The Norman Conquest (3 page)

Some readers may come away with the impression that, in the unlikely event of having to choose, I would line up with the Normans; if so it would only be because I know that they are going to win. I have no particular fondness for William and his followers. Like all conquerors, they come across as arrogant, warlike and inordinately pleased with themselves, as well as (in this particular case) holier than thou. But, at the same time, I don’t much care for the English either, as they were in the eleventh century, with their binge drinking, slavery and political murders. Whoever these people were, they are not ‘us’. They are our forebears from 1,000 years ago – as are the Normans. At the risk of sounding more pious than the most reformed Norman churchman, it is high time that we stopped taking sides.

Needless to say, however, I still think the Conquest is hugely important; indeed, I would agree with those historians who continue to regard it as the single most important event in English history.
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Many of the traditional claims made for the Normans, it is true, have been overturned in recent decades. Some of the things we once thought had been changed by their coming have been shown to have changed at other times and for other reasons, or simply not to have changed at all. Nobody now thinks that the Conquest introduced the nucleated village or much affected the development of the parish system; it is generally thought to have had little long-term effect on existing political structures, the economy or the arts.

But even as these questions have been settled on the side of continuity, other areas have been shown to have experienced dramatic change. Not only did the Normans bring with them new forms of architecture and fortification, new military techniques, a new ruling elite and a new language of government; they also imported a new set of attitudes and morals, which impinged on everything from warfare to politics to religion to law, and even the status of the peasantry. Many of these changes could be grouped under the heading ‘national identity’. The Conquest matters, in short, because it altered what it meant to be English.
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One last thing: this book is about the impact of the Normans on England, not about their impact in general. The Normans had all sorts of other exciting adventures in the course of the eleventh century, invading both Italy and Sicily and, eventually, as participants in the First Crusade, the Holy Land. These adventures are not part of this story, which is focused on the Conquest of 1066. This means we will look at events in Normandy and France up to that point, but not have much room for events in these regions thereafter. Also, because the book concentrates on England, we will not have much to say about the other countries and peoples in the British Isles. In recent decades there have been many brilliant books and articles reminding us always to consider the British Isles as a whole, and not just as England and its ‘Celtic Fringe’. The Normans did have an enormous impact on the peoples of Wales and Scotland – eventually. In the first generation after 1066, however, that impact was minimal. Some contemporary Celtic chroniclers failed even to register the Conquest, or noted it only in passing as something that was happening elsewhere that would not affect them. Events would
soon prove them wrong, but they are events that fall outside the time span of this story.
¹⁶

Stories have to stop somewhere. The Bayeux Tapestry stops with the death of Harold, but only because the original ending is lost. Most scholars assume that in its complete state the Tapestry stretched a little further, and probably concluded with the coronation of William the Conqueror at Christmas 1066. This story also stops with William, but it stretches a good deal further, ending with the king’s death in 1087.

Similarly, stories have to have a beginning. The Tapestry begins not long before the Norman invasion, with events that probably took place in 1064. To tell our story properly, we must necessarily go back much further. But, again, we do start with the same person.

1

The Man Who Would Be King

T
he Bayeux Tapestry begins with three men in conversation, two standing and one seated. The standing men are not identified, but the seated figure carries a sceptre and wears a crown, while above his head the caption reads
‘Edward Rex’—
King Edward. Today he is known, more conveniently, as Edward the Confessor. His memorable by name arose in 1161, almost a hundred years after his death, when he was recognized as a saint by the pope. The pope was satisfied that Edward had performed miracles while alive, and that miracles had continued to occur after his death.
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From the record of events in his own day, Edward does not appear to have been particularly saintly. There are suggestions in contemporary sources that he may have been more pious than most, but otherwise he seems to have cut a typical, indeed unexceptional, figure. He lived a fairly long life by medieval standards, dying in his early sixties. On the Tapestry he is shown as an old man with a long white beard, and his death forms one of the most important scenes. The date of his death – 5 January 1066 – is enough to indicate that he is crucial to our story. But in order to understand that story properly, we need to travel back to his youth, and explore how he came to be king of England in the first place. It is a remarkable tale – the one aspect of his career that is indubitably miraculous.

England at the start of the eleventh century was a country both old and new. Old, because its roots stretched back into a distant past, when tribes of Germanic peoples, now collectively known as the Anglo-Saxons, had begun migrating to the island of Britain in the
fifth century. Fierce warriors, these newcomers eventually made themselves masters of southern and eastern Britain, defeating the native Celtic peoples, subjugating them and driving them into the upland regions to the north and west. In the areas where the Anglo-Saxons settled, new kingdoms had arisen, the names of which are still familiar as the counties and regions of today: Kent, Sussex and Essex; East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria. Pagan at first, the rulers of these kingdoms began to convert to Christianity from the end of the sixth century, and so in time did their peoples.
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But in the ninth century, this galaxy of competing kingdoms was destroyed by new invaders – the Vikings. Despite attempts to rehabilitate them in recent times, the Vikings, with their lust for blood and glory and their gruesome human sacrifices, were not surprisingly regarded with horror by the settled Anglo-Saxons, who witnessed their monasteries being torched, their gold and silver treasures being looted, their precious illuminated manuscripts being destroyed, their young men and women being led away as slaves, and anyone else who stood in the way being mercilessly put to the sword. One by one the several kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxons fell: first Northumbria, then East Anglia, and finally even Mercia, the mightiest kingdom of all, collapsed in the face of the Viking onslaught.
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But the kingdom of Wessex endured. Led first by the celebrated King Alfred the Great, and afterwards by his sons and grandsons, the people of the most southerly Anglo-Saxon kingdom at first doggedly defended themselves, and then successfully fought back. And not just in Wessex. During the first half of the tenth century, the West Saxon kings became the conquerors, pushing their frontier northwards, driving the Vikings into retreat, and bringing the neighbouring peoples of Mercia and East Anglia under their dominion. In 954, the Viking capital of York finally fell, and the lands north of the Humber were also annexed by the heirs of Alfred.

In driving the Vikings out, the kings of Wessex had forged a powerful new state. As their armies had advanced, their conquests had been cemented by the foundation of fortified towns, known as
burhs
(boroughs), around which they had established new administrative districts, or shires. Where there had once been several, competing kingdoms there was now a single source of authority. Henceforth the various Anglo-Saxon peoples would swear an oath to one king,
and live under one law; they would use a single silver coinage and worship a single Christian God.

But, having conquered, the kings of Wessex took care not to be seen as conquerors. Anxious not to alienate his new Anglian subjects, Alfred had urged them to forget their former differences, and emphasized the common Christian culture that united them against the pagan hordes they were fighting. Diplomatically he was not a
rex saxonum
in his charters but a
rex angul-saxonum
, and his people were collectively described as the
angelcynn
. In a further effort to promote unity, he also stressed their common history, commissioning a chronicle that would circulate around the kingdom’s major monasteries. Remarkably, this Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (as it was later known) was written not in Latin, as was the practice in virtually every other literate corner of Europe, but in the everyday language that people spoke. By the end of the tenth century, this language had a name for the new state: it was ‘the land of the Angles’,
Engla lond
.
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Such was the kingdom, at once ancient and modern, that Edward the Confessor would eventually inherit. Dynastically speaking, his credentials for doing so were impeccable, for he had been born into the royal family at some point between 1002 and 1005, a direct descendant of King Alfred (his great-great-great-grandfather). Statistically speaking, however, Edward’s chances must have seemed vanishingly slim, for he was the product of a second marriage: six older half-brothers were already waiting in line ahead of him in the queue for the succession. And yet, at the time of Edward’s arrival, it would have been rash to have placed a bet on any particular candidate, because the world was once again being turned upside down. A decade or so earlier, the Vikings had come back.

They came at first in small parties, as they had done in the past, testing the waters, raiding and then retreating with their loot. But in 991 a large Viking horde had landed at Maldon in Essex and defeated the overconfident English army that had set out to meet them, and from then on the Vikings had returned to burn, pillage and plunder on a more or less annual basis; by the time of Edward’s birth, the violence had become almost a matter of routine. Under the year 1006, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that the Vikings ‘did as they had been wont to do: they harried, burned and slew as they went’. The citizens of Winchester, Wessex’s ancient capital, ‘could watch an arrogant and confident host passing their gates on its way
to the coast, bringing provisions and treasures from a distance of more than fifty miles inland’.
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Why did the powerful kingdom of England, so good at expelling the Vikings in the tenth century, fail to repel them in the eleventh? In part it was because the Vikings who came in the second wave did so as part of bigger, better equipped and better organized armies: the giant circular fortresses they built around this time in their homelands at Trelleborg and elsewhere give some indication of their power. But Viking success was also caused by an abject failure of leadership in English society, beginning at the very top, with Edward’s father, Æthelred.

Just as Edward has his famous cognomen ‘the Confessor’, so too his father will forever be remembered as Æthelred ‘the Unready’. As it stands, ‘unready’ is a pretty fair description of Æthelred’s level of preparedness for Viking attack and kingship in general. In actual fact, however, ‘unready’ is a modern misreading of his original nickname, which was the Old English word
unraed
, meaning ‘illcounselled’ or ‘ill-advised’. (It was a pun on the king’s Christian name, which meant ‘noble counsel’.)
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That Æthelred was ill-advised is not open to doubt: the king himself admitted as much in a charter of 993, in which he blamed the mistakes of his youth on the greed of men who had led him astray. From that point on he put more faith in peaceable churchmen, but they regarded the Viking attacks as divine punishment, and thus saw the solution as spiritual reform: more prayers, more gifts to the Church, and, in the meantime, large payments of tribute to persuade the invaders to go away. Naturally, this last policy only encouraged the Vikings to come back for more. At length – by the time his son Edward was a small boy – Æthelred embarked on a more confrontational policy. In 1008, says the Chronicle, ‘the king gave orders that ships should be speedily built throughout the whole kingdom’. But this shift coincided with Æthelred placing his trust in his most discreditable counsellor of all, the contemptible Eadric ‘the Grabber’ (Streona), who had risen to power at court by having his rivals variously dispossessed, mutilated and murdered. The result was that the English aristocracy was riven by feud and rivalry, with disastrous consequences. When the newly constructed fleet, for instance, eventually put to sea, arguments broke out between the two factions; twenty ships deserted, then attacked and destroyed the others.

And so the Viking attacks continued. Large areas of the country were ravaged in both 1009 and 1010. In 1011, the invaders besieged Canterbury and carried off the archbishop; when he refused to be ransomed the following year they killed him, drunkenly pelting him with ox heads and bones. ‘All these disasters befell us’, says the Chronicle, ‘through bad counsel [that word
unraedas
again], in that they were never offered tribute in time, nor fought against, but when they had done most to our injury, peace and truce were made with them; and for all this they journeyed anyway in war bands everywhere, and harried our wretched people, and plundered and killed them.’

The end came in 1013, when the Vikings came led by the king of Denmark himself. Swein Forkbeard, as he was known, had raided several times in the past, but this time his ambition was outright conquest. Landing in Lincolnshire, he quickly took the north of England, then the Midlands, and finally Wessex. Æthelred, holed up in London as his kingdom collapsed, had just enough presence of mind to get his two youngest sons, Edward and his brother Alfred, out of the country. A few weeks later, having spent what must have been a miserable Christmas on the Isle of Wight, the king himself followed them overseas. England had been conquered by the Vikings, and its ancient royal family were in exile – in Normandy.