Norman Conquest

The 1066 Battle of Hastings marked the Norman Conquest, didn’t it? Anglo Saxon England was obliterated by the new Norman tyranny of William the Conqueror. The country’s language, culture, law and indeed the whole structure of society was changed. Even the environment altered as hundreds of castles sprang up. But it certainly didn’t happen overnight. It was an attenuated and bumpy road for all of William's reign. And the period before 1066 was hardly the golden age of some people’s imagination.

Hastings did not secure England for Duke William. 1066, for all its drama, was just the beginning of the Conquest and Hastings only its opening engagement. Indeed, there followed 20 years of challenge to the new rulers from unreconciled groups in England, and external threats from Scandinavia. There was even a rebellion from some Norman earls in 1075. Far from being a settled state, England under William faced a series of revolts and insurrections lasting until 1087. In fact there was little peace and barely any time when the country was free from violence, often of the most brutal kind.

Nervous invaders

It’s hard to avoid the impression that the Norman invaders lived in constant fear of having their throats cut by the defeated English population. They were hardly new to the consequences of violent military invasions and occupations. Apart from constant fighting on their own domestic borders in Brittany, Maine and the Vexin, they were involved in Ireland, Spain and even North Africa. More recently they had been fighting as invaders and occupiers in southern Italy, and most notably, Sicily. In England perhaps 15,000 Normans ruled over two million conquered people. Worrying arithmetic. 

William may well have thought at first of a more inclusive Anglo-Norman regime. But events soon changed his mind. There was a nervy start with the 1066 Christmas Day coronation, when Norman guards mistook acclamation at Westminster Abbey for a riot. William supposedly trembled throughout the ceremony. The next five years saw a series of local English rebellions - in Norwich, Exeter (involving Harold’s mother, Gilda) and in the Welsh Marcher lands. They were not co-ordinated so were fairly comfortably defeated, though with increasing violence.

In autumn 1069 a fresh English northern revolt was triggered by King Sweyn’s Danish invasion. Sweyn was bribed to leave, but the English leaders Morcar and Edwin fought on, joined by Edgar Atheling, the Anglo-Saxon royal claimant. Their initial defeat of a Norman force saw a reprisal - a sustained campaign of killing the population north of the Humber, known as the ‘Harrying of the North’. Livestock and crops were destroyed in a brutal scorched earth policy leaving the population to starve and the land unusable for a generation. The worst ever atrocity in Britain, modern estimates put the number of deaths at a vast 100,000-150,000.

Among a general pattern of insurgency, and a Danish invasion and occupation of Norwich, a further revolt took place in the Fenlands. At Ely local leader Hereward was besieged by a Norman force. He held out for a while before defeat, but it tied down Norman military assets for yet another spell. And in 1075 William was challenged by three Norman/Breton earls led by Ralph de Gael. The roots of the quarrel are obscure but the effect was further to weaken Norman rule and the security of the Anglo-Norman state. William’s authority remained shaky yet a feared Danish invasion in 1085-86 did not materialise.

As William had returned to Normandy in 1067 and remained there for much of his reign, effective power was invested in a regency led by his half-brother Bishop Odo, who commissioned the Bayeux tapestry. This man’s greed and abuse of power were legendary – his estates were larger than anyone but the king’s – and he cannot have helped with any bridge building efforts. He faced trial in 1076 for defrauding the Crown and the Diocese of Canterbury, and was imprisoned in 1082 for freelancing a military expedition to Italy. He may have been planning to make himself Pope.              

Them and us

People these days, led by popular culture, tend to assume the Normans are ‘them’ and the English are ‘us’. The Normans brought militarism, feudalism, and the class system, true, but also abolished slavery (perhaps 20% of the country's population were slaves). Says historian Marc Morris, “The notion persists that pre-Conquest England had been a much nicer place - freer, more liberal, with representative institutions and better rights for women. Thus the Conquest is still regarded in many quarters as a national tragedy. But almost all of this is a myth”.  

William’s father died when he was young. His childhood influences were chiefly those of the medieval warrior culture, of which there were some key role models in Anjou - Counts Fulk and Geoffrey Martel. They and their like used terror as a political weapon. Says historian David Bates, “William had a strong sense of personal entitlement that sometimes translated into exceptional ruthlessness”.

The results of this attitude made for grim times. Lanfranco, the Italian cleric brought in to assume some of the administrative burden, cut a miserable figure. In 1073 he complained of "an unbearably awful" situation, "so much unrest among different people in such distress and injuries that I am weary of my life and grieve exceedingly to have lived in times like these". Yet it's worth pointing out that he was at the time angling to leave England for a change of job on the continent.   

Master builders? 

Castles were famously built from the very start of the invasion. But contrary to common belief they were almost all earth and wooden structures, put up quickly by new landlords using local forced labour. They defined territory - like staking a claim in a gold rush area - reinforcing strong points. The constructions were crude fortified positions. 500 were built by 1087, but stone castles weren’t erected in any numbers during William’s reign.

Such fortified strongholds reinforced the feudal link between a local magnate or landlord, and his superior lord. Says Marc Morris, whose work on the Conquest clearly sets the standard, “Kings were able to keep a firmer grip on their kingdoms through their vassals’ ability to defend the borders. Not only did this lead to greater security and stability, it allowed kings to think of themselves as rulers of a country, not simply rulers of a tribe or people, and to govern for all people in their realm”.  

One sphere where the Normans were keen to construct, or reconstruct, was religious buildings. There had been a boom in church and cathedral building in Normandy from earlier in the 11^th century. In 1066 England had 15 cathedrals. Nine had been completely re-built by William’s death in 1087, and the other six by the time of his son Henry I’s death in 1135. The same rebuilding programme was applied to every major Abbey.

It’s perhaps misleading to ascribe all this castle and church building activity simply to the Normans. Variants of castle design “reached parts of Europe not conquered by anyone, and would surely have arrived in England”, says David Bates. Romanesque architecture was here in Edward the Confessor’s Westminster Abbey, and new parish churches had been developing since well before 1066. But Norman occupation gave it a boost. “William’s insistence on grandeur and display did make a difference after 1066 in ways that were very influential. But the labels ‘Norman’ and ‘English’ often do not fit”.

St Cross Winchester

Land and power

It’s sometimes said that the Conquest marked an English tilt away from a Scandinavian to a Southern European orientation. Given the country’s long history of Danish/Viking conflict and then settlement, with a continuing threat from Scandinavian warlords, this is hard to establish. Much of northern and eastern England was Nordic by history and culture, and the Normans themselves were of course descended from Vikings. Norman princess Emma (Aelfgifu in English documents) was married in 1002 to King Aethelred, then in 1017 to Cnut. Part Danish through her mother Gunnor, she was a wealthy and influential figure. Emma's skeleton has been reconstructed in Winchester Cathedral. Her son Edward (the Confessor) was brought up in Normandy and had several Norman advisors. And in any case the English court had long links with the Carolingian political legacy and with Rome.

What of the 1086 Domesday survey? Morris convincingly concludes that it gave the Norman nobility security of title to the estates they grabbed in the Conquest’s early years. It was also a directory for royal officials of who held what (directly or indirectly from the king) providing them with the means to seize and deliver lands, and charge accordingly. It was sometimes said that the Conquest did not make much difference to people in general - they just exchanged one set of overlords for another. But Domesday reveals a cataclysmic change to England’s ruling class. Half the country was now in the hands of just 200 landlords. Bates writes “almost all the major landowners hail from Normandy and Northern France. There’s barely an English tenant-in-chief to be seen”,

Several myths about the Norman Conquest have been punctured. It wasn’t simply a romantic story of Anglo-Saxon England violated by Norman tyranny. And women usually had a hard time under both regimes. But it was still hugely important. There’s no doubt about the dramatic changes involved. Buildings and architecture, of course, plus new military techniques, a new ruling elite and language of government. John Gillingham calls it “a Conquest unparalleled in European history”. He’s right.

Besides the political and social revolution there’s a more intangible legacy. The Normans, concludes Morris, “imported a new set of attitudes and morals, which impinged on everything from warfare to politics to religion to law, and even the status of the peasantry. Many of these changes could be grouped under the heading ‘national identity’. The Conquest matters, in short, because it altered what it meant to be English”.