The Norman Conquest (36 page)

It was none of these risings or rebellions, however, that caused William to return to England, but reports of some wider conspiracy. The details are sketchy, and have to be reconstructed forensically from the often allusive comments of the chroniclers. The general conclusion, however, seems clear: in the last weeks of 1067, the Conqueror learned of a conspiracy against him, organized by the surviving members of the Godwine family.
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Orderic Vitalis gives us the general context. During his stay in Normandy, he says, the king was disquieted by intelligence which intimated that the troops he had left behind in England were about to be massacred as part of an English plot. William of Jumièges provides the more specific but uncorroborated information that the plotters’ intention was to attack the Normans on Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, when they would be walking barefoot to church. In 1068 this day fell on 6 February.

William, therefore, hurried to cross the Channel before the end of 1067, sailing from Dieppe on 6 December despite the rough sea and wintry weather, and arriving safely at Winchelsea the following morning. From there he made straight for London, where he celebrated Christmas and tried to sniff out the conspirators. According to Orderic, he was very gracious to the English lords and bishops who attended him, granting them favours and offering them the
kiss of peace. Such behaviour, explains the chronicler, often brings back to the fold persons whose loyalty is doubtful, but at the same time William warned his Norman followers, behind the backs of the English, not to relax their guard for a moment.

Early in the new year, William received the certain intelligence he had been seeking: the conspiracy was based in the south-west of England, in the city of Exeter. The king’s suspicions must already have lain in that direction. Before leaving Normandy he had apparently sent some of his knights across the Channel to investigate the rumours, and those who had gone to Exeter had been ‘ill-treated’. Confirmation came in 1068 when Exeter sent messages to other cities, urging them to join the rebellion – messages which William intercepted. The plot uncovered, the king sent a message of his own, demanding that Exeter’s citizens swear fealty to him.

Orderic Vitalis, presumably following William of Poitiers, says nothing about the identity of the plotters. It is only from the terse accounts of this episode in our English sources that we can see that the ringleaders were the surviving members of the Godwine family, and, in particular, Harold’s mother, Gytha. Last reported bargaining with the Conqueror over Harold’s body, Gytha had evidently gone west after the battle to lick her wounds and plan her revenge. We can well imagine the intensity of her hatred: besides Harold, she had lost three other sons in 1066 (Tostig, Leofwine and Gyrth), and her sole surviving son, Wulfnoth, still languished in a Norman prison.

Gytha evidently had her hopes pinned on a new generation of Godwine men. Harold, of course, had been married to his queen, Ealdgyth, for only a short time before his death; had this match produced any children – one later chronicler claims it produced a son – then they would still have been babies at this point. But the dead king had been married earlier, according to Danish custom, to Edith Swan-Neck, by whom he had multiple offspring – no fewer than five children, at least three of whom were boys.
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These young men, probably in their late teens or early twenties in 1066, had also fled west in the wake of their father’s death, crossing the sea to Ireland. Their plan, along with Gytha, was evidently to restage the successful Godwine comeback of 1052: a mercenary fleet from Ireland, a fifth column in England – and perhaps also an invasion from Scandinavia. William of Poitiers says that the plotters had ‘repeatedly sent envoys to the Danes or some other people from
whom they might hope for help’, while Orderic says the plot was ‘supported by the Danes and other barbarous peoples’.
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William was evidently determined to stop this plan before it started. When Exeter refused his demand for fealty, he raised an army and began to march westwards. Orderic notes that in doing so the king for the first time demanded military service from his English subjects. Naturally William still had many Norman troops by his side and stationed elsewhere around the country. But summoning Englishmen to fight by his side had wider implications. It made the rebellion in the West Country a litmus test for loyalty: those who did not aid the king in crushing it would themselves be counted as rebels.

At first it seemed that there would be no struggle at all. As the royal army drew near to Exeter, a delegation of leading citizens rode out to sue for peace, much as other urban leaders had done in 1066. They promised to open their gates to William and to obey his commands, guaranteeing their good faith by handing over hostages. Yet on their return to the city, says Orderic, these men ‘continued their hostile preparations, encouraging each other to fight for many reasons’.
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What were the reasons for this eccentric behaviour? One possibility is that the delegates were simply playing for time, and hoping to hold out until the arrival of their overseas allies. The other scenario, perhaps more likely, is that differences of opinion existed within the rebel ranks. Gytha and the other ringleaders had evidently been able to attract widespread popular support during William’s absence, and perhaps also for a time thereafter. One of the king’s first actions on his return, says John of Worcester, had been the imposition of ‘an unbearable tax’, and this was clearly a key factor for many in Exeter. According to Orderic, even as they defied William, the citizens indicated that they would be willing to pay tax at the customary rate. Some rebels, in short, were merely hoping for better treatment from the Conqueror; others remained determined to see him toppled. For the time being, it seems, the will of the diehards had carried the day.
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Inevitably, therefore, the matter was decided by violence. Exeter was a walled city and on his arrival William found the rebels manning the whole circuit of its ramparts. In a final attempt to induce a surrender he ordered one of the hostages to be blinded in view of
the walls, but, says Orderic, this merely strengthened the determination of the defenders. Indeed, according to William of Malmesbury, one of them staged something of a counter-demonstration by dropping his trousers and farting loudly in the king’s general direction. The siege that followed was evidently hard-fought. Orderic says that for many days William attempted to storm the city and undermine its walls; ‘a large part of his army perished’, adds the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

At length, after eighteen days, the citizens agreed to surrender. Orderic, no doubt toeing the line established by William of Poitiers, says that they were compelled to do so because of the Normans’ relentless assault. William of Malmesbury claims that the king’s forces gained entry after a section of wall collapsed – a break which he attributes to divine intervention after the fashion of Jericho rather than any Norman mining operations. The English chroniclers, by contrast, suggest that the surrender came about because of the desertion of the Godwine faction. Gytha, says John of Worcester, ‘escaped with many in flight from the city’, while the D Chronicle, apparently describing the same incident, says that the citizens surrendered ‘because the thegns had betrayed them’. Accompanied by ‘many other distinguished men’s wives’, Gytha sailed into the Bristol Channel and took refuge on the tiny island of Flat Holm. Presumably these pro-Godwine women remained hopeful that their husbands and grandsons would soon be crossing from Ireland.
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With the Godwine party gone, there was nothing to stop the more moderate of Exeter’s citizens from seeking terms of surrender. According to Orderic and Poitiers, these were very favourable: William refrained from seizing their goods and guarded the gates in order to prevent any post-siege plunder. The Chronicle, predictably, offers a more acid assessment: the king ‘made fair promises to them, and fulfilled them badly’. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, but that the surrender was negotiated rather than dictated seems clear. On one point, at least, the citizens seem to have got their way: the Domesday Book shows that in 1086 Exeter paid the same tax as it had done ‘in the time of King Edward’.

After the surrender William spent more time in the south-west attending to security. A castle was established in Exeter itself and very likely others were erected elsewhere. Orderic tells us that the king led his army on into Cornwall, ‘putting down every disturbance
that came to his attention’, and it was probably at this time he handed command of the region to a Breton follower called Brian. At length William disbanded his Anglo-Norman army and returned to Winchester, in time to celebrate Easter.
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With the defeat of the conspiracy and the flight of the Godwine faction, William no doubt felt more secure. He also had more rewards to distribute, for the property of Gytha and her followers, like the lands of those who had fought at Hastings, was now deemed forfeit. The chronicler at Abingdon Abbey, writing in the twelfth century, remembered how ‘the mother of the slain king … had with her in her company the priest Blæcmann, together with many others … and whatever had been his was taken back into the king’s hand, as that of a fugitive’.
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One of the principal beneficiaries of this fresh round of redistribution was the king’s long-term friend, Roger of Montgomery. Having remained in Normandy in 1066 to assist the regency government headed by Matilda, Roger had accompanied William on his return to England the following year, and had immediately been rewarded with lands in Sussex. It must have been at this time that the county was sliced up into new Norman lordships – the so-called ‘rapes’ which endured as administrative units into modern times. Stretching from the county’s northern border southwards to the sea, these long, narrow lordships were in each case named after the castles their new owners created just a few miles inland. Roger of Montgomery, for example, held the castles and rapes of Chichester and Arundel, while another of the Conqueror’s closest companions, William de Warenne, was responsible for the rape and castle of Lewes. Their purpose was clearly military: to protect the quickest routes to Normandy, and to tighten the Norman grip on what had been the Godwine heartland.
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At the same time, the Normans did not enjoy a total monopoly of royal favour. ‘Very many Englishmen received through his generous gifts what they had not received from their kinsmen or previous lords’, says William of Poitiers – speaking, admittedly, of the period immediately after the coronation, and no doubt exaggerating his case. Nonetheless, we find some evidence of Englishmen, or at least non-Normans, being rewarded for their loyalty in the eighteen months that followed. In 1067, for example, Regenbald, a Lotharingian
priest formerly in the service of Edward the Confessor, had been granted lands that had previously belonged to King Harold, while the following year another Lotharingian, Bishop Giso of Wells, was similarly granted estates that the late king had confiscated. Perhaps the most striking example, however, of William’s continued willingness to work with the natives was his settlement of affairs in the north. At some point after his return to England the king received a visit from Gospatric, a scion of the house of Bamburgh, who came in the hope of obtaining the earldom of Northumbria lately vacated by his kinsman, Oswulf. Given that Oswulf, as we have seen, had been personally responsible for murdering the king’s preferred candidate, Earl Copsig, Gospatric must have proceeded with some caution. Yet his mission was a success, and William agreed to sell him the earldom for what Simeon of Durham calls ‘a great sum’. Such were the pragmatic deals that the Conqueror was still willing to strike in the hope of a peaceful settlement.
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William’s increasing sense of security by Easter 1068 is revealed by his decision at that point to send messengers across the Channel to fetch his wife. Matilda, says Orderic, came at once, accompanied by a great company of vassals, noblewomen and clergy, and a few weeks later, on the feast of Whitsun, she was crowned at Westminster. This coronation, so far as we can tell, passed with none of the unplanned excitement that had marred the king’s own ceremony. Chronicle accounts of the occasion are perfunctory, but we possess a valuable snapshot of proceedings thanks to a royal charter drawn up on the day itself (‘when my wife Matilda was consecrated in the church of St Peter at Westminster’, to quote its dating clause). The content of the grant is unimportant, but its witness-list allows us to see the composition of William’s court at this particularly crucial juncture. Besides the king himself and his newly crowned queen stand the two English archbishops, Ealdred (once again officiating) and Stigand. The other bishops come next, a fairly even mix of English and Normans, with Leofric of Exeter, for example, lining up alongside the likes of Odo of Bayeux. When we reach the secular magnates, too, we see a similar degree of balance being maintained, with Roger of Montgomery and William fitz Osbern rubbing shoulders with Eadwine and Morcar. Significantly, the charter is a bilingual document, drawn up in both English and Latin. We seem, in short, to be looking
at the kind of Anglo-Norman modus vivendi that the Conqueror had been hoping to achieve.
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Behind this facade of unity, however, a new and more dangerous tension was building. Among the English at court and across the country there was great and mounting anger, the principal reason for which was the redistribution of land that had occurred since 1066. Dispossessing the dead of Hastings was all very well, but what of their sons, brothers, uncles, nephews and cousins – those who lived on but whose expectations had thereby been dashed? It is easy to imagine a figure like Gytha, perhaps, being motivated purely by thoughts of revenge, but most of her supporters, and perhaps even her grandsons, were probably fighting in the hope of regaining their lost inheritances. And, of course, it was not just the dead and their heirs who had been dispossessed.
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those who had fought against the Conqueror at Hastings, including the survivors, were deemed to have forfeited, and the same applied to those who had recently fled from Exeter. There was even a growing group of Englishmen whose lands had been confiscated because they were unable to pay the two heavy gelds that had been levied in the short time since William’s accession. That disinheritance was the principal English grievance is suggested by all our chronicle sources. The E version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for instance, woefully brief for the years immediately after the Conquest, sums up the six-month period after William’s return from Normandy in a single sentence: ‘When he came back he gave away every man’s land.’ Describing events that occurred a little later, Orderic attributed English anger against the Normans to ‘the killing of their kinsmen and compatriots’ and ‘the loss of their patrimonies’. William of Poitiers, meanwhile, merely confirms the criticism of his master’s actions with a typically clunky rebuttal. ‘Nothing was given to any Frenchman which had been taken unjustly from any Englishman’, he says, a line that Orderic Vitalis found so ridiculous he deliberately left it out.
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