The Norman Conquest (37 page)

Even those Englishmen whom William had apparently tried to appease were becoming dangerously disaffected. The brothers Eadwine and Morcar may have harboured resentment over their compulsory trip to Normandy as the king’s honoured guests, but what must have rankled more was the steady erosion of their authority in England. In Morcar’s case, the north of his earldom, thanks to William’s grant to Gospatric, remained outside his control; but in
Yorkshire, too, the young earl may have exercised very little power. A late but local source tells us that, after the brothers’ defeat at Stamford Bridge, Harold had handed control of the region to Maerleswein, the sheriff of Lincolnshire, and it seems quite likely that the same man was still in charge there two years on.
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As for Eadwine, he may have felt even more disillusioned, given the gulf between what he had been promised and what he had actually received. According to Orderic (here showing his Mercian roots), when William had made his peace with Eadwine he had granted him ‘authority over his brother and almost a third of England, and had promised to give him his daughter in marriage’. But none of this had come to pass. Far from being enlarged, Eadwine’s existing authority in Mercia had been undermined. Along the border between England and Wales, for example, the king had established a buffer zone, with new earldoms based on Hereford and Shrewsbury. The first, which had gone to William fitz Osbern, seems also to have included Worcester, which had previously been Eadwine’s concern. As for the second, lately given to Roger of Montgomery, there was no question: Shropshire was a constituent part of Mercia, now taken away from its English governor. The king’s desire was doubtless to create a cordon sanitaire between the western counties of England and kingdoms of Wales – this was, after all, the very area where Eadric the Wild and his Welsh allies remained active – but in doing so he had driven a wedge between himself and the greatest surviving English earl. As for William’s promise of his daughter’s hand in marriage, this too had been denied. ‘Listening to the dishonest counsels of his envious and greedy Norman followers’, says Orderic, ‘he withheld the maiden from the noble youth, who greatly desired her and had long waited for her.’
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And so, says Orderic, Eadwine and Morcar rose in rebellion, and many others with them. ‘A general outcry arose against the injustice and tyranny inflicted on the English … All were ready to conspire together to recover their former liberty, and bind themselves by weighty oaths against the Normans.’ Orderic mentions only a few by name: King Bleddyn of Wales, for example, the erstwhile supporter of Eadric the Wild, now came out to support the two Mercian brothers. But from other sources we can piece together a longer list of rebels, and it is impressive. The fact that Morcar exercised little true power in Northumbria, for instance, hardly mattered, because the
true leaders of northern society rallied to the cause. Maerleswein, the actual governor of Yorkshire, threw his lot in with rebels, as did Gospatric, the new earl beyond the Tyne, despite the fact that he had submitted to William only a few months earlier. Archbishop Ealdred, who had crowned the Conqueror in 1066 and his queen just a few weeks before the rebellion’s outbreak, reportedly tried to quell the discontent in his city of York, but entirely without success. The bishop of Durham, by contrast, appears to have supported the rebellion.
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The most significant name of all, however, was that of Edgar Æheling. Despite the fact that (according to William of Poitiers at least) the Conqueror counted him amongst his dearest friends on account of his kinship to Edward the Confessor, and had ‘endowed him with ample lands’ as a compensation prize, Edgar joined the rebels and thereby gave them a legitimate cause. They prepared to defend themselves, says Orderic, in woods, marshes and cities. ‘The king was informed’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘that the people in the North had gathered together, and meant to make a stand against him if he came.’
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William wasted no time in coming. Orderic goes on to explain how the king responded by marching northwards, building new castles as he went (this is the precise context of his famous quote about the English not having castles and therefore being unable to resist). To read his account (based, remember, on that of William of Poitiers), one would almost think that the campaign that followed was a purely defensive measure. ‘The king rode to all the remote parts of the kingdom and fortified strategic sites against enemy attacks’, we are told. We can reasonably assume, however, that as the Norman war machine advanced it blazed its typical trail of destruction; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for this year says at one point ‘he allowed his men to harry wherever they came’.
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The scale of the violence can also be inferred from the speed of the rebels’ submissions. As soon as William had planted his first new castle at Warwick, Eadwine and Morcar – ostensibly the leaders of the revolt – surrendered. When Nottingham fell, and another new castle arose, the citizens of York were sent into a terrified panic, and hurriedly dispatched hostages along with the keys to the city. William arrived there soon afterwards, planting a third new castle (the site now known as Clifford’s Tower), at which point the remaining rebels
in Northumbria also gave up the fight. Some, like the bishop of Durham, approached the king and sought his pardon. Others, including the leaders Mærleswein, Gospatric, and Edgar Ætheling, fled northwards, and sought refuge in Scotland. According to Orderic, King Malcolm had been backing the rebels from the start and was preparing to send forces in their aid. But, seeing how quickly the rising had collapsed, he now decided, to paraphrase Orderic, that he preferred peace to war. When envoys arrived from William demanding his submission, the Scottish king sent back representatives to swear fealty and obedience on his behalf. Satisfied, William departed from York, leaving a large garrison to guard the new castle there. As he marched his army back south, more new castles were established at Lincoln, Huntingdon and Cambridge.
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While William had been campaigning in the north, the sons of King Harold had decided to launch the invasion that had been frustrated at the start of the year by the pre-emptive strike on Exeter. Seizing what seemed to be a second chance, the three young men (John of Worcester names them as Godwine, Edmund and Magnus) landed in Somerset, and began ravaging around the mouth of the River Avon. (Their point of landing suggests that they may have travelled via Flat Holm, where their grandmother still lurked.) Having failed to take Bristol, they returned to their ships with such booty as they could grab (which would almost certainly have included slaves) and began raiding further south along the Somerset coast, but there they were confronted by local levies in a battle that saw heavy casualties on both sides. According to John of Worcester, the Godwine boys had the victory, and for an encore went on to raid in Devon and Cornwall, before returning to Ireland with their spoils. But if this was intended to be an attack to re-establish the Godwine family in England, it was a dismal failure.
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The summer months of 1068 had clearly been terrible ones – and not just for the English. ‘Ill fortune held victors and vanquished alike in its snare’, says Orderic, ‘bringing down on them war, famine and pestilence.’ In a particularly revealing passage, normally quoted only for its amusement value, the historian goes on to explain how at this moment many Normans were thinking of quitting England altogether:

Certain Norman women, consumed by fierce lust, sent message after message to their husbands, urging them to return at once, and adding that unless they did so with all speed, they would take other husbands. For they dared not join their men themselves, being unaccustomed to the sea-crossing and afraid of seeking them out in England, where they were engaging in armed forays every day and blood flowed freely on both sides.

What we see here, of course, apart from the casual misogyny of the medieval celibate, is a crude attempt to excuse faint-heartedness on the part of male Normans (one suspects that this passage originated with William of Poitiers). The desperate circumstances in England were clearly leading to widespread desertion: Orderic tells us that at this point the keepers of the castles at Winchester and Hastings, and many others besides, decided to abandon their posts and return home. Given the ongoing level of violence, one might suppose that even unmarried men (or men with less wanton wives) were having second thoughts about the whole enterprise, and concluding that the rewards were simply not worth the risk.

Such desertions, of course, put the Conqueror himself in a difficult bind. ‘The king,’ says Orderic, ‘with so much fighting on his hands, was most anxious to keep all his knights about him, and made them a friendly offer of lands and revenues and great authority, promising them more when he had completely rid the kingdom of all his enemies.’ This was an understandable reaction, but promising ever greater rewards to those Normans who stayed the course meant depriving ever greater numbers of Englishmen of their estates, and causing more of the disinheritance that seems to have inspired the rebellion in the first place. Both sides, in short, were being drawn into an increasingly vicious circle.
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Nevertheless, by the autumn of 1068, William may well have thought that the circle had been squared. In the course of the year he had defeated major rebellions in the south-west, the Midlands and the north, and in each case his enemies had submitted to his mercy or fled in the face of his wrath. A string of new castles had been established in strategic towns and cities, securing his grip on the country as far as York. Moreover, he could draw hope for the future from the fact that many Englishmen were evidently willing to fight, even to die, defending his authority: the sons of King Harold
had been beaten off in the first instance by the citizens of Bristol, and the forces that had subsequently met them in battle had been captained by Eadnoth the Staller, a sometime servant of Edward the Confessor. Once the campaign against the rebels was over, says Orderic, the king assembled his mercenary soldiers and, having rewarded them royally, allowed them to go home. It was a further mark of his confidence that, as the end of the year approached, William himself crossed the Channel and returned to Normandy.
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The peace did not last long. William evidently remained anxious about the security of northern England, and with good reason. The concessions he had wrung from the king of Scots during the campaign of 1068 had clearly been limited. Malcolm may have offered his personal submission, but there is no suggestion that he had surrendered any of the English rebels who had taken refuge at his court. Mærleswein, Gospatric and Edgar. Ætheling, to name just the three most important, remained at large, either in Scotland or in the far north of England.
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At the start of the new year 1069, therefore, the English king decided to tighten his grip on the north by appointing yet another new earl. His experiment with Gospatric having failed, William reverted to his original strategy and appointed an outsider. Robert Cumin, as this new appointee was named, is a man about whom we know next to nothing. A later writer says he came to England at the head of a band of Flemings, so it may well be that Robert himself hailed from the Flemish town of Comines. The Flemish connection also implies his men were probably mercenaries. No doubt conscious of the fate of his predecessor, Earl Copsig, Cumin came north in considerable force: the chroniclers give estimates of between 500 and 900 armed men.
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The fullest account of what followed is provided by the local chronicler, Simeon of Durham. According to Simeon, the new earl advanced leaving a trail of destruction, allowing his men to ravage the countryside by pillaging and killing. His remit was apparently to govern the territory beyond the River Tyne, and when they heard of his coming, the people of this region left their homes and prepared to flee. But, says Simeon, ‘suddenly there came such a heavy fall of snow and such harsh winter weather that all possibility of flight was denied’. With their backs against the wall, the Northumbrians decided
they had no choice, and resolved that they would either kill the earl or die trying. At this point the bishop of Durham – only recently reconciled after his dalliance with rebellion the previous year – hurried to meet Cumin and urged him to halt his advance. The earl, predictably, spurned this advice, and proceeded to enter Durham itself, where he planned to spend the night. Inside the city, his men continued their killing and looting in their quest for quarters.

The outcome was equally predictable. ‘At first light’, says Simeon, ‘the Northumbrians who had banded together burst in through all the gates, and rushed through the whole town killing the earl’s companions.’ The streets, we are told, were choked with bodies and awash with blood. Cumin himself was staying in the house of the bishop, where the Flemings were able to put up some effective resistance. But, driven back by the defenders’ javelins, the attackers simply set the building on fire. ‘Some of those inside burned to death,’ says Simeon, ‘others rushed out through the doors and were cut down. Thus the earl was killed on 31 January.’
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The massacre of Cumin and his men acted as a trigger for a new general rising. A short time later the governor of the new castle at York was slaughtered along with many of his men. (From what follows it seems clear that he must have been away from the castle at the time.) ‘The English now gained confidence in resisting the Normans, whom they saw as oppressors of their friends and allies’, says Orderic Vitalis. Seeing that a new and spontaneous uprising was underway, the leaders of northern England returned from their Scottish exile. As Orderic explains, Mærleswein, Gospatric and Edgar Ætheling, along with many others, joined forces with the insurgents and led them in an attack on York, where the Norman sheriff and his men were still holding out. Somehow he managed to get a message to the king, explaining that unless York was relieved quickly he would be forced to surrender.
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