Читать книгу Crown and Country: A History of England through the Monarchy - David Starkey - Страница 20

Chapter 6

Subjugation

William I

THE FIRST PART OF THIS BOOK traced the history of Anglo-Saxon England from its beginnings to the crisis of the Norman Conquest, when, as one contemporary put it, ‘God ordered that the English should cease to be a people’.

But the institutions of the Old English state proved more resilient and, within forty years of Hastings, the English could celebrate the English conquest of Normandy and the rebirth of an English nation. It was polyglot and multicultural and found itself retelling the Anglo-Saxon past in Latin or Norman French. But it was, finally, the values and practices of Anglo-Saxon politics which survived and came to dominate the history of medieval England.

I

William the Conqueror is perhaps the greatest man to have sat on the throne of England; he is certainly one of the most unpleasant. He was covetous, cruel, puritanical, invincibly convinced of his own righteousness and always ready to use terror as a weapon of first, rather than last, resort. He was also deeply pious and sure that God was on his side.

And the extraordinary course of his career gave him every reason for this belief.

William was born around the turn of the year 1027–8 in Falaise, Normandy. His father, Robert, was younger brother of Duke Richard III of Normandy and his mother, Herleva, was the daughter of a furrier or skinner. Six months later, Richard was dead, some said of poison, and Robert succeeded him as duke. Robert was not an effective ruler. During his reign the great Norman landed families seized the leading offices in the ducal household and made them hereditary. They likewise took over the local position of vicomte or sheriff. This last was especially important. Since the vicomte controlled the local administration of finance and justice, it meant that the duke was losing control of his dukedom – just as his own independence vis-à-vis the king of France was a symptom of the fragmentation of the kingdom into a series of largely independent territorial principalities.

Robert’s personal life was more successful. He and Herleva never married but their relationship was close, perhaps even loving, and Robert always treated William as his son. Shortly before he left on pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1035, he had the Norman magnates swear fealty to William as his heir and had the bequest confirmed by his overlord, Henry I, king of France. Robert never returned from his pilgrimage, and later in 1035, William succeeded as duke. He was still only in his eighth year.

Predictably, his minority was troubled. Two of his guardians were killed; his steward, Osbern, was murdered in the duke’s bedchamber as William slept, and in 1047 he was saved from deposition only by the personal intervention of King Henry I, who joined with William to defeat the rebels in battle at Val-ès-Dunes.

William was twenty and his victory marked his coming of age. He was now his own man and he quickly made his mark. In about 1050 he married Matilda, daughter of Count Baldwin V of Flanders; in 1051 he was apparently offered the throne of England by Edward the Confessor, and in the following year he was strong enough to go on the offensive against his enemies. These were headed by Count Geoffrey Martel of Anjou, who in 1051 conquered the county of Maine. This made him William’s immediate neighbour with, thanks to the revolt of the lord of the castles of Alençon and Domfront, a back door into Normandy itself. William resolved to close it. Geoffrey backed off from battle and William was able to pick the disputed castles off, beginning with the lightly defended Alençon. The defenders beat pelts on the walls in mocking reference to William’s birth. Once he had captured the place, William retaliated by cutting off their hands and feet. Domfront then surrendered without a struggle.

William had got what he wanted. But, in so doing, he had aroused a fear and loathing that he was never able to shake off. The immediate result was a renversement d’alliances in northern France, as Count Geoffrey and King Henry, hitherto inveterate enemies, went into alliance against the upstart. Two invasions of Normandy took place which William had difficulty in fighting off. But in 1060 both Geoffrey and Henry died and were succeeded, respectively, by a weakling and a minor. William never looked back from this extraordinary stroke of luck, which gave him a free hand in France and, it turned out, in England. He seized the county of Maine in 1062, claiming, as he was to do in England, that the late count had nominated him as his heir if he died childless. Then in 1064 he launched a successful attack on Brittany, in which, as we have seen, Earl Harold of Wessex had distinguished himself. Finally, in 1066, he won the battle of Hastings.

But winning the battle was not the same as winning England. To do that would take seven more years of almost continuous, often bloody fighting, and would involve an almost complete reversal of political strategy.

In the immediate aftermath of Hastings, it was far from clear that all was lost for the English: William had only a toehold on the south coast and only a tiny proportion of the available manpower had been thrown against him. The problem, essentially, was one of leadership. The Godwins had monopolized political power. But, between them, the two battles of Stamford Bridge and Hastings had wiped them out. The Mercian earls, Edwin and Morkere, survived, as did Earl Waltheof, the son of Siward of Northumbria. But the two former had been bloodied by Harold Hardrada and Tostig and were, in any case, more used to an oppositionist role against the Godwin hegemony than to leadership in their own right.

Archbishop Ealdred of York stepped into the breach. He had played a leading part in bringing back the family of Edward the Exile to England and now, together with the leading citizens of London, he sought to have Edward’s surviving son, the fifteen-year-old Edgar the Æthling, nominated king, ‘as he was quite natural to them’. Following this lead, Earls ‘Edwin and Morkere promised that they would fight with them’. It was a moment for decisive action. Instead, as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle bitterly observed, ‘the more prompt the business should ever be, so was it from day to day the later and worse’.

And they faced an opponent, of course, who was both ruthless and a master of timing. After the battle, William had returned to his fortified camp at Hastings to wait and see whether the English would submit. When they did not, he first marched to the old Godwin manor of Southwark at the southern end of London Bridge. But the City held out and he decided that his forces, which probably numbered only about seven thousand men, were not strong enough for a frontal assault on London. Instead, he resorted to his favourite weapon of terror. Riding in a swift arc round London, from the south to the north-west, he ‘ravaged all the country that he overran’. After a few days of this, the demoralized English leadership had had enough and made their formal submission to William twenty-eight miles north-west of London at Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire:

where Archbishop Ealdred came to meet [William], with child Edgar, and Earls Edwin and Morkere, and all the best men from London: who submitted them for need, when the most harm was done.

It was a grim parody of the usual recognition ceremony by the witan.

Why had English morale collapsed so quickly and so completely? The explanation seems to be that the shattering defeat at Hastings was taken as God’s judgement on the nation’s sins. The possibility, after all, had always been latent in Bede’s providential history of the Anglo-Saxon people. The Britons had forfeited their territory to the invaders, he explained, because of their sins. Now, clearly, it was the turn of the English to be deprived by the Normans for their wrongdoing. Hence the surprisingly unrancorous verdict of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle that ‘the Frenchmen gained the field of battle [at Hastings], as God granted them for the sins of the nation’.

How long this mood of resigned submissiveness would last was, of course, another matter.

Nevertheless, the Anglo-Saxon tradition of consensual monarchy still had some life left in it. Once again, it was Archbishop Ealdred who tried to rescue something from the wreck in William’s coronation as king of England. This took place on Christmas Day 1066 in the Confessor’s abbey at Westminster with Ealdred himself as the principal celebrant:

Archbishop Ealdred hallowed him king … and gave him possession with the books of Christ, and also swore him, ere he would set the crown on his head, that he would so well govern this nation as any before him best did, if they would be faithful to him.

Seen in this light, William’s coronation becomes another contract between king and people, as had been agreed by the last foreign conqueror, Cnut, at the Oxford witan of 1018.

Maybe William, who was always vehement in his assertion that he was the true heir of his ‘kinsman’, Edward the Confessor, sincerely shared in these hopes. But the confusion which surrounded the remaining ceremonies of the coronation highlighted the difficulties in the way. After William had sworn the oath, Ealdred in English and Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances in French asked the people whether they would have William for their king. The loud acclamations that followed alarmed the troops guarding the Abbey and, as a precaution, they fired the surrounding houses. Much of the congregation, panicking in turn, rushed out of the church, leaving the clergy and the king, who is described as trembling from head to foot, to conclude the ceremony.

These events were sufficient to remind William of the dangers of remaining in London, exposed to the ‘fickleness of the vast and fierce populace’. Soon after the coronation, he withdrew to Barking, at a safe distance to the east of the City. And thence, in March 1067, he returned to Normandy to spend the remainder of the year celebrating his victory. Along with vast spoils, William took with him (nominally as guests but in reality as hostages) most of the surviving English political elite, including Archbishop Stigand, Edgar the Æthling and Earls Edwin, Morkere and Waltheof. In their place, William left a wholly Norman government, headed by two of his closest associates: Bishop Odo of Bayeux, who was his half-brother by Herleva’s subsequent marriage to Herluin de Conteville, and William fitzOsbern, one of the leading Norman magnates. And Odo and fitzOsbern lost no time in giving England the firm slap of Norman-style government: they ‘wrought castles widely through this country’, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported, ‘and harassed the miserable people’.

II

One of William’s first acts in England had been to build a castle to secure his camp at Hastings. The scene is vividly represented in the Bayeux Tapestry. William sits in council with his two half-brothers, Bishop Odo and Robert, count of Mortain. The latter issues the order to build the castle. Workmen, with picks and shovels, throw up the pudding-shaped motte or mound, which is crowned with a wooded stockade. The motte was one essential feature of the castle. The other was the bailey or stockaded enclosure at the foot of the motte.

These motte-and-bailey castles, like the mounted knights and archers who had won Hastings, were another mark of the Normans’ military superiority. They were standardized, quick and easy to build using forced labour and the plentiful supplies of local timber; and, above all, they were effective.

On his march to London after the battle of Hastings, William strengthened the fortifications of Dover and, from his residence at Barking, he used the first weeks of 1067 to supervise the construction of another castle at London, to the south-east of the City on the site of the present Tower. William’s first two English castles, at Hastings and Dover, were designed to secure his communications with Normandy; his third, at London, was intended to overawe the capital city. Now Odo from his base at Dover, and Robert from his at Norwich, were building more.

Anglo-Saxon England had seen nothing like them. The burhs, or fortified towns, were designed to protect the people. The motte-and-bailey castles were there to intimidate them. And they did. With their raw earth and wood, set in a tree-denuded landscape, each was the symbol of a profoundly alien military occupation.

But, despite the castles and the heavy-handedness of William’s two regents, the prospects for Anglo-Norman cooperation still seemed reasonably good when William returned to England on 6 December 1067, in time to celebrate the feast of Christmas in his new kingdom. Early in the new year, there was a little local difficulty at Exeter, where Harold’s mother, Gytha, had taken refuge with her household. The town held out against the king for two weeks, despite William’s typical tactic of having a hostage blinded within sight of the walls, and the defenders inflicted heavy casualties on William’s troops. Nevertheless, they were granted easy terms: yet another castle was built; otherwise, William wanted to show that life could return to normal under his rule.

Indeed, by April William felt secure enough to bring his wife Matilda to England. And, on Whit Sunday, 11 May 1068, ‘Archbishop Ealdred hallowed her for queen at Westminster’. William’s reunion with Matilda was evidently a happy one and their youngest son, the future Henry I, was born within the year. The political climate equally seemed set fair. The court that gathered for the coronation was unusually full and it was evenly balanced between Norman and English magnates.

But, within a few months, this fair weather turned to foul and any hopes for an Anglo-Norman state were dead. In the course of the summer, some of the most distinguished English elite chose exile: Harold’s mother, Gytha, ‘and the wives of many good men with her’, went to St Omer in Flanders; while Edgar the Æthling with his mother Agatha and sisters Margaret and Christina took refuge in Scotland at the court of Malcolm III. But others turned to rebellion: Earls Edwin and Morkere rose in the Midlands and Gospatric in Northumbria, where William had made him earl. Both their motives and strategy are obscure. And William, as usual, moved too fast for whatever plans they may have had to mature. First he advanced to Nottingham. This cut Edwin and Morkere off from their northern allies and they had no choice but to surrender. Then William marched to York, at which point Gospatric and ‘the best men’ fled to join Edgar in Scotland. Finally the king returned south via Lincoln. And everywhere he went he built a castle, as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports:

He went to Nottingham, and wrought there a castle; and so advanced to York, and there wrought two castles; and the same at Lincoln and everywhere in that quarter.

Most ambitiously of all, he set up a Norman, Robert de Commines, as earl of Northumbria, with another new castle at Durham.

With the north apparently settled, William and Matilda returned to Normandy in late 1068. But it proved to be a lull before a far greater storm. Early in 1069, the Northumbrians rose against Earl Robert; took Durham Castle; murdered the earl and slaughtered the garrison. Most ominously, having been joined by the exiles in Scotland, Edgar the Æthling and Earl Gospatric, they took York, where, with the agreement of the citizens, Edgar was proclaimed king. At the same time, aid was solicited from King Swein of Denmark, who still persisted with his own claim to the English throne.

This was even worse than the Northumbrian revolt of 1065. Then, the Northumbrians had chosen their own earl; now they had elected their own king. Once more, William made a lightning march to York and took the rebels unawares. He captured and sacked the city, not sparing the Minster, and then, after refortifying and regarrisoning it, returned south.

But the leaders had escaped and were still at large when the Danish fleet landed in the Humber in September 1069. The Danes and the English rebels, who now included Earl Waltheof, joined forces and on 20 September captured York, where they demolished William’s castles and slaughtered the French garrison. It was the third time that the city had changed hands within the year. And William had to set out on his third northern expedition to recover it. He was determined that it should be his last.

First, he came to terms with the Danes. Lacking the ships to attack their fleet, William bought them off with a Danegeld, in return for which they promised to leave before Easter. This distraction out of the way, he turned to settle accounts with his own subjects. Once again, his weapon was terror. But this time the scale was infinitely larger. On his march north through Yorkshire, he systematically ravaged the countryside: destroying crops, killing livestock and burning villages. He reached York in time for Christmas. The city was a ruin, but William kept the feast with his accustomed splendour and wore the crown and regalia which had been brought up specially from the treasury at Winchester. The north, he was determined, should know who was king, even if he were king of a wasteland.

After the celebrations, the destruction was carried still further north, far into Durham. Eighteen years later, the countryside still bore the scars and the Domesday Book describes dozens of villages between York and Durham as wasta (‘waste’). ‘Waste’ is a technical term. It does not necessarily mean that the land had been devastated; rather, that it was uninhabited, uncultivated and hence untaxable. This technical distinction is important. But it was William’s actions that had made so much of the north wasta in whatever sense of the term. And, in so doing, he had killed tens of thousands by the sword, starvation and disease.

The Harrying of the North, as it became known, shocked an unshockable age. Even the twelfth-century chronicler Oderic Vitalis, an Anglo-Norman and a self-consciously balanced writer, is unreserved in his condemnation:

Never did William such cruelty; to his lasting disgrace, he yielded to his worst impulse, and set no bounds to his fury, condemning the innocent and the guilty to a common fate.

‘I assert’, Oderic concluded, ‘that such barbarous homicide could not pass unpunished’ – by God, if not by man.

But, whatever its morality, the terror achieved its purpose. The north would not trouble William again.

III

The centre of resistance now shifted south to the Fenlands of East Anglia. Its many monasteries, such as Peterborough and Ely, saw themselves as guardians of Anglo-Saxon faith and culture; while the landscape of marshes and islets, criss-crossed by a watery maze of rivers, streams and meres, provided ideal territory for guerrilla warfare. The leader of the Fenland revolt was a local thegn, Hereward, who was joined by a large and shifting coalition. His first allies in 1070 were the Danes, who had broken their promise to return home. Hereward joined forces with them to sack Peterborough and to strip it of its treasures to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Frenchman Thorold, whom William had appointed abbot. This sacrilegious attack, by an Englishman on a great English monastery, opened up a gulf between last-ditchers, like Hereward, and more cautious compromisers, like the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, himself a monk of Peterborough, who denounced ‘Hereward and his gang’.

All members of the Anglo-Saxon elite faced a similar choice. Their eventual decision must have depended on personal circumstance, family connection and even chance. But, by and large, administrators, like the Anglo-Saxon chronicler himself, who ‘lived sometime in [William’s] court’, chose compromise, as did the financiers and moneyers, while the political aristocracy joined Hereward in the last ditch. In the course of 1071 both the Mercian brothers, Earls Edwin and Morkere, renounced their allegiance and went underground, ‘roam[ing] at random in woods and in fields’. Edwin was ‘treacherously slain by his own men’ on his way to Scotland, but Morkere made it ‘by ship’ to Hereward’s last redoubt in the heavily fortified monastery of Ely. There he was joined by the rump of Northumbrian resistance, led by Bishop Æthelwine of Durham, who came ‘with many hundred men’. William now launched an all-out amphibious assault. Ely was blockaded to the north by ships, while, to the west, the land attack took place along a specially built, two-mile-long causeway. Trapped, most of the rebels surrendered. Morkere was imprisoned for life; Æthelwine was deprived of his bishopric and sent to the monastery of Abingdon, where he soon died, while the lesser rebels were imprisoned, blinded or had limbs amputated ‘as [William] thought proper’. Only Hereward and the diehards refused to bow the knee; instead Hereward ‘led [them] out triumphantly’ – to escape no one knows where and to live in legend for ever.

With the fall of Ely and the extinguishing of the last spark of English resistance, William was free to turn against Scotland. Malcolm III owed his very throne to Edward the Confessor. Moreover, in 1069 he had married Margaret, sister of Edgar the Æthling. She was a powerful character, who became a force in Scottish politics in her own right. For all these reasons, Malcolm had been happy to offer protection and occasional assistance to English refugees from William. William now determined to close this back door into his kingdom. In 1072, he led a joint naval and military expedition to Scotland. At first, Malcolm retreated before William. But, beyond the Forth, the two kings met on the borders of Perthshire and Fife and agreed the Peace of Abernethy. Malcolm became William’s vassal; surrendered hostages and, almost certainly, agreed to stop supporting his brother-in-law, Edgar the Æthling.

But the process of disengagement was handled slowly and with due regard to decorum. Edgar returned to Scotland in 1074 from his then place of exile in Flanders. He was given a warm reception by the king and queen but was encouraged to seek a reconciliation with William. Edgar did as he was advised and William graciously accepted his overtures. Loaded with gifts, Edgar was then dispatched to William in Normandy. ‘William received him with much pomp, and he was there afterwards in his court, enjoying such rights as he confirmed to him by law.’

At least Edgar’s cage was golden.

It remained only for William to take over the English Church and Normanize it as completely as the English state. This, of course, was a battle which had to be fought with spiritual weapons. But William proved as adept at deploying these as fire and sword. Back in 1066, he had begun by a determined campaign to win papal support for his claim to the English throne. William’s arguments were given a mixed reception in Rome, as Hildebrand, then an archdeacon and a leading figure of the papal court, reminded the king in a subsequent letter:

I believe it is known to you, most excellent son, how great was the love I have always borne you … and how active I have shown myself in your affairs; above all, how diligently I laboured for your advancement to royal rank. In consequence I suffered dire calumny through certain brethren insinuating that by such partisanship I gave sanction for the perpetration of great slaughter.

The premonitions of the ‘certain brethren’ were of course right. Nevertheless, the then pope, Alexander II (1061–73), was persuaded to give William’s expedition his blessing and to equip it with a papal banner.

And the pope proved equally accommodating after William’s victory by sending two cardinal-legates to oversee the reform of the English Church. The legates arrived in England in the spring of 1070 and were met by William, fresh from the Harrying of the North, at Winchester. There they celebrated Easter and the king and legates presided jointly over a council of the English Church. It began with William receiving – like the Carolingians but uniquely for an English king – a second, papal, coronation at the hands of the legates. Then the business of reform began. King and pope saw this differently. For the papacy, it was a question of removing unworthy bishops and abbots, who were incompetent, sexually incontinent or owed their appointment to anti-popes. For William, it was simpler: he wanted to get rid of politically unreliable Englishmen from high ecclesiastical office. Fortunately, the two different objectives coincided in practice, and when the council was over only two Englishmen retained bishoprics: one, Wulfstan of Worcester, would become a saint; the other, Siward of Rochester, was senile.

A second council, held at Whitsuntide, started to fill the resulting vacancies. William’s favourite churchman, Lanfranc of Bec, was made archbishop of Canterbury in place of the deprived, disgraced and now imprisoned Stigand; while York, left vacant by Archbishop Ealdred’s death in 1069, was given to Thomas, a canon of Bayeux, who was doubly qualified as both a former pupil of Lanfranc and a protégé of Bishop Odo.

There is no doubt that Lanfranc and the rest were infinitely superior as churchmen to those they replaced. But it is also the case that they were outsiders, with an outsider’s indifference or even hostility to native customs and traditions. Buildings that the Anglo-Saxons thought venerable they saw merely as old-fashioned; locations that were sanctified by memory and the experience of countless English generations were merely inconvenient. The result was a wholesale relocation and rebuilding that transformed both the physical and the organizational fabric of the English Church. The seats of one third of English bishops were moved, from the countryside into thrusting towns. And everywhere, with the Norman fondness for glossy and grandiloquent structures, new buildings replaced old. The fate of Ely is typical. Within ten years of Hereward’s final defeat and disappearance into legend, there was a Norman abbot at Ely and work had started on the building of the present vast church, whose massive walls and piers seem to crush out even the memory of revolt and transform the last centre of Anglo-Saxon resistance to William into an eloquent symbol of the Conquest and the permanence of Norman power. Work at Lincoln, whither the see of Dorchester had been transferred, started a decade earlier in the 1070s, while the foundations of Durham were ceremonially laid on 11 August 1093, after the Anglo-Saxon church had been entirely demolished the previous year.

We think of cathedrals as noble monuments to God and the Christian faith. Norman cathedrals, however, were ecclesiastical versions of Norman castles: at once centres of Norman administration, advertisements for a new, Norman, way of life, and monuments to the permanence of Norman power. Above all, they were visible proof that God was on King William’s side.

IV

The 1070s were the nadir of England and the English. It was, wrote Henry of Huntingdon, who was himself half-English, an insult to be called English; William, despairing of his new subjects, abandoned his attempts to learn their language; while God Himself, it seemed, had ‘ordered that they should no longer be a people’ (iam populum non esse iusserit).

But, at the same time, there were signs of movement in the opposite direction. These eddying currents find their clearest expression in the so-called Bride’s Ale revolt of 1075. The revolt took its name from the fact that it was planned at the marriage of Earl Ralph of East Anglia to the sister of Earl Roger of Hereford. It was a marriage at the highest level of the Anglo-Norman elite: Roger was the son of William’s closest aristocratic ally, William fitzOsbern; Ralph, the son and heir of one of Edward the Confessor’s Breton favourites, Ralph ‘the Staller’, while it was William himself who had arranged the match. Nevertheless, at the marriage feast at Norwich talk quickly turned to treason: there was ‘Earl Roger and Earl Waltheof and bishops and abbots; who there resolved that they would drive the king out of England’. Earls Roger and Ralph were the prime movers and both tried to raise their earldoms against the king. But neither enjoyed much success and Ralph, in particular, confronted a remarkably hostile coalition: ‘the castlemen that were in England and also the people of the land came against him, and prevented him from doing anything’. In other words Normans (‘castlemen’) and Englishmen (‘the people of the land’) had joined together in the king’s name against an Anglo-Norman earl. The revolt now collapsed. Ralph succeeded in fleeing abroad while Roger was captured and imprisoned for life. But William’s full vengeance was saved for the Englishman, Earl Waltheof.

Waltheof ’s career was a switchback. Youngest son of Earl Seward of Northumbria, he had been an enthusiastic participant in the northern revolt, and, at the battle of York, had personally slaughtered many of the Norman garrison, ‘cutting off their heads one by one as they entered the gate’. Nevertheless, he was pardoned by William, who then went to great lengths to keep his loyalty. He gave him his father’s earldom of Northumbria, as well as the earldom of Huntingdon, which he had been granted by the Confessor; he even gave him his niece, Judith, as his wife. In the face of such generosity, Waltheof ’s participation in the Bride’s Ale revolt, hesitant and quickly regretted though it seems to have been, was unforgivable. He was beheaded at Winchester on 31 May 1076 and reburied at Crowland Abbey, where, as with the victims of earlier Anglo-Saxon political deaths, a popular cult quickly developed at his tomb.

The drama of Waltheof ’s execution, the pathos of his position as the last surviving English earl and his posthumous reputation for sanctity have conspired to obscure the real significance of the Bride’s Ale revolt. It was not the last stand of the English. On the contrary. The English, or at least some lesser East Anglian landowners, had been actively loyal to William. Instead, the threat to the king was Norman. It came from within the Norman establishment; and its motives seemed to have been characteristically Norman as well.

For what had apparently outraged Earl Roger was that the king’s sheriffs had been holding pleas in his lands. The office of sheriff had first appeared in the early eleventh century. The sheriff acted as immediate deputy to the earl; he was also the king’s direct representative in the shire, presiding in the Shire Court and supervising the collection of the geld and the dues from the royal estates. The office had become necessary with the creation of the great earldoms of Cnut’s reign, which embraced many counties and turned their holders into figures of central, even more than local, politics. In Normandy, as we have seen, the aristocracy had got control of the equivalent office of vicomte in the reign of William’s father, Duke Robert. But in England, the king kept it firmly in his grasp – and no king more firmly than William.

All this makes it important to understand what changed in the socio-political structure of England, and what did not, with the Norman Conquest. There was, indisputably, a revolution in the aristocracy, by which a native Anglo-Saxon elite was replaced, almost entirely, by a foreign, Norman-French ruling class. These newcomers brought with them a new language, new values and new attitudes. But did these importations include what historians call ‘feudalism’? For the great Victorian scholars, such as Stubbs and Freeman, it was axiomatic that they did: English feudalism was a Norman invention. More recent scholars reject this idea. They point out that Anglo-Saxon England, as King Alfred’s works alone make clear, was fully familiar with the idea of ‘lordship’. The earls acknowledged the king as their lord, probably in a formal ceremony of homage; the thegns, in turn, were the ‘men’ or vassals of the earls, and so on down the social scale. And each relationship of lord and vassal involved the granting of land by the lord in return for the supply of troops by the vassal.

In this sense of the word ‘feudalism’, little of substance changed at the Conquest. Noble estates, it is true, probably became larger. In part, this was a matter of necessity, since the Norman military innovations of the castle and the mounted knight were more expensive than their Anglo-Saxon equivalents. But it was also a question of opportunity, since, with the mass expropriation of the Anglo-Saxon elite, there was so much land to distribute among such a comparatively small group of people. This exceptionally rapid and wholesale turnover of land, and the fact that it took place in a foreign and often hostile environment, also meant that practices which had developed piecemeal and over time in Normandy became more explicit and schematic in England.

All of this, however, is far from the ‘Feudal Revolution’ imagined by the Victorians. Nevertheless, they were right, I think, to insist that something had changed. For feudalism has another sense. It is not simply the hierarchical ordering of society as a chain of lords and vassals; it is also the displacement of ‘state’ structures by ‘feudal’ ones – so that, for example, lords take over royal powers of justice and taxation. This tendency was present, too, in Anglo-Saxon England, as, once again, King Alfred’s writings bear witness. But in England, unlike France, the tendency was resisted, and resisted effectively, by the king.

But the Conquest made this resistance much harder. For it introduced, and lavishly endowed, a French ruling class who had a very high opinion of French practices in government, as in everything else, and a very low one of English. Hence Earl Roger’s rebellion against William. And hence the increasing difficulties William had with the new Norman elites and with his own family most of all. The English found themselves caught in the middle. But for most the choice was easy. They would support the king, even a Norman king, against a feudal noble, especially a Norman one. And it was this occasional, mutually self-interested, alliance between king and people against a foreign aristocracy that marks the beginning of the English recovery from the shame of defeat and dispossession.