Читать книгу The Conquerors: The Pageant of England - Thomas B. Costain - Страница 13

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But the fate of Brihtric was exceptional only because of the personal reason for the severity shown him. All over England the Saxons were being dispossessed. William had recruited his army by offering to make rich men of all who would follow him to England. He had won and now he had to find rewards for hundreds of clamoring Norman nobles and their followers. The Norman nature was hard, acquisitive, exacting. Nothing was going to satisfy the Fitz-Osborns, the Mortimers, the Laceys, short of land grants in keeping with his most lavish promises. William had proceeded slowly after his victory at Hastings. He had not advanced at once on London but had waited while the distraught Saxon leaders tried all kinds of desperate expedients, even going to the extreme of crowning Edgar the Atheling of the royal line as successor to Harold. It was not until they had time to realize there was nothing they could do, that their army had been almost exterminated in the lost battle, that he advanced to the English capital. The princeling fled, London opened its gates without striking a blow, and William was crowned King on Christmas Day. A grim present for the people of England.

William had been thinking as he paced in front of the pavilion he had raised on the bloodstained soil of Senlac, and an idea had been born in that shrewd head which he proceeded to put into effect. He had realized that, in order to justify what he was now going to do, he must declare what had happened in England since the death of Edward the Confessor an interlude of confusion and misrule. He, William, was the rightful successor to the Confessor. On arriving with his men to take possession of the throne, he had found the country in the hands of an archrobber. Harold had never been King of England, he had been a usurper. The Battle of Hastings had not been a meeting of the armies of two nations but one in which a rebellion had been suppressed. It followed that the men who had fought under Harold were rebels and were to be treated as such. This ingenious piece of casuistry was the weapon he would now use to satisfy his clamoring mercenaries.

He decreed that the property of every man who had fought at Hastings be confiscated to the Crown. Not a Saxon landowner who could get there had failed to fight under the banner of Harold, and most of them had died in the shield wall. It was no longer difficult now to meet the demands of the Norman knights, for William had all of the south of England to give away. He proceeded to do so.

One case will serve to illustrate how generously the Conqueror sweetened the palms of the robber barons. The town of Nottingham had stood out against the invaders, and when it fell he built a typical Norman citadel there to prevent any further attempts at resistance. The citadel was then given to a Norman knight named Guillaume Peveril. But this was a small part only of what he received. It is on record that he was given no fewer than fifty-five manors thereabouts and that in the town he became the owner of sixty-eight houses. He did not need one hundred and twenty-three homes for his own use, and so it is to be assumed that Guillaume Peveril portioned out these properties to the men under him. For himself he built a castle on a very high rock, so high that the place became known as the Peak. To this day some remnants of the original masonry are to be seen.

Guillaume de Garonne was given eighteen villages and Guillaume de Percy eighty manors. Ives de Vesey was awarded the town of Alnwick and the granddaughter of the former owner as his wife. When the wife of Eudes de Champagne, who had been allotted the island of Holderness, gave birth to a son, the father complained to William that the island was capable of growing oats only and that the new heir would die for lack of wheat. This problem was easily solved. William picked out the town of Bytham and gave it over to the anxious father so that the revenues could be applied to securing better land. It is probable that the boy grew up strong and hearty, but it is certain that the unfortunate children of Bytham paid for his health in misery and malnutrition.

William, canny Norman that he was, did not neglect his own interests while thus carving up England like a Christmas turkey. It is recorded that he kept fifteen hundred manor houses, and all the lands attached thereto, for himself; which seems a handsome share. Occasionally he would hand one of these estates away as a special reward. When Matilda was given a coronation of her own, the King was so pleased with a dish of dilligrout (a kind of oatmeal soup) which his cook Tezelin made for the banquet that he there and then conferred the manor of Addington on the lucky chef. Because of this the owners of Addington continued to send a great container of dilligrout to the kings of England on their coronations for many centuries. The bones of the real owner of Addington were moldering on the hill of Senlac, so all this made little difference.

But even through these excesses of liberality William kept a cool and calculating head. He saw to it that the new lands of his knights were scattered. They received a village in one shire, a tract of land in another. He did not want them to grow so powerful with great compact holdings that they would be a menace to royal authority. As the Normans married among themselves, the country soon became a curious crisscross of scattered inheritances. Some nobles held bits of property in nearly all the counties of England!

It was not even necessary for a Frenchman to have fought with William’s army to receive a share. Take the case of a ferocious fellow named Hugues-de-Loup who had succeeded in putting down resistance in the county of Chester. As a reward he was made an earl and had the disposal of the land in his hands. Hugues-de-Loup lost no time in taking advantage of this. He sent at once for all his friends and relatives to come over and get a share of the rich booty. Five brothers named Houdard, Edward, Volmar, Horswin, and Volfan were among the first to arrive. None of them had fought for William, but each received two bovates of land (a bovate being as much as a team of oxen could plow in a year) except Volfan, who was a priest. The Saxon incumbent of the church at Runcone was turned out and Volfan was put in his place.

The people of England were able to retain some sense of humor even in the face of this kind of treatment. They watched the mad scramble of the land-hungry Normans and sometimes they would sing under their breaths a song which was going the rounds:

William of Coningsby

Came out of Brittany,

With his wife Tiffany

And his maid Manfas,

And his dog Hardigras.

They were so bitter in their hearts, however, that they called any Englishman who fell into Norman ways or showed a tendency to conform to the new authority “thrall of the Mamzer [bastard].” The Mamzer! They never referred to the self-made King by any other name among themselves. Sometimes they did it openly, without fear of the punishment the Mamzer might inflict.

In order to keep the conquered people in proper subjection, the new masters of England began to erect castles. William entrusted the task of converting a small Roman tower on the Thames into a London stronghold and home for himself to an ingenious monk who had followed victory into England and had been rewarded with the bishopric of Rochester. Gundulph the Weeper, as he became known, was a good builder, and soon Caesar’s Tower was changed into a formidable structure called the White Tower. Here the new King set himself up in the business of governing. He located the mint here and courts of justice and the royal wardrobe. In it were grouped the royal banqueting hall and around it the Queen’s gardens. What the lachrymose Gundulph was building was not intended at first as a prison, but in later reigns it became known as the Tower of London, the most famous prison the world has ever seen.

All the great nobles followed his example by putting up castles of stone, surrounded by deep moats and with battlements from which hot pitch and burning brands and a rain of arrows could be directed at attackers. In all, one hundred strongholds were built during the reign of the Conqueror and that of his son, William Rufus.

This was something new for England. The homes of the thanes had been low wooden houses surrounded by moats and with palisades of pointed beams, strong enough to repel robbers but not to serve the ends of aggression. Now these grim Norman structures, with their glowering keeps, loomed up on every horizon and commanded every strategic point, as proof that the English were a subject race.