12

The Spoils of Victory

The night after Hastings was almost as terrible as the day itself. William of Poitiers paints a vivid picture of the English fleeing from the battlefield, ‘some on horses they had seized, some on foot; some along roads, others through untrodden wastes’. These, he makes clear, were the fortunate ones, the lucky unscathed or the lightly wounded. More pitiful is his description of those who wanted to flee but could not: the men lying helpless in their own blood, the maimed who hauled themselves a short distance only to collapse in the woods, where their corpses blocked the escape of others. The Normans pursued them, says Poitiers, slashing at their backs, galloping over their bodies, ‘putting the last touches to the victory’. Yet even the victors died in large numbers that night, their pursuit turning to disaster when they rushed headlong into an unseen obstacle.’ High grass concealed an ancient rampart’, explains Orderic Vitalis, ‘and as the Normans, fully armed on their horses, rode up against it, they fell, one on top of the other, thus crushing each other to death.’ The chronicler of Battle Abbey records that this pit was afterwards known locally as the Malfosse.¹

Thus when the sun came up the next morning it revealed an appalling scene. ‘Far and wide the earth was covered with the flower of the English nobility and youth, drenched in blood’, says Poitiers, noting that among them lay Harold’s two brothers, Leofwine and Gyrth, whose bodies were said to have been found close to the king’s own. Beyond this, however, Poitiers gives us a fairly sanitized account. He says little, for instance, of Norman casualties, which must have been considerable. (The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle speaksof ‘great slaughter on both sides’.) Similarly, we hear nothing about the routine medieval practice whereby the dead were deprived of their valuables, yet we know from other sources that this had been happening even before the end of the battle. (The Bayeux Tapestry, for example, shows in its margins men being stripped of their expensive mail shirts.) Most interestingly, we see Poitiers implicitly contesting a statement made by the author of the Carmen, who says that while William buried his own dead, he left the bodies of the English ‘to be eaten by worms and wolves, by birds and dogs’. Nothing too surprising there, you might think, considering the labour that burying thousands of Englishmen would entail, but Poitiers was determined to depict his master in the best possible moral light, however much it contradicted military common sense. Leaving the dead unburied, we are told, ‘seemed cruel’ to the Conqueror, who accordingly allowed any who wished to recover their relatives’ remains to do so.²

But not the remains of Harold. As Poitiers and several other sources make plain, the king’s corpse was in a very bad state, stripped of all its valuables, and so hacked about the face that it could be recognized only by ‘certain marks’. According to the twelfth-century tradition at Waltham Abbey, the task of confirming his identity required the presence of Harold’s sometime partner, Edith Swan-Neck, ‘for she had been admitted to a greater intimacy of his person’.³ In contemporary accounts, by contrast, it is the king’s mother, Gytha, who appears amid the carnage to plead for the return of her son’s body. Despite allegedly offering its weight in gold (a detail provided by the Carmen and kept by Poitiers), her request was refused, William angrily replying that it would be inappropriate for Harold to be interred while countless others lay unburied on his account. This directly contradicts the later tradition that the king was buried at Waltham, and both Poitiers and the Carmen state that his remains were buried on the summit of a nearby cliff, under a mocking inscription which suggested that he could in this way still guard the seashore. It is not impossible that Harold was removed to Waltham at some later date; but had he been granted a Christian burial in 1066, we can be sure that William of Poitiers in particular would have let us know about it.

So the king was dead; long live the king? The Carmen says that, with Harold thus entombed, William ‘renounced the title of duke [and] assumed the royal style’, but Poitiers once again offers a pointed rebuttal: the victor could have gone on immediately to London, placed the crown on his head and rewarded his followers with the booty, slaying Englishmen or driving them into exile; but, we are told, ‘he preferred to act more moderately, and rule with greater clemency’. Both comments, of course, are equally nonsensical. There was no rule that said the man who killed a king must automatically replace him, nor was William in any position to march on Westminster. He had won a great victory, and succeeded in what we take to be a deliberate strategy of decapitation. But when Poitiers, even in what is obviously a rhetorical passage, suggests that’ the forces of Normandy had subjugated all the cities of the English in a single day’, the effect is unintentionally comic. The truth was that, apart from Pevensey and Hastings, every town and city in England still remained to be taken.⁴

In London, for example, the streets were teeming. ‘A crowd of warriors from elsewhere had flocked there’, says Poitiers in a more prosaic mode, ‘and the city, in spite of its great size, could scarcely accommodate them all.’ Some of these men were doubtless the troops summoned by Harold that had not arrived by the time of his premature departure. Others were survivors from Hastings – ‘the obstinate men who had been defeated in battle’, as the Carmen calls them. Their collective mood was determined and defiant. TheCarmen speaks of their ‘hope of being able to live there in freedom for a long time’, while Poitiers goes even further, saying ‘it was indeed their highest wish to have no king who was not a compatriot’.⁵

With Harold gone, there was only one plausible candidate. ‘Archbishop Ealdred and the citizens of London wished to have Edgar Ætheling as king’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘as indeed was his right by birth.’ The great-nephew of Edward the Confessor, last of the ancient royal line, Edgar did indeed have a better claim than anybody else. Yet, as events at the start of the year had shown, a teenager with a strong claim could easily be elbowed aside by a powerful man with a weak one. Support from the archbishop of York, who had led the mission to bring Edgar’s father home from Hungary, was useful, as was the allegiance of the Londoners. But for the boy to have any hope of success he would need friends with more muscle.

The only individuals in London that autumn in a position to lend such strength were Eadwine and Morcar, the brother earls of Mercia and Northumbria, last seen losing the battle of Fulford several weeks earlier. What they had been doing in the meantime is frustratingly unclear: contemporary sources make no mention of them until this point, and later ones are contradictory. Orderic Vitalis, for example, states categorically that they had not fought at Hastings, whereas John of Worcester implies that they had, but withdrew before its bloody conclusion. On reaching London their first thought was reportedly to get Harold’s widow, Ealdgyth – their sister – out of harm’s way, to which end they sent her north to Chester; but they also gave their backing to Edgar Ætheling. ‘Eadwine and Morcar promised they would fight for him’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.⁶

None of this, of course, can have been known to William in the days immediately after the battle. Having buried his own dead, the duke had withdrawn to Hastings, where he waited, in the words of the Chronicle, ‘to see if there would be any surrender’. According to the Carmen he stayed there for a fortnight, but no surrender came. ‘When he realized that none were willing to come to him’, says the Chronicle, ‘he marched inland with what was left of his host.’

William began his march by heading east along the coast. His first stop was the town of Romney, where, says Poitiers, ‘he inflicted such punishment as he thought fit for the slaughter of his men who had landed there by mistake’ – an interesting, belated indication of the dangers the Normans had risked by crossing the Channel at night. Presumably leaving the charred remains of Romney behind him, the duke proceeded further along the coast to Dover. ‘A great multitude had gathered there’, says Poitiers, ‘because the place seemed impregnable’, and both he and the Carmen devote several lines to describing the defensive advantages of the rocky headland on which Dover Castle now stands. As the Normans approached, though, the defenders lost heart and surrendered. More burning followed when the town was occupied, which Poitiers insists was accidental, and blames on the lower ranks of the duke’s army, greedy for plunder.

William remained at Dover for some time: a month according to the Carmen, though Poitiers, perhaps more credibly, implies it might have been just over a week. One reason was his reported desire to strengthen the site’s existing defences (some historians would date the origins of Dover Castle from this point); another may have been the need to wait for the ‘reinforcements from overseas’ referred to by the D Chronicle. Despite the losses suffered at Hastings, William’s army was clearly still formidably large. Too large, perhaps: during their stay at Dover, some of his men resorted to drinking water and eating freshly killed meat, which led to an outbreak of dysentery and in due course many deaths. Their high-risk diet indicates that supplies of more suitable foodstuffs must have run short, and reminds us of a fundamental point: the Normans were living off the land, and needed to keep foraging and ravaging in order to remain alive. A short time later, Poitiers tells us, William himself fell ill, but despite the concern of those close to him he pushed on, ‘lest the army should suffer from a shortage of supplies’.⁷

Leaving a garrison at Dover, as well as those too ill to continue, William set his sights on London. As he advanced, representatives of other cities approached him and offered their submission. The citizens of Canterbury did so, says Poitiers, fearful of total ruin if they resisted further. The Carmen, meanwhile, carries the uncorroborated but entirely credible story that the duke sent troops to demand the surrender of Winchester, the site of the royal treasury and hence a highly desirable prize. Since the start of the year the city had been held by Edward the Confessor’s widow, Edith, as part of her dower, and this, says the Carmen, meant that its inhabitants were treated leniently, with William requiring only a profession of fealty and a promise of future rent – terms which the former queen and the city fathers chose to accept. Other towns and cities evidently had to make their submission on such terms as they could get, which generally involved the payment of large tributes. ‘Just as hungry flies attack in swarms wounds brimming with blood’, says theCarmen, ‘so from all sides the English rush to dance attendance on the king. Nor do they come with hands empty of gifts. All bring presents, bow their necks to the yoke, and kiss his feet on bended knees.’⁸

But not the citizens of London. If he had not known before, by now William had heard about the election of Edgar Ætheling.’ When he learnt what had been done in London’, says the Carmen, ‘contrary to justice and by fools, he ordered his troops to approach the walls of the city.’ Unfortunately at this point the Carmen becomes an unreliable guide, describing a siege of London which is at odds with the accounts of all other writers. We seem to be on surer ground with William of Poitiers, who explains how the approach of an advance party of Norman knights triggered an English sortie. Poitiers does not say so, but since the city lies on the north side of the Thames and the Normans were approaching from the south, the defenders must have crossed the river to meet their enemies, which presumably means they used London Bridge. The sortie was unsuccessful, with the English forced into a retreat, back across the bridge and inside the walls. The Normans vented their fury by torching all the houses on the south bank.⁹

With his army on one side of the Thames and London’s recalcitrant citizens safely ensconced on the other, William faced a major problem: how to induce a surrender without attempting a suicidal direct assault. The solution was the kind of terror campaign he had used in similar circumstances earlier in his career, most recently in the case of Le Mans. The Norman advance from Hastings to London can hardly have been the peaceful progress that some later chroniclers pretended; apart from anything else, the need to forage for food would have meant much violent appropriation. Even William of Poitiers, although he makes some prefatory noises about clemency and moderation, could not avoid mentioning the punishing of Romney and the burning of Dover. These actions, however, Poitiers evidently felt could be justified or excused as accidental; when, by contrast, he comes to describe the army’s actions after the confrontation on the south bank, he retreats into one of his telling silences, saying only that the duke proceeded ‘wherever he wished’. It is our English sources, despite their habitual terseness, that furnish us with a fuller picture. William, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘harried that part of the country through which he advanced’. From this moment, if not before, foraging became outright ravaging – wilful and deliberate destruction, intended to sow fear among those who had not yet submitted. Some idea of the extent of the campaign is provided by John of Worcester, who wrote that the Normans ‘laid waste Sussex, Kent, Hampshire, Middlesex and Hertfordshire, and did not cease from burning townships and slaying men’.¹⁰

As to precisely where they went, we cannot know. More than a century ago, a scholar called Francis Baring suggested that the route of William’s devastating march could be recovered by looking at the depreciation of land values recorded in the Domesday Book. It all seemed very clever and well substantiated, and one can still find books written in the not too distant past that cite Baring’s reconstruction with approval. Latterly, however, the Baring method has been discredited, not least because even its staunchest advocates are unable to agree on the same conclusion.¹¹ The truth is that we can only recover the general direction of the duke’s route from the information recorded in the chronicles. We can be fairly sure that, having decided against a direct assault on London, William headed west. If John of Worcester is right, the Normans harried into Hampshire, then turned north, burning their way through Berkshire and on into Oxfordshire, before coming to a stop at Wallingford. As its name implies, Wallingford was a convenient place for the Normans to cross the Thames (apparently the first place they could have crossed the river without recourse to boats or bridges). It may also have had an additional importance as a military target: the town’s entry in the Domesday Book contains a passing reference to land ‘where the housecarls lived’. To judge from the comments of the chroniclers, William stayed in Wallingford for several days – even the brief account of William of Jumièges says that the duke ordered his troops to pitch camp there – and one naturally suspects that during this time, as at Dover, work commenced on the town’s new castle.¹²

According to William of Poitiers, it was at Wallingford that the archbishop of Canterbury, Stigand, came and did homage to William, at the same time renouncing Edgar Ætheling. While we have no particular reason to doubt that this was the case, we might suspect that Poitiers exaggerates the archbishop’s role in the English resistance. In his account, Stigand is portrayed as the leader of the Londoners at the time of Edgar’s election; Ealdred, whom the English sources identify in that role, receives no mention. Very likely Poitiers is altering the past here, conscious of the subsequent fortunes of the two men, protecting Ealdred’s reputation by making Stigand the scapegoat. (He may have done much the same with the coronation of Harold at the start of the year.) The submission of the archbishop of Canterbury was, of course, significant. But the opposition in London, for the time being, continued.¹³

And so therefore did the harrying. Having crossed the Thames at Wallingford, the Norman army resumed its devastating progress, turning north-east so that the line of their march began to encircle the capital. Probably following the ancient path along the Chilterns known as the Icknield Way, William and his men passed through Buckinghamshire and on into Hertfordshire (as John of Worcester indicates), where they established another camp (and possibly the great motte-and-bailey castle) at Berkhamsted.

By now the mood in London must have been quite despondent. Apart from the terrifying spectacle of the Norman progress, English spirits had been dealt a crushing blow by the desertion of Eadwine and Morcar. The two earls, says John of Worcester, ‘withdrew their support and returned home with their army’, presumably meaning that at some point during the autumn they had left London and gone north to their earldoms. As a result of this action, Eadwine and Morcar have long been cast, probably unfairly, in the role of arch traitors. In the early twelfth century, for example, William of Malmesbury described them as ‘two brothers of great ambition’, and stated, quite inaccurately, that they left London because the citizens had refused to elect one of them as king: as we have seen, our most closely contemporary source, the D Chronicle, indicates that the earls had initially promised to fight for Edgar Ætheling, and says nothing about their departure for the north. At the same time, the D Chronicle, brief as it is, conveys vividly the collapse of hope among the English in London in the weeks that followed, as they contemplated fighting in the name of a child king against the terrible enemy that was wasting the land beyond their walls. ‘Always when some initiative should have been shown, there was delay from day to day, until matters went from bad to worse, as everything did in the end.’¹⁴

And so the English in London – or at least those who had championed the cause of young Edgar – decided to surrender. As the darkest days of the year drew in, Edgar himself, accompanied by a delegation of magnates and bishops, began the thirty-mile journey from London to Berkhamsted in order to submit to William’s superior might. They went, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘out of necessity, after most damage had been done – and it was a great piece of folly that they had not done it earlier’. When at last they came before the Conqueror, ‘they gave hostages, and swore oaths to him, and he promised them that he would be a gracious lord’.

Did this mean that William was England’s new king? To English minds, the answer must have been yes. As we’ve seen, English kingship was elective: a ruler’s reign began the moment he was accepted by the magnates. This means, of course, that the ætheling must have been regarded as king as well. Although the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is understandably very coy about saying so, Edgar’s rule had clearly been proclaimed in the days immediately after Hastings. We are told, for example, that after the death of their abbot from wounds sustained in the battle, the monks of Peterborough had sent his successor to Edgar for confirmation, and – more to the point – Edgar had ‘gladly consented’. William of Poitiers is even more explicit: ‘They had chosen Edgar Ætheling, of the noble stock of King Edward, as king.’ Evidently Edgar, like the Confessor before him, had not been crowned in the early days of his reign, but in English eyes this did not matter. Coronation, to repeat, was simply confirmation – it conferred God’s blessing, but not the kingship itself.¹⁵

The Normans, however, saw matters differently. On the Continent, a king was created at the moment of his coronation, not before. The Edgar episode, of course, gave them good reason for insisting on this point: the boy had not been crowned; ergo he was not king. The English may have thought this was rather irregular, but they were clearly in no position to debate constitutional practice, and so fell quickly into line with Norman thinking. At the same time, they realized that this new logic left the country in an anxious state of limbo: England would have no king until William was crowned. Hence, says William of Poitiers, ‘the bishops and other leading men begged him to take the crown, saying that they were accustomed to obey a king, and wished to have a king as their lord’. The Normans, too, urged their leader to take the throne quickly, albeit for different reasons. ‘They wished their gains and honours to be increased by his elevation.’¹⁶

But, according to Poitiers, William himself hesitated. It was not seemly, he said, to rush when climbing to the topmost pinnacle. Given that this had been the whole point of the Conquest, we might assume that this scene is Poitiers’ own invention – a conceit designed to emphasize his master’s thoughtfulness and modesty, and hence ultimately his suitability to rule. Yet unseemliness is not the only argument that the Conqueror is said to have put forward. What chiefly dissuaded him, he told his closest companions, was the confused situation in England: some people were still rebelling; also, he had wanted his wife to be crowned with him, and she, of course, was still in Normandy. These arguments seem quite credible. At this point only the south-eastern part of the country was under William’s control. It would have been perfectly understandable had he wished to complete his military takeover, and to have all Englishmen submit to him, so that he and Matilda could experience an orderly coronation at some future date. In this respect at least, his attitude towards the ceremony was not so very different from that of his Anglo-Saxon predecessors.

Eventually, having put the matter to a meeting of his magnates, William was talked around. ‘After carefully reconsidering everything’, says Poitiers, ‘he gave way to all their requests and arguments.’ Apparently the key argument that persuaded him to change his mind was the military one. ‘Above all, he hoped that once he had begun to reign, any rebels would be less ready to challenge him and more easily put down.’ The decision taken, says Poitiers, William sent some of his men ahead to London to make the necessary preparations.¹⁷

By the time William himself reached London some days later, the situation there must have been incredibly tense. The city, as we have noted, had been swelled by the survivors of Hastings. They, and the relatives of the thousands who had fallen, can hardly have looked upon the arrival of the Normans with anything other than abhorrence. According to William of Jumièges, the advance guard that the Conqueror had sent ahead ‘found many rebels determined to offer every possible resistance. Fighting followed immediately and thus London was plunged into mourning for the loss of her sons and citizens.’ Jumièges may not be the most reliable witness here, but the resistance he describes is implicitly acknowledged by the better-informed William of Poitiers, who tells us that the advance guard had been ordered to build a fortress in the city, ‘as a defence against the inconstancy of the numerous and hostile inhabitants’.¹⁸

The coronation itself took place on Christmas Day. Given the situation in London, there can have been little appetite for the kind of processions through the streets that we know preceded later ceremonies. If the Carmen can be believed (and, sadly, most of its account of this episode has to be rejected), William may have taken up residence in Edward the Confessor’s palace at Westminster in the days immediately prior to the ceremony. We know that the ceremony took place in the Confessor’s new church at Westminster Abbey, and we also know that the audience included both English and Normans. Since there can only have been space inside for a few hundred people, the majority of London’s citizens must have remained at home, and the bulk of the Norman army camped elsewhere (perhaps in the new castle in the city’s south-eastern corner). A number of armed and mounted Normans, however, were stationed outside the abbey as a precaution against ambush.¹⁹

As for the ceremony itself, we know enough to see that it followed a conventional form. Historians continue to debate which order of service was followed, but all agree that, despite the novelty of regarding it as the king-making moment, William’s coronation adhered to long-standing English traditions. Anthems in praise of the king were sung, just as they had been in the Confessor’s day, and the service was conducted by an English archbishop. As at the start of the year, this was Ealdred, archbishop of York, rather than Stigand, the pariah archbishop of Canterbury. In describing the ceremony, English sources, for obvious reasons, emphasized the first part, wherein the new king swore the traditional oath to govern his subjects well, according to the best practice of his predecessors. As John of Worcester explains, William promised to defend the Church and its rulers; to govern the whole people justly; and to establish and maintain the law, totally forbidding ‘rapine and unjust judgements’.²⁰

The English in the audience must have been particularly keen to hear the last part, in light of recent events. William of Poitiers gives the impression that the days between the submissions at Berkhamsted and the coronation had been peaceful ones: had the Conqueror wished, we are told, he could have spent all his time in hunting and falconry. The D Chronicle, by contrast, tells a different story. Having noted William’s promise at Berkhamsted to be a gracious lord, it adds bitterly that ‘nevertheless, in the meantime, they harried everywhere they came’. As the English had feared, the Normans had continued to behave during these weeks as if they were still at war. Now, at last, as their new king swore his oath, they could hope the ravaging would cease.²¹

But evidently someone had forgotten to explain the significance of this moment to those Normans who were standing guard outside. As William of Poitiers explains, the next part of the service involved asking the audience whether or not they would accept the rule of the new king – a question which had to be put twice, first in English by Ealdred, and again in French by the Norman bishop of Coutances. Naturally everyone answered in the affirmative, shouting out in their respective tongues, but, unfortunately, says Poitiers, the guards outside the church thought that this loud clamour was some sort of last-minute English treachery, and responded by setting fire to the nearby houses.

As modern historians have observed, this is William of Poitiers at his most unconvincing: if the guards had really thought there was trouble in the church, surely they would have rushed inside. What we seem to have is a clumsy attempt to excuse yet more burning and pillaging, even as the coronation service was in progress. At the same time, the fact that Poitiers felt compelled to mention this incident at all suggests it must have been serious, and that suspicion is confirmed by the later but fuller account provided by Orderic Vitalis. As the fire spread rapidly, says Orderic, ‘the crowd who had been rejoicing in the church took fright, and throngs of men and women of every rank and condition rushed outside in frantic haste’. Some, we are told, went to fight the flames, while others went to join in the looting. Meanwhile, in the abbey, only the bishops and a few monks and clergy remained to complete the coronation service. Archbishop Ealdred, as was customary, anointed William with holy oil, placed the crown upon his head, and seated him on the royal throne. The churchmen were reportedly terrified, and one can well believe it: at the very moment they had called upon God to bless their new king and grant him a peaceful rule, the scene outside was mayhem. By the end of the ceremony, we are told, even the Conqueror himself was trembling from head to foot. It was, as Orderic observes, an inauspicious beginning.²²

For a few days after his coronation William remained in London. His first royal act, if we follow William of Poitiers’ account, was the distribution of rewards to those who had supported him. This was the moment his men had been itching for, and the reason they had echoed the English cry for an early coronation. Naturally, Poitiers does his best to put a positive spin on the process. The new king, he says, ‘distributed liberally what Harold had avariciously shut up in the royal treasury’, though he cannot avoid admitting, belatedly, that this munificence was also made possible by the large tributes that had been received during the preceding months. We are next assured that, while some of the spoils went to ‘those who had helped him win the battle’, the greater and more valuable part was given to monasteries. Whatever the truth about the ratio, that many churches received gifts from William is well established. Needless to say, Poitiers is speaking here of Continental churches, and particularly those which had offered prayers for the success of the Conquest. Some, we are told, received large golden crosses, wonderfully jewelled, while others were given golden vessels or vestments. The obvious inference (made all the more obvious by Poitiers’ later attempt to deny it) is that these items had been obtained by plundering English churches. The choicest gifts of all were reserved for William’s greatest spiritual supporter, Pope Alexander, who was sent ‘more gold and silver coins than could be credibly told, as well as ornaments that even Byzantium would have considered precious’. These included Harold’s own banner, with its image of an armed man embroidered in gold, presumably a quid pro quo for the banner Alexander had bestowed on William to signal his support for the invasion.²³

The needs of the English at the start of the reign were not entirely ignored: Poitiers assures us that, immediately after his coronation, William ‘made many wise, just and merciful provisions’, some for London, some for the country as a whole. In the case of London, at least, this statement is supported by an original writ, almost certainly drawn up during these dramatic early days, and still preserved at the London Metropolitan Archives, in which the new king promises the city’s leading men that their laws will be maintained as they had been ‘in the time of King Edward’. In general terms, however, Poitiers’ repeated insistence on the fairness of his master’s actions (‘he condemned none save those whom it would have been unjust not to condemn’; he accepted ‘nothing which was contrary to fair dealing’) reads like a response to complaints that the new king had been anything but fair. In particular, his comment that William ‘set a limit that was not oppressive to the collection of tribute’ needs to be set against the opinion of the D Chronicle, which juxtaposes the king’s coronation oath to govern justly with the comment ‘nevertheless, he imposed a very heavy tax on the country’.²⁴

This glaring contradiction between the Norman and English accounts is also apparent with regard to an important meeting that took place early in the new year 1067. As William of Poitiers explains, the king, having gained the measure of London’s citizens, decided it would be better to stay elsewhere until his new fortress was finished, and so withdrew from the city to nearby Barking. It was while he was there, says Poitiers, that earls Eadwine and Morcar, ‘perhaps the most powerful of all the English’, came to submit to him. Along with ‘various other wealthy nobles’, the two brothers ‘sought his pardon for any hostility they had shown him, and surrendered themselves and all their property to his mercy’.²⁵

But what happened to that property? According to Poitiers, ‘the king readily accepted their oaths, freely granted them his favour, restored all their possessions, and treated them with great honour’. Other sources, however, suggest that William’s favour was anything but free. ‘Men paid him tribute, and gave him hostages’, says the E Chronicler, ‘and then redeemed their lands from him [my italics]’. Similarly, the Domesday Book refers casually on more than one occasion to ‘the time when the English redeemed their lands’. Englishmen, in other words, were obliged to buy back their estates from the Conqueror, and we can assume he charged them handsomely.²⁶

Many Englishmen, of course, were no longer in a position to strike such a bargain, having perished on the field at Hastings. The fate of their lands is revealed in a writ, almost certainly issued at the very start of William’s reign, in which the king insists that the abbot of Bury St Edmunds should surrender to him ‘all the land which those men held … who stood in battle against me and there were slain’. The fact that the list of the fallen included some of the greatest landowners in the kingdom – not only the late King Harold but also his brothers Leofwine and Gyrth – meant that the amount of land forfeited was massive. Much of it in the first instance the Conqueror kept for himself, but some of it was quickly redistributed as rewards to his closest followers. To his half-brother Odo, for instance, William gave all of Kent, formerly the property of Leofwine, along with the castle of Dover; William fitz Osbern, meanwhile, received the Isle of Wight and lands in adjacent Hampshire; soon after the Barking meeting, the king travelled to Hampshire in person, and began building a castle at Winchester for fitz Osbern to hold on his behalf.²⁷

The concentration of power implicit in these gifts to his two most trusted advisers was appropriate, because William intended them to act as his regents. Although just a few weeks had elapsed since the start of his reign, the new king wanted to return to Normandy. In March he travelled to Pevensey, where he had landed his troops the previous September. Now, barely six months later, he was ready to let them leave. Substantial numbers of knights and soldiers remained to guard England in his absence, but the majority were paid off at this point, rewarded for their role in his mighty victory.

Also assembled at Pevensey by the king’s command were a crowd of high-ranking Englishmen: Archbishop Stigand, Edgar Ætheling and earls Eadwine and Morcar are the most notable names. ‘Those whose loyalty and power he particularly suspected’, as Poitiers describes them, were to join William for his homecoming, ‘so that during his absence no revolt instigated by them might break out, and the general populace, deprived of their leaders, would be less capable of rebellion’. They were, in other words, hostages, which is what the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle calls them, and indeed is a word that Poitiers himself found impossible to avoid. But although these men were held ‘almost as hostages’, we are assured that ‘they were not led about as captives, but accompanied their lord the king in his retinue, so as to have greater favour and honour’.²⁸

Thus the Conqueror, accompanied by victorious Frenchmen and vanquished Englishmen, returned home. For William of Poitiers, this was a culminating moment, and he misses no trick in describing it: the weather was unseasonably bright and sunny; the crossing of the Channel was made easy by a favourable wind and tide. For several pages we are treated to an extended comparison of William with Julius Caesar, much to the king’s advantage and to Caesar’s detriment. Hence when we are told that the Norman ships were fitted with new white sails for their return journey, after the fashion of the conquering fleets of antiquity, we might suspect that fact is shading into fable. Nevertheless, we can believe our source when he tells us that the strict observances of Lent were forgotten that spring, and everyone in Normandy behaved as if it were a time of high festival. Wherever William went, people from remote parts crowded to see him; in his principal city of Rouen, men, women and children shouted out his name. The churches of Normandy were showered with precious objects generously donated by their English counterparts. The duke, now a king, was reunited with his consort, now a queen, and the rest of the family and friends he had left behind. When he celebrated Easter at Fécamp, William was surrounded by not only a crowd of bishops and abbots from Normandy, but also a delegation of nobles from neighbouring France. All gazed in awe at the new king and his entourage, decked out in their clothes encrusted with gold, accompanied by their handsome, long-haired English guests. At the banquet that followed the Easter service, they drank only from horns gilded at both ends, or goblets of silver and gold.²⁹

Such is the picture that Poitiers paints of his master’s return: exaggerated in places, airbrushed in others, but overall capturing brilliantly the exultation of a duke and a duchy whose fortunes had been in every sense transformed by his astonishing victory. ‘Nothing which ought to have been done in celebration of such honour was left undone’, says the chronicler, and we can see that festivities continued well into the summer. On I May, for example, the new abbey church at St-Pierre-sur-Dives, begun a generation earlier, was consecrated on William’s orders and in his presence, and a similar ceremony followed at Jumièges on 1 July. At some other point during the summer the king visited Caen, and his own foundation of St Stephen’s, bringing gifts so precious ‘that they deserve to be remembered until the end of time’. ‘A light of unaccustomed serenity seemed suddenly to have dawned upon the province’, says Poitiers; William ‘spent that summer and autumn, and part of winter, on this side of the sea, devoting all his time to love of his native land’.³⁰

But the onset of winter brought ominous intelligence from the other side of the Channel: an English conspiracy to kill the Norman occupiers and undo the recent Conquest.

The Godwine family, it seems, were planning another comeback.