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FEUDAL & CLAN SYSTEMS

WILLIAM, BOSS OF NORMANDY, belonged to a fourth or fifth generation of Scandinavian pirates who had made themselves overlords of western Europe. He had a claim to the English crown which the English council of local leaders ignored. They elected Harold, one of their own nation who had been ruling England wisely and well as the previous king’s minister. William decided to take the nation by force. He got the other Norman lords on his side by promising to double their French estates by the addition of estates across the channel. They believed him because at land grabbing he had already proved himself deadly efficient. In a Europe with a very primitive money market he borrowed enough to hire mercenary soldiers from French neighbours who would otherwise have attacked Normandy when he left it. Then he left it and added England to his other possessions.

The job was not easy. Though his soldiers were all professionals who lived by warfare the English were mostly farmers fighting for their land. For five years William fought uprisings in the south and east and west (where the English were helped by their old enemies, the Welsh) but resistance was strongest in the north. Here two other former enemies, Scots and Danes, helped the English. William paid the Danes to go away then burned homes, crops, farms and farming tools. His massacres drove English survivors into Scotland. Famine stopped them returning – shires north of York were deserted for half a century.

The north never bothered William again. After six and a half centuries south Britain was again owned by a military empire on both sides of the English Channel. Nearly all England’s gentry were killed or exiled by William, so now he could give his poorest mercenary soldier land with a village or two on it, his barons estates of a hundred manors or more. On these they built great strongholds from which England was ruled for the next three centuries. It was now the most thoroughly feudal state in Europe, under the permanent martial law of fighting landlords whose commander conferred with them in the House of Lords. When not fighting the landlords liked to hunt.

England still had forests where the pigs of commoners could forage and the English catch deer or smaller game when poor crops reduced their diets. William was an excellent man-killer because he disliked most people, but he loved the deer he hunted and was merciless to others who did so. In Hampshire he fenced off a private hunting ground by clearing farms, villages and religious houses from between the woodlands and his landlords followed his example on a smaller scale. The English natives were excluded from a source of cheap meat by game laws threatening them with death, though seven centuries later this penalty was changed to transportation for life. In the nineteenth century Norman property laws were used to evict hundreds of Scottish communities from their land, and even nowadays the remaining natives can be arrested for taking a bird or fish from the land where they live.

Along with other natural rights the English were robbed of a language. Their original speech and splendid literature were gradually forgotten as the commoners improvised a new speech that made sense to their bosses. Meanwhile wealthier folk sent their children to schools where they learned Norman French, which had no great literature but gave them a chance of defending themselves in the conquerors’ law courts.

PUBLISHER: You seem obsessed with the Norman Conquest.

AUTHOR: I am! It enrages me more than earlier robberies with violence because power-loving historians and teachers used it – perhaps still use it – to warp children’s minds. They praised Roman invaders because they brought a kind of peace and spread Christianity. They praised English invaders because their way of choosing aldermen and kings was a kind of democracy. They could only praise the Normans for their efficient feudal system, so they romanticized it. The English were taught to be PROUD of having been conquered because – though painful at the time – it gave them a tougher class of managers who, centuries later, led them to thrash the French at Agincourt and seize the British empire.

PUBLISHER: Maybe it did.

AUTHOR: (wildly) Agincourt and the British empire were ALSO robberies with violence! Children should be taught it is WRONG to take riches from foreign lands by military force, COWARDLY to gun down spear-throwing natives, VICIOUS to mass bomb civilians and grounded soldiers in Kuwait and Iraq!

PUBLISHER: Calm down – you’ll make some readers fling the book away. I admit Duke William was not a nice man but were Scottish kings better?

AUTHOR: No better. Malcolm Canmore, son of the Duncan killed by Macbeth, ruled Scotland from 1069 to 1093 and raided England five times, attempting in the north what William was doing in the south. He lacked troops to hold the land he invaded so could only keep looting it and retreating. When English kings counter-attacked Scotland he avoided battle by apologizing and swearing allegiance to them, then broke his promise. On his fifth raid he was trapped and killed. Compared with Duke William the Scottish king was a coward, liar and failure, but his power to hurt was limited by the number of people he ruled and by Scottish geology.

The population of eleventh-century Scotland was about 300,000 to England’s 1,750,000. It had few towns and the peopled parts were isolated from each other by more or less mountainous wilderness. Even the plain between Forth and Clyde was divided between Gaels with Irish relations in the west, English with Northumbrian relatives in the east, so everywhere the social organization was in clans who could only fight clannishly. Clans were extended families where everyone had the surname of their chief who sometimes inherited the job from his mother’s side of the family. As in African and north American tribes the agricultural work was often done by women while men hunted and fished. Hunting weapons are as efficient against people as against deer and wild cattle – one reason why Normans forbade hunting to the English. Clan chiefs showed their efficiency by leading raids upon their neighbours so Scotland, though not feudal, was often feuding. Regard Scotland as a cluster of small nations, each with good reason to fear its neighbours, each with a chief who supported the king because, with the king’s help, no neighbour could finally conquer him. That was the clan system. Its essential difference from England was in the king’s title – he was King of Scots, not King of Scotland. England’s king was also a warlord but owned the whole land by right of conquest. He had given his barons counties in return for the oath of allegiance – their promise of military service. The counties were divided into estates of knights who held them in return for their oath of allegiance. That was feudalism. Neither system was perfect. Feuds were as chronic between Scots clans as civil wars between Anglo-Norman nobles.

PUBLISHER: Why describe these two systems? Modern readers will think them then equally nasty.

AUTHOR: Because the struggle between them turned this Scotland of squabbling chiefdoms into a new kind of European nation – one whose king only ruled because he had proved his fitness to the Scottish commoners – despite the fact that he was a greedy murderer who began by betraying the Scots to their enemies.

PUBLISHER: Oh dear. Am I about to hear the story of Bruce again?

AUTHOR: (firmly) The story of WALLACE and Bruce. All who write about Scotland come to it.