The Norman Conquest (40 page)

William was acutely conscious of such criticism and the need to diffuse it. At an earlier stage in the Conquest, probably on the occasion of his victorious homecoming at Easter 1067, the bishops of Normandy had instituted a set of penances for those who had participated in the Hastings campaign; they survive in a fascinating document known today as the Penitential Ordinance. Since this was a highly unusual measure, and the Conqueror’s control over the Norman Church is well established, we can reasonably assume that he personally approved it, and regard it as a reflection of his ongoing desire to have his actions seen as legitimate.
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In general the penances imposed by the Ordinance seem fairly heavy: ‘Anyone who knows that he killed a man in the great battle must do one year’s penance for each man he killed … Anyone who wounded a man, and does not know whether he killed him or not,
must do penance for forty days for each man he struck’: by these reckonings the more practised warriors in William’s army were going to be doing penance for an extremely long time. There were, however, other clauses designed to lighten the burden in certain circumstances. Archers, for example, who could not possibly know how many they killed or wounded, were permitted to do penance for three Lents. In fact, as another clause made clear,
anyone
unable to recall his precise body count could, at the discretion of his local bishop, do penance for one day a week for the rest of his life; alternatively, he could redeem his sin by either endowing or building a church. This last, of course, was the option chosen by William himself. At some point in the early years of the Conquest, the king caused Battle Abbey to be founded on the site of the field of Hastings, its purpose both to commemorate the victory and atone for the bloodshed.
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The provisions of the Ordinance also extended into the post-Hastings period, acknowledging that William’s men may have faced resistance when looking for food, but imposing stiffer penances for those who killed while in pursuit of plunder. The cut-off point was the coronation: any killings carried out thereafter were deemed to be regular homicides, wilfully committed, and hence subject to regular (i.e. stricter) penalties. But once again there was an exception: the same special penances would apply even
after
the coronation, if any of those killed were in arms against the king. This, of course, meant that the Penitential Ordinance, although probably drafted in the months after Hastings, could also cover the years of violence that had followed, and the fact that it survives only in English sources in connection with the papal legation of 1070 strongly suggests that it was confirmed or reissued at this point – again, doubtless on the express orders of the king.
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The principal reason for the legates’ visit, however, was neither legitimization nor atonement but reform. ‘They took part in much business up and down the country, as they found needful in regions which lacked ecclesiastical order and discipline’, says Orderic Vitalis. The lax state of the English Church had been one of the main arguments put forward by William to secure papal support for the Conquest, so it was hardly surprising to find the legates engaged in such work. In one sense this was simply a policy intended from the outset, delayed by the years of rebellion.

At the same time, the rebellion itself clearly influenced the nature
of the reform that was undertaken. At the start of his reign the Conqueror had promised to uphold established law and custom, and had confirmed the majority of his subjects in their lands and titles. But if the period 1068–70 had proved one thing, it was that Englishmen could not be trusted. Time and again William had forgiven certain individuals, only to have them rebel again once his back was turned. With laymen he was able to take a tough line by confiscating their estates and thus depriving them of their place in society, but with churchmen the task was not so simple. The most recalcitrant clergy had already removed themselves, either by dying in battle or fleeing into exile, while a few others appear to have been subject to summary sentences – most notably Æthelric, the former bishop of Durham, and his brother, Æthelwine, the sitting bishop, respectively arrested and outlawed during the summer of 1069, presumably for having supported the northern rebels.
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But kings could not simply start deposing and replacing senior churchmen, however culpable or untrustworthy they seemed.

Papal legates, on the other hand, could. Soon after Easter, in a specially convened council at Winchester, reform of the English Church began with the dismissal of Archbishop Stigand. In many respects, of course, it was surprising that Stigand had not been removed sooner. He was, after all, the Godwine candidate for Canterbury, uncanonically installed in 1052 after the flight of his Norman predecessor, Robert of Jumièges, and this indeed formed part of the charge sheet against him at Winchester. The other main plank of the prosecution’s case – one which was impossible to contest – was pluralism: despite his promotion to Canterbury, Stigand had continued to serve as bishop of Winchester. Since he had already been excommunicated on these grounds by the pope it can hardly have been a surprise that he was in due course deposed by the legates. His survival prior to this point was probably due to the wealth and influence attributed to him by William of Poitiers, and also his advanced years: a career that had started in 1020 could not have been expected in 1066 to last very much longer. By 1070, however, William had clearly grown tired of waiting for the inevitable and had abandoned any pretence of deferring to English sentiment: the archbishop was an embarrassment and therefore had to go.
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But Stigand was far from being the only casualty. Either in the
same council at Winchester, or else during a second synod held a few weeks later at Windsor, three other English bishops were similarly expelled from office. In the case of Leofwine, bishop of Lichfield, we know that part of the case against him was a charge of ‘carnal incontinence’: he had a wife and children. A similar case may have been brought against Æthelmaer of East Anglia, for he too was a married man. As for Æthelric, bishop of Sussex, we have no idea what the charge was, but it cannot have been very convincing: the following year the pope ordered the case be reviewed and the bishop reinstated (an order which was ignored).

It is amply clear from both their concentration and their timing that these depositions were political. Æthelmaer and Leofwine may have been married, but so too were countless other clerics (including, in Æthelmær’s case, the man appointed as his successor). The real reason for their dismissal is apparent from their connections: Leofwine was a leading light in the affinity of the earls of Mercia; Æthelmser was Stigand’s brother. What William was doing in 1070 was sweeping the board clean of bishops whose loyalties he considered to be suspect. The moral or canonical case against Æthelric of Sussex was clearly very weak, but in the king’s eyes he must have constituted a major security threat, for he was not only deposed but imprisoned: ‘kept under guard at Marlborough’, in the words of John of Worcester, ‘even though he was guiltless’.
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It was, of course, a virtual replay of events in Normandy sixteen years earlier, when Archbishop Mauger of Rouen had been removed from office in the wake of a rebellion in which he was suspected of being complicit. On that occasion, too, William had been careful to follow procedure, and the accused had been condemned on account of his supposed moral failings by a council headed by a papal legate. Indeed, if the English episcopate had been paying any attention to the Conqueror’s earlier career, they might have read the writing on the wall from the moment of the legates’ arrival in 1070, for the bishop in charge of proceedings was none other than Ermenfrid of Sion, the same man who had presided over Mauger’s downfall.
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That said, the exercise in 1070 was conducted on a far larger scale; it was not just the bishops who were purged at Winchester and Windsor. ‘Many abbots were there deposed’, says John of Worcester, and although he names no names it seems likely that
the cull included the abbots of Abingdon, St Albans and St Augustine’s Canterbury, all of whom lost their positions – and in some cases their liberty – around this time. The king, says John, ‘stripped of their offices many bishops and abbots who had not been condemned for any obvious cause, whether of conciliar or secular law. He kept them in prison for life simply on suspicion (as we have said) of being opposed to the new kingdom.’
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Naturally, their replacements were Normans. For obvious reasons William preferred to promote men he knew personally, and so turned in the first instance to the clerks of his own chapel. The bishoprics of Winchester, East Anglia, Sussex and Lichfield were in each case filled by former royal chaplains, as was the archbishopric of York, vacated the previous year by the death of Ealdred. Only in the case of Durham did the king depart from this practice, installing instead a Lotharingian priest by the name of Walcher. The net result of these new appointments was that the higher echelons of the English Church were transformed, just as surely and swiftly as the secular aristocracy had been transformed by the Battle of Hastings and the subsequent rebellions. By the time the purge of 1070 was over, only three of England’s fifteen bishoprics were held by Englishmen.
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The plunder of its monastic riches during Lent; the deposition of many of its leaders during the spring: clearly 1070 was already shaping up to be an
annus horribilis
for the English Church. But in the course of the same year, it seems, the Church had to absorb yet another blow, when the Conqueror imposed on many of its bishoprics and abbeys the novel burden of military service.

Military service was something that all medieval rulers expected from their subjects. In Normandy, as we’ve noted, there is scant evidence to indicate how it was obtained before 1066, but enough to suggest that the duchy was moving in an increasingly ‘feudal’ direction, with magnates being made to understand that they held their estates at the duke’s discretion in return for supplying him with, among other things, a specific number of knights whenever he demanded. In England, as we’ve also noted, a somewhat different system was used, whereby individual lords were required to contribute a certain number of soldiers to the royal host, the number apparently determined by the amount of land they owned as measured in hides. Since the start of his reign in England, William had been granting
out new estates to his Norman followers and also, in some cases, allowing English lords to redeem their existing lands. The assumption, based on later evidence, is that the king must have seized the unique opportunity afforded by this fresh start to define precisely how much military service each man owed, expressed as a quota of knights.
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In the early years of the reign such new demands were apparently not imposed on the English Church. Whereas in Normandy it was quite common for monasteries to be expected to provided benefices for their founders’ military followers, in England it was more common for the monks to wave a charter, granted by some obliging former monarch, conveniently excusing them from all such secular burdens. William, given his professed intention at the start of his reign to abide by the laws and usages of his English predecessors, appears initially to have accepted the validity of such exemptions.

Four years into his reign, however, the Conqueror changed his mind. ‘In the year 1070’, says the chronicler Roger of Wendover, ‘King William imposed military service on all the bishoprics and abbacies which had, until that time, been free from all secular authority’, adding that the king ‘had written down how many knights he wanted each to provide to him and his successors in time of hostility’. Wendover is, admittedly, a late source, writing in the early thirteenth century, which has led some historians to doubt the worth of his words. (There are few more controversial topics relating to the Norman Conquest than the introduction of knight service.) But his comments are supported by those of other chroniclers writing in the twelfth century and, more tentatively, by a copy of an original writ which, if genuine, can have been issued no later than 1076. Despite the controversy, most historians accept that the Conqueror did make new military demands of the English Church at this moment.
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If we ask why he did so, the answer is self-evidently because he felt that such additional service was required. William may have been content to uphold the promises of his predecessors at the start of his reign, but since that time his new kingdom had been shaken by three years of almost constant rebellion. We know that during these years he had summoned Englishmen to fight in his armies, who presumably turned out on the basis of their existing pre-Conquest obligations; but we can also see that he made
extensive use of mercenaries from the Continent, rewarding them with the proceeds of two heavy gelds. As the desperate expedient of plundering the monasteries in 1070 shows, the maintenance of an army by such methods was unsustainable; indeed, one could speculate that the cash-flow crisis at the start of the year might well have suggested to the king and his advisers the necessity of finding new ways to pass on the burden to his subjects. The rebellions may have been over by the spring of 1070, but the need for military service remained pressing. William no longer had a grand army in his pay, but over the previous two years he had founded dozens of new castles, all of which required permanent garrisons. Who was going to pay for this dispersed army of occupation from one week to the next, until some unforeseen time in the future?

The answer, clearly, was the English Church. According to the twelfth-century chronicler at the abbey of Ely, William informed all his abbots and bishops that ‘from then on, garrisons for the kings of England were to be paid for, as a perpetual legal requirement, out of their resources … and that no one, even if supported by the utmost of authority, should presume to raise an objection to this decree’. Similarly, and more specifically, the twelfth-century Abingdon Chronicle says ‘this abbey was ordered by royal command to provide knights for guard duty at Windsor Castle’. Of course, in some cases the heads of these houses were Normans appointed as a result of the recent purge, and who could hardly have been expected to take up their posts without investing in such protection. At Abingdon, it was later recalled that the new Norman abbot, Adelelm, ‘went nowhere in the first days of his abbacy unless surrounded by a band of armed knights … For at that time many and widespread rumours of conspiracies against the king and his kingdom boiled up, forcing everyone in England to defend themselves.’
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