The result of this centuries-long agricultural expansion was, to a modern agronomist, predictable: yields—the difference between the number of seeds, or bushels, planted, and those available for consumption after reserving seed for the next crop—that dropped precipitously. After centuries of weather that made even poor soil productive, the typical French or English farmer was harvesting no more than ten grains of wheat for every one he planted, and frequently as few as three; in places like Scotland (and places like Erik the Red’s homeland, to say nothing of his Arctic colony) the ratio was sometimes barely two to one.*
This is agricultural balance on the edge of a Malthusian knife. When previously unattractive land becomes—at least temporarily—fertile, and population continues to grow, one option is expanding the land under cultivation, but another is extracting the value of the land using a sword instead of a plow. Frontiers become battlegrounds. Warlike cultures invade peaceful ones.
And Norse traders become Viking raiders. Even before they established themselves in Iceland and Greenland, they were raiding as far afield as Majorca, Provence, and even Tuscany. Norwegians occupied the Orkneys, Shetlands, and Hebrides. In 851 Danes invaded and—by 866—essentially conquered England.* Most relevant of all, for those in attendance at Edward and Isabella’s nuptials, in 820, a Norse expedition, comprising thirteen ships, arrived at the mouth of the Seine.
They came to raid, but stayed to conquer. In 841, they burned and captured Rouen; within a decade they had built a permanent camp on the now-disappeared (and possibly imagined) island of Jeuvosse in the middle of the Seine, as a convenient jumping-off place for, among other things, raiding Paris, which they did in 857, burning and sacking Chartres for good measure. Every few months, a party of Vikings would sail (or row) up the Seine, and either take everything of value they could, or accept a bribe to go away. By 910, the bishops of Noyon, Beauvais, Bayeux, and Avranches had each been killed in Viking raids. Finally, in the fall of 911, a desperate Charles III, a descendant of Charlemagne, and king of the Western Franks, or Francia (roi des Francs; the nation of France was not yet a going concern) signed the Treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte with a Viking chieftain named variously Robert, Rolf, Rosso, or, most frequently, Rollo. The document doesn’t survive, and most of its terms, which probably included Rollo’s baptism and marriage to one of the king’s daughters, remain speculative. The core of the treaty, however, couldn’t be clearer: a grant of territory in return for a promise to stop raiding Frankish land.
The land in question was named for its new Norse rulers: Normandy.
• • •
The impact of the Norman colony wasn’t immediate. Though the colonizers were Danes and Norwegians, and secondhand Norse families from the Orkneys, Ireland, and England, they quickly embraced the customs of their new home. By the time of Rollo’s death in 931, he had been baptized into the Christian church; by the time his grandson Richard I succeeded to the rule of the territory, he had not only become a loyal vassal of the soon-to-be kings of France, but gave himself, in the Frankish fashion, a new title, the first duke of Normandy—a territory that had grown from its original grant to include, by 933, the Cotentin Peninsula and the Avranches in Brittany.
The onetime Viking raiders were quick to exchange their old titles, names, languages, and feudal obligations for new ones. What they retained was a powerful tradition of military conquest. As the tenth century turned into the eleventh, Norman knights had campaigned successfully everywhere from Armenia to Byzantine Greece, and even, under Roger I, the descendant of one of Rollo’s soldiers, established the Norman kingdom of Sicily, which ruled both the island and the boot of Italy as far north as Naples until the end of the twelfth century.
But when historians speak of “the” Norman Conquest, they aren’t talking about Armenia or Sicily. The most significant bit of military adventuring in European history—and the reason that the groom in Boulogne in 1308 spoke a dialect known as Norman French—was the work of one of Rollo’s direct descendants, Duke William II of Normandy.
The year that changed Europe, and particularly Britain, forever, began with the death, on January 4, 1066, of England’s king, Edward the Confessor. Saint Edward—in 1161, he became England’s first and only king to be canonized—had spent his reign in a series of fairly inconsequential attempts to keep one step ahead of both Viking invaders and his own nobility when he died, childless and, most inconveniently, without a named successor.
The realm itself was something of a shaky edifice anyway, a onetime Roman colony that had been invaded, successively, by Saxons, Norwegians, and Danes, one of whom, Cnut the Great, had been Edward’s immediate predecessor as England’s king. In fact, given the numerous ways in which the Medieval Warm Period unleashed the Viking Age upon European history, it isn’t actually so surprising that the three contenders for Edward’s throne were each, in one way or another, Norsemen.*
The first, Harold Godwinson, the earl of Wessex, selected as Edward’s successor by the witenagemot—the assembly of leading nobles that functioned as a sort of privy council to the Anglo-Saxon kings of England—was half-Norse, the son of a Danish princess. The second, a Dane named Harald Hardrada, claimed the English throne by way of a conveniently lost agreement with Cnut’s son, Harthacnut, supposedly promising to recombine the Danish and English thrones. And, last, there was Duke William, whose claim rested on an equally convenient—and equally lost—agreement with Edward the Confessor. William’s position was not only that Edward had promised him the throne during a time when the future saint was living in Normandy but that Harald Hardrada had sworn support when the duke rescued the Norwegian king, who had been shipwrecked on the coast of Brittany.
Conflict was inevitable. Mobilizing took some time, but by fall, both Harald Hardrada and William had assembled armies, and departed for England . . . though they did so in very different ways, and with even more significant consequences. In September 1066, King Harald landed near York, and Duke William in Sussex, each with an army of perhaps ten thousand men, though, as always with medieval orders of battle, solid numbers are hard to come by.
The two battles that followed were each, in their way, decisive.
Though the town of Stamford Bridge occupies the site today, it was nothing but a river crossing over the River Derwent when Hardrada’s forces arrived around September 16, 1066. They were led by Harald himself, and by the earl of Northumbria, Tostig Godwinson, the violently estranged brother of Harold, England’s newly crowned king. His troops were mostly Norwegians, but included a fair number of Scots, Danes, and mercenaries from northern Europe. They were well armed and experienced, but not especially ready for combat, secure in the news that King Harold was arrayed in the south, preparing a welcome for Duke William and his army. However, in an impressive bit of soldiering, Harold, once apprised of the arrival of the army to his north, led a truly remarkable forced march—185 miles in four days, if the chronicles are to be believed—and, on September 25, surprised his enemy in the worst of all possible situations.* A few thousand troops of Hardrada’s army were on the west side of the bridge, with the remainder on the east. All of them had left their armor aboard ship.
Though exhausted from marching, Godwinson’s army immediately closed on their opponents and destroyed Hardrada’s heavily outnumbered forces on the west side of the Derwent, and prepared to cross the bridge to deal with the remainder. No one knows precisely what delayed them, but The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the Homeric story of a giant Dane who kept King Harold’s forces from crossing the bridge, killing forty Englishmen before he was finally overcome. The heroic effort bought enough time for the Hardrada forces to line up behind their shields in a strong defensive position, some thirty meters above the riverbed. It did not, however, give them the time required to get their armor; not even time to get mail coats on either King Harald or Earl Tostig, both of whom were killed as the battle turned into a slaughter. The best estimate is that the Norw
egians landed with three hundred ships, and returned home with fewer than twenty.
Unfortunately, Stamford Bridge was only a battle. Winning the war meant defeating William’s Normans as well. Which is why, three weeks later, King Harold’s army, battered and exhausted, arrived at Caldbec Hill, on October 13. The following morning, they deployed across the only road from the enemy’s camp at Hastings, which was blocked to the west and the east by inlets that have long since been drained.
The two forces that faced each other at Hastings that day were similar in size, but in no other way. Harold’s Englishmen were almost entirely infantry: at the center, the king’s housecarls, the professional soldiers who formed the core of the English army, armored with helmets and mail hauberks, and mostly armed with three-foot-long, thirty-pound Danish axes. On either wing were less experienced freemen, similarly armed and armored, and stiffened with Anglo-Saxon nobles: thegns, or thanes. Tactically, they were well trained and equipped to defend, and so they established themselves in a powerful defensive position: at the top of Senlac Hill, in a long but shallow ridge, behind a phalanx of locked shields. William’s army, on the other hand, was a combined arms force—perhaps fifteen hundred archers, carrying longbows and crossbows, as well as three thousand to four thousand infantry—but the core of the army, its shock troops, valuable only in attack and pursuit, were two thousand or so heavy cavalry—mailed, helmeted, and armed with lance and sword.
Predictably, therefore, it was the Norman force—really a northern European force, with Bretons on the left and Flemings on the right—that began the attack, with a salvo of arrows that did little against the interlocked shields of the English. William then sent his left division in a probing attack that likewise failed to break the integrity of the English line, though it did succeed, in a manner of speaking, by pulling some of Harold’s troops out of the shield wall as it pursued them down Senlac Hill.
And so it went, for hour after indecisive hour: a Norman attack, or feint, that failed to decide anything except the fates of a few dozen soldiers who fell at each one. Eventually, however, William calculated how to turn the attacks into a winning tactic: Every quarter hour or so, he charged a portion of his cavalry at the English line, turning at the last minute in order to provoke a pursuit. Once having pulled a few dozen English housecarls out of the shield wall, the Norman cavalry would turn and cut it to pieces. This they did over and over again, while William’s archers were given the order to fire at a high enough trajectory to have their missiles drop down on Harold’s forces from above, further weakening the obdurate English shield wall. In legend, at least, it was one of those high-arching arrows that fell on the unprotected head of King Harold himself, killing him instantly.
At that moment, the English army, though still formidable, had lost. It is impossible to overstate the importance of personal leadership in combat, and in the mess that was a medieval battle, there were no noncommissioned officers or company commanders. In the battle’s early hours, an English counterattack seemed to have struck down Duke William, and, in an army no bigger than a modern regiment, the loss of the only real leader would have been disastrous, which is why the duke of Normandy knew enough to climb back onto his horse, remove his helmet, and display his well-known face to his troops by riding along the entire front line of his army, restoring their morale. It was not an option available to the English, and they scattered almost as soon as word of Harold’s death spread—all except his most loyal housecarls, who fought literally to the death as their bodies formed a wall around their fallen king. The field had been won, decisively, by the duke of Normandy, and with it the crown of England.
The Battle of Hastings is rightly remembered as one of the signature “battles that changed history,” and it certainly deserves to be; it ended five centuries of nearly uninterrupted Anglo-Saxon rule of Britain and inaugurated eight centuries of conflict between the rulers of England and France.
But there’s an even more fundamental significance to Hastings, which was not only a battle between two armies but also between two very different ways of life. The military contrast couldn’t have been more stark: One force, entirely infantry, with a core of professional soldiers—Harold’s housecarls—were paid a wage by the sovereign. The other, William’s Normans, was built around heavy cavalry, and such a force was enormously more expensive to maintain. Like every premium form of military technology, the premium came at a premium price. In continental Europe, the only way to finance it—in money and manpower—was a social innovation that, in broad terms, has come down to us as feudalism.
In its simplest meaning, feudalism is a system in which an entire class of men owes military service to the class immediately above them, in return for the right to a specific bit of land. Though the term is widely, and casually, used to describe arrangements everywhere from Mesoamerica to imperial China, its European version was unique: a system that organized society through oaths of fealty—by contract, rather than blood. Its origins are traceable to Charlemagne and his subordinates, but the system owed its endurance to both its flexibility and its unique ability to exploit a new version of a centuries-old military technology: masses of heavy cavalry.
Ever since the sixth century, when the armored cataphracts of the eastern Roman Empire battled against their similarly armed Persian opponents, the use of cavalry as shock troops had been a decisive tactic on European battlefields. But the lancers of late antiquity were armed and armored by imperial treasuries. The heavy cavalry forces of the high medieval era, with lance, mail, and sword for each rider, in addition to a form of armor for at least one of his warhorses, were even more expensive to maintain—among other things, every knight needed multiple mounts, each one bred specifically for combat, and several retainers and grooms to maintain them—and the cost fell squarely on the knights themselves. During the eighth century, a single knight’s armor, helmet, sword, lance, shield, and one horse cost fifteen times as much as a cow. By the eleventh, at least ten times as much income was needed to maintain a single knight in the field as a single foot soldier.
To William of Normandy, whose tactics required one mounted soldier for every four afoot, this was not just a logistical problem but a recruiting one. His Anglo-Saxon and Norwegian opponents could field an army with a core of professional ax-wielding infantrymen, personally loyal to the sovereign, who paid them an annual wage. William, unable to do so, assembled an army drawn not just from Normandy but the lands that would subsequently be known as Brittany, Flanders, and Germany. He did so not with the lure of coin but the promise of lands and titles in the island of Britain. Gibbon, in the Decline and Fall, describes Charlemagne fearing “the destructive progress of the Normans,” but in truth William’s victory at Hastings was Charlemagne’s as well, because it was William’s feudal army—a heritage from the Carolingian emperor—that destroyed the Saxon host. And it was William who, in the manner of Charlemagne, appointed himself as the de facto landlord of all England, and redeemed the promises made to his knights (not merely the great nobles but nearly everyone who carried a lance at Hastings). The victor at Hastings dispossessed the Anglo-Saxon owners of virtually every acre in England and transferred them to newly made lords, earls, and barons, who held them as his vassals.
At the time of Hastings, the decisive elements of Northern Europe’s next few centuries were already largely in place. Enabled by what would eventually be four centuries of warm summers and moderate winters, population and land cultivation both continued to grow, one barely keeping up with the other. For three centuries after William’s victory, feudal levies would shape the course of European conflict, and manorial land tenure the nature of European agriculture and trade. The combination of population growth and feudal land expansion—the seeds for a future disaster—were already planted in Europe before the Norman army sailed across the channel in 1066.
Without Hastings, though, there’s no obvious reason the same system would have taken root in Britain. A
s, indeed, it did.
CHAPTER TWO
“Henceforth Be Earls”
1066–1298
The Tragedy of Macbeth ends with Malcolm telling his thanes that they would “henceforth be earls, the first that ever Scotland in such an honour named.” Shakespeare’s dramatic device had a real historical antecedent. Duke William’s accession to the English throne after his victory at Hastings transformed political power in the British Isles, and what the playwright got wrong in detail—Shakespeare’s Malcolm, properly Malcolm III Canmore, an eleventh-century king of Scotland, wasn’t the one to adopt Norman ways, but his son, David I—was nonetheless accurate in broad. The transplanted Vikings known as Normans had brought a new political structure to England, and shortly thereafter, Wales and Scotland: no more Thane of Cawdor; henceforth Earl of Moray. A dozen new cities—burghs, like Edinburgh and Roxburgh—were built. The relatively simple national bureaucracy in the lands north of the river Forth was replaced with the same European model William had brought with him from Normandy: constables, chancellors, stewards, sheriffs, and the like.
But the most fundamental change in Scotland was a profoundly different way of sharing the kingdom itself—that is, its land. Every society establishes rules for such an allocation, since land is desirable, and therefore valuable, for many reasons: houses are built on it, minerals mined from it, wood harvested from it. But land matters most because it produces food.
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