Crown and Country: A History of England through the Monarchy

All this is no doubt true. But it is the Anglo-Saxon chronicler who goes further and grasps the essential. For he sees Domesday as a product of William’s covetousness. The king had devoted the best years of his life to the acquisition of England, while the means he had used to get and keep it had risked his immortal soul. Now, at last, it was his and Domesday enabled him to hold it, literally, in his hands.

The survey was presented to the king on Lammas Day, 1 August 1086, at the great court held at Old Sarum in Wiltshire. The court was attended, not only by the council and the magnates, but also by ‘all the landsmen [landowners] that were of any account over all England’. And there they all, each and every one, performed homage to the king. It was an extraordinary scene, and the Anglo-Saxon chronicler describes it with the precision of an eyewitness:

They all bowed themselves before him, and became his men, and swore him oaths of allegiance that they would against all other men be faithful to him.

At first sight, this mass act of feudal homage looks like the ultimate Normanization of English politics. But the appearance is deceptive. For at Salisbury William received the oaths, not only of his own immediate vassals, or tenants-in-chief as they would later be called, but also of their tenants and sub-tenants as well. This looked forward to the idea of liege homage but it also looked back to the practice – which was as old as Alfred’s time at least – of every free man swearing an oath to the king in the Hundred Courts. The result was to give English feudalism a decidedly English twist.

William left for Normandy immediately after the Oath of Salisbury. It was to be his last visit to England, and he left in typical fashion, having first exacted a heavy geld. The money was needed to finance William’s struggle with the king of France, Philip I, who had taken advantage of the quarrels within William’s family to try to cut his over-mighty vassal down to size. William’s campaign went well, and in August 1087 he captured Mantes. The lightly defended town was sacked and fired, and many of the inhabitants, including two especially venerated hermits, perished in the flames.

This calculated use of terror was, as we have often seen, business as usual for William. But this time something went wrong. William’s horse bolted in the chaos of the burning town and he was struck hard in his now-protuberant stomach by the pommel of his saddle. He was carried to Rouen, where he lay for three weeks. He remained lucid throughout and was expected to recover. But in early September his condition deteriorated and on the 9th he died.

The Anglo-Saxon chronicler honoured the dead king with a magnifi-cent obituary. It is based on personal knowledge – ‘we who often looked upon him’ – and it is nuanced and balanced. The chronicler praised his wisdom and wealth, which were very great; his piety, which built and endowed so many monasteries; his dignity, which manifested itself in the crown-wearings which took place three times a year when he was in England; his force of will, which brooked no opposition, and struck down bishops, abbots and earls and even his own brother Odo. But, above all, he admired his harsh yet equitable justice, which brought peace and tranquillity to a distracted kingdom. To set against all these qualities, however, were William’s vices: his insatiable covetousness, his inordinate pride and his addiction to hunting, which, for his mere pleasure, inflicted so much suffering on his subjects.

The chronicler extenuates none of these faults. But, finally and justly, he acknowledges William’s stature as England’s greatest king: ‘he truly reigned over England’, he concluded, and was ‘more splendid and powerful than any of his predecessors’.

From an Englishman, this was high praise indeed.

But great king of England though he was, William remained a Norman at heart. As he requested, his body was taken for burial to the Norman abbey of St Etienne at Caen; all the bishops and abbots of Normandy were present at the ceremony, and the sermon was preached by the Norman bishop of Evreux. But a final hitch occurred. As the manner of his death makes clear, William had grown very fat in his later years. But his sarcophagus, probably made long before, took no account of the fact and some force was needed to fit the body in. The result was described by the Anglo-Norman monk, Oderic Vitalis: ‘the swollen bowels burst, and an intolerable stench assailed the nostrils of the bystanders and the whole crowd’. Not even the clouds of incense could mask it and the service was rushed to a conclusion.

It was a humiliating end for a man who had been so conscious of his dignity in life.

II

The three weeks William lingered on his sickbed at Rouen left him plenty of time to arrange his affairs and divide his estate among his sons: despite their quarrel, Robert, he decided, should have Normandy; William, England; while Henry was ‘bequeathed immense treasure’. It was a decision that was guaranteed to perpetuate the divisions in the royal house long after his own death.

William II’s accession was smooth. His father dispatched him to England before the life was out of his body and gave him sealed instructions for Archbishop Lanfranc. These were executed to the letter. Lanfranc anointed and crowned William at Westminster on 26 September and all the magnates did him homage. William then rode to Winchester; opened and viewed the Treasury; distributed the lavish bequests to monasteries, churches and the poor of each county which his father had made for the good of his soul, and released all political prisoners. He then returned to London for the winter.

It was a conventional beginning to a highly unconventional reign. For, in contrast to the older William with his piety and uxoriousness, the younger set himself to flout all contemporary norms of behaviour. Not only did he plunder the Church, he was actively irreligious. He never married or fathered children; instead, he had male ‘favourites’ and was almost certainly homosexual. Still worse, he made no bones about the fact.

This flamboyantly un-Christian mode of life led churchmen both to loathe him and to underestimate him. We should not make the same mistake. For, despite the great differences in their moral character, William also inherited many of his father’s most impressive qualities. Like the Conqueror, Rufus was a skilled soldier and a natural leader of men. He was similarly strong-willed and determined to enforce his authority. And he went about it more imaginatively: he showed an occasional flair for public relations, while his building works transformed the physical setting of the monarchy.

All this made William II a powerful and effective king. But that very fact meant that much of the Norman baronage looked with envy across the Channel at the laxer rule of Duke Robert. They correctly saw Robert as one of themselves and longed to have him for their lord in England. The lead was taken by Bishop Odo, whom William had been persuaded, against his better judgement, to include in his deathbed amnesty for political prisoners. Odo was duly released and returned to his earldom of Kent, whence he plotted with his fellow malcontents. During Lent 1088, a formidable coalition was assembled and at Easter, 16 April, a coordinated series of provincial revolts broke out: in East Anglia, Durham, the Midlands, the Welsh Borders, the West Country and, above all, in Odo’s territories of Kent.

The rebellion polarized opinion – and the races – in England. The rebels, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle noted, were ‘all French’, or rather they were the crème de la crème: ‘the richest French men that were in this land’. And the chronicler castigates their behaviour severely: their purpose was to ‘betray their lord the king’; they were guilty of ‘great treachery’. But his harshest words are reserved for Odo: he was a veritable ‘Judas’, who planned ‘to do by [William] as … Iscariot did by Our Lord’.

In contrast, English sentiment seems to have been solidly royalist. Bishop Wulfstan stood firm in Worcester and, with a comparatively small force, put the rebels to flight there. But the situation in Kent, where Odo had retreated with his spoil to his near-impregnable castle of Rochester, demanded sterner measures. The result was an appeal by William to his English subjects:

He then sent after Englishmen, described to them his need, earnestly requested their support, and promised them the best laws that ever were in this land; each unright geld he forbade and restored to the men their woods and chases [that is, their hunting rights].

The promised abolition of the Forest Laws (of which more later) was, like the Laws themselves, an innovation. Otherwise, both the form and the content of William’s appeal are remarkably similar to the compact hammered out between king and people as a condition of Æthelred II’s restoration to the throne in 1014.

And it was equally effective. Thanks to the forces raised, William was able to bottle Odo up in Rochester. Finally, after inordinate wriggling on Odo’s part, an agreement was reached: Odo would surrender all his offices and possessions in England, in return for which William would allow him to return unharmed to Normandy. The English troops, however, thought this more than Odo deserved and, as he emerged from the castle, cried out:

Halters, bring halters, and hang this traitor bishop and his accomplices from the gallows!

A similar punishment awaited William of St Calais, who as bishop of Durham had begun the building of the mighty cathedral and castle. He had joined Odo and ‘did all the harm that he could all over the north’. William Rufus besieged him and the bishop was forced to come to terms: he ‘gave up the castle, and relinquished his bishopric, and went to Normandy’. This, as the Anglo-Saxon chronicler notes with satisfaction, was the common fate of most of the leaders of the revolt: ‘many Frenchmen also abandoned their lands and went overseas; and the king gave many of their lands to the men that were faithful to him’.

The crisis over, William’s promises to the English were forgotten. When he was taxed with this by Archbishop Lanfranc, the king smoothly retorted: ‘who can be expected to keep all his promises?’

Despite his broken word, William was able to deploy the men and money of England to re-create and even to extend the Conqueror’s empire. He first forced an effective division of Normandy, by taking the east of the duchy and leaving Robert with only the west. Finally, in 1096, Robert mortgaged him the whole of Normandy to finance his participation in the First Crusade. The price was 10,000 marks of silver. And it was raised, needless to say, by an English geld at the rate of four shillings per hide.

Even more remarkable was the fate of Scotland. As we have seen, Malcolm III had married Margaret, sister of Edgar the Æthling. The hope must have been to exploit Margaret’s Anglo-Saxon royal blood to make England Scottish. The result instead was to make Scotland English or, at any rate, Anglo-Norman. In part, this was the work of Margaret herself. She was passionately Anglo-Norman, in both culture and church-manship, and imposed these values when and where she could in Scotland. This inevitably led to a native Gaelic backlash and King Malcolm found himself caught in the middle. A complicating factor was Edgar the Æthling’s reconciliation with William the Conqueror, which led, in effect, to his becoming an honorary member of the Norman dynasty.

With both his wife and his brother-in-law as Anglo-Norman agents, the pressure on Malcolm was intense. And it was not made any easier by William II’s high-handed approach to his northern neighbour.

In the event, however, it was Malcolm who threw the first stone by taking advantage of William’s absence in Normandy in 1091 to launch an invasion of England, which, after making considerable headway, was repulsed by William’s regents. But then, as Malcolm’s ill-luck would have it, William and Robert sank their differences and decided to celebrate their new-found friendship by joining in a punitive expedition to Scotland. The English fleet was destroyed in September. But the army swept into south-eastern Scotland and it was clear that Malcolm would have to submit. Duke Robert and Edgar the Æthling acted as intermediaries and it was agreed to renew the Peace of Abernethy, in return for which Malcolm performed homage to William on the same terms that he had done to his father.

But William, probably sensing Scottish weakness, had no intention of keeping his side of the bargain. Next year he came north with a large army; captured Carlisle and built and garrisoned the castle. He also rebuilt the town and planted an English colony around it: sending ‘a vast number of rustic people with wives and with cattle … thither, to dwell there in order to till the land’.

The establishment of Carlisle as a fortified outpost of England altered the whole balance of power along the vague and unstable Anglo-Scottish border. Malcolm had to respond. But, having learned the lesson of Anglo-Norman power, he tried negotiation and came under safe-conduct to the crown-wearing at Gloucester. There, however, William chose to inflict deliberate humiliation on him. ‘But when he came to the king, he could not’, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported, ‘be considered worthy either of our king’s speech, or of the conditions that were formerly promised him.’

Malcolm returned to Scotland and, intent on revenge, launched a destructive raid on England. But the raid ended disastrously. Malcolm was entrapped near Alnwick and killed by Morel of Bamborough, the steward and kinsman of the earl of Northumberland and Malcolm’s own intimate friend. Malcolm’s son and nominated heir, Edward, was killed at the same time. The death of both her husband and son was too much for Margaret, who, almost maddened with grief, died a few days later. There followed a powerful Gaelic reaction in which Donald III Bane (White- or Fair-haired), Malcolm’s backwoodsman brother, was made king and ‘drove out all the English’. A counter-blow was struck when Duncan II, Malcolm’s son by his first wife, briefly regained the throne as an English client. But he was soon forced to dismiss his foreign entourage and was then murdered and replaced once more by Donald III.

William, meanwhile, put his own house in order by bringing Robert de Mowbray, the rebel earl of Northumberland, to heel. But the earl’s castle of Bamborough proved impregnable. Instead, William built a counter-castle, which he called Malvoisin, ‘Evil Neighbour’. Earl Robert unwisely ventured outside his stronghold with a raiding party and was captured. William then forced the countess, who was mounting an intrepid defence of Bamborough, to surrender by resorting to one of his father’s favourite tricks and threatening to blind the earl in front of the castle walls. With the surrender of the great fortress, William enjoyed greater direct power in the north than any previous king.

It remained to deal with Scotland. William’s chosen instrument was Edgar the Æthling. He was dispatched north in 1097 with a large army; defeated and captured Donald III Bane, who was later blinded, and installed his namesake and nephew as King Edgar I.

Scotland was now, effectively, an English protectorate. A vassal-king, who was half-English in blood and wholly English in culture, had been put on the throne by an English prince at the head of an Anglo-Norman army. And under Edgar’s ten-year rule, the English language, English colonizers and English ways of doing things spread far into the Lowlands. The result, paradoxically, made Scotland, as a mirror-image of England, all the more able to resist England when the time came.

Wales also suffered the relentless expansion of Anglo-Norman England. But here the consequences were different. In Scotland, the aftermath of the death of Malcolm III led to the eventual creation of a strengthened kingdom that was, in essential respects, another England. In Wales, in contrast, the death of the dominant native prince of south Wales, Rhys ap Tewdwr, also at the hands of a Norman and also in 1093, marked an end: ‘and then fell the kingdom of the Britons’, the Welsh chronicler lamented; or, as an English writer put it, ‘from that day kings ceased to bear rule in Wales’.

The result was that ‘English’ Wales became the most purely Norman area in Britain. Here were feudal lordships, each based on a castle, that feuded ceaselessly with each other and with the king. And they did so more or less without restraint since the structures of royal government, which held firm over most of England, had never been imposed there.

III

Probably more important than these events on the periphery, both to the king and his subjects, was his redevelopment of London. It was, as we have seen, Edward the Confessor with his building of the Abbey who had taken the first crucial step in the establishment of London/Westminster as the political capital. But William II’s building programme comes close behind. The programme included the construction of the first curtain-wall of the Tower; the rebuilding of London Bridge, in a piece of advanced engineering; and, most importantly of all, the erection of a new Great Hall at Westminster.

The Hall, at 240 feet long by 67 feet wide, was one of the largest secular buildings north of the Alps, and, reroofed and reskinned in the fourteenth century, it still stands as the most impressive surviving monument of the Anglo-Norman monarchy. One curious feature, however, is the lack of alignment between the fenestration on the two long walls, so that the windows on the west wall are four feet further north than their equivalents on the east. This has never been satisfactorily explained. It cannot, for example, be a question of the Hall’s size defeating the technical ability of eleventh-century masons, since, big though it is, many English cathedrals are even bigger. One possibility, however, is that the problem was caused by building the new Hall round Edward the Confessor’s hall, which was left standing and operational. Certainly we know that Westminster Hall was built in a rush, taking little more than the year 1098–9. This required plentiful use of forced labour, and, according to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, cost numerous lives: ‘many men perished thereby’.

The Great Hall was finished in the first half of 1099. When he first saw it, one of the king’s attendants is supposed to have said that, though it was impressive, he felt it was rather too big. William crushed him with his retort. It was, the king said, ‘too big for a chamber but not big enough for a hall’. The remark was worthy of a Nero; indeed, the crown-wearings, for which the Hall was principally intended, were imperial in both their origins and their pretensions. The king sat in the middle of the dais, crowned, robed and enthroned, while the Latin text known as the Laudes