The Norman Conquest (57 page)

But the greatest cause for lamentation remained the enormous loss of life – the ‘bitter strife and terrible bloodshed’, as Orderic called it. Beginning with the carnage at Hastings, continuing with the crushing of rebellion after rebellion, and culminating in the deliberate sentence of starvation served on the population of northern England, the coming of the Conqueror had brought death and destruction on a scale that even the Danes had not been able to match. As the agents of this holocaust, the Normans appeared to the natives to be anything but civilized. ‘In their unparalleled savagery’ said Henry of Huntingdon, ‘they surpassed all other peoples.’
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To those that survived, there was only one explanation for such suffering: the English had sinned and were being severely chastised
by their Creator. ‘God had chosen the Normans to wipe out the English nation’, concluded Henry, and all of his countrymen agreed, even if they did not put it in quite such stark terms. We find similar comments in Orderic, Malmesbury, Eadmer and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The English had once been God’s chosen people, but they had strayed from the path of righteousness, and were being punished by the Norman scourge.
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Most strikingly, we find this opinion expressed in the
Life of King Edward,
a tract begun shortly before 1066 as a paean of praise to the Godwinesons, but changed completely as a result of the Conquest and recast soon thereafter as a tribute to the Confessor.

Woe is to you, England, you who once shone bright with holy, angelic progeny, but now with anxious expectation groan exceeding for your sins. You have lost your native king and suffered defeat, with much spilling of the blood of many of your men, in a war against a foreigner. Pitiably your sons have been slain within you. Your counsellors and princes are bound in chains, killed or disinherited.
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So great, indeed, is the anonymous author’s grief at the events he has just experienced he can hardly bear to confront them directly. ‘What shall I say about England?’ he asks. ‘What shall I say of generations to come?’

20

The Green Tree

T
owards the end of the
Life of King Edward,
the author describes how the sleeping Confessor had woken on his deathbed and described to those around him a vivid dream. In this dream, two monks whom he had known during his youth in Normandy had come to him with a message from God, telling him that all the top people in England – the earls, bishops and abbots – were actually servants of the Devil. God had therefore cursed the whole kingdom, and within a year of Edward’s death, ‘devils shall come through all this land with fire and sword and the havoc of war’. When the king replied that he would warn his people about God’s plan in order that they could repent, he was told that this would not happen. In that case, the Confessor asked the two monks, when could the English expect God’s anger to end? ‘At that time’, they replied,

when a green tree, cut down in the middle of its trunk, and the felled part carried three furlongs from the stump, shall be joined again to its trunk, by itself and without the hand of man or any sort of stake, and begin once more to push leaves and bear fruit from the old love of its uniting sap – then first can a remission of these great ills be hoped for.

When those who were present heard this, says the author of the
Life,
they were all very afraid. For it was impossible for a tree to move itself or repair itself in the way the monks had described – at least with man. With God, for whom nothing was impossible, such
a thing might be possible, but that could only happen when the English had repented. ‘Until then,’ the author wondered, ‘what can we expect but a miserable end in slaughter?’
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What indeed. To judge from the tone of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, matters had improved very little by the time of the Conqueror’s death. The violence might have subsided, but the Norman takeover had left the English in no doubt that they were an underclass in their own country. William’s writs addressed his subjects as two separate peoples,
Angli et Franci,
and, as Henry of Huntingdon explains, ‘it was even disgraceful to be called English’. True, the Domesday Book shows that the economic situation had improved in some parts of the country by 1086: in Bury St Edmunds 342 houses are recorded on land that had been arable two decades earlier. But against this the year that followed had brought fresh disasters. A great fire had destroyed most of London, including St Paul’s Cathedral, and there were apparently also fires in almost every other important town and city – whether accidentally or deliberately started we are not told. The Chronicle also notes that the appalling weather of the previous year had brought famine and pestilence in its wake. ‘Such a malady fell upon men that nearly every other person was in the sorriest plight and down with fever: it was so malignant that many died from the disease … Alas! A miserable and lamentable time was it in that year, that brought forth so many misfortunes!’
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Nor was there much improvement during the generation that followed. The Conqueror’s hopes for the English succession were fulfilled in 1087 when William Rufus ascended to the throne, but his fears about the other members of his family also proved to be well founded. Robert Curthose, once installed as duke of Normandy, plotted to replace Rufus as England’s new ruler, aided by his uncle Odo. This plot failed, but the struggle between the Conqueror’s sons continued for many years. The story of Rufus, Robert and their younger brother Henry in the decade after their father’s death is a sorry saga of betrayal and double-crossing. A temporary peace prevailed after 1096 when Robert left to participate in the First Crusade and pawned Normandy to Rufus in order to pay for his passage. But four years later Rufus was killed, slain by a stray arrow while hunting in the New Forest (a fact not lost on English chroniclers, who observed that the hated institution had now claimed two of its creator’s sons). Henry was crowned as England’s new king,
Robert returned from the east and the struggle for supremacy resumed. It was ended only in 1106, when Henry defeated and captured his brother at the battle of Tinchebray. Robert spent the rest of his life in prison, dying in 1134. Henry ruled a reunited England and Normandy until his own death the following year.
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None of this was particularly auspicious for relations between the English and their new Norman masters. Robert, it is true, had struck up a remarkable friendship with Edgar Ætheling since the latter’s submission to the Conqueror in 1075 – they were virtually foster-brothers, says Orderic. But this closeness between the new duke of Normandy and the last Old English claimant caused both Rufus and Henry, in their capacity as kings of England, to regard Edgar and his ilk with more caution. Rufus, for example, had arrived in England in 1087 accompanied by Morcar and Wulfnoth, recently released from their long captivity, but his first act on disembarking had been to have both men re-incarcerated.
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More generally, the struggle for the Conqueror’s inheritance meant that Rufus and Henry had frequent occasion to tax England heavily, just as their father had done, and this remained equally true after 1106, as Henry sought to defend Normandy from both rebellion and invasion. In addition, the fact that from this date Henry, like his father, ruled both England and Normandy meant that the king of England continued to spend much of his time overseas. William had spent sixty per cent of his reign in Normandy and the same figure is true for Henry after 1106.
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Both these trends – high taxation to pay for foreign wars and absentee kings – would persist for the rest of the twelfth century. The political union of England and Normandy during this time had far-reaching cultural and economic consequences: England was drawn inexorably into the European mainstream, dominated by Frankish arms and customs. For some merchants in southern England this was a cause for celebration; but others were left lamenting the loss of the old ties to Scandinavia. For Ailnoth of Canterbury, writing in Danish exile in the 1120s, the failure of the Danes to invade in 1085 remained a matter of lasting regret. Cnut IV, he felt, would have been the liberator of an English people, freeing them from French and Norman tyranny.
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During the reigns of the Conqueror’s sons the English regarded themselves very much as the subject people in a Norman colony. ‘This was exactly seven years since the accession of King Henry,’
wrote the Anglo-Saxon Chronicler in 1107, ‘and the forty-first year of French rule in this country.’ William of Malmesbury, writing two decades later, could in this respect see no change in the sixty years since the Conquest. At one point in his history he retells the story of Edward the Confessor’s deathbed dream, with its prophecy of the severed Green Tree, and feels he can only agree with the pessimistic interpretation of the original author. ‘The truth of this we now experience,’ he says, ‘now that England has become the dwelling place of foreigners and a playground for lords of alien blood. No Englishman today is an earl, a bishop or an abbot; new faces everywhere enjoy England’s riches and gnaw at her vitals. Nor is there any hope of ending this miserable state of affairs.’
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And yet, despite Malmesbury’s pessimism, there were signs of change. He may have been right about the earls and bishops, but he was wrong to say that there were no English abbots. Although most had been replaced by Normans, there had still been a handful of English abbots at the end of the Conqueror’s reign, and this continued to be the case during the reigns of his sons. More importantly, within the monasteries themselves a large proportion of the monks remained English, and many of them retained or obtained positions of power (it is not uncommon, for example, to find a Norman abbot with an English prior as his second-in-command). In the monasteries English and Normans were living together at close quarters from the very beginning, and although this created some notorious clashes (such as the massacre at Glastonbury) in general it meant that the cloister was probably the foremost arena of assimilation. This meant that there was also frequent contact between Englishmen and their new foreign bishops, thanks to the uniquely English institution of the monastic cathedral. Lanfranc, in particular, liked this idea, and after the Conquest the number of monastic cathedrals increased from four to ten.
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According to a letter written not long after his death in 1089, the archbishop eventually came to regret the harsh line he had taken towards English customs at the time of his arrival, and towards the end of his career had become an enthusiastic devotee of St Dunstan. We can see a similar softening elsewhere: when the giant Norman cathedral at Winchester, begun in 1079, was completed in 1093, the bones of St Swithin were reinstated with great honour.
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And when, during the latter year, another new cathedral was begun in Durham, it was a very different proposition from anything that had gone before.
Norman in its scale and proportions, Durham has none of the interior austerity of the new churches of the immediate post-Conquest period. Instead, it is decorated in a style that is unmistakably pre-1066, its columns carved with the linear patterns that are so characteristic of Old English art. Architecturally, we are already witnessing Anglo-Norman fusion.
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By the early twelfth century there was an evident yearning among some churchmen to build bridges across the divide created by the Conquest. William of Malmesbury may have bemoaned the divide in his own day, but he wrote partly in the hope of mending it, and the numerous surviving copies of his history suggest that he found a receptive audience, at least in other monasteries. So too did his clerical contemporary, Henry of Huntingdon, who wrote at the request of his bishop, Alexander of Lincoln, a man of Norman descent, at least on his father’s side. ‘At your command, I have undertaken to tell the history of this kingdom and the origins of our people’, the author told his patron, a comment which, with its inclusive ‘our’, raises the possibility that Alexander considered himself to be English.
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Meanwhile, the monk of Ely who wrote the
Gesta Herewardi
in the early twelfth century did so with the clear intention of defending the honour of a defeated people. Hereward is presented as not only heroic but also chivalrous, a worthy adversary for his Norman opponents. The underlying message of the
Gesta
is that the English and Normans could coexist on equal terms. Indeed, in this version of the story, Hereward and the Conqueror himself are eventually reconciled.
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Because they wrote their histories in Latin, we might expect that, beyond the cloister and the cathedral close, the impact of such historians was fairly limited. Yet this was not necessarily the case: William of Malmesbury sent copies of his history to several leading lay people, including the king of Scots and the children of Henry I. The thirst for such information among the laity is confirmed within a decade or so by the appearance of Geoffrey Gaimar’s
Estoire des Engleis.
As its title suggests, Geoffrey’s history was written in French – a remarkable fact, given that the French themselves had produced almost nothing in the way of vernacular literature by this date. Also remarkable is his attitude towards the English, which was entirely free from condescension. Geoffrey celebrated the lives of earlier kings of England, including Cnut and his sons, and even wrote up Hereward as a freedom fighter battling against Norman
oppression. Yet he was commissioned by Constance, the wife of Ralph fitz Gilbert, a woman of impeccable Norman descent.
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