Читать книгу The Spirit of London - Boris Johnson - Страница 11

William the Conqueror

The tower builder

It was a cold and clammy morning. A biting wind was coming up off the Thames. A huge glossy raven gave a metallic cark, and the white tower seemed to get bigger and more sinister as we came in under its eaves.

As we approached the monument of William the Conqueror, I gazed up through the thin mist at its chalky stones, and felt the savagery of the place. It wasn’t so much the thought of the ghosts of Anne Boleyn and the other men and women slaughtered in the grounds – just over there, in fact, where a yellow-jacketed janitor was sweeping something up. Nor was I thinking of the corpses of children they found in the walls, or the thousands of headless bodies they discovered under the church.

Ever since it was made – at the behest of the Conqueror – the Tower of London has been a Lubyanka, an expression of power, a horrible bully of a building.

‘It was a skyscraper for the times,’ said the Yeoman Jailer, RSM Victor Lucas, as we cricked our necks to inspect its beautiful lines. ‘Anglo-Saxon London had nothing on this scale.’ Of course it was handy for controlling the Thames, and it put paid to the endless aquatic invasions that had destabilised London over the centuries. But its main purpose was surely symbolic.

It told the English that they had been beaten. They had been thrashed, licked, stuffed, conquered by a race of people who built great donjons and keeps on a scale that had never been attempted on the island.

The Normans didn’t even build the tower with indigenous stone. They disdained the Kentish ragstone and shipped in limestone from Caen. Not only the design but the very substance of the building is an import, a colossal alien cuboid crash-landed amid the Roman ruins and the huddled Anglo-Saxon huts.

The whole thing was an insult, and it was also the most audacious fraud. This William – from whom today’s aristocrats like to trace their descent – he wasn’t even English. It was an act of usurpation.

He was born in Falaise, the son of Robert I of Normandy, in about 1028, and he was a bastard. That is, he was the illegitimate product of Robert’s union with a tanner’s daughter, and he had some difficulty asserting his claim to Normandy, never mind to the English throne.

Remember that in 1066 Harold Godwinson had been properly acclaimed as king; he had been named as the heir of Edward the Confessor. What was William to do with England?

He was a Norman, the descendant of Frenchified Vikings, who had been settled in that part of France since Rollo arrived there in 911. He didn’t speak Anglo-Saxon. His only link with London was that he was the great-nephew of Emma, the wife of Ethelred the Unready, one of the most famously useless kings in English history. It is a tenuous connexion, and yet William was convinced that he was born to rule England. He set about doing so with frightening efficiency.

Having cheated a childhood assassination attempt (they stabbed the baby in the next-door crib), William grew up tall – well, about five foot ten, which was tallish for a Norman – with gingery hair and powerful arms that enabled him to shoot arrows from a horse at full gallop. He was a hearty eater, and in middle age he had acquired such a belly that his enemies said he was pregnant. He was a voracious student of the arts of hunting and war, so that by the death of Edward the Confessor he was psychologically ready for an expedition of Caesar-like audacity, a seaborne invasion that would change England and the world forever.

There is no need to repeat the essentials of the campaign: how Harold was faced with simultaneous threats from Danes and Normans; how he rushed back south from the battle of Stamford Bridge and got an arrow in his eye at Hastings. All this is well known (or blooming well should be) to the average ten-year-old. What is much less clear is how William clinched the deal.

It was one thing to proclaim yourself the conqueror of a small hill on the Sussex coast, but ever since Alfred had restored the city and its fortifications, London held the key to the kingdom. London was the fat spider at the centre of the web of Roman roads, and it took William a surprisingly long time to make himself master of the city. Indeed, the closer you study the story, the more you wonder whether Hastings was as decisive as all that.

Perhaps Londoners could have held out. Perhaps they could have changed the course of history – had they not behaved so badly, or been so badly led.

‘London is a great city,’ says the twelfth-century ‘Song of the Battle of Hastings’, ‘overflowing with froward inhabitants and richer than the rest of the country. Protected on the left side by its walls and on the right side by the river, it neither fears enemies nor dreads being taken by storm.’ In the end, it was the cynicism and divisions among Londoners that handed the city – and the country – to William.

For about a month after Hastings William hung around, hoping that London would just drop into his lap. There was a pro-Norman faction behind the walls, and indeed the court of Edward the Confessor had shown Normanising tendencies. But for the time being these pro-Normans were outnumbered by the pro-Saxons, who favoured the claims of one Edgar the Atheling.

You have to understand that London was at this stage a bit of a multi-culti maelstrom. In the last seventy years they had chopped and changed so often between English and Scandinavian rulers that by the time William arrived at Hastings, London was milling with Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Danes and Anglo-Celts and Anglo-Normans, to say nothing of the other international merchants in the city.

If you went into a shop and ordered a pound of offal, it is not at all clear what language you would be expected to speak. While Londoners bickered in their various tongues, William’s troops got dysentery. He tried to bring matters to a head by attacking the south of the city, burning much of Southwark to the ground; and yet somehow the victor of Hastings was repulsed – which shows, perhaps, what the Londoners might have achieved had they possessed more discipline.

William retreated south and west, and eventually crossed the Thames as far away as Wallingford in Oxfordshire, before wheeling across to Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. From there he issued a fresh invitation to the Londoners to pack it in – and again, the citizens delayed. By now it was late autumn of 1066, and disease and campaigning were surely taking their toll of the Norman army.

Behind the city walls the defences were organised by one Ansgar the Staller, who is named in some chronicles as the ‘mayor’ of London. The Staller had been injured at Hastings, and had been heroically carried into the city on a stretcher. For weeks, perhaps even months, Ansgar the Staller stalled away.

He might have stalled to victory had he not been let down by his allies. Edgar the Atheling – the Anglo-Saxon alternative – was supposedly backed by Edwin, Earl of Northumberland, and his brother Morcar. At the critical juncture they seem to have vanished back up north, taking their troops with them. Another Edgar backer, Archbishop Stigand, switched sides and went over to the Conqueror, and by December 1066 the Staller could stall no more.

Like Suetonius Paulinus, William marched down what is now the Edgware Road, but this time he turned right at (what is now) St Giles’s Circus and established his HQ at Westminster. There he constructed ‘siege engines and made moles and the iron horns of battering rams to destroy the City … to reduce the bastions to sand and bring down the proud tower to rubble’.

It is not clear what Guy of Amiens means by ‘the proud tower’, but he is presumably referring to the remaining Roman fortifications. Ansgar and Co are said to have put up a vigorous resistance, with what little soldiery they had left. But William’s knights were tougher. They ‘inflicted much sorrow upon London by the death of many of her sons and citizens’.

William was crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey, on Christmas Day 1066. It is a measure of the extreme tension in the city that the ceremony very nearly ended in disaster.

The turncoat Archbishop Stigand was given the honour of placing the English crown on Norman temples (even though he had crowned Harold in the same year), and he turned to the English contingent and asked them, in English, if William was acceptable as their king. They shouted their assent – as well they might, given that they were surrounded by Norman knights.

Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances then put the same question in French, for the benefit of those in the audience who could not speak English. The Norman knights shouted Oui! so loudly that the guards outside thought there was some sort of revolt going on. They torched the neighbouring buildings, and the congregation fled – some to fight the flames, some to loot the houses. A handful of clergy and monks were left to complete the consecration of the King, who was trembling from head to foot. As for Ansgar the Staller, his lands at Enfield were confiscated and he went on to have a quiet career as a minister in Westminster Abbey.

There are many senses in which Norman rule in London was merely a continuation of what had gone before. The new king issued a famous Charter for Londoners, in which he greeted all the burgesses, French and English, in friendly wise, and assured them that all the laws of Edward would continue to apply. ‘And I will that every child be his father’s heir after his father’s day and I will not suffer any man to offer you any wrong. God keep you,’ said the benign new ruler. London’s political system was kept intact, with the Saxon portreeve evolving into the Norman sheriff, and Londoners by and large retained the freedoms they had acquired in the reign of the Confessor. According to William of Poitiers, one of the more boot-licking Norman chroniclers, the English were absolutely thrilled to be conquered.

‘Many English received by his liberal gift more than they had ever received from their fathers or their former lords … He gave them rich fiefs in return for which they willingly endured hardship and danger. But to no Frenchman was anything given unjustly taken from an Englishman.’

It is not clear that the English saw it this way. William devastated the north of England, and on any objective reading the Norman Conquest was a cultural and political catastrophe for the Anglo-Saxons. Lands and titles were plundered and handed over to Norman noblemen. Many English aristocrats were driven to flee the country, some to Flanders, some to Scotland. Some turned up as soldiers in the Byzantine empire’s Varangian Guard, some were sold into slavery.

By 1086 the Norman cuckoo had shoved almost all the Saxon fledglings over the side of the nest, and the English aristocracy retained a pathetic 8 per cent of its original landholdings. Half the country was owned by one hundred and ninety men, and a quarter by just eleven men. All were Normans. Lovely Anglo-Saxon crafts of embroidery and metal working were lost. Above all, a foreign language was imposed on the country, and French was to be used by the ruling classes for the next three hundred years.

As Sir Walter Scott pointed out, the subjection of the Saxons is visible in the language today, where we use an English word for a farm animal, and a French word for the cooked meat it provides. So the Saxon servants would take a cow and provide the Normans with beef, or they would take a pig and offer them pork, or a sheep and offer them mutton. Scott composed a little ditty, which he put into the mouth of someone called Wamba. It was ‘Norman saw on English oak, On English neck a Norman yoke; Norman spoon to English dish, And England ruled as Normans wish.’

It was a humiliation, and I have always been fascinated by the politics of the Conquest. ‘Et fuga verterunt Angli’, it says on the Bayeux tapestry – and the English turned in flight. To any modern English-speaking person the message is clear: we, the English, lost. And the Normans conquered us, right?

I ask the Yeoman Jailer whether he thinks that we – the English – were conquered by foreigners. He pauses and then says judiciously: ‘I think in the end, sir, that we conquered them. In a hundred years they were calling themselves kings of England.’ I suppose that is true; but for three hundred years the language of the elite in England became French, and the Anglo-Saxons were ruthlessly pushed down the social scale.

When William died he was not buried in London, but in his Norman home of Caen. He had become so fat that they could not fit him into the sarcophagus, and when the officiating bishop tried to push down on the lid his body burst, releasing such appalling vapours from his ventral cavity that the congregation swooned.

It seems unlikely that he was mourned by any of the four thousand Anglo-Saxon lords who lost their land, because the sad truth is that the Conquest was a nightmare for the Anglo-Saxons; and yet it was terrific for London.

Suppose it had been William, not Harold, who had taken one in the eye at Hastings. Or suppose that Ansgard the Staller had won the battle of London. Without the Norman Conquest the city would never have had the unity and peace that goes with firm government.

The chronicler tells us that under the Conqueror a young maiden could travel the length of England without being injured or robbed, and it is security that is the paramount condition for trade. Merchants from Caen and Rouen came over to buy and sell, and London flourished under its famous charter. It is an indication of the city’s favoured status under the Normans that it was not required to submit to the Domesday Book – even Winchester was eventually required to tot up its assets.

Norman London was to become emphatically and officially the capital of England – perhaps for the first time since the Romans. And William enshrined one reform that was crucial for the development of the city.

Edward the Confessor had originally moved the court from outside the Alfredian/Roman boundaries, because he wanted to oversee the rebuilding of the eighth-century West Minster monastery, which he turned into the Abbey. William not only decided to be crowned in the Abbey, but he established the Norman court – the centre of administration and justice – at Westminster.

So it was that London acquired its bicephalous identity, with the centre of political power at one remove from the centre of wealth.

Sometimes the moneymen have infuriated the politicians, and sometimes the politicians have egged on the mob against the moneymen. But for a thousand years London’s commercial district has had easy access to government – and yet been apart from it; and that semi-independence has surely contributed to the City’s commercial dynamism.

We have the Normans to thank for that, just as we can thank them for the rule of law, a series of socking great castles, and above all for adulterating the language so vigorously with French. If Harold had won at Hastings, or if Ansgard the Staller had held London, then we would never have been blessed with the hybrid language that was to conquer the world.

The success of that hybrid has been ascribed to the genius of our next great Londoner – the first in the series to have been actually born in the city.

***

Just before we come to Chaucer, we must consider an important detail about his pilgrims. Think of them all: the fornicating friar, the randy old widow, the cook with the ginormous zit, the drunken miller, the pretentious prioress. If they came from London or anywhere north of the river, there was only one route to get to Canterbury, and that was my daily commuter trek. London Bridge was still the only crossing, and in the years of England’s Norman kings it was a very rickety affair.

We have seen that Olaf the Norwegian found it easy enough to pull it over with his rowers in 1014, and on ten occasions between that date and 1136 the bridge either collapsed or experienced a disastrous failure, and no wonder.

The population of the city had doubled between AD 1000 and 1200 – to more than twenty thousand. Across this wonky track went growing quantities of people and goods: wool from Dorset, wine from Deauville. It seems unlikely to have been more than six metres or ten metres across at the widest point, and there would scarcely have been room for two carts to pass abreast. Then in 1170 the decrepit Saxon piece of infrastructure faced a new load – a fresh rush of mediaeval commuters with their defecating horses and pounding heels.

Henry II had his row with Thomas à Becket about the power relationship between church and state. In one sense the argument ended decisively in Henry’s favour, as Cheapside-born Becket’s brains were splattered over the altar of Canterbury Cathedral. But in death the great Londoner was more powerful than in life. Henry made his penitential pilgrimage, and to the mediaeval mind that showed the triumph of God over the kings of the earth.

To mediaeval folk who believed in the literal truth of the licking tongues of hellfire, a pilgrimage of their own was a chance to win points with the almighty. Even greater numbers started to head for Canterbury. A priest called Peter de Colechurch, the chaplain of the church where Becket had been baptised, proposed a lasting solution.

What was needed, he told Henry II, was a stone bridge. The pilgrims and the holy blissful martyr deserved no less. Fed up with paying for repairs on the wooden structure, Henry agreed. The design appeared to be very expensive, so he announced a tax on wool and set up a monastic guild called the Brethren of London Bridge, who could raise cash through the sale of indulgences.

Even with these funding streams, the project proved almost too much for twelfth-century England. The river was 900 feet wide, strongly-flowing and tidal. The design required twenty stone piers, rising on vast ship-shaped stone starlings that rose from the river bed and jutted their prows into the current.

These days you would build a cofferdam, and pump the water out to allow the men to work on the bed of the river. That was beyond them.

Henry ran out of money and died; Peter de Colechurch was buried in the uncompleted foundations. Richard the Lionheart was too busy with the Crusades. After thirty years and the loss of one hundred and fifty lives, the project was finished by King John.

He did a cunning deal with the merchants of London. In exchange for loans to complete the bridge, they could have revenue from tolls and all future bridging rights over the Thames. These days we would call it a private finance initiative. London Bridge was completed in 1209, and was a huge popular hit. Houses and shops were built along it, with the eaves leaning together above the crowd. The congestion was so bad that sometimes it took the pilgrims an hour to cross.

On they struggled through the next one hundred and fifty years, with all the disasters of the Middle Ages – the little ice ages, the Black Death, the start of the One Hundred Years War with France.

They went to see the shrine of the martyr, because they believed he could help relieve them of their aches and miseries, but there were times when the people’s feeling of oppression was so great that the consolation of religion was not enough.