The Norman Conquest (34 page)

As for the ceremony itself, we know enough to see that it followed a conventional form. Historians continue to debate which order of service was followed, but all agree that, despite the novelty of regarding it as the king-making moment, William’s coronation adhered to long-standing English traditions. Anthems in praise of the king were sung, just as they had been in the Confessor’s day, and the service was conducted by an English archbishop. As at the start of the year, this was Ealdred, archbishop of York, rather than Stigand, the pariah archbishop of Canterbury. In describing the ceremony, English sources, for obvious reasons, emphasized the first part, wherein the new king swore the traditional oath to govern his subjects well, according to the best practice of his predecessors. As John of Worcester explains, William promised to defend the Church and its rulers; to govern the whole people justly; and to establish and maintain the law, totally forbidding ‘rapine and unjust judgements’.
²⁰

The English in the audience must have been particularly keen to hear the last part, in light of recent events. William of Poitiers gives the impression that the days between the submissions at Berkhamsted and the coronation had been peaceful ones: had the Conqueror wished, we are told, he could have spent all his time in hunting and falconry. The D Chronicle, by contrast, tells a different story. Having noted William’s promise at Berkhamsted to be a gracious lord, it adds bitterly that ‘nevertheless, in the meantime, they harried everywhere they came’. As the English had feared, the Normans had continued to behave during these weeks as if they were still at war. Now, at last, as their new king swore his oath, they could hope the ravaging would cease.
²¹

But evidently someone had forgotten to explain the significance of this moment to those Normans who were standing guard outside. As William of Poitiers explains, the next part of the service involved asking the audience whether or not they would accept the rule of the new king – a question which had to be put twice, first in English by Ealdred, and again in French by the Norman bishop of Coutances. Naturally everyone answered in the affirmative, shouting out in their
respective tongues, but, unfortunately, says Poitiers, the guards outside the church thought that this loud clamour was some sort of last-minute English treachery, and responded by setting fire to the nearby houses.

As modern historians have observed, this is William of Poitiers at his most unconvincing: if the guards had really thought there was trouble in the church, surely they would have rushed inside. What we seem to have is a clumsy attempt to excuse yet more burning and pillaging, even as the coronation service was in progress. At the same time, the fact that Poitiers felt compelled to mention this incident at all suggests it must have been serious, and that suspicion is confirmed by the later but fuller account provided by Orderic Vitalis. As the fire spread rapidly, says Orderic, ‘the crowd who had been rejoicing in the church took fright, and throngs of men and women of every rank and condition rushed outside in frantic haste’. Some, we are told, went to fight the flames, while others went to join in the looting. Meanwhile, in the abbey, only the bishops and a few monks and clergy remained to complete the coronation service. Archbishop Ealdred, as was customary, anointed William with holy oil, placed the crown upon his head, and seated him on the royal throne. The churchmen were reportedly terrified, and one can well believe it: at the very moment they had called upon God to bless their new king and grant him a peaceful rule, the scene outside was mayhem. By the end of the ceremony, we are told, even the Conqueror himself was trembling from head to foot. It was, as Orderic observes, an inauspicious beginning.
²²

For a few days after his coronation William remained in London. His first royal act, if we follow William of Poitiers’ account, was the distribution of rewards to those who had supported him. This was the moment his men had been itching for, and the reason they had echoed the English cry for an early coronation. Naturally, Poitiers does his best to put a positive spin on the process. The new king, he says, ‘distributed liberally what Harold had avariciously shut up in the royal treasury’, though he cannot avoid admitting, belatedly, that this munificence was also made possible by the large tributes that had been received during the preceding months. We are next assured that, while some of the spoils went to ‘those who had helped him win the battle’, the greater and more valuable part was given
to monasteries. Whatever the truth about the ratio, that many churches received gifts from William is well established. Needless to say, Poitiers is speaking here of Continental churches, and particularly those which had offered prayers for the success of the Conquest. Some, we are told, received large golden crosses, wonderfully jewelled, while others were given golden vessels or vestments. The obvious inference (made all the more obvious by Poitiers’ later attempt to deny it) is that these items had been obtained by plundering English churches. The choicest gifts of all were reserved for William’s greatest spiritual supporter, Pope Alexander, who was sent ‘more gold and silver coins than could be credibly told, as well as ornaments that even Byzantium would have considered precious’. These included Harold’s own banner, with its image of an armed man embroidered in gold, presumably a quid pro quo for the banner Alexander had bestowed on William to signal his support for the invasion.
²³

The needs of the English at the start of the reign were not entirely ignored: Poitiers assures us that, immediately after his coronation, William ‘made many wise, just and merciful provisions’, some for London, some for the country as a whole. In the case of London, at least, this statement is supported by an original writ, almost certainly drawn up during these dramatic early days, and still preserved at the London Metropolitan Archives, in which the new king promises the city’s leading men that their laws will be maintained as they had been ‘in the time of King Edward’. In general terms, however, Poitiers’ repeated insistence on the fairness of his master’s actions (‘he condemned none save those whom it would have been unjust not to condemn’; he accepted ‘nothing which was contrary to fair dealing’) reads like a response to complaints that the new king had been anything but fair. In particular, his comment that William ‘set a limit that was not oppressive to the collection of tribute’ needs to be set against the opinion of the D Chronicle, which juxtaposes the king’s coronation oath to govern justly with the comment ‘nevertheless, he imposed a very heavy tax on the country’.
²⁴

This glaring contradiction between the Norman and English accounts is also apparent with regard to an important meeting that took place early in the new year 1067. As William of Poitiers explains, the king, having gained the measure of London’s citizens, decided it would be better to stay elsewhere until his new fortress was finished, and so withdrew from the city to nearby Barking. It was while
he was there, says Poitiers, that earls Eadwine and Morcar, ‘perhaps the most powerful of all the English’, came to submit to him. Along with ‘various other wealthy nobles’, the two brothers ‘sought his pardon for any hostility they had shown him, and surrendered themselves and all their property to his mercy’.
²⁵

But what happened to that property? According to Poitiers, ‘the king readily accepted their oaths, freely granted them his favour, restored all their possessions, and treated them with great honour’. Other sources, however, suggest that William’s favour was anything but free. ‘Men paid him tribute, and gave him hostages’, says the E Chronicler, ‘
and then redeemed their lands from him
[my italics]’. Similarly, the Domesday Book refers casually on more than one occasion to ‘the time when the English redeemed their lands’. Englishmen, in other words, were obliged to buy back their estates from the Conqueror, and we can assume he charged them handsomely.
²⁶

Many Englishmen, of course, were no longer in a position to strike such a bargain, having perished on the field at Hastings. The fate of their lands is revealed in a writ, almost certainly issued at the very start of William’s reign, in which the king insists that the abbot of Bury St Edmunds should surrender to him ‘all the land which those men held … who stood in battle against me and there were slain’. The fact that the list of the fallen included some of the greatest landowners in the kingdom – not only the late King Harold but also his brothers Leofwine and Gyrth – meant that the amount of land forfeited was massive. Much of it in the first instance the Conqueror kept for himself, but some of it was quickly redistributed as rewards to his closest followers. To his half-brother Odo, for instance, William gave all of Kent, formerly the property of Leofwine, along with the castle of Dover; William fitz Osbern, meanwhile, received the Isle of Wight and lands in adjacent Hampshire; soon after the Barking meeting, the king travelled to Hampshire in person, and began building a castle at Winchester for fitz Osbern to hold on his behalf.
²⁷

The concentration of power implicit in these gifts to his two most trusted advisers was appropriate, because William intended them to act as his regents. Although just a few weeks had elapsed since the start of his reign, the new king wanted to return to Normandy. In March he travelled to Pevensey, where he had landed his troops the previous September. Now, barely six months later, he
was ready to let them leave. Substantial numbers of knights and soldiers remained to guard England in his absence, but the majority were paid off at this point, rewarded for their role in his mighty victory.

Also assembled at Pevensey by the king’s command were a crowd of high-ranking Englishmen: Archbishop Stigand, Edgar Ætheling and earls Eadwine and Morcar are the most notable names. ‘Those whose loyalty and power he particularly suspected’, as Poitiers describes them, were to join William for his homecoming, ‘so that during his absence no revolt instigated by them might break out, and the general populace, deprived of their leaders, would be less capable of rebellion’. They were, in other words, hostages, which is what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls them, and indeed is a word that Poitiers himself found impossible to avoid. But although these men were held ‘almost as hostages’, we are assured that ‘they were not led about as captives, but accompanied their lord the king in his retinue, so as to have greater favour and honour’.
²⁸

Thus the Conqueror, accompanied by victorious Frenchmen and vanquished Englishmen, returned home. For William of Poitiers, this was a culminating moment, and he misses no trick in describing it: the weather was unseasonably bright and sunny; the crossing of the Channel was made easy by a favourable wind and tide. For several pages we are treated to an extended comparison of William with Julius Caesar, much to the king’s advantage and to Caesar’s detriment. Hence when we are told that the Norman ships were fitted with new white sails for their return journey, after the fashion of the conquering fleets of antiquity, we might suspect that fact is shading into fable. Nevertheless, we can believe our source when he tells us that the strict observances of Lent were forgotten that spring, and everyone in Normandy behaved as if it were a time of high festival. Wherever William went, people from remote parts crowded to see him; in his principal city of Rouen, men, women and children shouted out his name. The churches of Normandy were showered with precious objects generously donated by their English counterparts. The duke, now a king, was reunited with his consort, now a queen, and the rest of the family and friends he had left behind. When he celebrated Easter at Fécamp, William was surrounded by not only a crowd of bishops and abbots from Normandy, but also a delegation of nobles from neighbouring France.
All gazed in awe at the new king and his entourage, decked out in their clothes encrusted with gold, accompanied by their handsome, long-haired English guests. At the banquet that followed the Easter service, they drank only from horns gilded at both ends, or goblets of silver and gold.
²⁹

Such is the picture that Poitiers paints of his master’s return: exaggerated in places, airbrushed in others, but overall capturing brilliantly the exultation of a duke and a duchy whose fortunes had been in every sense transformed by his astonishing victory. ‘Nothing which ought to have been done in celebration of such honour was left undone’, says the chronicler, and we can see that festivities continued well into the summer. On I May, for example, the new abbey church at St-Pierre-sur-Dives, begun a generation earlier, was consecrated on William’s orders and in his presence, and a similar ceremony followed at Jumièges on 1 July. At some other point during the summer the king visited Caen, and his own foundation of St Stephen’s, bringing gifts so precious ‘that they deserve to be remembered until the end of time’. ‘A light of unaccustomed serenity seemed suddenly to have dawned upon the province’, says Poitiers; William ‘spent that summer and autumn, and part of winter, on this side of the sea, devoting all his time to love of his native land’.
³⁰

But the onset of winter brought ominous intelligence from the other side of the Channel: an English conspiracy to kill the Norman occupiers and undo the recent Conquest.

The Godwine family, it seems, were planning another comeback.

13

Insurrection

W
e have encountered the chronicler Orderic Vitalis on several earlier occasions. A monk at the Norman abbey of St Evroult, not far from the town of L’Aigle, Orderic began writing in the early twelfth century, but is a valuable source for events well before his own day. He is, for example, one of our best informants for the troubled years of William the Conqueror’s boyhood, because he possessed a keen ear for the stories told to him by local aristocrats about the deeds of their ancestors.
¹
Similarly, his monumental
Ecclesiastical History,
despite its title, is one of our principal sources for the Norman Conquest of England – but for rather different reasons.