9
Few features better reveal the history of a country than its built environment. And few buildings are so eloquent in this regard as religious houses. Northern France stands out for its ornate Gothic architecture, embodied in the hulking Notre-Dame in Paris, the shining brilliance of the nearby Sainte-Chappelle, and the imposing majesty of Chartres. By contrast, Italy, Austria and southern Germany are striking for their embrace of the Baroque, exemplified by St Peter’s Basilica in Rome, St Stephen’s in Passau and Salzburg Cathedral. Here we see Counter-Reformation bulwarks against the growing influence of Protestantism. England, by contrast, is characterised by the elegant simplicity of the Romanesque – an architectural style developed in continental Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries and characterised by its thick walls and large, rounded arches. With the exception of St Paul’s – rebuilt following the Great Fire of 1666 – almost all of England’s great cathedrals bear Romanesque features; and many are Romanesque through and through. These were all built within a short span of years following the Conquest. And they are part of a wider set of changes in the institutional Church. In 1066, only four of fourteen English bishops hailed from the continent; by the time of the Conqueror’s death, it was fourteen of fifteen.
To modern eyes, conquest and colonisation may seem like acts of military might and political nous. But in an era before the separation of Church and State, conquest was inevitably a moral affair – a process as much religious as it was political. This was doubly true of England after 1066. From the start, William had been keen to secure papal support for his invasion; and one of his first acts as king was to found an abbey at Battle (as the name suggests, the site of the carnage in October 1066). The latter was partly a gesture of thanks and reconciliation, but it was also an attempt to expiate the sins incurred in the course of conquest.
Such acts were part of a wider programme of religious transformation. Just as William and his men ushered in a tenurial revolution in the countryside, so they were catalysts of change within the Church. In part, this reflects the logic of William’s case for invasion. An essential element of this had been the claim that the English and their Church were venal, irregular and schismatic. And while such caricatures may be unfair, they exploited real differences between Church structures in England and its continental neighbours. It was common for English bishops to hold multiple sees (as had Stigand), a practice long since abandoned elsewhere as being contrary to canon law; the small number and uneven distribution of the English dioceses was also most unusual from a European perspective.1 At a time when stricter ideas about ecclesiastical life were gaining ground across western Europe, these variations were bound to become a problem at some point – and William was only too happy to speed on the process. He positioned himself as the brush needed to sweep clean the English Church.
William’s case was strengthened by the associations he’d developed with the papacy in the years preceding 1066. For although the duke’s marriage to Matilda (a distant relative) had briefly raised heckles in Rome, William had been a firm supporter of the Church and its leading pontiff.2 He was helped by the strong Italian element within the Norman Church, which opened channels to Rome. Another important point of contact were the councils held by Pope Leo IX in France and Germany in 1049 and 1050. These played a key part in spreading new reformist ideas. The most visible consequence in Normandy was a run of similar councils (on a smaller scale), starting in the early 1050s. These concerned clerical marriage and the purchase of ecclesiastical office (simony), faults the Norman episcopate now stood beside the pope in seeking to eradicate.
Once William had established himself in England, it was but a matter of time before similar initiatives would be introduced. It must always have been the plan to replace Stigand; and a more thorough-going reform of the Church was clearly the end goal. William’s initial caution is illustrated by his coronation. Although Archbishop Ealdred of York presided, much as he had at Harold’s, Stigand was also present and may have played a more active role than later sources let on. It’s clear, however, that William did not trust the archbishop – and with good reason. Stigand was Harold’s (and Godwin’s) creature; he could scarcely be expected to support William wholeheartedly. After the disaster at Hastings, Stigand had initially backed Edgar, and only submitted to William once the writing was on the wall. In the name of continuity, the Conqueror now tolerated Stigand’s presence. But as English rebellions spread, the archbishop’s position became untenable. Thanks to William’s own propaganda, Pope Alexander II was calling for Stigand’s deposition. The king was only too happy to oblige.3
The opportunity was presented by a visit from papal legates in 1070. Their intention was to survey the situation within the Conqueror’s new realm and set about righting the purported wrongs of the English Church. As the pre-eminent symbol of these ills, Stigand had to go. At an important council held at Winchester at Easter, the archbishop was formally deposed by the legates and other bishops in attendance. This was followed by a second council at Windsor at Pentecost.4 Stigand was not the only figure to suffer as a result of these developments. With papal support – indeed, at papal request – William now conducted a cull of the English episcopate every bit as ruthless as that of the kingdom’s secular aristocracy. Alongside Stigand, the archbishop’s brother Bishop Æthelmær of Elmham (in East Anglia) and three unnamed abbots (one of them probably Brand) were removed from office at the first of these gatherings. Leofwine of Lichfield was also called to answer charges of clerical marriage on this occasion; and when he refused to appear, was excommunicated, freeing up another see. It was around this time, too, that the former bishop of Durham, Æthelric, was imprisoned, while Æthelric’s brother (and successor) Æthelwine was outlawed. By the time the second council deposed Æthelric of Selsey on accusations of irregular appointment, over a third of the episcopate had been forcibly removed. If we add to this the two English prelates who’d died of natural causes since 1066 (Ealdred of York and Wulfwig of Dorchester), half of the kingdom’s sees had changed hands in just four years. In all cases, English bishops were replaced with continental (typically Norman) ones. This was a move as political as it was religious.
Clearly the determination was to start afresh, on the basis of the best models available in mainland Europe. In this respect, it is no coincidence that of the seven surviving bishops, one was already Norman (William of London) and four hailed from (or had received their training within) the Francophone region of Lotharingia, on the western frontiers of the German Empire (Leofric of Exeter, Herman of Sherborne, Walter of Hereford and Giso of Wells). The other two were Wulfstan of Worcester and Siward of Rochester. The latter was an old man in charge of an inconsequential see, while the former seems to have survived on account of his saintly reputation.
Yet it is not simply the depositions which warrant our attention. The councils of 1070 set in motion a series of more fundamental changes. It was probably on these occasions that the possibility of relocating many English sees was first raised. The first two canons of the Winchester council also prohibit the possession of more than one bishopric (pluralism) and simoniacal ordination, crimes of which the recently removed bishops stood accused. The remaining canons go on to touch on other reformist themes, including ecclesiastical ordination, the payment of tithes and the regular holding of diocesan synods (smaller gatherings on the level of the individual bishopric). While councils and synods had been known throughout the Anglo-Saxon period – and were probably more common than our sources reveal – regular local and national gatherings had not been common since at least the early ninth century.5
From the early 1070s, a run of councils and synods can be observed which sought to confront a similar range of subjects to their Norman counterparts. The ambitions of the legatine councils were soon fulfilled. Spearheading these efforts was Lanfranc, the new archbishop of Canterbury. Lanfranc had been one of the leading lights of the Norman Church for some time. An Italian by birth but a Norman by choice, Lanfranc had made a name for himself at the newly founded monastery of Bec in the south-western Roumois. He’d settled here in 1042 and swiftly established a reputation as one of the leading teachers and intellectuals of northern France. He played an important part in early reforming efforts within the duchy. Lanfranc’s reputation soon made it to the ducal court. When William came to pick an abbot for his prize foundation of Saint-Etienne at Caen – the duke’s counterpart to his wife’s La Trinité – the choice naturally fell on Lanfranc.6
As a man on good terms with both duke and pope, Lanfranc – or an associate – had probably been responsible for securing Alexander II’s support for William’s invasion of 1066.7 It thus made sense that he should take the lead in transforming the English Church: having persuaded the pope of the sins of the English, it fell on Lanfranc to put these to rights. Lanfranc’s appointment was clearly on the cards at the Winchester and Windsor councils of 1070. Stigand’s removal created a vacuum at the top of the English ecclesiastical hierarchy, which it was in William and Alexander’s interests to fill. Lanfranc was the ideal figure to do so.
The only problem lay in persuading Lanfranc to take the job. William had already tried to make Lanfranc archbishop of Rouen – the most senior ecclesiastical post in Normandy – in 1067, to no avail. Now once more, the learned abbot sought to avoid such responsibilities, expressing his desire to remain in monastic solitude. This time, however, William had the pope on his side. According to Lanfranc’s letters, it was Alexander’s legate Erminfrid of Sion and a Roman cleric named Hubert who finally persuaded him – in the pope’s name – to accept the office.8
Lanfranc’s arrival in England in summer 1070 was met with pomp and ceremony. He was formally appointed on the feast of the Assumption of Mary (15 August), then consecrated on that of the Beheading (or Decollation) of John the Baptist (29 August), two weeks later. The latter event was witnessed by a veritable who’s who of the English episcopate: William, the longstanding Norman bishop of London; Walkelin, Stigand’s Norman successor at Winchester; Remigius, a monk of Fécamp who’d been appointed bishop of Dorchester on the death of the English bishop, Wulfwig, in 1067; Siward, the elderly English prelate of Rochester; Herfast, the Norman successor to Æthelmær at Elmham; Stigand, the Norman ducal chaplain made bishop of Selsey (who shared a name with the disgraced English archbishop); Herman, the longstanding Lotharingian bishop of Sherborne; and Herman’s fellow countryman Giso of Wells.9
Lanfranc came to the job well equipped. He was on excellent terms with king and pope, and had been involved in earlier reforming initiatives within Normandy. He was also an experienced ecclesiastical administrator, having been abbot of the wealthy foundation of Saint-Etienne for over half a decade. In the latter guise, Lanfranc had initiated the construction of the massive new church, whose consecration he would oversee during a rare visit back to Normandy in 1077. Still, Lanfranc faced a number of challenges at Canterbury. At the time of his appointment, he was an old man by medieval standards (probably over sixty) and had no prior experience of English Church or society. He also almost certainly didn’t speak a word of English.
As archbishop, Lanfranc’s priorities were three-fold: to clarify the position of Canterbury at the head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy; to secure the archbishopric’s landed assets; and to drive forward the initiatives against simony, clerical marriage and other failings of the English Church, as outlined at the Winchester and Windsor councils. All three could be subsumed under the umbrella of reform. What Lanfranc conceived of in terms of restoration was in practice an exercise in bringing local traditions more closely in line with those of mainland Europe (and, in particular, Normandy).
It was not only the personal administrative structures of the English Church that were transformed. For the Conqueror’s new Norman episcopate proved just as interested in rebuilding the nation’s churches as they were in reforming its practices. As a result, the seventy-five years following the Conquest witnessed an unprecedented boom in church building. This was the heyday of the Romanesque style, which had been developed in mainland Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries. The replacement of earlier English church architecture was almost complete: by 1130, every cathedral had been rebuilt or relocated (sometimes both – and sometimes more than once). None of the resulting structures owes more than its location and orientation to its Anglo-Saxon forbear, and many are completely new creations. In the majority of cases, the Norman church still stands, often as first constructed in these years. The replacement of the English clerical and secular elite was thus accompanied by an erasure of native architecture every bit as thorough. Modern tourists have to go out of their way to find an Anglo-Saxon church, but they can scarcely avoid catching sight of one (or more) of England’s great Romanesque masterpieces.
Building a church was, of course, a much longer process than replacing an abbot or bishop. But even so, the speed of this reconfiguration of the ecclesiastical landscape is startling. By the Conqueror’s death, construction had been commenced (and in some cases com-pleted) at Christ Church and St Augustine’s in Canterbury, York Minster, the Old Minster in Winchester, Rochester, Salisbury (Old Sarum), Worcester, Lincoln, St Albans, Glastonbury, Abingdon, Ely, Bury St Edmunds, Evesham and Battle. By the time of William Rufus’ death in 1100, these were joined by St Paul’s (London), Chichester, Durham, Norwich, Gloucester, Bath, Pershore, Crowland and Tewkesbury – not to mention a second, larger Christ Church Cathedral at Canterbury.10 This construction boom was new. With the exception of the Confessor’s foundation at Westminster – itself inspired by Norman models – the half-century prior to 1066 had witnessed remarkably little church building in England. And even if we go back to the activities of the monastic reformers of the later tenth century, who’d refounded religious houses across southern and eastern England, we find nothing approaching this in scale and ambition. In 1066, almost all the English cathedrals and major abbey churches were centuries old; fifty years later, they were all of recent vintage.
In part, this was an extension of developments in Normandy. The duchy had witnessed major building undertakings at Jumièges, Rouen and Caen before 1066. At the latter, William and Matilda’s joint foundations of Saint-Etienne and La Trinité offer particularly fine (yet starkly contrasting) examples of the early Norman Romanesque.11 This was also part of a wider European trend, evocatively described by Raoul Glaber in the 1040s as a new ‘white mantle of churches’ cladding the landscape.12 Yet the scale and speed of church building in England after the Conquest was not the organic growth seen in much of France and Germany; it was frenetic and ambitious. Christ Church, Canterbury, trumped Battle in size (both c.1070), only to be bettered by St Augustine’s (also c.1070), which was then matched by Lincoln (c.1072 × 1075), soon to be outdone by St Albans (c.1077), before Winchester (c.1079) topped them all.13 With the exception of Rochester (c.1077) – a small and poor see, traditionally dependent on neighbouring Canterbury – each new church was as long or longer than the one before, and the resulting structures were far larger than those of William’s Normandy – indeed they were among the largest in western Christendom.
Bigger was, however, not always better. Many of the earlier Anglo-Norman churches show signs that their artisans and architects were operating at the limits of their abilities. Bishop Walkelin’s new cathedral in Winchester may impress in size (at the time of its completion, it was the longest in western Europe), but this cannot hide the shoddy quality of much of the stonework. Similarly, there is a marked improvement in the quality of execution between the two phases of work on Ely: that undertaken before an abbatial vacancy in 1093 is solid but unexciting, lacking the ornate mouldings popular in Normandy at the time; the second phase following 1100 matches in quality that seen anywhere else in Europe. Yet the problems were not simply aesthetic. Only five days after its consecration in 1092, the bell tower at Old Sarum was blown down by a storm. More dramatic was the experience of the monks of Winchester, whose cavernous new cathedral came crashing down in 1107, only a few decades after its completion. Similar experiences were had at Abingdon, Gloucester, Ely, Evesham and Lincoln, all of which had towers collapse in these centuries.14
Still, not all the architecture and stonework was so shoddy, nor would it be right to see this simply as an extension of the Norman Romanesque. Architects in England borrowed ideas and approaches from the Rhineland as well as northern France, combining these with native traditions. If at its worst Anglo-Norman ecclesiastical architecture was crude and fleeting, at its best, it set standards for the rest of Europe. Among the finest early achievements are the innovative structures at St Albans and Bury St Edmunds. But the jewel in England’s Romanesque crown is Durham Cathedral. Construction here began in 1093 and extended well into the twelfth century. Due to its site crowning the Durham peninsula, flanked on either side by the meandering Wear, the cathedral could never have rivalled its largest English, French or German counterparts in scale. But what it lacks in size, Durham more than makes up for in skill.
The new cathedral church made the most of its unique setting. It is as long as the natural rise on which it stands allows, towering over the Wear. Its layout conforms closely to established norms, taking the form of a cross running west to east. The smaller apse and main altar are separated by a transept running north-south from the longer nave in the west. The ultimate model here is that of Saint-Etienne, though this was probably mediated via St Albans and Bury St Edmunds. Arches flank the nave and apse, serving to define the main internal space. These were finished with complex mouldings, the first of their kind in England. Equally innovative was the use of ribbed vaulting over the east arm (and perhaps also the transept and nave) – again one of the first examples of this from the British Isles (indeed, one of the earliest anywhere in Europe). Similarly novel are the elaborate decorations on the arches, columns and piers (as square or rectangular columns are known), which are likewise among the first (and finest) of their nature.15 Above all, it is the consistency of execution which impresses, and Durham has (quite rightly) been dubbed ‘the culminating achievement of the Norman Romanesque school in England’.16
Alongside the Romanesque church, the castle was the most striking (and enduring) Norman contribution to English architecture. Whether the simple wood motte and bailey, or the rarer (but sturdier) stone keep, these fortifications were an essential part of the Normanisation of the landscape. They were in large part functional. A newly imposed aristocracy was in need of bolt holes, and castles provided these in abundance. Yet they were also symbolic. Typically constructed after regions had been subdued (violently or otherwise), castles were the projections of royal and lordly power par excellence.17 When the Peterborough Chronicler, one of our few English voices on William’s reign, came to write a poetic epitaph for the king, he began with the themes of fortification and domination: ‘He [William] had castles constructed / and wretched men greatly oppressed.’18 The novelty of the Conqueror’s interventions is underlined by the poet-chronicler’s choice of words; he employs the new Franco-Norman loan-word castelas (‘castles’), in favour of the native English burig (‘fortifications’) here. This was a new concept as well as a new structure.
Though later Anglo-Saxon lordly towers anticipate the Anglo-Norman castle in important manners, it too was a fundamentally new phenomenon.19 The most famous of the resulting structures is the Tower of London, where the Crown Jewels reside to this day. Yet far more important were the more workaday castles, constructed in wood from Exeter to Durham, and Cambridge to the Welsh marches. Few people would have been more than half a day’s walk from the nearest of these, and it’s estimated that a staggering 600 had been erected in England and Wales by the turn of the century.20 The impact of the Norman aristocracy on the English countryside could scarcely be clearer. But having whetted their appetite for conquest, would the Normans really stop at England’s frontiers?