The Norman Conquest: 1066-1087

The Coronation of William I – A King Like Cnut – Revolutions in England Government & Society – The Tyranny of Odo of Bayeux – The Revolt of 1068 – The Scourging of Northumbria – Morcar’s Last Stand –The Age of Castles – A New English Church – Domesday Book 1086 – An Unseemly Death

The Coronation of William I

On Christmas Day 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, was crowned King William of England at Westminster Abbey. William of Poitiers’ coronation eulogy paraded William as the (successful) reincarnation of Julius Caesar, and when Archbishop Ealdred handed William the crown, the crowd broke into enthusiastic (albeit disingenuine) applause. And from there the troubles started. Norman sentries had been posted outside the Abbey to guard against assassination attempts, and upon hearing the celebration inside, they suspected that someone had slipped through their cordon and taken the duke’s life. This, at least, is the tale reported by medieval historians. In the wake of their alarm, numerous buildings were torched. Modern historians believe it’s more likely that the fires were caused by Norman soldiers unable to restrain themselves from looting and burning (a favorite pastime of conquering troops). Whatever the cause of the fires, it was, according to Orderic Vitalis, “a portent of future calamities.” From that point on, according to Orderic, “The English never again trusted the Normans.”

Though he had conquered, William I didn’t want to rule as a conqueror but as a lawful king, as King Cnut had done generations before. This didn’t mean, of course, that he would leave the political landscape of England unchanged. Far from it. During the tenure of his reign until his death in 1087, William I would revolutionize England, making it more “medieval” (as some historians put it) while also modeling it along familiar French lines. He centralized the government by forcing everyone to pledge him an oath of allegiance; this meant that everyone would have to obey him rather than the rules of the feudal lord(s) they served. By making himself the liege lord (the “top dog” lord), he cut through the thorny problems of hierarchal feudalism by making himself the top lord over all. Though bringing the French phenomenon of castle-building to England, he limited the number of castles that could be built in order to facilitate his ideal of a centralized government with a weaker hierarchy of less lords. Nevertheless he mostly left the local Anglo-Saxon institutions alone. The bottom level of government administration continued to be the shire (or county) placed under the supervision of the reeve, or sheriff, who was tasked with being the king’s eyes, ears, and hammer in the countryside. The sheriff managed royal estates, oversaw the collection of taxes, summoned and led commoners to the national militia, and presided over the shire court and doled out the king’s justice. But higher up the ladder—when it came to the great Saxon nobles (earls) and the lesser nobles (thegns)—the changes were drastic (as will be seen, momentarily, in the Domesday Book of 1086). William’s court spoke strict French, and he altered the Anglo-Saxon Witan so that it had more in common with a king’s Great Council (or curia regis). William’s council consisted of a hodgepodge assembly of abbots, bishops, and barons, and anyone else whom the king summoned. The council was tasked with giving the king advice and serving as the principal court of the land. Because the council consisted of men who had other jobs throughout England, it wasn’t forever in session, but at its core was a smaller, permanent council that was always traveling with the king. The Witan had become the Great Council, and in time the Great Council would evolve into Parliament; the small council, the core of the Great Council, would carry on in history as the administrative bureaus of the king’s government. 

These far-reaching changes didn’t happen overnight, and in the immediate wake of his coronation, William moved to solidify his hold on the throne. His main focus was keeping his soldiers disciplined and attempting to learn English (but failing miserably). He declared that stiff fines, called murdrums, would be imposed on local communities if corpses found therein couldn’t be proven to be Englishmen; because the Normans were conquerors and loathed by the populace, William hoped this would dissuade discontented Englishmen from taking out their frustrations on French passerby. He made no immediate attempt to change English laws or customs, and though Northumbria and wide swathes of Mercia refused to recognize him as king, he didn’t press the subject. He was content to work with those territories that had already submitted to him; the submission of the others could wait. Besides, he had problems in his homeland across the Channel to tend to, and in 1067 he departed for Normandy and left his half-brother Odo, the Bishop of Bayeux, in charge of England along with his minister William FitzOsbern. 

The choice of Odo as vice-rent was a bad move, and Odo’s tyranny would incite the first widespread English revolt against Norman rule. Odo saw himself as a conqueror and liked to live as a conqueror. He didn’t have the tact or grace that enabled William to keep his English subjects in compliance. In Kent Englishmen sought help from Count Eustace of Boulogne, but when their overtures failed they fled Kent, some going as far as Constantinople to serve in the Byzantine emperor’s Verangian Guard. In the west the war-hungry Welsh princes supported an English uprising against the Normans, and when William returned from Normandy he had to push Odo aside and squash a Welsh uprising based out of Exeter. He then marched north and brought Eadwine and Morcar into submission, thus incorporating Northumbria and Mercia into the Norman fold. Then an uprising in York needed his attention, and he garrisoned the town with Norman troops. By then all of England south of the River Tees belonged to William, but things were about to get harder. The events of 1068—known in history as the National Revolt of 1068—would turn William the Great into William the Conqueror. Though he had conquered, he had yet to earn the nickname by which he’s now known. His expert (albeit it brutal) handling of the 1068 revolt would cement his fame as a true lord of war, and the revolt that would force him to show his hand would be inspired not by disgruntled Englishmen but by a man who had refused to show any interest in England just years before: King Swein of Denmark. 

King Swein questioned William’s claim to the English throne, and he questioned it not only with words but also with might: his Danish fleet sailed into the Humber River, and the Danes onboard—many of them descendents of the Vikings who had harried England in the centuries before—salivated at the thought of taking back that which Alfred of Wessex and his successors had stolen from them: a truly Danish England. The appearance of a Danish fleet in the Humber sent electricity through the courage of the unhappy English, and an England-wide revolt against the Normans sprouted from the soil. The revolt started in the Norman-occupied city of York: over 3000 Normans were slaughtered by riotous Englishmen, and William received the news while hunting in the Forest of Dean. The news was dire, but as the days progressed he came to see that the episode in York wasn’t isolated but part of a wider pattern. The English were seizing against their captors, desperate to hurl them back into the sea. At the head of the Northumbrian revolt was Eadgar the Aetheling, former (brief) king of England after Harold II’s death, returned from exile in Scotland; in the southwest the men of Somerset, Dorset, and Dover launched sieges on Norman-held Exeter and Montacute; and in the west a single lonely Norman castle at Shrewsbury held back the tide of a western uprising. 

William’s first move was to bribe off the Danish fleet in the Humber. Having accomplished that, he marched his forces along the Welsh border and secured Shrewsbury Castle while William FitzOsbern routed the rebels at Exeter. William threw himself against York, retook the city, and paid Northumbria back for its slaughter of the Normans in York by ravaging the countryside all the way to the River Tees. Every town, village, and homestead was burnt to the ground, and anyone who didn’t flee over the Scottish border was killed. To dissuade Scandinavians from setting their sights on the coastline, William made sure to strip it bare. Rumor has it that so many crops were wasted and animals killed that the resulting famine killed 100,000 commoners; though this is no doubt an exaggeration, that the scourging of Northumbria was nothing short of cataclysmic is seen in the fact that fifty years after the events, the landscape remained bare and depopulated up to sixty miles north of York. Upon reaching the River Tees, William turned his army around and returned to York. Winter had settled, and though his men probably thought they would winter in the recaptured city, William had other plans: Chester remained in rebellion, and he meant to lose no time in putting them in their place. His men endured a harrowing, freezing, and fate-defying march to Chester. The late historian John Green reflects, “The winter was hard, the roads choked with snowdrifts or broken by torrents, provisions failed; and [William’s] army, storm-beaten and forced to devour its horses for food, broke out into mutiny at the order to cross the bleak moorlands that part Yorkshire from the West. The mercenaries from Anjou and Brittany demanded their release from service. William granted their prayer with scorn. On foot, at the head of his troops, which still clung to him, he forced his way by paths inaccessible to horses, often helping the men with his own hands to clear the road…” When his beleaguered but proud army finally reached the outskirts of Chester, the rebellious city capitulated. 

Earl Morcar

William had stifled the uprising in all the corners of his kingdom, but it wasn’t over yet. Eadgar the Aetheling had returned to sanctuary in Scotland, where his sister had become the wife of Scottish King Malcolm. Hoping for Scottish aid, those pernicious former earls Eadwine and Morcar launched one last ditch effort to retake England. Eadwine met his unfortunate end in a run-of-the-mill ambush, but Morcar allied himself with a small band of renegade warriors led by an outlaw named Hereward. They tried to hide in the wetlands of the Fens, but William was determined to bring Morcar to heel. He built a two-mile-long causeway across the marshes to reach their camp, and Morcar had no choice but to surrender. Taken into custody, Morcar would spent the rest of his life imprisoned by both William I and his successor William II. Victorious, William marched north to deal with the hotbed of rebellion in Scotland. He forced King Malcolm to swear him fealty in 1071, and in that stroke all England now truly belonged to the Conqueror. 

Having quelled the unrest after Odo, dealt with the National Revolt of 1068, and brought King Malcolm to heel, William could now breathe easier and turn his attention not only to the restructuring of England along Norman lines but also with travails on the Continent. Being king of England didn’t free him from his duchy in Normandy, and he spent a good amount of the rest of his life securing Normandy. Normandy had for a long while been a tempting target for French rulers hoping to extend their influence, and with William’s kingdom now stretched across the Channel, they hoped Normandy’s defenses would be weakened. Thus William spent much time outside England quarreling with King Philip of France (over the disputed territory of the Vexin on the north bank of the Seine between Rouen and Paris) and Count Fulk de Rechin of Anjou, who wanted to win back the county of Maine which William had seized in 1063. Though often absent from England, his newly-won territory underwent a litany of top-to-bottom changes spearheaded by trusted ministers: he sponsored a vast castle-building program that forever changed the English landscape, razed and rebuilt the English church along Romanesque lines popular not only in France but also with the papacy who had backed his undertaking, and William replaced the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy with a Norman elite who pledged their loyalty to him.

The White Tower

Castles—known in William’s day as castella—were of French design, a French phenomenon carried over to England during the Norman Conquest. While the Anglo-Saxons didn’t build castles per se, they had fortified cities (called burghs), and the Confessor had built a couple wooden forts along England’s border with the Welsh. The first castles constructed (such as the one atop the Iron Age hill fort in Hastings) were built to secure prime locations and communication routes. After the Conquest William ordered more castles to be built, and by his death in 1087 there would be 86 castles in England. The first castles were built in towns as defensive bastions for Norman troops to defend against English uprisings, and they were built indiscriminately: towns were wholly restructured as buildings were demolished to make way for the fortifications. One historian notes that England wouldn’t experience such wide-scale rebuilding until the wake of the Second World War. Castles built outside busy towns were intended to protect highways and communication routes, as well as to serve as supply points for bands of Norman soldiers tasked with keeping the English in submission. A flurry of castle-building took place on the outskirts of London: the city was hemmed in with gigantic castles on three sides, and though two have been lost to history, a third—the White Tower—remains the bulwark of the Tower of London. The White Tower (so-called because it was likely painted white) defended the king’s supply ships on the River Thames and stood ninety feet tall with walls ranging from fifteen feet thick at the base to eleven feet thick at the top. Construction on the White Tower began in 1078 but wouldn’t be completed until 1097, a decade after William’s death. One medieval writer tells us that the Tower’s walls “rise from very deep foundations and are fixed with mortar tempered with animals’ blood.” The White Tower was just the cream of the crop around London: a further nine castles spaced about 20-30 miles apart were constructed, all within a day’s march of England’s commercial hub. The largest of these castles, that of Windsor, is spread over more than thirteen acres and remains a primary residence of the British monarch (though its “look and feel” owes more to Henry II and numerous Plantagenet and Tudor monarchs than to William). On the opposite side of London from Windsor is Colchester Castle; at the time of its construction it had the largest keep (or fortified tower) not only in England but also in all Europe, surpassing the White Tower in both size and strength. It was rebuilt in its entirety out of recycled Roman stone from the rundown Temple of Claudius, but the castle today is but a weak echo of its glory days: attempts to tear it down in the mid-19th century failed, as the lower two floors were too difficult to disassemble. Another Norman castle is Rochester Castle, whose keep is one of the best-preserved Norman keeps in all England. The castle’s keep is now just a shell of its former self. 

a "motte and bailey" castle

Though Windsor, Colchester, and Rochester are all built of stone, the first Norman castles in England weren’t constructed of stone but of earth and timber. They had a prefabricated look to them, which implies that William had brought castle-building engineers from the Continent to spread French strongholds across his newly-won territory. These early soil-and-timber castles were called “mottes and baileys”, and they consisted of a wooden tower and palisade built on top of a tall, man-made mound of dirt encircled by a ditch. The baileys housed outhouses, workshops, servants’ quarters, and animal sheds, and outside the whole contraption villages would often spring up as people sought to take advantage of the castle’s garrison. Once William secured England in the days after 1071, the earliest earth-and-timber castles were rebuilt in stone. The stones were often taken from surviving Roman masonry, not only because this was easy to do (there were lots of Roman ruins scattered throughout England) but also because it carried a symbolism echoed by William of Poitiers’ coronation eulogy: William the Conqueror had trumped even the Romans in his successful invasion. As William reshuffled the political landscape of England, he granted castles to his best followers, and they in turn began increasing the fortifications by building stone citadels. These royal castellans (as they were called) had a knack for building their own castles off royal grounds, often in the countryside. Though these private castles tended to have functional purposes, in time they became status symbols in and of themselves. Castles would eventually spread to Scotland, but not by way of conquest: seeing the effectiveness and utility of Norman castles, the Scottish kings were willing to allow Normans (including castle engineers) to settle on their hands. Many of the big-wig families of medieval Scotland—including the houses of Stewart and Bruce—first came to Scotland as Norman settlers with a knowledge of castle-building. 

Norman castles became a fixture of medieval England thanks to the Norman Conquest, and the English church buildings received their Romanesque look-and-feel in the same way. William expanded the Confessor’s palaces at Winchester and Westminster, and Westminster Hall was likely the largest secular building in 11th century Europe. He engaged in a demolition spree against English-style church buildings, and so thorough was his handiwork that within half a century, all English cathedrals and abbeys had been torn down and rebuilt in the Romanesque style imitating Roman buildings. Only Westminster Abbey survived, and for two reasons: first, it was the burial place of the Confessor, and whatever the late Edward might have thought of William, it remains the fact that it was the Confessor’s oath that paved the way to William’s triumph; and second, it had been the site of William’s coronation as king. This program was the first step in the fulfillment of William’s promise to the papacy to bring the English church back into line with papal ideals, and in this vein William’s purge went beyond brick and mortar: he instituted a wide-scale purge of the English clergy, replacing them with Norman stock. Lanfranc, who had played a key role in securing William the Pope’s favor for the Conquest, was made Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest clerical post in the nation. In a bid to ensure that this new church wouldn’t be tempted to slide back into old English ways, William I authorized a genocide of English saints, replacing them with Norman saints and leaving intact only those saints who could be favorable to Norman ways. 

As he replaced the English clergy with Normans, so, too, went the English aristocracy. In 1086 William authorized a comprehensive survey of the lands of England. The survey was spearheaded by William of St. Calais, the bishop of Durham, who was an adroit lawyer and administrator from Normandy. His survey would become known as the Domesday Book. Historian George Garnett, pondering the Domesday Book, writes, “Legalistic precision, brutal practicality, and the rewriting of history went hand in hand.” Royal officers traveled to each and every shire to report all the taxes, tolls, mints, markets, and services that would be owed to the king. The survey shows that 25,000 Normans lived alongside 1.1 million Englishmen—but the disparity in landholding between Norman and English tells a morbid story. William himself owned 17% of the English land, twice that of the Confessor; the Church owned 26%, and the remaining 54% was owned by the aristocracy. 40% of all land belonged to ten laymen and twelve clergy, and none of them were English. By 1086 there were only four English landowners of any repute. By the time of the king’s death in 1087, just a year after the compiling of the Domesday Book, the Normans—though dwarfed in numbers by the vast English population—controlled not only the government but the upper echelons of English society. To understand how all this happened, we must go back to the earliest days of the Conquest, to English shame at Hastings and beyond to its aftermath. Vast swathes of the English aristocracy had died at Stamford Bridge, Hastings, or the rearguard actions in the initial days of conquest; many more rallied together in the subsequent uprisings, only to be killed by Norman reprisals or driven into exile. Any English thegns or nobles suspected of having ties to the rebellions had their lands confiscated, and those who bowed down to William and didn’t make a fuss still had to pay him handsomely for the privilege of keeping their lands intact. All these factors left large tracts of land empty, and William took over those lands and distributed it to his most loyal and trusted followers. He made them barons, a title which identified them as the king’s immediate vassals. He made all English lands fiefs held directly or indirectly by the king, imposing a feudal hierarchy on the land with himself as the recognized owner of the land and his vassals as recipients of his fiefs. The commoners (or free peasants and slaves) were organized onto manors, and most peasants became serfs. Anglo-Saxon society dissolved under the Norman way of doing things, but that’s a different (and controversial) story all on its own. 

The Wounded William I

The Domesday Book of 1086 is a testament to what Garnett has called the “swiftest, most brutal, and most far-reaching transformation in English history.” By the day of William I’s death, Anglo-Saxon England was a figment of memory, England had become increasingly French in government and culture, and England’s orbit had shifted south from the Scandinavian countries to that of France. Even William I couldn’t have imagined the long-reaching scope of his Conquest. He saw the last of it in the late summer of 1087: he was in Normandy when a French garrison made a raid into his duchy. He struck back with his troops, and they sacked the French fortress of Mantes in July. During the assault the king was thrown from his horse; he had become quite obese, and a contemporary speculated that when he lurched forward, his saddle’s pommel drove into his stomach and ruptured his internal organs. He died on 9 September, and his body was brought to the church of St. Stephen at Caen. When the attendants tried to maneuver his body into the stone sarcophagus, the flesh burst, his bodily fluids splashed out, and the church reeked for days. It was an unseemly death for such a triumphant life.