Читать книгу Enemies of the People - Sam Jordison, Sam Jordison - Страница 11
ОглавлениеDate of birth/death: c. 1028 – 9 September 1087
In a nutshell: Thug got lucky
Connected to: The Queen, Jesus
William the Conqueror’s reign of terror and murder may have faded into the mists of time, but its legacy lives on. The descendants of the gang of bandits he brought over here still control huge amounts of British land and wealth, while his policies have ensured 950 years of inequality.
William (generally known as William the Bastard during his lifetime) was convinced that he was uniquely favoured by his Christian God – and so had a licence to do pretty much whatever the hell he liked. He was a correspondingly harsh and austere man. Surprisingly, it was once thought that people gathered round and made speeches at his funeral about what a jovial and generous fellow William had been. Less surprisingly, this story turned out to be incorrect. It was based on a mistranslation of an ancient chronicle – and the good-hearted man the people were talking about was actually the Abbot of Verdun. There’s only one other recorded instance of William attempting a joke. This was when he pretended to stab one of his Norman abbots with a great big knife. You can imagine how side-splitting his unwilling comedy partner found that.
All the other evidence points to William being a cold-hearted killer. His nature was best demonstrated in the winter of 1069–70, when William put down rebellions in England’s northern counties with genocidal savagery.
‘The King stopped at nothing to hunt his enemies,’ wrote the chronicler Orderic Vitalis. ‘He cut down many people and destroyed homes and land … To his shame, William made no effort to control his fury, punishing the innocent with the guilty. He ordered that crops and herds, tools and food be burned to ashes. More than 100,000 people perished of starvation.’
Charles Dickens also wrote a vivid description of the events in his Child’s History of England:
The streams and rivers were discoloured with blood; the sky was blackened with smoke; the fields were wastes of ashes; the waysides were heaped up with dead … In melancholy songs, and doleful stories, it was still sung and told by cottage fires on winter evenings, a hundred years afterwards, how, in those dreadful days of the Normans, there was not, from the River Humber to the River Tyne, one inhabited village left, nor one cultivated field – how there was nothing but a dismal ruin, where the human creatures and the beasts lay dead together.
Here we can see the clear origins of modern Tory party policy towards the north of England. There are other lasting legacies of William’s rule. We can probably blame him for the average Brit being strangely prejudiced against the French, decent food and learning foreign languages. We can certainly blame him because just 0.3 per cent of the UK population owns more than two-thirds of the land in Britain – and 1 per cent of the population owns more than 70 per cent.
William’s very first act after he was crowned on Christmas Day 1066 was to claim that every acre of land belonged to him (strictly speaking if you live in the UK, your house still belongs to the monarch). He then parcelled out this booty to the soldiers who fought with him at Hastings, thus beginning feudalism and a landowning system that has stayed with us ever since. And even aside from all the royals, dukes and earls, people with Norman names like Darcy, Percy and Mandeville are still much wealthier than the general population. According to a 2011 survey they also live an average of three years longer than everyone else. There they are: born to rule over us, just because they’re descended from a gang of roving bandits who got lucky in one battle in 1066 when a stray arrow landed in Harold’s eye. The game is rigged. And it’s William’s fault.
