. It also, of course, as the richest of all medieval institutions, played an equally significant role in the economic exploitation of post-Conquest England. This can be demonstrated from such well-documented instances as Peterborough, a pre-Conquest abbey, founded in 966, exactly a century before the Conquest, by Aethelwold, the great reforming bishop of Winchester. As a result of the Conquest, not only did the new abbot of Peterborough swamp his lands with knights imported from Normandy and from amongst his own kin, but he encouraged a massive new clearance of the Northamptonshire woodlands, assarting or grubbing up at least a thousand acres of previously uncultivated land now laid to the plough. Abbot Thorold’s activities as entrepreneur were themselves, at least in part, urged on by tensions between English and Norman elements at Peterborough. The importation of sixty or more knights to the Peterborough estates was a direct response to the revolt of 1070/71 by Hereward, a former Northamptonshire thegn. It was at Peterborough and at nearby Ely that the legend of Hereward was most keenly cultivated, and it was at Peterborough, after 1100, that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle continued to be written up, year by year, in the Old English vernacular: an important reminder that even those religious institutions most keenly involved in the Normanization of England, in the clearance of ancient woodlands and the draining of England’s fenland wildernesses, also continued to admire and to commemorate the old English past.

  The new bishoprics founded after 1070, at Lincoln and Sarum, might look to the first of their new Norman bishops as potential patron saints, setting a trend whereby the calendar of saints came to be filled by an increasing number of Anglo-Norman bishops, canonized as much for their administrative skills and their patient learning as for any more dramatic accomplishments. Yet the very first post-Conquest saint generally to be recognized in England was almost certainly Waltheof, at Crowland in the Lincolnshire fens, an Anglo-Saxon earl executed, some would say martyred, for rebelling against Norman rule. After 1066, a great mass of blood lay spilled behind the English throne. The Church did as much to advertise as to conceal this fact.

  King and Church

  It was the Church that imposed penance upon those who had fought at Hastings or who had afterwards, even in time of peace, killed and looted their way to English wealth. It was the Church, in the form of gifts to monasteries, that served as the chief repository for the Normans’ own burden of sin. Like many newly enriched vulgarians, unsure of their entitlement to prosperity and uncertain whether they themselves were to be accounted instruments of God or the Devil, the Normans were lavish in their almsgiving. Their new cathedrals and the fifty or so new abbeys and priories established in England by the 1130s testify to this generosity born of guilt. At the same time, the Church was also prepared to support the claim of the Norman kings to be vicars of Christ rather than tools of Satan. The elaborate, imperial elements introduced to the English coronation service (no one is quite sure when, but certainly before the death of Henry I); the ceremonial crown-wearings in which the King regularly displayed his authority, majestic on his throne; the introduction both to Normandy and to England of the ritual performance of the ‘Laudes’, elaborate hymns in praise of the King and his monarchy sung regularly on public occasions, all of these were ritual acts by which the Church and its leaders acknowledged that the King was more than a mere warlord, more indeed than a mere man: a semi-sacral representative of Christ on earth. At his coronation, the King was anointed with chrism, the same oil mixed with myrrh from the sap of trees native to the Yemen and Arabia, by which priests themselves were consecrated to their holy offices. At a time when the papacy, especially Pope Gregory VII, was seeking to draw an ever clearer distinction between the superior power of the Church and the inferior authority of lay rulers, this deliberate insistence in England that kings ranked amongst the chosen ones of God was highly provocative.

  Perhaps the clearest sign of the King’s self-perception comes from his seal, the blob of beeswax attached to all royal letters and charters, as a means of authentication more majestic (and in an age of secular illiteracy more convenient) than any sort of signature. William I’s seal copied that of Edward the Confessor in two respects. It was double-sided, which itself implies a deliberate attempt to emulate the double-sided seal of the Holy Roman emperors, and on one of its sides it carried an image of the King enthroned in majesty. Where Edward had been shown carrying a rod and a sceptre, however, the two symbols of royal authority with which the King was ritually invested according to the new imperial coronation ceremony, William was shown carrying a sword and an orb, symbols of dominion (the world encompassed in a metal ball) and of justice imposed at sword-point. On the other side of his seal, the change in emphasis was even clearer. Where the Confessor had employed merely a second version of the image of enthronement, William the Conqueror’s seal introduced an entirely new portrait of the King on horseback with helmet, lance, shield and pennant. The majesty or throne side carried his titles as King of England, the equestrian side his titles as Duke of Normandy.

  In essence, this same juxtaposition of majesty and warlord has been maintained on the great seals of all successive kings and queens of England over the past thousand years. Under Henry I, the lance on the equestrian side was replaced with a brandished sword. Thereafter, despite growing progressively larger (from three and a quarter inches in diameter under the early Norman kings to five inches for the second seal of Henry IV), and more elaborate in their decoration and setting (including the use of ever more garishly coloured wax), there were to be no fundamental changes here until the second seal of Henry VIII (after 1538), when a greyhound was introduced to the scene of the king on horseback, transforming it from an image of war to one of hunting. Even Queen Victoria, however, continued to use a two-sided seal, the equestrian image striking a neoclassical pose in which the Queen carries a sceptre rather than a sword. All of this imagery, from the 1060s through to the early twenty-first century, conveys two unmistakable messages, firstly, that the monarch is invested with authority from God, and secondly, that such authority should be imposed, if necessary, from horseback and under the threat of a very sharp and heavy piece of iron. Sacrality and the sword were here merged into a single image of the King as a warrior ruler blessed by God. Those who consider such traditions of sacrality inappropriate to our desacralized age are in for a nasty shock, when King Charles III or King William V receive coronation on the Confessor’s throne in Westminster Abbey.

  Something of the impression that the conqueror made on contemporaries can be recaptured from a story told in the Life of Lanfranc attributed to Milo Crispin. On one of those great festivals when William was seated in majesty, wearing his crown and royal robes, a jester, seeing the King resplendent in gold and jewels, cried out ‘Behold, I see God!’ Archbishop Lanfranc, standing beside the throne, reproved the King, saying ‘Don’t allow such things to be said of you’ and demanding that the jester be flogged. Superficially, this story suggests that contemporaries were persuaded to identify William with the Almighty. Beneath the surface, however, it can be read in a more ironic sense. The jester, being a jester, was mocking rather than praising a King who dared clothe himself like God, and Lanfranc was determined not that William should project a less majestic image, but that he should punish those who mocked his majesty. The Church supplied the props to the theatre of monarchy, but never abandoned its right to discipline any actor who misplayed the role of King.

  Religious faith in the Middle Ages remains a difficult subject to probe. In general, the kings of England, and most of their subjects, are written off as ‘conventionally pious’, which is the historian’s way of admitting that we can never really probe the depth of their religious sincerity. The most outspoken of religious invocations in wills may have been dictated by the clergy rather than by the dying believer. Gifts to a monastery might have been undertaken in true faith. Alternatively, as for example with William I
’s patronage of the abbey of St-Florent-de-Saumur on the Loire, they might represent an attempt to intrude political influence via the back-door of gift-giving and patronage. The most emotional outbursts of personal penance have to be treated with a degree of scepticism, as confessors were reminded at the time, since many people are capable of acting out a remorse that they do not themselves feel. God alone could tell whether a penitent’s tears were genuinely contrite. Even so, it is clear that protestations of Christian belief were the norm, and that outright atheism was something attributed only to the most inveterate of sinners. Some Christians, as today, were more enthusiastic than others, but essentially this was a religiously minded society, for whose members Christianity offered the conventional, and in many cases the only possible explanations for a whole series of eventualities.

  In an age of high child mortality, of violence, of fire and potential famine in which there were no insurance companies to offer compensation and no doctors aware of the true causes of most disease, a belief in the supernatural was an entirely rational recourse. So much in the world made so little rational sense that the frontier between the natural and the supernatural was blurred. Recovery from disease, the destruction of crops, thunder and lightning, even the sudden death of children, could best be explained as divinely ordained eventualities. The sinner uncertain as to whether it was an incurable tumour or bad indigestion from which he was suffering, the woman who mourned the death of a child, the King who sought to probe the secrets of the future or the hidden thoughts of his courtiers, all of these could find a degree of comfort within the Church. We should add to this list of the comforts of religion the facts that man is perhaps by nature a religious animal, that the Church was massively powerful and attractively adorned, and that, in an age without properly equipped medics, let alone psychologists, the clergy, or on occasion the saints working from beyond the grave, were often those best-equipped or at least most willing to discuss ‘personal’ issues. Tears and chatter were the two great driving forces of monastic spirituality.

  As for the clergy living in the world rather than the cloister, even the humblest of parish priests could command authority within village communities whose lords were frequently absent. The parish church, after all, was in general the largest of village institutions, and, with its bells and its bell tower, the loudest and best advertised. Although not necessarily educated beyond the simple needs of reading and some writing, the priest could on occasion serve not just as spiritual but as practical community leader. In the 1130s, when the north of England was threatened with a Scots invasion, it was the parish priests of Yorkshire who gathered together a militia to oppose invasion. As the first teacher of the village’s young, on occasion teaching as much by the whip as with words, and as the repository of much secret knowledge about his parishioners, long before lay confession became a universal adult obligation after 1215, the priest was a figure of awe, even if, like various priests in medieval fiction, he himself were merely the poor vicar of a much richer absentee rector, his robe roughly darned and his farmyard worse kept than those of his parishioners. The priesthood of rural Ireland as imagined by nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers is not a million miles from that of the medieval English village. It is not difficult to understand why this was an age in which faith was a great deal more than just a superficial or ritual affair.

  Amongst the early Norman kings of England, one alone stands out as a figure for whom religion meant less than it did for most. William Rufus was not only branded a sensualist and a sodomite by his opponents, but reported openly to have mocked the Church. Warned that he should not cross the Channel in the middle of a storm, he replied that he had never heard of a king being lost in a shipwreck, joking that the sea and the wind would obey his royal commands. Told that a group of fifty Englishmen had been acquitted of forest offences by the ordeal of hot iron – in effect a way of testing God’s judgment by making the accused hold a red-hot piece of metal and then estimating his innocence or guilt from the severity of the burns – Rufus declared that anyone who believed God to be a just judge deserved to be damned. His favourite oath, ‘By the Holy Face of Lucca’, was intended as a jibe against one of the eleventh-century’s most venerated yet least plausible relics, a full-sized wooden image of the crucified Christ, said to have been carved by Nicodemus, one of the attendants at Christ’s burial, and to have floated miraculously from the Holy Land to western Italy, arriving there after a voyage that must have lasted nearly a thousand years.

  Towards the English Church in general, Rufus was mercenary and unyielding. He demanded knight service from its lands and left vacant for long periods any bishoprics whose incumbent died, meanwhile reserving their revenues for his own royal coffers. To profit from the Church in this way, and to make over resources intended for spiritual purposes to his own very secular needs was a provocative gesture, not least because this was an age in which simony, the offering of money in return for holy office, was considered the worst of all crimes, worse even than sodomy. Within the Church, Rufus’ closest henchman was his confidential clerk, Ranulph Flambard (‘the torch-bearer’), eventually promoted bishop of Durham. Flambard was a sinner of such notorious lasciviousness that young girls, even those vowed to religion like the future saint, Christina of Markyate, were well advised to lock their doors whenever he appeared.

  Yet, like other noisily irreligious men, Rufus was perhaps more aware of his own sinfulness than many of those who outwardly posed as believers. The most hardboiled of sinners often make for the best and most tearful of penitents. This is precisely what happened at Easter 1093, when Rufus lay ill at Gloucester, clearly believing that death was upon him. Rather than appoint a worldly man to fill the archbishopric of Canterbury, vacant since the death of Lanfranc, he suddenly and without apparent warning demanded that it be given to a visitor to his court, the abbot of Bec, an other-worldly old man who had recently heard the King’s confession. The abbot was named Anselm and he was already approaching sixty. An Italian by birth, he had found refuge with Lanfranc at Bec and had stayed on there after Lanfranc’s departure for higher things, attempting largely unsuccessfully to manage the financial affairs of the abbey. Like many of the greatest intellectuals, Anselm was a late starter. He published virtually nothing into his forties. He was widely regarded as a charismatic and holy pastor of monks, willing to spend time not just lecturing but listening to the young and the troubled. He was also a visionary.

  Anselm Finds God

  Listening to matins one day, and allowing his mind to wander, he had come upon what he believed to be an irrefutable proof of the existence of God. This, the so-called ‘ontological proof’ (from ‘ontology’, the pursuit of the essence of things) continues even today to fascinate theologians. For present purposes it should serve to remind us that English history is far more than a mere catalogue of facts, dates and battles: Englishmen (or in this instance Norman-Italians later resident in England) once had minds and thoughts that captured the imagination of Europe. In essence, Anselm argued, if ‘God’ is a concept that embodies the greatest thing that can be imagined, and if God exists in the imagination, then it must be greater for him to exist in reality than merely in the mind. Therefore he must really exist. This is an argument unthinkable a century earlier, derived from two developments in Western thought that were to have profound future consequences: a rediscovery of classical philosophy, and in particular of the teachings of Plato on the relationship between ideas and reality, and a new delight in human language as a means of exploring the purposes of God. Language, linguistic terminology, and the organization of language statements into self-evident ‘truths’, still underlies a great deal of philosophical enquiry. Anselm is surprisingly close in this respect to twentieth-century philosophers. At the time that he was writing, the three skills deployed here – grammar, logic and rhetoric – constituted the very basis of education, being drummed into the heads of all schoolboys attempting to grapple with Latin as a European-wide language of learnin
g.

  It was through grammatical analysis, more than through recourse to classical philosophy, that Anselm’s former teacher, Lanfranc, had sought to oppose those who taught that the Mass was little more than a commemorative re-enactment of Christ’s last supper and that nothing akin to transformation of the elements of bread and wine into the substance of the body and blood of Christ took place at the moment that a priest consecrated them. The technical terminology, and the understanding of the precise operation of this transformation, what would later be known as ‘transubstantiation’, had yet to be established. For a modern audience it is nonetheless important to notice that what Lanfranc and others argued was not a literal, physical transformation of bread and wine into flesh and blood. This would have been an abomination, akin to cannibalism. Instead, we are once again here in the realm of words, grappling with realities that could only be expressed through ideas clothed in language. In such an environment, it could be argued that the substance, the inner nature of the bread and wine, was changed into that of the substance of Christ himself without this involving any obvious change to the accidents, the outer appearance of the elements of bread and wine.

  To many people at the time, as indeed to many people even now, such arguments seemed too abstract and, like the ontological proof advanced by Anselm, to depend upon a false identification between words, ideas and realities. Hence the numerous miracles reported by the more literally minded of the faithful, in which the bread or wine was seen literally to transform itself into bleeding flesh, into images of Christ the lamb, or to become incandescent with an inner light revealing the light of God in ways less subtle than those proposed by the philosophers. But to Lanfranc, and later to Anselm, the possibilities that language and philosophy opened up to the exploration of divine truth seemed both new and tremendously exciting. To Anselm, who in his meditations could declare with deep self-knowledge, ‘My life terrifies me,’ language, properly used, seemed to offer solutions even to such deep-rooted secrets as the distinction between truth and justice, or the inner reality of good and evil.