The Norman Conquest (15 page)

King Henry entered the fray in the autumn of 1053, leading an army into Normandy with the intention of raising the siege. Norman chroniclers report with satisfaction how some of his forces were lured into a trap by the garrison of the siege castle, with the result that many French knights were killed or captured, a disaster that apparently decided the king to retreat. Nevertheless, the same chroniclers admit that in spite of their losses the French succeeded in getting additional men and supplies into Arques. Not until William returned to prosecute the siege in person did the castle finally surrender, probably towards the end of the year.
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There was little time, however, to celebrate its fall, because soon into the new year (1054) the king of France returned. Anxious to
avenge his earlier humiliation, Henry had assembled a great army, a coalition of the kind he had earlier directed against the count of Anjou. Except now, of course, it was Count Geoffrey who rode at the king’s side, along with the counts of Aquitaine and Blois, while the duke of Normandy had become the target. Julius Caesar himself, says William of Poitiers, who loved a classical reference, would have been terrified of such a mighty host.
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Sadly, our accounts of the action that followed are extremely scant. From what little the chroniclers do tell us, we can see that the French had decided on a two-pronged invasion: one army, led by Henry’s brother, Odo, was to advance into north-eastern Normandy, while another, led by the king himself, would enter from the southeast. The intention may have been for the two forces to converge on the Norman capital at Rouen.
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We can also see that the tactics that Henry employed were entirely typical. Medieval commanders, contrary to popular belief, rarely went in search of battle. Only when their very survival was at stake (as William’s had been in 1047) would they take such a colossal risk. Normally (as William’s more usual resort to siege-craft suggests) they relied on attrition. Invading armies did not have supply lines stretching back to base; they lived off the land, seizing supplies from the inhabitants as they advanced. Inevitably this meant that many of those inhabitants were killed, but there was no law against that. On the contrary, harming non-combatants was an integral part of warfare, for it exposed the weakness of the enemy’s lordship, and showed that his protection was not worth having. Thus William of Poitiers, commenting on the French strategy in 1054, said that the people of Normandy ‘feared for themselves, their wives, their children and their goods’. The French intention, he added, was to reduce the duchy to a desert.

Faced with such a prospect, yet anxious to avoid battle, what could a conscientious defender do? Poitiers, predictably, gives the impression that William set out in 1054 to confront his enemies head-on, but the reality was probably different. According to William of Jumièges, the duke, ‘accompanied by some of his men, shadowed the king, and inflicted punishment on any member of the royal army whom he was able to catch’. By staying close to Henry’s army, William could prevent it from spreading out, limiting the amount of damage it could do and – crucially – the amount of food it could
collect. Denied the opportunity to ravage and forage, the invaders would soon be forced to retreat.
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It was the need to keep themselves fed, and the failure to realize that they were being followed, that cost the invaders the campaign. While William shadowed Henry’s own forces through south-eastern Normandy, another group of Normans had been dispatched to meet the king’s northern army. According to Jumièges, they found their opponents near the town of Mortemer, just across the border, ‘engaged in arson and the shameful sport of women’ – in other words, exactly the kind of ravaging operation that would have left them dangerously exposed. Seizing the opportunity, the Normans surprised their enemies by attacking at dawn. The battle that followed was clearly hard-fought – the bloodshed reportedly lasted until noon – but the attackers’ advantage proved decisive. ‘At length’, says Jumièges, ‘the defeated French took to flight, including their standard-bearer, Odo, the king’s brother.’ William of Poitiers adds that a great many were captured as they fled.

Defeat at Mortemer spelt the end of the French invasion. When news of the Norman victory reached Duke William later that night, he immediately dispatched a herald to Henry’s camp, who shouted the details into the darkness from the top of a nearby tree. ‘Stunned by the unexpected news,’ says William of Poitiers, ‘the king put aside all thought of delay and roused his men to flight before dawn, convinced of the need to escape Norman territory with the utmost speed.
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And so the invasion crisis of 1053–4 drew to a close. Not long afterwards William and Henry formally made peace: in return for the release of the prisoners taken at Mortemer, explains William of Poitiers, the king recognized the duke’s right to retain any territory he had taken from Geoffrey Martel, and any further lands he might wrest from him in the future. In other words, William had effectively compelled Henry to abandon his alliance with Anjou, and ensured that any future fighting would be concentrated on a single, southern frontier.
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It remained for William to deal with those Normans who had supported the French invasion. The chief rebel, of course, was the count of Arques, who surrendered his giant castle and went into exile, where he would remain for the rest of his life. His fall, and
the similar fate of those who had supported him, handed William a welcome opportunity to impose his authority more firmly on Upper Normandy, awarding lands confiscated from rebels to those who had proved their loyalty, and almost certainly obtaining in return more precise professions of dependency and service.
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The other outstanding casualty of the failed revolt was the count’s brother, Mauger. Precisely how involved he had been is impossible to say: later chroniclers took his complicity for granted, but contemporaries were altogether less committal.
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The reason for their caginess probably owed much to the fact that Mauger, as well as being the duke’s half-uncle, also happened to be the archbishop of Rouen (he had succeeded William’s great-uncle, Robert, after the latter’s death in 1037). As the most senior churchman in Normandy, Mauger could not be dismissed in the same summary manner as his brother; in order to secure his removal in the spring of 1054 William had to go to the trouble of convening a special Church council. From William of Poitiers’ account, the case against the archbishop was constructed entirely on the grounds of his unfitness for office, and the charges were fairly obviously trumped-up. Nevertheless, Mauger was in due course deposed and sent to live out his remaining days on the island of Guernsey. In truth he was probably no worse a churchman than any of his episcopal colleagues. It was simply his misfortune to have been implicated in his brother’s rebellion, and to have been the head of a Church which in his lifetime had experienced revolutionary change.
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The Normans had arrived in Normandy as destroyers of churches – marauding Vikings, pirates in search of treasure, they had fallen like wolves upon the province’s undefended cathedrals and monasteries, massacring their occupants and making off with their sacred objects of silver and gold. Very little in the way of institutional Christianity can have survived this initial onslaught. In the case of the monasteries it seems likely that none survived at all, except in a few instances where the monks stole a march on the invaders, fleeing into neighbouring regions to preserve their communal existence in exile.

Quite soon, of course, the Normans had settled down to a more peaceful way of life, and their leaders, anxious to adapt to the norms of the host society, had converted. Within a few decades of their
arrival, the dukes of Normandy had re-established some of the monasteries their ancestors had ruined, tempting back their former residents with promises of protection and restituted riches. But progress during these early generations was painfully slow. By the turn of the first millennium, only four monastic houses had been re-founded, while as late as 1025 the bishop of Coutances was still living as an exile in Rouen, he and his predecessors having all but abandoned their diocese in western Normandy to the rule of the heathen.
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Matters began to improve soon after the millennium when Duke Richard II, having re-founded the monastery in the coastal town of Fécamp, invited the celebrated monastic reformer William of Volpiano to act as its new abbot. Father William had established a reputation as the man to whom the powerful turned when they were serious about their pious investments. Born in northern Italy, he had trained at the abbey of Cluny in Burgundy, itself the birthplace in the early tenth century of a movement that aspired to reform not just monasticism but Christian society as a whole. At first he reportedly rejected Duke Richard’s offer, declaring that Normandy was too barbarous even for his considerable talents. But at length he was persuaded, and under his direction Fécamp became the model for all other Norman monasteries, as well as a training ground for priests who would reintroduce Christianity to the world beyond the cloister.
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During the rule of Richard’s son, Robert, reform initially stalled and went into reverse, as the new duke and his aristocracy preyed upon the Church for land with which to reward their knights. Robert in due course repented, restoring his usurpations and founding two new monasteries of his own at Cerisy and Montivilliers. Moreover, for the first time, the duke’s example was followed by certain Norman aristocrats, a handful of whom also established new religious houses during the final years of his rule. But this nascent trend was arrested after Robert’s death in 1035 and the accession of his underage son. William’s troubled minority saw no new foundations, ducal or private, and the fortunes of existing houses threatened by the eruption of violent aristocratic feuds.
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It was in the worst throes of this convulsion, however, against all odds and expectations, that the most influential of all new Norman monasteries was nurtured into existence. Its story began in the early
1030s when Herluin, a knight in the service of Count Gilbert of Brionne, grew tired of the pursuit of arms and fixed his mind on higher matters. Much to the amusement and derision of his military companions, the thirtysomething nobleman prayed and fasted, dressed in cheap clothes, let his hair and beard grow long and gave up his horse for an ass. At length his lord gave him leave to follow his new vocation, but Herluin failed to find solace in any of Normandy’s existing religious houses. And so, in 1034, he established a community of his own on his estate at Bonneville-Aptot. Around five years later, it migrated a few miles to a more suitable site beside the River Risle called Le Bec. Today, appropriately, it is known as Le Bec-Hellouin.
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Herluin’s humble establishment would have doubtless remained just that, had it not been for the unexpected arrival of Lanfranc. A scholar of international distinction, Italian by birth, Lanfranc had come to Normandy several years earlier to teach the liberal arts, but he too had grown disenchanted with his lot and increasingly religious. In or around 1042 he entered Bec as a monk in search of a simpler existence. It was not long, however, before the great scholar began once again to take on students, who began to arrive in droves from every corner of France and eventually beyond. By the end of the 1040s, with Herluin as abbot and Lanfranc as prior, Bec had become the most celebrated centre of learning not just in Normandy but across the whole of Europe.
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It was also by the end of the same decade, if not before, that Lanfranc had become spiritual mentor to the young Duke William. The first evidence of their friendship concerns its temporary breakdown around this time, when William, for reasons that remain obscure, destroyed one of Bec’s estates and ordered Lanfranc into exile. As the latter was leaving, however, he chanced to encounter the duke on the road, and (thanks to an icebreaker occasioned by Lanfranc’s amusingly useless horse) all was forgiven. Thereafter the most famous scholar in Europe became the most trusted of all William’s advisers. ‘He venerated him as a father, revered him as a master, and loved him as a brother or a son’, says William of Poitiers. ‘He entrusted to him the direction of his soul, and placed him on a lofty eminence from which he could watch over the clergy throughout the whole of Normandy.’
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And, indeed, throughout the whole of Normandy there are clear
signs that the end of the duke’s minority marked the start of a remarkable religious revival. In terms of the establishment of monasteries, for instance, it was a veritable golden age. William contented himself for the time being with the completion of his father’s house at Cerisy, but elsewhere in the duchy his closest followers were establishing brand-new communities. William fitz Osbern, for example, founded one at Lyre, Roger of Montgomery another at Troarn, while the duke’s stepfather, Herluin de Conteville, established a new monastery at Grestain. ‘At that time the people of Normandy rejoiced in the profound tranquillity of peace and the servants of God were held in high esteem by all’, wrote Orderic Vitalis, whose own monastery at St Evroult was established by the Grandmesnil family in October 1050. ‘Each of the magnates strove to build churches in their land at their own expense to enrich the monks.’ In the period between the battles of Val-ès-Dunes (1047) and Mortemer (1054), the Norman aristocracy founded no fewer than seven new houses, and would create as many again during the decade that followed.
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