The Norman Conquest (44 page)

In one crucial respect, however, the Normans deliberately spurned the linguistic tradition they encountered. As we’ve already noted, English was highly unusual in being a written as well as spoken language. In England, not only were books and chronicles composed in the vernacular; so too were official documents – the charters, writs and diplomas issued in the name of the king. But in or around 1070 the use of English for such documents suddenly ceased. This must have been a decision taken at the highest level, and the coincidence of its timing with the arrival of Lanfranc might lead us to identify him as the prime suspect. That said, the purge of the Church hierarchy that same year, along with the steady attrition of English secular officials, must have made the abandonment of written English a fairly obvious development: what, after all, would have been the point of addressing orders to Continental newcomers in words they could not understand? From 1070 onwards, therefore, all royal documents were written in Latin, a language that was familiar to both literate Normans and educated Englishmen. Nevertheless, even if it was a necessary switch, it was a switch that had been rendered necessary by the fact of the Conquest, and may therefore still have been perceived by many Englishmen as yet another attack on their native culture.
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Such cultural attacks, real or imagined, could lead to tension which spilled over into violence. The most notorious example occurred at Glastonbury in 1083, when the new Norman abbot, Thurstan, fell out with his monks over a number of matters (among other things, he insisted that they abandon their accustomed Gregorian chant in favour of the version used at Fécamp). Eventually the argument escalated to such an extent that Thurstan tried to silence his critics by sending in a group of armed knights. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, normally so laconic, in this case lamented at length:

The Frenchmen broke into the choir and threw missiles towards the altar where the monks were, and some of the knights went to the upper storey and shot arrows down towards the shrine, so that many arrows stuck in the cross that stood above the altar: and the wretched monks were lying round the altar, and some crept under it, and cried to God zealously, asking for His mercy when they could get no mercy from men. What can we say, except that they shot fiercely, and the others broke down the doors there, and went in and killed some of the monks and wounded many there in the church, so that the blood came from the altar on to the steps, and from the steps on to the floor. Three were killed there and eighteen wounded.

This was clearly an extreme episode in every sense: the king himself intervened and Thurstan was sent back to Normandy in disgrace.
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Yet there are other recorded instances of similar discord, albeit less violent, between English monks and their Norman masters. A letter from Lanfranc to Adelelm, the unpopular abbot of Abingdon, refers to an unspecified row that had caused several of the brothers to abscond, and implies that the disagreement was partly Adelelm’s own fault. Meanwhile Lanfranc himself at one time clashed with the monks of St Augustine’s over their refusal to accept the rule of a new French abbot. To reduce the rebels to obedience, the archbishop imprisoned some of them in chains, but even this was not enough for one especially obdurate individual. ‘Would you kill your abbot?’ asked Lanfranc. ‘Certainly I would if I could,’ replied the monk – an answer which resulted in him being tied naked to the abbey door, whipped in view of the people and driven from the city.
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That exchange exposes one of the great fears for the Normans immediately after the Conquest – that Englishmen, given half the chance, would surreptitiously slaughter them the moment their backs were turned. That much is made clear by a new law introduced by William, known as ‘murdrum’, to deal with precisely such circumstances. By this law, if a Norman was found murdered, the onus was placed on the lord of the murderer to produce him within five days or face a ruinous fine. If the culprit remained at large despite his lord’s financial ruin, the penalty was simply transferred to the local community as a whole, and levied until such time as the murderer was produced. Clearly the aim was to deter both lords and communities from granting protection and anonymity to such killers, and the obvious inference is that this is exactly what they had been
doing. The murdrum fine conjures the vivid picture of Englishmen up and down the country, frustrated by the failure of the major rebellions, continuing to vent their anger against their Norman occupiers by picking them off individually whenever the opportunity presented itself.
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Writing to Alexander II in the early part of 1073, Lanfranc described the situation in England as unbearably awful. ‘I am continually hearing, seeing and experiencing so much unrest among different people, such distress and injuries, such hardness of heart, greed and dishonesty, such a decline in the Holy Church, that I am weary of my life, and grieve exceedingly to have lived in times like these.’ It is notable that, in describing England’s woes, the archbishop does not seek to apportion blame between the English or the Normans. As his letters show, Lanfranc was not afraid to upbraid Frenchmen if he felt they had strayed from the path of righteousness. The bishop of Thetford received a stern admonition to curb his licentious lifestyle, while the bishop of Chester was severely criticized for his harassment of the monks of Coventry. Lanfranc’s correspondence with the bishop of Rochester, meanwhile, shows the Normans in a poor light when it refers to the problem of Englishwomen who had fled to nunneries ‘not for love of the religious life but for fear of the French’ – a line that rubbishes William of Poitiers’ glib assertion that during the Conquest ‘women were safe from the violence which passionate men often inflict’, and proves that Orderic Vitalis had been right to speak of Norman rape.
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Nevertheless, it seems likely that, in one important respect, the archbishop probably did see the English as more culpable than their conquerors. The problem with Englishmen was not just that they killed Normans on the quiet when no one was looking; it was also that they frequently resorted to killing each other. There was a long tradition in England of solving political problems or family disputes by resorting to murder. Confining ourselves to only eleventh-century examples, we could point to the purges that had been carried out at the court of King Æthelred, or the aristocratic bloodbath that had attended the accession of King Cnut. Earl Godwine had famously killed Edward the Confessor’s brother, Alfred, Earl Siward had arranged the murder of his rival, Eadwulf, and Tostig had similarly ordered the deaths of his Northumbrian enemies. Even Godwine’s daughter, Queen Edith, was said to have
contrived the assassination of her brother’s bête noire, Gospatric, when he was staying peacefully at her husband’s court. Monastic chroniclers may have bewailed such behaviour, but it was clear that secular society tolerated it as a usual and useful part of the political process.
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In Normandy this was not the case. The Normans may have been famously violent and rejoiced in their reputation as masters of war, but by 1066 both their warfare and politics adhered to a different set of rules. During the eleventh century it had become usual practice in northern France for noblemen to spare the lives of their enemies once they had them at their mercy. Society had become, in a word, chivalrous. The Normans seem to have embraced this new attitude in the course of the Conqueror’s own lifetime. The last time we witness political killings in Normandy is during his minority, when the duchy’s leading families had engaged in a murderous struggle for control of the young duke. Since he had come of age, however, such behaviour had ceased. His own warfare was still appallingly violent, and many innocent people perished when it was prosecuted; also, when all else failed, the duke resorted to blinding and maiming his opponents. But, significantly – and in stark contrast to Æthelred, Cnut et al. – he refrained from killing them, and even the blinding and maiming does not seem to have been inflicted in the case of high-status individuals. Aristocrats who rebelled against William were either imprisoned or exiled; occasionally they were even forgiven.
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William had applied these same principles in England after the Conquest. Of course the Conquest itself had been extremely bloody. Constant campaigning down to 1070 had led to indiscriminate slaughter, especially in the north, and revolts had occasionally been resolved by the maiming of low-status rebels. But no Englishman is known to have been executed after his surrender. Earl Morcar was committed to prison after his capture; so too was his fellow rebel from Ely, Siward Barn. Gospatric of Northumbria was at first forgiven and then later banished, while his replacement, Earl Waltheof, was not merely forgiven but promoted. From an English point of view this was quite remarkable – good grounds, it has been observed, for regarding William as the first chivalrous king of England. His biographer, William of Poitiers, certainly seems to have thought so: on one occasion he breaks off his story to address the English directly,
drawing an implicit contrast between his master’s behaviour and that of earlier English kings:

And you too, you English land, would love him and hold him in the highest respect … if putting aside your folly and wickedness you could judge more soundly the kind of man into whose power you had come… Cnut the Dane slaughtered the noblest of your sons, young and old, with the utmost cruelty, so that he could subject you to his rule and that of his children.
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Yet the inclusion of this impassioned plea clearly indicates that, at the time Poitiers was writing in the mid-1070s, the English did not appreciate William’s finer qualities. As far as they were concerned he was responsible for the death of Harold and countless thousands of their fellow countrymen; the fact that he had spared those who surrendered seems to have made no difference to his popularity. Nor, it seems, did it have much impact on attitudes towards killing among the English themselves, who in some cases continued to behave exactly as before. The family of Earl Waltheof, for example, had for most of the eleventh century been engaged in a long and murderous bloodfeud. In brief, the earl’s great-grandfather, Uhtred, had been ambushed and killed by his rival, Thurbrand, who was in due course killed by Uhtred’s son, Ealdred, who had accordingly been slain by Thurbrand’s son, Carl. And there the matter had rested for over three decades – until the winter of 1073–4, when Waltheof himself saw an opportunity for vengeance, and sent his retainers to slaughter Carl’s sons and grandsons as they were sitting down to dinner in their hall at Settrington. Despite his marriage to William’s niece and his implicit acceptance into the new chivalrous world order, the earl in this instance had chosen to act in a traditional English manner. Such conduct must have seemed appalling to the Normans; it may be behaviour of this sort that led several Continental commentators in the 1070s, including both William of Poitiers and Archbishop Lanfranc, to describe the English as ‘barbarous’.
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It will be obvious by now that evidence about conditions in England during the 1070s, and relations between the English and Normans, is largely anecdotal, and as such open to different interpretations. Lanfranc, for example, insisted that the situation in 1073 was dreadful, but he clearly wanted to paint as bleak a picture as
possible, for he immediately went on to ask the pope to allow him to resign his post and return to a peaceful monastic life in Normandy. Similarly, his letter which mentions the flight of English women to nunneries in order to avoid Norman rape was written in response to a question from the bishop of Rochester, who wanted to know what to do in the case of those women who now wished to abandon their veils. In other words, by the time this letter was written (some point after 1077), conditions were far better than they had been in 1066.

One can marshal other evidence to suggest that Anglo-Norman relations were improving as time wore on. Within just a few years of the Conquest, says Orderic Vitalis, ‘English and Normans were living peacefully together in boroughs, towns and cities, and were intermarrying with each other. You could see many villages or town markets filled with displays of French wares and merchandise, and observe the English, who had previously seemed contemptible to the French in their native dress, completely transformed by foreign fashions.’ Of course, this too is anecdotal evidence, and many modern historians have argued that Orderic, writing several decades after the events he describes, gives an impression which is altogether too roseate. Nevertheless, it is as well to remember that Orderic, born in 1075, was himself the product of an Anglo-Norman match. It may also be the case, as his quote suggests, that intermarriage was more common in urban areas.
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There are other anecdotes that speak of co-operation between the English and their conquerors. Earl Waltheof, as well as marrying into the Norman world, was also seen to be working well with the new Lotharingian bishop of Durham. ‘Bishop Walcher and Earl Waltheof were very friendly and accommodating to each other’, recalls Simeon of Durham, ‘so that he, sitting together with the bishop in the synod of priests, humbly and obediently carried out whatever the bishop decreed for the reformation of Christianity in his earldom.’
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There were also political developments that led to improved relations. Waltheof’s predecessor, Gospatric, who soon returned from Flanders to Scotland and therefore might have continued to pose a threat, appears to have died between 1073 and 1075. Far more significantly, the other Flemish exile, Edgar Ætheling, decided during this same period that it was time to submit. For a while he had cherished
the idea of continuing his fight against the Conqueror on the Continent; the young king of France, Philip I, offered him the castle of Montreuil-sur-Mer as a base from which to harass Normandy’s northern border, and in 1074 Edgar returned to Scotland in order to marshal the resources necessary for such a move. But thereafter the plan went disastrously wrong: en route to France the pretender was shipwrecked, losing all his treasure and very nearly his life. When he eventually limped back to Scotland, his brother-in-law King Malcolm suggested it was perhaps time for Edgar to make peace with William. ‘And so indeed he did,’ says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,