A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons (53 page)

The Normans called Harold an oath-breaker and perjurer. But from an English point of view William, the illegitimate descendant of pirates, with no share in the blood royal, who had not been chosen by the councillors or people of the realm and whose claim to be the nominated successor had been superseded by the dead king’s nomination of Harold, could be considered as openly planning a war of usurpation and conquest against the lawfully anointed king of one of Europe’s ancient Christian kingdoms. The pope’s blessing was essential, and for that blessing to be given ‘Harold the Perjurer’ was an important bogey-man. After 1066 some religious establishments deleted the Godwine name from their lists of benefactors.
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As R.H.C. Davis has stated:

The most interesting fact about the Norman Conquest is what made it so complete . . . Apparently . . . England received a new royal dynasty, a new aristocracy . . . and virtually a new church, as the result of one day’s fighting . . .
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In fact the picture was not quite that simple. But the total defeat of the English at Hastings made a reversal of the decision virtually inconceivable.

Hastings shattered the English army, and William subdued the kingdom by terror. Quite apart from the horrors to come in the north, from the day after Hastings until the week before their master’s coronation William’s soldiery, drawn from Brittany, Picardy, French Flanders and other regions of northern France by the lure of
booty in England, carved a swath of devastation across southeast England. But the leading members of this ‘joint stock enterprise’, as his army has often been called, expected more than casual loot: they expected to be rewarded with land.

The pope, the patron of William’s war, enjoined penances on the army. After the coronation, William issued a writ in English to the bishop and citizens of London (who had been spared the punitive rampage), greeting them as friends, proclaiming his wish that they should continue to enjoy the laws that had governed them in King Edward’s day, and promising to protect them from injury. There now followed a systematic suppression of native English culture that in the emotive rhetoric of our own day would be called cultural genocide.

First, there was the suppression of the language and literature. Secondly, there was the dismantling of the vibrant spirituality of the Anglo-Saxon church tradition and the destruction of many of its buildings.

The organized wealth of southern England was in the hands of the conquerors and they celebrated their triumph in stone . . . nowhere else in Latin Christendom was so much built in so short a time . . .
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By dint of ‘unfortunate conflagrations’, combined with ordered demolitions, within fifty years of the conquest Old English cathedrals and minsters had been levelled to the ground, in most cases to be replaced by Norman-style buildings, built under Norman contractors, even using stone from Norman quarries. It was a highly profitable rebuilding programme in which the native participation rarely amounted to more than forced labour, which first demolished its own historic structures and then raised, ‘to the glory of God’, the ‘great churches’ of the conquerors. The architectural glories of England’s Norman/Romanesque architecture are, like the ruined castles that still line the heritage trails, perpetual monuments to an historic act of cultural cleansing.

In addition there was spiritual vandalism. A particular feature of Anglo-Saxon religious life had been its exceptionally developed cult of the Virgin Mary. (Modern scholars tend to accept that the cult of the Virgin Mary at Walsingham probably began in the last years of Edward the Confessor.) Certain of the Marian feast days, including the Presentation [of Christ] in the Temple and the Conception of the Virgin, seem to have originated at Winchester in the 1030s. From there they found their way to Canterbury, where they were entered in the liturgical calendar of the archdiocese. One of the first acts of the new Norman archbishop Lanfranc, who finally succeeded Stigand in 1070, was to reform the calendar and abolish many of the old feasts of the Anglo-Saxon Church, among them these Marian celebrations. Elsewhere, such as at the great abbey of Abingdon, which in the time of Æthelwold had been adorned with an altar table of gold and silver and texts in silver decorated with precious stones, treasures were destroyed or dispersed after the Conquest.
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William had made various land grants before his return to Normandy in February 1067. In his train went a number of aristocratic English hostages to be paraded through the streets of Rouen as part of the spoils of victory. According to the chronicler William of Poitiers, ‘these long-haired sons of the North, with their almost feminine beauty’ made something of a stir.

For William, acceptance as the lawful heir of Edward the Confessor was of critical practical consequence. He had acquired an exceptionally well-run country. The basic unit, the shire, was in the hands of an administrative team that was ‘literate, active and continuous’. Here the assessment and collection of levies were organized on the basis of a sort of land register. The sheriff, instructed by writ, was responsible for implementing such instructions. His court was the place where local disputes were settled and local big men could be enlisted in support of the king’s business. Only when England’s sheriffs and their staff were satisfied that the alien ruler
now in place was duly vested with the authority of a king of the English would they willingly discharge their functions. Their collaboration was essential to ensure the continued services of skilled Anglo-Saxons as scribes in his court writing office (or chancery) and as local officials in the shires and boroughs, to ensure the smoothest possible completion of the conquest, at least until a sufficient number of Frenchmen had been trained to replace them. The shire court lies behind the success of the Norman settlement.

A Norman granted land by the king need only present himself before the court with a sealed writ to that effect. If inspected and found authentic it was then read to the assembly. The leading men of the shire, thus made witness to the royal will in the matter, were duty bound to see it implemented. The alien intruder had to be duly informed of the lands that were now his and assisted, if need be, in taking possession of them. Not all the beneficiaries were best pleased. Orderic Vitalis tells us that while some were astounded by the extent of the lands awarded to them, others complained about ‘domains depopulated by war’. (‘
Tant pis
to you’, any Anglo-Saxon with a smattering of Norman French might no doubt have been heard to mutter.)

Yet when it suited him William was scrupulous in paying respect to the old ways. At a famous trial held on Pinnenden Heath in Kent in the 1070s, Æthelric, bishop of Selsey, ‘a man of great age and very wise in the law of the land’ was brought on William’s order in a wagon to the place of the trial so that ‘he might expound the ancient practice of the laws.’

In his 1966 essay, ‘The Norman Conquest’, R. H. C. Davis assumed that at first the Normans would have had to live like an army of occupation, ‘living, eating and sleeping together in operational units . . . and . . . exploiting their estates as absentee landlords for the time being’. But castles of various types soon encroached like a malignant rash across the English landscape, to enforce obedience. The simplest type comprised an earth mound (the motte)
topped by a palisaded enclosure, or possibly a wooden tower, surrounded by a ditch and a palisade enclosing an outer compound, the bailey. Designed as protection for the henchmen of an alien warrior brigandage intent upon becoming a ‘nobility’, it was a constant menace to the subject countryside and a standing humiliation to its people whose forced labour had raised the structure. Stone-built keeps (donjons) replaced the first emergency timber towers. That the French name for a tower rising skywards was transmuted into ‘dungeon’ in the language of the conquered population to signify the dank and dreadful pit at its base, the domain of torment and sewer rats, recalls realities of the Conquest years that are rarely touched on. But the Normans had a hidden advantage. Many ordinary English may have felt that the invaders were sent as a scourge from God for the nation’s sins. After all, the pope in Rome had, for reasons known to himself, blessed the alien banners.

The more adventurous among the conquerors might take advantage of the general confusion to add to their holdings. Some ‘manipulated’ the suitors at the shire courts to make false returns in their favour. For example, Rochester Cathedral under its Anglo-Saxon bishop suffered for years at the hands of a Norman sheriff named Picot. He claimed that the cathedral’s manor of Freckenham in Suffolk was in fact royal demesne and as such under his management – and kept the profits for himself. In due course, however, the old English bishop was succeeded by a Norman and he persuaded King William to have a shire court convened to give judgement as to ‘whose the land ought to be’. Eventually the new bishop tracked down the Englishman who had managed the cathedral estates in the Confessor’s time and he confirmed that the manor had indeed belonged to the king.

King William was as interested as anyone to discover the exact location and value of the grants of lands he had made and whether any of his followers had seized more than allotted to him. Confident in the Rolls-Royce administration of his new kingdom, he ordered
an inventory of England and its landholders – Domesday Book. The first question posed about any manor was ‘Who held it in King Edward’s time?’ If the answer did not match the one expected, in other words if the present occupier was not the one to whom the king had awarded the lands of the Anglo-Saxon lord named, then he could expect trouble. Many
clamores
or complaints came before the Domesday commissioners, some revealing attempted encroachments on the king’s land and then it could be the Normans’ turn to suffer. A certain Berengar, charged with invading the royal demesne land, found himself ‘in the king’s mercy’ – he became so ill that he was unable to attend the official hearing.

Before the Conquest it had become common practice for the great monastic houses to keep detailed records of their estates, tenants’ rents and so forth; lay landowners may have followed the same practice. The machinery of the sheriff’s court was essential to the Domesday inquests but such estate records, as we saw in the case of Freckenham, must have provided invaluable back-up material:

The Domesday survey brought the Norman Conquest to a conclusion by examining all the details of the ruthless spoliation, and approving them only when they had been done with authority . . . It made the Norman settlement permanent.
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English heritage

The death in a hunting accident of the second Norman king, William Rufus, in the New Forest near Winchester on 2 August 1100 seemed ill-omened to contemporaries and still attracts conspiracy theories: the most lurid of these claim that he was the sacrificial victim of a pagan fertility cult, although more likely it was the result of a coup. On Friday 3 August, the day after the body was interred in the cathedral at Winchester, the assembled barons elected his brother Henry to be king. Having put a guard on the
royal treasury, still housed in the old West Saxon ‘capital’, Henry rode for London, its English citizenry ranked below only the bishops and the Norman baronage in their influence on national affairs. That Sunday he was consecrated as Henry I by the bishop of London before the altar in Westminster Abbey ‘and all the people in this land submitted to him’. Barely three days after one king’s accidental death a new one is elected, consecrated and acclaimed.

By the terms of William the Conqueror’s will Robert, the eldest son, had Normandy; to William went the newly acquired conquest of England; Henry received only money. William was unmarried and Robert away on the First Crusade. He was now on his return. Once he and William made their brotherly reunion Henry could kiss goodbye to the English throne unless it should become vacant – quickly. The timing and location of William’s accident, an hour or so’s ride from the kingdom’s treasury, was certainly convenient.

At the consecration Henry solemnly pledged ‘before God and all the people . . . to uphold the best of the laws upheld by any of his predecessors’. This was confirmed in a ‘charter of liberties’, which specifically committed Henry himself to maintain ‘the law of King Edward [the Confessor]’. Intriguingly the text of the Latin document as we have it uses the vernacular word
laga
instead of the Latin lex.

For England’s Norman conquerors the model for good government was to be found in pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon England. The Confessor as Law-giver would be cited in many a post-Conquest text. Yet no laws actually issued by him have survived. The text known as
Leges Edwardi Confessoris
dates from about 1140 and is not an authentic record of any previous code. It is of course possible that Edward did make laws that are lost or that his reputation for justice rested on his judgements and pronouncements by word of mouth.

Henry sent a copy of his coronation charter to every shire; then he turned to the threat from his brother Robert. At length in September 1106, largely thanks to his English troops, he defeated
his brother at the Battle of Tinchebrai in Normandy, and Robert became his prisoner for life. The English fought enthusiastically for their Norman king, not least because he had married into the English royal house, his wife Matilda/Edith being the great granddaughter of Æthelred II.

During this reign there was something of a resurgence in things Anglo-Saxon. Although probably the son of a French father and an English mother, William of Malmesbury, who wrote his
Gesta regum Anglorum
following a request by Matilda/Edith that he compile an account of her ancestors, considered that Hastings had been a fateful day for England, ‘our sweet country’. His contemporary John of Worcester, born, a contemporary tells us, of English parents and a partisan for the memory of King Harold, drew on Bede and other Anglo-Saxon sources to amplify the English content in his continuation of a ‘Universal Chronicle’ he worked on up to about 1140. In addition he also produced royal genealogies of the pre-Conquest kingdoms. The last of these ‘Mercian-born’ historians, Henry of Huntingdon, wrote his
Historia Anglorum
(‘History of the English’) in ten short books. It found a wider market. The abbot of Westminster made a premature move for the beatification of Edward the Confessor. Miracles claimed for the king included the story that Earl Godwine had choked to death on bread blessed by him, while attempting to prove his innocence of the mysterious death of Edward’s brother, Alfred, years before (see the cover illustration of this book).