Hastings, as decisive as it was, marked the start, not the end, of William’s campaign to conquer England. It would be nearly five years before he was finally able to establish full control over the country. Even so, it was at this battle that the English lost not only their most effective leader, but also their best chance of turning back the Norman invader.

This was something that Englishmen of the time were all too well aware of, and the half-English William of Malmesbury later described the “day of destiny” as “a fatal disaster for our dear country as she exchanged old masters for new.”¹ The chroniclers estimate that as many as fifteen thousand men perished in the battle. While this figure was again almost certainly an exaggeration, it had clearly been one of the bloodiest and hardest-fought conflicts that England had ever seen.² “The fields were covered with corpses, and all around the only colour to meet the gaze was blood-red. It looked from afar as if rivulets of blood, flowing down from all sides, had filled the valleys, just like a river.”³ The battle had wiped out much of the English ruling elite: “The mangled bodies that had been the flower of the English nobility and youth covered the ground as far as the eye could see.”⁴ As well as Harold, his brothers Leofwine and Gyrth had been killed, and “many good men.”⁵ The victorious duke of Normandy ordered the burial of all his fallen men, but he left the English dead unburied, “to be eaten by worms and wolves, by birds and dogs.”⁶ He defended this apparently callous action on the grounds that they had supported a tyrant and did not therefore deserve a Christian burial. Neither did he accede to a request by Harold’s grieving mother that she might be given her son’s body so that she could arrange a fitting burial. According to Orderic, even when she offered him “Harold’s weight in gold for his body,” William angrily refused.⁷

A rash of Norman accounts appeared soon after the battle, praising William as a magnificent warrior and justifying the cruelty of his actions. The size of the English army grew with each telling, so that the feat of the Normans appeared all the more remarkable. Tales of cowardice and disorganization among Harold’s men were contrasted with Norman bravery and tactical brilliance. Writing almost sixty years later, Malmesbury decried the bias with which the story of the battle had been told: “Those men seem to me wrong who exaggerate the number of the English and diminish their courage, thus bringing discredit on the Normans whom they mean to praise. A mighty commendation indeed! That a most warlike nation should conquer a set of people who were disorganised because of their numbers, and fearful through cowardice! On the contrary, they were few in number and brave in the extreme, who disregarded the love of their own bodies and laid down their lives for their country.”⁸

The reports that were sent back to Normandy in the immediate aftermath of the battle were no less biased than those of which Malmesbury complained. Among the first to hear the news was Matilda. She was in the Benedictine priory of Nôtre Dame du Pré, a small chapel that she had founded in 1060 on the banks of the river Seine near Rouen, praying for William’s safety, when a messenger arrived with the news. Upon hearing it, she joyfully proclaimed that the priory should henceforth be known as Nôtre Dame de Bonnes Nouvelles (Our Lady of Good News).⁹ She had good reason to rejoice, for she was now queen of England—an honor that she could not possibly have hoped for when she had agreed to become the wife of “William the Bastard” some fifteen years earlier.

Determined to celebrate her husband’s success and revel in her exalted new status, Matilda embarked upon a series of well-planned public gestures. She made a number of high-profile—and extremely generous—religious bequests, giving thanks to God for her husband’s victory. Orderic Vitalis wrote admiringly: “The alms which this princess daily distributed with such zeal brought more succour than I can express to her husband, struggling on the field of battle.”¹⁰ It might have been at Matilda’s command that in 1068 her chaplain,¹¹ Guy, bishop of Amiens, composed an epic poem—Carmen de Hastingae Praelio—“praising and exalting William” and “abusing and condemning Harold.”¹² The theme that ran throughout this piece of blatant Norman propaganda was that the duke had only taken what was rightfully his. The prologue declares: “For manfully he recovered a kingdom of which he had been deprived, and by his victory extended the boundaries of his ancestral lands across the sea—a deed worthy to be remembered forever.”¹³Throughout the poem, William is hailed as a triumphant leader, comparable to Caesar, whose nobility and virtue excelled those of all his contemporaries.¹⁴ It is a straightforward tale of hero versus villain, usurper versus rightful king.

According to popular legend, Matilda’s most powerful and iconic commemoration of the Battle of Hastings was the Bayeux Tapestry, which told the story of the battle from a Norman perspective and reinforced the justice of William’s claim to the English throne. For many years, it was assumed that it was the work of the duchess and her ladies, an idea recorded by the Benedictine historian Bernard de Montfaucon, who discovered the Bayeux Tapestry in the late 1720s. He subsequently published a reproduction of it in hisMonuments de la monarchie française, in which he reported: “The common opinion in Bayeux is that Queen Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror, had the tapestry made. This opinion passes for a tradition in the region. It seems highly probable.”¹⁵ His theory was soon widely accepted, and gained greater currency when it was reiterated—and embellished—by the prolific nineteenth-century historian Agnes Strickland in her Queens of England series.¹⁶ It has since proved remarkably enduring, to the extent that most French people today know the work not as “La Tapisserie de Bayeux” but “La Tapisserie de la Reine Mathilde.” Indeed, a modern-day visitor to Bayeux will encounter numerous references to Matilda as being the orchestrator of the work—from the Hotel Reine Mathilde to a plaque outside the museum that houses the tapestry bearing her name.

That Matilda was responsible for the Bayeux Tapestry is in many respects a natural assumption to make. It was customary for queens and noble ladies to embroider hangings for churches or monasteries depicting the glorious successes of their families. Bertha, wife of Matilda’s grandfather, Robert the Pious of France, commissioned just such a hanging for the abbey of St.-Denis. Meanwhile, Duchess Gunnor, wife of Duke Richard I of Normandy, presented an exquisite embroidery in silk and linen to the church of Nôtre-Dame in Rouen.

It would therefore have been entirely commensurate with Matilda’s role as a dutiful wife to the Conqueror, eager to promote his successes, that she should have commissioned the Bayeux Tapestry. The image of the new queen of England and her ladies assiduously working on the tapestry during their idle hours while their husbands completed the obliteration of the Saxon kingdom fits neatly with the conventional view of women’s role in society. Moreover, Matilda certainly was an accomplished seamstress, having been taught the art of embroidery as a young woman in her parents’ household, and she bequeathed some fine needlework in her will.

Beguiling though the image conjured up by Montfaucon and Strickland is, however, it is fundamentally flawed. There is no doubt that Matilda had been a dutiful wife up until this point, and she was shrewd enough to realize the importance of justifying William’s tenuous claim to the English throne. But in the aftermath of his victory, she was fully preoccupied with the regency of Normandy, so the notion that she was able to idle away countless hours sewing with her ladies is questionable in the extreme. At best, she might have commissioned the tapestry and set her female attendants to work on it, providing only occasional supervision.

However, as early as the nineteenth century, historians were questioning whether Matilda was involved in the making of the Bayeux Tapestry at all. One of them claimed that the tapestry was produced after her death, attributing it instead to her granddaughter and namesake, the empress Matilda.¹⁷ Other historians of the period began to voice doubts that any royal woman could have been responsible. Their reasoning says much about the age in which they were writing. The tapestry contains some overtly sexual images in its borders, and it was felt that neither queen could possibly have been involved in such a shockingly crude piece of work.

More important in understanding the provenance of the tapestry are recent painstaking investigations providing compelling evidence that it was in fact made not in Normandy, but in the conquered land, England. The style of decoration mirrors that found in English manuscripts, and some of the Latin names are spelled the English rather than the Norman way. Moreover, Anglo-Saxon women were renowned for their skill at embroidery, and many of them were employed in this profession. William of Poitiers, who was hostile toward the English, admitted that “the women are very skilled at needlework and weaving gold thread.”¹⁸ The late King Harold’s sister, Edith, was among them, and it is possible that if any royal lady had a hand in the work, it was she rather than Matilda.

The case for the tapestry’s having been made in England rather than Normandy is also supported by a fresh interpretation of the story it tells. One recent historian has argued convincingly that it was not the great statement of Norman triumphalism that it appears, but a subversive work loaded with hidden meaning. For example, the images depicted in the tapestry imply that Edward the Confessor did not support William’s claim to the English throne, as the Norman chroniclers would have us believe. Furthermore, the scenes in which the Battle of Hastings is played out suggest that it was the French, not the Norman troops, who assumed the starring role. These troops were under the command of Count Eustace II of Boulogne (which was then part of Flanders), who although nominally on William’s side in the battle was otherwise one of the duke’s most troublesome northern French rivals. In fact, Eustace is one of only three Normans who are singled out in the tapestry as being present at Hastings (the others being Bishop Odo and William himself), which again suggests that this was hardly a work celebrating that duchy’s triumph.¹⁹

That the artist was a supporter of Eustace adds weight to the notion that the Bayeux Tapestry was a subversive work, and it may also be possible that Eustace himself had commissioned it.²⁰ But the more commonly accepted view is that its patron was Matilda’s brother-in-law, Bishop Odo. In 1824, a French antiquarian, Honoré François Delauney, one of those nineteenth-century historians who did not believe that Matilda was responsible for the tapestry, put forward the theory that it could have been given to Bayeux Cathedral by an immoral cleric.²¹ Bishop Odo perfectly fitted the bill. His lax morality was notorious, and he made little secret of the fact that he had a mistress and a son. The fact that Odo was bishop of the cathedral in which the tapestry was discovered might seem to strengthen the case for his being its originator, but it was his connections in Kent that have proved more significant. Soon after the Battle of Hastings, William made him earl of that region. Canterbury was its principal town, a thriving artistic center. Any patron intending to commission an embroidery on such a grand scale would naturally have turned to the artisans of this city.

It is with this in mind that most historians are now agreed that the tapestry was made in Canterbury at Odo’s orders with a view to decorating the magnificent new cathedral that he was building at Bayeux. He may have unveiled it at the elaborate consecration ceremony in 1077, which Matilda herself attended. The idea that Matilda was in any way connected to it has thus been cast into grave doubt. She could claim the credit for a number of similarly high-impact gestures to mark her husband’s victory in England, but it is unlikely that the Bayeux Tapestry was one of them.

When William triumphed at Hastings, Matilda had only been regent of Normandy for a little over two weeks, but there was no prospect of her tenure’s coming to an end in the near future—her husband still had much to do in his newly conquered land. He might have won the English crown, but his campaign to subdue the rest of this hostile, rebellious country was only just beginning. His apologist’s bold claim that he “subjugated all the cities of the English in a single day” was wildly exaggerated.²²

William’s first task was to take the city of London, which was so far from accepting the Norman duke as its ruler that it had elected Edgar the Aetheling, great-nephew of Edward the Confessor, as king instead. William rapidly reassembled his forces and advanced toward the city. They brought terror wherever they went, for William’s tactic was to force his recalcitrant new subjects into submission with brutality and bloodshed. Entire villages and towns were razed to the ground, and their citizens raped or murdered. The major strategic strongholds of Dover and Southwark were laid waste by the Norman troops as they advanced toward London—“a most spacious city, full of evil inhabitants, and richer than anywhere else in the kingdom.”²³ Meanwhile, the duke ordered a detachment of his army to Winchester in order to secure its surrender and that of Queen Edith, Edward the Confessor’s widow and Harold’s sister, who had become a figurehead for the beleaguered English. Within a few short weeks, both cities had capitulated. Then, in early December, William marched to Berkhamsted, some thirty miles northwest of London, where Edgar the Aetheling had taken refuge. Upon the Conqueror’s arrival, Edgar immediately relinquished the crown, and William was declared king of England.

Eager to formalize his new status, William set about organizing his coronation. He had originally wanted to defer the ceremony so that Matilda might join him, “since if God granted him this honour, he wished for his wife to be crowned with him.” This was more than just devotion: he knew full well that Matilda’s presence—given her ancestral ties with previous English kings—would lend the occasion much-needed legitimacy. However, he had been dissuaded from doing so by his advisers, who had urged him that it was crucial to consolidate his position as soon as possible.²⁴

Plans for the coronation duly proceeded, and the ceremony took place on Christmas Day 1066 in Westminster Abbey, where Harold had been crowned and Edward the Confessor buried. To further legitimize his position and emphasize the continuity of his accession, William ordered that the service should follow that used for previous English kings. He also commissioned a magnificent new crown in the style of Solomon (the ancient king of Israel renowned for his wisdom), “fashioned out of gold and precious stones,” including a sapphire, an emerald, and a large ruby at its center.²⁵ But there was no fooling his new subjects, who still viewed him as a foreigner, a bastard, and a usurper.

Indeed, far from being a cause for celebration, William’s coronation was a tense, somber affair. The crowds that had gathered outside the abbey to witness the arrival of their detested new king were silent and subdued. The only cheering came from the Conqueror’s own men, who were there as much to suppress any trouble as to support their leader. During the ceremony, one of William’s Norman bishops, Geoffrey of Coutances, sought the assent of those present for their new king, as tradition dictated. Their affirmations were so loud that they alarmed the guards keeping watch outside the abbey, who, fearing an uprising, went on the rampage and torched a series of houses in order to terrify the inhabitants into submission. Meanwhile, the congregation took flight, and the ceremony had to be hastily concluded by the handful of “terrified” clergymen who had stayed behind. The episode tested the nerve of England’s newly crowned king, who, according to one chronicler, was “trembling from head to foot.”²⁶

Still, the English were now forced to acknowledge William as their sovereign, however reluctantly. In doing so, they were also accepting Matilda as their queen. But William was not content with her sharing in his newly won status by association only; he resolved that she, too, would be crowned with full pomp and ceremony as soon as she could join him in England. This met with some opposition from the English barons, because it had not hitherto been the practice of the Saxon kings to gratify their wives with the title of queen. But William was determined. In his eyes, no woman was fitter than she for such a position. Matilda herself was eager to be crowned, and even before she joined her husband in England, she began styling herself queen of that kingdom.²⁷ She was no doubt highly satisfied when she received news of her husband’s plans for her separate coronation. The prospect of playing as active a role in England as she did in Normandy would have appealed to her keen sense of ambition.

It would in fact be two years before Matilda joined her husband in his new kingdom. The reason for this delay is a matter for debate. It is possible that William considered the situation there too volatile, but as we have seen, Matilda’s unquestionable pedigree and heritage would have made her presence advantageous in the duke’s attempts to quickly establish his authority. Moreover, Matilda herself was keen to see her new kingdom—and take possession of her landed wealth. Upon becoming king, William had granted her extensive lands—perhaps as much as a quarter of the total at his disposal. These included rich estates in Buckinghamshire, Surrey, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Dorset, Devon, and Cornwall.²⁸

These lands made Matilda a wealthy woman in her own right, for she could levy taxes, or “geld,” from them. According to Domesday Book, this earned her in the region of £1,070 per year, a staggering sum for the time—equivalent to around £500,000 today. This income alone made her the richest woman in England. But as queen, she was also entitled to claim “Queen Gold,” which was one-tenth of every fine paid to the crown. There were numerous other financial privileges associated with her new position. The city of Warwick, for example, was obliged to provide her with one hundred shillings for the use of her property. Not all of Matilda’s revenue was paid in cash. For example, as well as sending her tolls on all goods landed at Queenhithe, the city of London provided oil for her lamps and wood for her hearth.²⁹ The city of Norwich, meanwhile, had to deliver a palfrey to her each year.

Considering the riches that lay in wait for her in England, it must have been a compelling reason that kept Matilda in Normandy for so long, especially as she had so successfully quelled the threats both within and outside its borders during her regency. One of the stronger explanations is that she had been pregnant when William had set sail for England in September 1066. If she had conceived another child before her husband’s departure, then she would have given birth no later than June 1067.³⁰ As the birth dates of Matilda’s sons do not fall within this period, the child must have been a girl, and it is most likely to have been the one whose name appears in the sources more than any of the other daughters, thanks to her later career: Adela.

The choice of name was significant. Adela was the name of Matilda’s mother, daughter of the king of France, and as such it would have reminded William’s rebellious new subjects of the legitimacy of his dynasty. A poem written in around 1079 by Godfrey of Rheims, chancellor to the French king, provides further evidence. He alludes to Adela’s birth as occurring just after the Norman Conquest:

The duke’s child would rise to become an excellent woman,

The goddess did not think it sufficient for her to be of ducal status.

The royal virgin obtained by fate that her father would be a king.

In order for Adela to be the daughter of a king,

The Fates allowed the father to establish himself as a king.

Because the virgin was not allowed to leave the womb

Her father owed the kingdom of England to her.³¹

If, as the evidence suggests, Matilda was pregnant during the weeks leading up to her husband’s invasion of England—arguably the most crucial moment of their reign—then, given her belief in the mystical arts, she might well have consulted soothsayers at court on the significance of the pregnancy and how she might use it to ensure a favorable outcome. As Godfrey implies in his poem, the safe delivery of the child thus became inextricably linked with the successful conquest of England.³²

Whatever her reason for remaining so long in Normandy, it did mean that Matilda was not present to witness the brutal early months of William’s reign. After being crowned, he was formally referred to as “the great and peacegiving King,” something that his new subjects would have found deeply ironic.³³ The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes the mercilessness of William’s regime, which butchered thousands of Englishmen, laid vast swaths of land to waste, and imposed “stiff” taxes and other strictures upon the beleaguered natives. Any who dared to defy him were either mutilated or put to death. The twelfth-century chronicler John of Worcester describes how William punished his recalcitrant subjects “by gouging out their eyes or cutting off their hands.”³⁴ The English commentators clearly believed that the Norman invasion was a punishment from God for their manifold sins. “They built castles widely throughout this nation, and oppressed the wretched people; and afterwards it always grew very much worse. When God wills, may the end be good.”³⁵

The prospect of assimilation between the conquerors and conquered looked bleak indeed. The Norman Conquest was the second successful invasion of England in the eleventh century, the first being led by the Danes in 1013–16. The latter had been overthrown by the native English less than thirty years later, and it remained a strong possibility that the Normans would be ousted in similar fashion.³⁶

The invading Normans presented a stark contrast to the people of England. They certainly looked very different, with their clean-shaven faces giving them the appearance more of priests than of fighting men. They were also “well-dressed to a fault.” It was with a mixture of curiosity and scorn that they regarded the “long-haired denizens of England” with their mustaches and “skin tattooed with coloured patterns.” William of Poitiers derided “the long-haired sons of the northern lands,” who appeared rough and ill-kempt next to the neatly cropped style of the Normans. According to Malmesbury, their appearance was mirrored by their uncivilized ways, which included “eating till they were sick and drinking till they spewed”—although he admitted that the conquering army inherited these bad habits.³⁷

In religion, at least, the Normans were in accord with their new subjects. The Saxon were Christians who now found themselves in the hands of one of the most devout Christian peoples in Europe. Malmesbury claims that the Conquest greatly enhanced the religious life of the English: “you may see everywhere churches in villages, in towns and cities monasteries rising in a new style of architecture; and with new devotion our country flourishes.”³⁸ Great Romanesque churches were erected across the country, becoming as much a sign of Norman preeminence as the imposing castles with which William and his men would later stamp their authority. As in the political sphere, the higher ecclesiastical offices were now held by Normans, and the English clerics were gradually (or in some cases, summarily) ousted from their positions.

The new king personified his race’s emerging piety, but he also symbolized its strident self-confidence, which was viewed as arrogance by resentful Saxon subjects. He trusted none of the English nobles who had survived Hastings and the campaigns that followed. To be fair, they had done little to earn his trust, proving all too ready to rebel against him—“behaviour which so exasperated his ferocity that he deprived the more powerful among them first of their revenues, then of their lands, and some even of their lives.”³⁹ William’s privileged inner sanctum, then, was dominated by Normans. Odo of Bayeux, Roger of Montgomery, Roger de Beaumont, Robert of Mortain, Alan of Brittany, Geoffrey of Coutances, Earl Hugh of Chester, Richard fitzGilbert, and William of Warenne seem to have been the most active in his government, judging from the frequency of their witness marks on the charters. Almost all of these “wise and eloquent men,” as Orderic described them, had served the royal couple ever since their marriage, and some even before that time.⁴⁰ Their loyalty was richly rewarded with large estates, honors, and titles. As well as the relentlessly acquisitive Odo, William’s other half-brother, Robert of Mortain, and his close associate Roger of Montgomery also profited from a share of the spoils after 1066.

William was not alone in his disdain for the English people. Lanfranc, still one of his closest advisers, felt such an aversion toward them that he begged to be excused from the post of archbishop of Canterbury when it was offered to him by William and a convention of powerful ecclesiastics. “I pleaded failing strength and personal unworthiness, but to no purpose; the excuse that the language was unknown and the native races barbarous weighed nothing with them either.” Neither did his opinion of the English improve after he was obliged to take up the office. He complained to Pope Alexander II: “Now I endure daily so many troubles and vexations and such spiritual starvation of nearly anything that is good; I am continually hearing, seeing and experiencing so much unrest among different people, such distress and injuries, such hardness of heart, greed and dishonesty, such a decline in holy Church, that I am weary of my life.”⁴¹

For all of his determination to sweep away every remnant of the Saxon regime, England’s new king found himself conforming to at least some of it. For example, William himself recognized that the English system of government was more sophisticated than that of his dukedom. Within this system, the king was assisted by the witan council. This William adapted, albeit under a different name (the curia regis), and he would surely have retained many of the existing personnel if they had not proved so rebellious. His kingship was much as Edward the Confessor’s had been, superior only in the formidable military power that supported it.

At a local level, the system of government more closely mirrored that of Normandy. Instead of comtes and vicomtes there were earls and sheriffs, but the function they performed was essentially the same. They were responsible for the collection of royal revenues, acted as executants of royal justice, held castles on behalf of the king, and played an important financial role. The key difference was the degree of autonomy these men had. In Edward the Confessor’s time, the kingdom had been divided into earldoms, and each earl had enjoyed immense power. They thus constituted a threat to royal authority, and the king was often subject to their will. All of this changed with the accession of William the Conqueror. He replaced any surviving Saxon incumbents with Norman men whose loyalty was proven and who were firmly under his control.

One of William’s first acts after the Battle of Hastings was to reassure Londoners that they would have the same rights of inheritance that they had enjoyed in Edward’s day. Upon the death of a father, his child would inherit his estate, with no interference from the crown. As a rare gesture of conciliation on the part of the arrogant and all-powerful new king, this offered some reassurance. However, in practice, the heavy casualties suffered by vast swaths of the native landowning classes at Hastings and the battles that followed made this privilege of dubious value. It certainly did little to stop the major social revolution that took place between 1066 and 1100, during which the great majority of Saxon estates fell into Norman hands.

The contemporary chronicler Abbot Ingulphus, of Croyland Abbey in Lincolnshire, abhorred this situation. “So inveterately did the Normans at this period detest the English, that whatever the amount of their merits might be, they were excluded from all dignities; and foreigners, who were far less fitted, be they of any other nation whatever under heaven, would have been gladly chosen instead of them.”⁴² A powerful inner ring of high-ranking Normans, related by ties of blood and loyalty to the royal court, came to control nearly a quarter of the landed wealth of England. William himself controlled a fifth, and the church and remaining barons almost half between them. Even Orderic Vitalis was forced to admit that “foreigners grew wealthy with the spoils of England, whilst her own sons were either shamefully slain or driven as exiles to wander hopelessly through foreign kingdoms.”⁴³

Rather than curtailing her husband’s excesses, Matilda initially joined in. She ordered the abbey of Abingdon, the loyalty of which was questionable, as it had been closely affiliated to the Godwine family, to send her a selection of precious ornaments. The monks duly obliged, but upon receiving their treasure, she declared it inadequate and demanded richer items.⁴⁴

With wealth came corruption, and many of the Normans who had profited from their lord’s generosity “arrogantly abused their authority and mercilessly slaughtered the native people.”⁴⁵ As scores of English abbots were ousted from their posts and replaced by greedy, tyrannical men, the same corruption spread to the country’s religious life. Orderic Vitalis observes: “Between such shepherds and the flocks committed to their keeping existed such harmony as you would find between wolves and helpless sheep.”⁴⁶

There seemed to be no end to the Norman oppression. New laws were introduced that were heavily weighted against the native population, while even the humblest followers of the Conqueror were protected. If any of them was attacked by a Saxon, the perpetrator faced a considerable fine. By contrast, the attempted murder of a native Englishman would go unpunished if the attacker was a Norman.

The revolution did not end there. In almost every sphere of life, the customs and traditions of old England were gradually swept away by the new ruling class. Referring to the disdain with which the conquerors viewed the traditional English ceremony for conferring knighthoods, Ingulphus lamented: “And not only in this custom, but in many others as well, did the Normans effect a change.”⁴⁷ Even the native language was systematically eroded. The conquering Normans may have learned sufficient English to administer their newly acquired estates, but otherwise they spoke Latin and French, and these now became the dominant languages of the ruling and upper clerical classes. “The very language even they abhorred with such intensity, that the laws of the land and the statutes of the English kings were treated of in the Latin tongue,” observed Ingulphus, “and even in the very schools, the rudiments of grammar were imparted to the children in French and not in English. The English mode of writing was also abandoned, and the French manner adopted in charters and in all books.”⁴⁸ Before long, all government business was transacted in Latin rather than English. William himself had made a rather halfhearted attempt to learn English so that he could understand his new subjects without the aid of an interpreter, but he soon gave up. Orderic Vitalis excuses this failing on the grounds of William’s “advancing age” and “the distractions of his many duties,” but it is difficult to imagine that he tried very hard.⁴⁹

The gradual erosion of their language was one of the most tangible losses suffered by the native English people. If the Normans had been a civilized and diplomatic race, this might have been easier to bear. As it was, their leader epitomized the often shockingly rude, even barbarous manners of the conquering regime, which made a mockery of the ancient chivalric values cherished by the Saxons. In the early years at least, William’s English court lacked the refinements of the former royal and noble households. Nor was the flowering of intellectual life that had begun before the Conquest sustained. Instead, the brutish, boorish people of the new regime seemed to derive all their pleasure from the cruelty of their military exploits. Even the great Norman castles that later sprang up across the country were, in their earliest incarnation, little more than ugly barracks thrown up as a temporary means of defense against the intransigent natives.

Women had even more cause for complaint in this dramatically changed culture and society. Rape became commonplace, as Orderic Vitalis describes: “Noble maidens were exposed to the insults of low-born soldiers, and lamented their dishonouring by the scum of the earth.” Those women who escaped such violence on account of their age were no less wretched. “Matrons, highly born and handsome, mourned the loss of their loving husbands and almost all their friends, and preferred death to life.”⁵⁰ Moreover, women found themselves oppressed by the law. For example, new marriage customs put them at a disadvantage, as they were now expected to bring with them considerable dowries, whereas in Anglo-Saxon times the onus had been on the man to arrange a more equitable settlement. As one authority on the subject neatly put it: “Favour lay with the spear not with the spindle in Norman days.”⁵¹

With precious few exceptions, then, the changes wrought by the Norman Conquest proved both dramatic and unwelcome for the native population. Even sixty years later, Malmesbury had cause to lament, “England has become a dwelling-place of foreigners and a playground for lords of alien blood. No Englishman today is an earl, a bishop, or an abbot; new faces everywhere enjoy England’s riches and gnaw her vitals, nor is there any hope of ending this miserable state of affairs.”⁵²

Orderic Vitalis’s account, however, provides a stark contrast. He paints a picture of harmonious integration in which the Saxons gladly accepted the civilizing influence of their Norman conquerors: “English and Normans were living peacefully together in boroughs, towns, and cities, and were inter-marrying with each other. You could see many villages or town markets filled with displays of French wares and merchandise, and observe the English, who had previously seemed contemptible to the French in their native dress, completely transformed by foreign fashions. No one dared to pillage, but everyone cultivated his own fields in safety and lived contentedly with his neighbour.”⁵³

On this latter point, at least, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is in agreement: “Among other things, the good order he [William] made in this land is not to be forgotten, so that a man who was of any account could travel over his kingdom with his bosom full of gold, unmolested.” It also attests that after the initial wave of violence against the native population, England’s new king gradually imposed a set of strict laws against crimes such as murder and rape: “No man dare kill another man, however great a wrong he might have done the other. And if any common man had sex with a woman against her will, he immediately lost the limbs with which he played.”⁵⁴

But this account was written at the end of William’s life, which indicates that the change had been gradual. Orderic Vitalis’s claim that the Conqueror’s civilizing influence had taken full effect within the space of just four years was an idealized and inaccurate view, as would be proved by the continuing unrest and resentment among the English population. William’s struggle with his rebellious subjects was to be a long and bitter one, and he would never enjoy the luxury of feeling secure on his throne.