The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (15 page)

For several hundred years the elective kingship of Anglo-Saxon England and the existence of the witan had given England consultative traditions. But the new Norman king did not consult. He dictated. There was to be no more asking for the approval of the witan. The role of the new curia regis, the court of the king, was to implement, not to advise. In March 1067, six months after the Battle of Hastings, the two remaining great magnates of Anglo-Saxon England, Edwin and Morcar, as well as Edgar the Atheling and Archbishop Stigand, were forced to accompany the new master of England over the Channel to Normandy, where they were paraded in triumph.

In charge of England in the Conqueror’s absence were the new Norman earl of Kent, formerly Bishop Odo of Bayeux, William’s half-brother, and William FitzOsbern, William’s seneschal or steward who became earl of Hereford. And soon, as the native English landowners began to rebel against harsh treatment by the Normans, William would return to extirpate the old English ruling class and replace them with a Norman military aristocracy. Most Anglo-Saxon buildings in brick and wood, especially the churches, were replaced by Norman stone. The Saxons became an underclass whose language, as we shall see, was the despised argot of the stable. French became the language of the new aristocracy.

The Normans inherited a country with the strongest government in eleventh-century Europe, whose distinctive efficiency continued to be outstanding despite the weakness of the last Old English kings themselves. The English administrative system would form an excellent base for the new Norman government. William was keen to be seen as the legitimate successor of Edward the Confessor and everything was done in the name of that king to wipe out the year of the usurper. But, whatever the justification, the inescapable fact remained that foreigners now ruled the land.

Though peace had succeeded the Conquest, it was not to last. Outbreaks of resistance continued to flare up particularly as the new rulers turned a deaf ear to complaints from the Anglo-Saxons that Norman men-at-arms were abusing their positions, stealing from the English and carrying off their wives or turning humbler thanes out of their family homes. More dangerous were the attempts of regional leaders such as Edwin, Morcar and Edgar the Atheling and their supporters to regain control of the country by seeking assistance abroad. At Rouen William heard rumours that the king of Denmark and even his own cousin the count of Boulogne had been approached by the English to help them get rid of the Normans. In the west of England three sons of Harold who had been hiding in Ireland started laying waste the country. In the north a widespread resistance movement began, led by the northern earls. But once again, as at the Battle of Hastings, the failure of all these parties to make common cause would mean they could never succeed.

It was enough of a threat at the time, however, to oblige William to leave his wife Matilda of Flanders to govern Normandy with his eldest son Robert, while he returned to London. Impressing contemporaries by his refusal to wait for campaigning weather in the milder spring, at the beginning of January 1067 he sent one army north while he personally marched the second west. His progress through the country to Exeter was marked by the throwing up at regular strategic points of characteristic Norman castles. These were towers or keeps erected on top of a man-made mound, or in Norman French
motte
, and surrounded by a moat, their purpose to control the countryside. The use of slits for windows and the forbidding absence of decorative features proclaim their strictly military purpose.

Having successfully besieged Exeter and built the castle of Rougemont outside it, William hurried north to confront the greatest threat to his rule. Early in 1069 the Saxons massacred William’s governor in Durham, Robert de Comines, and all but two of his 500 men as they slept. The English population of York soon followed suit, rising against its foreign garrison and destroying it and burning York Minster. When Harold’s sons landed again at Plymouth while the fleet of the King of Denmark sailed unopposed up the Humber river alongside ships loyal to Edgar the Atheling, William’s control of his new domain seemed suddenly in doubt. But, acting with his usual decisiveness, he bought off the Danes and persuaded them, with the English leaders, to retreat up to the Tyne. Then he himself proceeded to York where the local Saxon leader Waltheof, Earl of Huntingdon had been directing operations and in fact doing much of the fighting himself.

This massive slayer of Normans so impressed William that he took him into his service and married him to his niece Judith. But he loosed a dreadful vengeance on the Northumbrians for their defiance. At Christmas, the season of goodwill, the Conqueror sat in grim and solitary state in the empty city of York planning wholesale destruction for a hundred miles around. Every day Norman soldiers were sent out to kill every living thing in the area: men, women, children and all their livestock. Houses and all fruits, conserves and grain were to be burned, ploughs broken and the country from the Humber to the Tees, from the Wear to the Tyne, to be made a desert. Fourteen years later, in the Domesday Book–the celebrated record of landholding in England compiled for tax purposes–all of that country had only the terrible Latin word
vasta
(meaning ruined or destroyed) to describe it. For fifty years nothing grew there. This episode became known as the Harrying of the North. It was intended to ensure that its inhabitants never rose again against the Norman occupying power.

Nevertheless, thanks to an indomitable Lincolnshire thane named Hereward the Wake, one little place in England held out against William and all his military devices until 1071. That was the tiny Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire, which was then surrounded on every side by impassable marshes and wild fens. It became a symbol of English national resistance. That its leader’s name Hereward the Wake passed into semi-mythical folklore on the level of Robin Hood and King Arthur indicates the strength of emotion surrounding him. Unlike those characters, however, Hereward was a real person whose existence is solidly documented. He had returned from abroad to find his mother turned out of the family home by Norman upstarts who were now themselves living in it. Enraged by her treatment Hereward began harassing the Normans. After the Harrying of the North had driven the two northern earls Edwin and Morcar out of their country they joined him with their followers and Ely became the centre of English resistance.

In the end William could trust only himself to defeat the wily Saxon. He blockaded the Wash for weeks and every little inlet that led into the Fens, trying to starve the English out. But though by then Hereward and the rest of the resistance were living on roots they never gave up. They were so successful in ambushing William’s men when they tried to build a causeway to the island that it began to be rumoured that Hereward had magic powers. In fact the Normans might never have captured Hereward at all had not the monks on the Isle of Ely betrayed him. Unlike Hereward they missed their luxurious diet of fine white bread and venison and good French wines. They sent a message to William revealing the existence of a secret passage which ran between the island and the Normans’ camp. In the middle of the night William and his men poured on to the island, capturing Hereward as he lay hidden in the reeds.

This marked the real end of the English national resistance. Hereward was treated leniently as William was impressed by his courage, and he is believed to have died on one of the king’s campaigns in France to secure the borders of Normandy. But since England continued to be periodically shaken by regional rebellions, minor though they were, William retreated from his policy of using the Anglo-Saxons to govern England for him. The Conquest was still a very recent event and had yet to take permanent root among the people. Owing to the interest neighbouring countries like Denmark and Flanders continued to take in rebel conspirators’ plans, in 1074 when the earls of Hereford and Norfolk and the treacherous Earl Waltheof tried to seize power, William’s attitude to his newly acquired country changed.

Previously, in exchange for paying a redemptive tax or geld many Saxon thanes had been permitted by the Normans to retain their old lands. The shires and shire courts had continued to be largely administered by English officials. Although there had been some land redistribution to reward William’s followers it was on a relatively small scale. But from 1075 onwards the 4,000 thanes who had been the important landowners in England under Harold began to be dispossessed of their ancient estates. Their fields, pastures, meadows and forests would be consolidated into far larger blocs and transferred to the ownership of 200 Norman barons and their own small armies of soldiers. William now believed that only Normans could be trusted to control the rebellious country of England for him, through the military landholding system called feudalism.

Under the Saxon kings land had been owned freely, despite the ancient defensive obligation of the fyrd and the duty to maintain roads and bridges. The Duke of Normandy introduced to England the Norman legal custom in which all landholding carried a military obligation. It was described as being ‘held of the king’. Land was granted by William to his followers on the specific condition that its owner served the lord above him in war. It bound the whole of England into one military unit and could have been achieved only in a revolution such as had just taken place in England. For each unit of land or ‘fief’ that the new Norman landowner held in England, he was obliged to put an armed soldier or knight at William’s disposal to fight for him for so many days a year, and he had to take an oath to be faithful to the lord he held it of, called the oath of fidelity or fealty. The man who took it did homage to the man above him, who was called his liege lord.

The Norman feudal system had accounted for the ease with which William the Conqueror had raised his invading army in 1066. He had called on the knights’ service owed to him by the great Norman lords who held land from him, which meant they had to be ready for war, complete with arms and horses, at all times. The king was at the top of the system and below him were the most powerful nobles called the tenants-in-chief, each bound to supply him with up to 1,500 knights. Many of those 1,500 knights would be supplied from among the tenants below who owed the lord above them knight service.

By 1085 not only had all the land been redistributed, but the official or government class responsible for royal business in the shires was now composed of all Norman Frenchmen rather than English. Shires had also been renamed counties, after the Conqueror’s local representative, the vicomte, who to begin with took over the functions of the sheriff. But, though county remains another word for shire, the office of vicomte soon melted away, and the title sheriff returned. Over the previous ten years the population of England had become used to the sight of large numbers of Norman French officials guarded by soldiers arriving from London to gather information to facilitate the transfer of land in their area. The Normans called up what became known as juries (from the Latin
juro
, I swear)–that is, panels of inquiry which sat in the open air on the village green to determine what the boundaries, the ancient rights and the labour obligations were for each estate, whether belonging to a lord or a churchman.

The Normans’ claim to England was based on conquest. At the same time they were natural lawyers and immensely businesslike. They were obsessed with legitimacy and believed in doing everything by the book. Even though a Norman lord might be taking over a Saxon property, they intended services and dues to carry on as before or ‘as in the days of King Edward’, in that phrase so resonant of legitimacy for the Normans. William was particularly keen to sort out the large estate owners’ rights when it came to the law of the land. The legal powers of the King of England were far greater than those of other western European monarchs. Although the Anglo-Saxon lord was entitled to hold his own courts to judge disputes over land in his domain, to punish thieves and to assess stolen goods, the English national custom had been established for centuries that those rights were granted by the king. The king and his officials were considered to be responsible for keeping the peace. Moreover, the King of England was entitled to raise taxes in every part of the country. When his instructions or writs came to the shire court, now called the county court, the English tradition was that they were to be obeyed. There was no need for soldiers to enforce his writs.

At Christmas 1085, with the land transfer complete, the king held the last of his tri-annual councils with all the most important new landholders or tenants-in-chief. William was recorded as having ‘held very deep speech with his council about this land–how it was peopled, and with what sort of men’. He was now in a position to send further posses of government officials among the newly Normanized English to set up an enlarged version of the shire court in every county. They were to assess everyone for tax, from cottagers to lords, and once again to obtain evidence on oath about every item of the countryside from a gathering of the propertied locals, evidence relating both to twenty years before, in 1066, and to the current year, 1086. The court consisted of local lords, members of all the hundred courts within the shire and six of the wealthier peasants, as well as the sheriff. The Norman commissioners were to have no interests in the particular shire and the facts were to be checked by another group of commissioners.

The survey with its descriptions of the land twenty years before in 1066, and at the present day reveals how completely during that period the native aristocracy had been displaced by Norman warriors. It also demonstrates the Normans’ powers of organization and their interest in statistics, which were without precedent in medieval times. Indeed not until the nineteenth century would such attention to detail be displayed again. The survey rapidly became known to the irreverent English as the Domesday Book. Affronted by the level of detail required by the Norman commissioners, down to how many geese and pigs a cottager owned, one Anglo-Saxon wit remarked that it was as close a record as the Recording Angel would make at the crack of doom on the Day of Judgement, or Doomsday.

Although some counties are missing from the Domesday Book, it gives us an amazingly detailed picture of England, listing all the woodland, pasture, millponds and fishponds, towns and villages and even the names of the inhabitants, English and Norman alike–many of which remain the same today. Reflecting the redistribution of land among a smaller number of Norman warriors England is treated as a country which from now on was to be organized in terms of manors. Each manor is the basis for an assessment of subordinate hides. The Norman commissioners divided the majority of the population into the following main categories: villein, cottars or cottagers, and slaves. The largest group were the villein or villeins. Although by the thirteenth century villeins had become synonymous with serfs, who being the property of their landlord had no independent legal existence, in 1086 they were free men. They ranged from tenant farmers, who held their land in return for services to their landlords, to small landholders, who owned the title to their land outright. Rents, labour services and plough teams were all assessed to see whether William could get any more money out of his new country.

Thanks to Domesday survey, which is held in the National Archives in London, England has the most complete picture of a country in Europe at that time. Completed in a little over a year it is a monument not only to Norman efficiency but to the tremendous tradition of English local government which had flourished since Alfred’s time. The already extremely well-organized and mature institutions of Anglo-Saxon local government with its hundred and shire courts could not have been better suited to William’s autocratic purposes. But the sort of changes William was rushing through, albeit in an orderly fashion, created such a volume of parchment that by the end of his reign the king’s writing office, inherited from Edward the Confessor, could no longer be attached to the royal household. It had to become an independent department called the royal Chancery, staffed by clerks trained to draft the king’s directives and send writs to the shires.