14

Aftershocks

As the year 1069 drew to a close, and with the countryside all around him still smouldering, the Conqueror left his army in camp and went to keep Christmas in York. After the recent waves of violence, and particularly the uncontrollable fire started by the Norman garrisons in September, there can have been few buildings in the city left standing. The cathedral church of York Minster was in a terrible state, ‘completely laid waste and burnt down’, in the words of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, its ornaments and documents, according to a later writer, either lost or destroyed. Yet it was almost certainly in the church’s charred remains that William, to quote OrdericVitalis, ‘celebrated the birth of our Saviour’. He was also, of course, celebrating the third anniversary of his own coronation, and this coincidence was not allowed to pass unnoticed. As Orderic explains, at some point during the fighting the king had sent to Winchester for his crown and regalia, and he wore them both in York that Christmas. His northern subjects, so fickle of late in their loyalty, were being reminded that William’s authority was not based simply on overwhelming military might; he was also their legitimate king, anointed by the Holy Church, chosen by God.¹

The military might was nevertheless rapidly reapplied. Soon after Christmas William learned the location of some of the English rebel leaders and set out to confront them. When they in turn fled he pursued them across the unforgiving landscape of North Yorkshire, ‘forcing his way through trackless wastes, over ground so rough that he was frequently compelled to go on foot’. At length he came to the banks of the River Tees, where he camped his army for a fortnight, during which time there were significant submissions. Some prominent rebels, says Orderic, appeared in person and swore an oath of fealty; Earl Gospatric stayed away but swore through proxies. Others, such as Mærleswein and Edgar Ætheling, evidently fled further north, eventually finding their way back to Scotland. It is not entirely clear whether the king himself followed them, but, according to Simeon of Durham, his army ‘spread over all the places between the Tees and the Tyne’. Everywhere they went, though, the Normans ‘found only one continued solitude’. The people of Durham had fled to the woods and the mountains; they had heard about Yorkshire’s terrible fate.²

Towards the end of January 1070, therefore, William decided to abandon the hunt. Returning to York he spent some time rebuilding the castles and re-establishing order, before setting off to deal with the remaining rebels in Mercia. Orderic says simply that he suppressed the risings there ‘with royal power’, but we can safely infer that more harrying occurred: the Domesday Book shows a dramatic drop in values for the counties along the Welsh border. The rebel siege of Shrewsbury was raised and more new castles were constructed at Chester and Stafford. All of this must have taken several weeks, and so it must have been well into March before the king reached Salisbury, at which point his troops were finally dismissed.³

After almost two years of fighting, the English revolt was over. Thousands, probably tens of thousands, had died – the total figure will forever remain unknown, but it must have been far in excess of the death toll at Hastings. The English themselves, of course, had suffered appallingly, cut down in battle or killed indiscriminately as part of the brutal process of repression. Many more had been condemned to a slower death because of the Harrying, and would continue to perish from hunger for months to come. ‘In this year there was great famine’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1070, passing over in silence the fact that much of it had been artificially induced.⁴

It is important to recognize, however, that for the Normans too these had been terrible days. They had also fallen in battle, or been massacred in great numbers when their castles were overrun. They too had experienced horrendous conditions. Consider, for example, the description of the Conqueror’s march from York to Chester during the early weeks of 1070 given by Orderic Vitalis:

He pushed on with determination along a road no horseman had attempted before, over steep mountains and precipitous valleys, through rivers and rushing streams and deep abysses. As they stumbled along the path they were lashed with rain and hail. Sometimes all were obliged to feed on horses which had perished in the bogs.

For some of the king’s followers this proved too much to stomach. Even before they had set out for Chester,

The men of Anjou, Brittany and Maine complained loudly that they were grievously burdened with intolerable duties, and repeatedly asked the king to discharge them from his service. They urged in defence of their conduct that they could not obey a lord who went from one hazard to the next and commanded them to do the impossible.

Orderic is clearly copying William of Poitiers here – witness the telltale attempt to blame this dissent on the non-Norman elements in the army. Yet the fact that Poitiers felt compelled to include it at all is highly significant, for it implies a protest so serious that not even the Conqueror’s principal apologist felt able to sweep it under the carpet. During the winter of 1069―70 conditions in William’s army were clearly so bad that there appears to have been something approaching a mutiny; there was certainly widespread desertion, because we are later told that the king ‘counted any who chose to desert him as idle cowards and weaklings’. As before, there was only one inducement that William could offer to the waverers. ‘He promised that the victors should enjoy rest when their great labours were over, assuring them that they could not hope to win rewards without toil.’⁵

Some may have wanted land, and the king had plenty to spare. A few English rebels, such as Gospatric, had submitted in January and had their estates restored. But many more had been killed or exiled, which meant there had been a new round of confiscations. Those who lost their lands at this point probably included Edgar Ætheling, and certainly his fellow exile Mærleswein, whose estates were transferred en bloc to a Norman called Ralph Pagnell. Other Normans who received lands around this time included William de Percy, who was active in restoring order to Yorkshire after the rebellion, and Hugh fitz Baldric, who became the county’s new sheriff.⁶

Yet not everyone can have been rewarded with land, nor can everyone have wanted it. Even the hardiest and hungriest of Normans might have thought twice about accepting estates on such a wild and desolate frontier, and having to wonder whether each day might bring a new English rising or Danish invasion. By the end of the campaign, many of William’s troops would doubtless have preferred to receive the kind of reward they could carry back home to the Continent. Here, however, there seems to have been more of a problem. Land may have been superabundant, but money and other moveable wealth was in short supply. This was hardly surprising, given the huge amount that had already been extracted since 1066 in the form of tribute and taxes. Getting more by such methods was clearly going to be difficult: in many areas of the country the economy had been completely devastated. And yet, at the same time, mercenaries must be paid.

The solution, it seems, was the eleventh-century equivalent of a raid on the bank. As John of Worcester explains, precisely because of the ravaging and violence, many rich Englishmen had secreted their money in monasteries – the assumption being, of course, that valuables would be safer in such theoretically inviolable spaces. But during Lent (i.e. after 17 February 1070) the king ‘ordered that the monasteries all over England be searched, and that the wealth deposited in them be seized and taken to his treasury’. (The idea, we are told, was the brainchild of William fitz Osbern.) The twelfth-century chronicler at Abingdon Abbey relates much the same story, but explains that it was not just the secular stashes that were confiscated. ‘In addition, very many precious goods which could be found within the monks’ precinct – a wealth of gold and silver, vestments, books, and vessels of diverse types, assigned to the use and honour of the church – were indiscriminately taken away.’ There can be little doubt, given the timing of the raid, that this loot became the ‘lavish rewards’ distributed to the king’s troops when they were dismissed at Salisbury a short while later. Such expedients, while they solved the immediate problem of mercenary expectations, can hardly have done much to improve relations between the conquerors and the conquered.⁷

At Easter 1070 William was crowned for a second time. The ceremony, which on this occasion took place in Winchester, passed without any reported hitches, and was designed, like the recent crown-wearing in York, to provide an emphatic statement of the Conqueror’s legitimacy. Some time earlier, the king had petitioned his friend and supporter, Pope Alexander, for assistance in bolstering his rule, and Alexander had responded by sending to England a legation composed of two cardinals and a bishop. It was these men, explains Orderic Vitalis, who solemnly re-crowned William that Easter, underscoring his position as the pope’s most cherished son.⁸

A new coronation was not the only reason for the cardinals’ visit; another was the Normans’ pressing need for atonement. Even by the competitive standards of the eleventh century, the king and his fellow warriors had been responsible for spilling an exceptionally large amount of blood. Indeed, it seems possible that some of the opposition the Conqueror faced during the campaign of 1069–70 might have been due not merely to physical hardship but also to moral objections. Orderic Vitalis names at least one Norman who returned home at this point declining to have any further part in the Conquest, and chronicle accounts of the Harrying suggest that, even in an age familiar with such atrocities, the scale of the human suffering was felt by some to be shocking.⁹

William was acutely conscious of such criticism and the need to diffuse it. At an earlier stage in the Conquest, probably on the occasion of his victorious homecoming at Easter 1067, the bishops of Normandy had instituted a set of penances for those who had participated in the Hastings campaign; they survive in a fascinating document known today as the Penitential Ordinance. Since this was a highly unusual measure, and the Conqueror’s control over the Norman Church is well established, we can reasonably assume that he personally approved it, and regard it as a reflection of his ongoing desire to have his actions seen as legitimate.¹⁰

In general the penances imposed by the Ordinance seem fairly heavy: ‘Anyone who knows that he killed a man in the great battle must do one year’s penance for each man he killed … Anyone who wounded a man, and does not know whether he killed him or not, must do penance for forty days for each man he struck’: by these reckonings the more practised warriors in William’s army were going to be doing penance for an extremely long time. There were, however, other clauses designed to lighten the burden in certain circumstances. Archers, for example, who could not possibly know how many they killed or wounded, were permitted to do penance for three Lents. In fact, as another clause made clear, anyone unable to recall his precise body count could, at the discretion of his local bishop, do penance for one day a week for the rest of his life; alternatively, he could redeem his sin by either endowing or building a church. This last, of course, was the option chosen by William himself. At some point in the early years of the Conquest, the king caused Battle Abbey to be founded on the site of the field of Hastings, its purpose both to commemorate the victory and atone for the bloodshed.¹¹

The provisions of the Ordinance also extended into the post-Hastings period, acknowledging that William’s men may have faced resistance when looking for food, but imposing stiffer penances for those who killed while in pursuit of plunder. The cut-off point was the coronation: any killings carried out thereafter were deemed to be regular homicides, wilfully committed, and hence subject to regular (i.e. stricter) penalties. But once again there was an exception: the same special penances would apply even after the coronation, if any of those killed were in arms against the king. This, of course, meant that the Penitential Ordinance, although probably drafted in the months after Hastings, could also cover the years of violence that had followed, and the fact that it survives only in English sources in connection with the papal legation of 1070 strongly suggests that it was confirmed or reissued at this point – again, doubtless on the express orders of the king.¹²

The principal reason for the legates’ visit, however, was neither legitimization nor atonement but reform. ‘They took part in much business up and down the country, as they found needful in regions which lacked ecclesiastical order and discipline’, says Orderic Vitalis. The lax state of the English Church had been one of the main arguments put forward by William to secure papal support for the Conquest, so it was hardly surprising to find the legates engaged in such work. In one sense this was simply a policy intended from the outset, delayed by the years of rebellion.

At the same time, the rebellion itself clearly influenced the nature of the reform that was undertaken. At the start of his reign the Conqueror had promised to uphold established law and custom, and had confirmed the majority of his subjects in their lands and titles. But if the period 1068–70 had proved one thing, it was that Englishmen could not be trusted. Time and again William had forgiven certain individuals, only to have them rebel again once his back was turned. With laymen he was able to take a tough line by confiscating their estates and thus depriving them of their place in society, but with churchmen the task was not so simple. The most recalcitrant clergy had already removed themselves, either by dying in battle or fleeing into exile, while a few others appear to have been subject to summary sentences – most notably Æthelric, the former bishop of Durham, and his brother, Æthelwine, the sitting bishop, respectively arrested and outlawed during the summer of 1069, presumably for having supported the northern rebels.¹³ But kings could not simply start deposing and replacing senior churchmen, however culpable or untrustworthy they seemed.

Papal legates, on the other hand, could. Soon after Easter, in a specially convened council at Winchester, reform of the English Church began with the dismissal of Archbishop Stigand. In many respects, of course, it was surprising that Stigand had not been removed sooner. He was, after all, the Godwine candidate for Canterbury, uncanonically installed in 1052 after the flight of his Norman predecessor, Robert of Jumièges, and this indeed formed part of the charge sheet against him at Winchester. The other main plank of the prosecution’s case – one which was impossible to contest – was pluralism: despite his promotion to Canterbury, Stigand had continued to serve as bishop of Winchester. Since he had already been excommunicated on these grounds by the pope it can hardly have been a surprise that he was in due course deposed by the legates. His survival prior to this point was probably due to the wealth and influence attributed to him by William of Poitiers, and also his advanced years: a career that had started in 1020 could not have been expected in 1066 to last very much longer. By 1070, however, William had clearly grown tired of waiting for the inevitable and had abandoned any pretence of deferring to English sentiment: the archbishop was an embarrassment and therefore had to go.¹⁴

But Stigand was far from being the only casualty. Either in the same council at Winchester, or else during a second synod held a few weeks later at Windsor, three other English bishops were similarly expelled from office. In the case of Leofwine, bishop of Lichfield, we know that part of the case against him was a charge of ‘carnal incontinence’: he had a wife and children. A similar case may have been brought against Æthelmaer of East Anglia, for he too was a married man. As for Æthelric, bishop of Sussex, we have no idea what the charge was, but it cannot have been very convincing: the following year the pope ordered the case be reviewed and the bishop reinstated (an order which was ignored).

It is amply clear from both their concentration and their timing that these depositions were political. Æthelmaer and Leofwine may have been married, but so too were countless other clerics (including, in Æthelmær’s case, the man appointed as his successor). The real reason for their dismissal is apparent from their connections: Leofwine was a leading light in the affinity of the earls of Mercia; Æthelmser was Stigand’s brother. What William was doing in 1070 was sweeping the board clean of bishops whose loyalties he considered to be suspect. The moral or canonical case against Æthelric of Sussex was clearly very weak, but in the king’s eyes he must have constituted a major security threat, for he was not only deposed but imprisoned: ‘kept under guard at Marlborough’, in the words of John of Worcester, ‘even though he was guiltless’.¹⁵

It was, of course, a virtual replay of events in Normandy sixteen years earlier, when Archbishop Mauger of Rouen had been removed from office in the wake of a rebellion in which he was suspected of being complicit. On that occasion, too, William had been careful to follow procedure, and the accused had been condemned on account of his supposed moral failings by a council headed by a papal legate. Indeed, if the English episcopate had been paying any attention to the Conqueror’s earlier career, they might have read the writing on the wall from the moment of the legates’ arrival in 1070, for the bishop in charge of proceedings was none other than Ermenfrid of Sion, the same man who had presided over Mauger’s downfall.¹⁶

That said, the exercise in 1070 was conducted on a far larger scale; it was not just the bishops who were purged at Winchester and Windsor. ‘Many abbots were there deposed’, says John of Worcester, and although he names no names it seems likely that the cull included the abbots of Abingdon, St Albans and St Augustine’s Canterbury, all of whom lost their positions – and in some cases their liberty – around this time. The king, says John, ‘stripped of their offices many bishops and abbots who had not been condemned for any obvious cause, whether of conciliar or secular law. He kept them in prison for life simply on suspicion (as we have said) of being opposed to the new kingdom.’¹⁷

Naturally, their replacements were Normans. For obvious reasons William preferred to promote men he knew personally, and so turned in the first instance to the clerks of his own chapel. The bishoprics of Winchester, East Anglia, Sussex and Lichfield were in each case filled by former royal chaplains, as was the archbishopric of York, vacated the previous year by the death of Ealdred. Only in the case of Durham did the king depart from this practice, installing instead a Lotharingian priest by the name of Walcher. The net result of these new appointments was that the higher echelons of the English Church were transformed, just as surely and swiftly as the secular aristocracy had been transformed by the Battle of Hastings and the subsequent rebellions. By the time the purge of 1070 was over, only three of England’s fifteen bishoprics were held by Englishmen.¹⁸

The plunder of its monastic riches during Lent; the deposition of many of its leaders during the spring: clearly 1070 was already shaping up to be an annus horribilis for the English Church. But in the course of the same year, it seems, the Church had to absorb yet another blow, when the Conqueror imposed on many of its bishoprics and abbeys the novel burden of military service.

Military service was something that all medieval rulers expected from their subjects. In Normandy, as we’ve noted, there is scant evidence to indicate how it was obtained before 1066, but enough to suggest that the duchy was moving in an increasingly ‘feudal’ direction, with magnates being made to understand that they held their estates at the duke’s discretion in return for supplying him with, among other things, a specific number of knights whenever he demanded. In England, as we’ve also noted, a somewhat different system was used, whereby individual lords were required to contribute a certain number of soldiers to the royal host, the number apparently determined by the amount of land they owned as measured in hides. Since the start of his reign in England, William had been granting out new estates to his Norman followers and also, in some cases, allowing English lords to redeem their existing lands. The assumption, based on later evidence, is that the king must have seized the unique opportunity afforded by this fresh start to define precisely how much military service each man owed, expressed as a quota of knights.¹⁹

In the early years of the reign such new demands were apparently not imposed on the English Church. Whereas in Normandy it was quite common for monasteries to be expected to provided benefices for their founders’ military followers, in England it was more common for the monks to wave a charter, granted by some obliging former monarch, conveniently excusing them from all such secular burdens. William, given his professed intention at the start of his reign to abide by the laws and usages of his English predecessors, appears initially to have accepted the validity of such exemptions.

Four years into his reign, however, the Conqueror changed his mind. ‘In the year 1070’, says the chronicler Roger of Wendover, ‘King William imposed military service on all the bishoprics and abbacies which had, until that time, been free from all secular authority’, adding that the king ‘had written down how many knights he wanted each to provide to him and his successors in time of hostility’. Wendover is, admittedly, a late source, writing in the early thirteenth century, which has led some historians to doubt the worth of his words. (There are few more controversial topics relating to the Norman Conquest than the introduction of knight service.) But his comments are supported by those of other chroniclers writing in the twelfth century and, more tentatively, by a copy of an original writ which, if genuine, can have been issued no later than 1076. Despite the controversy, most historians accept that the Conqueror did make new military demands of the English Church at this moment.²⁰

If we ask why he did so, the answer is self-evidently because he felt that such additional service was required. William may have been content to uphold the promises of his predecessors at the start of his reign, but since that time his new kingdom had been shaken by three years of almost constant rebellion. We know that during these years he had summoned Englishmen to fight in his armies, who presumably turned out on the basis of their existing pre-Conquest obligations; but we can also see that he made extensive use of mercenaries from the Continent, rewarding them with the proceeds of two heavy gelds. As the desperate expedient of plundering the monasteries in 1070 shows, the maintenance of an army by such methods was unsustainable; indeed, one could speculate that the cash-flow crisis at the start of the year might well have suggested to the king and his advisers the necessity of finding new ways to pass on the burden to his subjects. The rebellions may have been over by the spring of 1070, but the need for military service remained pressing. William no longer had a grand army in his pay, but over the previous two years he had founded dozens of new castles, all of which required permanent garrisons. Who was going to pay for this dispersed army of occupation from one week to the next, until some unforeseen time in the future?

The answer, clearly, was the English Church. According to the twelfth-century chronicler at the abbey of Ely, William informed all his abbots and bishops that ‘from then on, garrisons for the kings of England were to be paid for, as a perpetual legal requirement, out of their resources … and that no one, even if supported by the utmost of authority, should presume to raise an objection to this decree’. Similarly, and more specifically, the twelfth-century Abingdon Chronicle says ‘this abbey was ordered by royal command to provide knights for guard duty at Windsor Castle’. Of course, in some cases the heads of these houses were Normans appointed as a result of the recent purge, and who could hardly have been expected to take up their posts without investing in such protection. At Abingdon, it was later recalled that the new Norman abbot, Adelelm, ‘went nowhere in the first days of his abbacy unless surrounded by a band of armed knights … For at that time many and widespread rumours of conspiracies against the king and his kingdom boiled up, forcing everyone in England to defend themselves.’²¹

And, indeed, soon after the council at Windsor was over, a fresh military crisis erupted – or rather the embers of an old one were kindled back into flame. Despite the deal struck the previous year, the Viking army sent by King Swein of Denmark had not returned home. Their plan all along, it seems, had been to establish a base in northern England from which Swein could personally lead an outright conquest, and, at some point towards the end of May 1070, the Danish king finally arrived, joining his brother Asbjorn at the mouth of the River Humber. His reception, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was rapturous. Although the English leaders had either fled or surrendered at the start of the year, the local people came out in support of the invader, assuming that he would carry all before him. Swein himself seems to have remained near the Humber, but Asbjorn and a force of Danish housecarls immediately moved south into East Anglia and seized the town of Ely. Here too there was reportedly a great surge of goodwill among the natives, and optimism about what portended. ‘Englishmen from all over the fenlands came to meet them’, says the E Chronicle, ‘thinking that they were going to conquer the whole land.’²²

One Englishman who was particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of a Danish takeover was Hereward, known to posterity as ‘the Wake’. Of all the figures who chose to resist the Normans, Hereward is arguably the most famous, but sadly his fame derives almost entirely from stories written down several generations after his own day, by which stage they had already taken a legendary turn. The twelfth-century Gesta Herewardi, for example, contains a few elements that appear to have some basis in fact, but too many escapades involving witches, princesses and monsters to be taken seriously as a historical source. Even Hereward’s arresting cognomen, once taken to indicate an exceptional level of alertness, is not recorded until the thirteenth century, and probably signifies nothing more than his supposed connection with the Wake family of Lincolnshire. The most we can say about Hereward is that, despite an uncertain ancestry, he seems to have been a man of noble status; apparently in exile at the time of the Conquest, he had returned to England at some point after 1066 to discover the Normans had killed his brother and seized his estates. Certainly when he enters the historic record in the summer of 1070, Hereward is already an outlaw.²³

Having described the arrival of the Danes in East Anglia, the E version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports that ‘Hereward and his gang’ were planning to plunder the monastery at Peterborough (where the E chronicle was later copied and interpolated, hence its detailed description of these events). It seems that they were motivated not only by the Danish invasion, but also by the knowledge that Peterborough had recently been committed to a new Norman abbot. Determined to score another victory against his oppressors, Hereward resolved to ransack the abbey ahead of the newcomer’s arrival. Despite the best efforts of the monks, who sent for help and resisted for as long as they could, Hereward and his followers eventually forced their way into the town of Peterborough and reduced much of it to ashes. They then entered the abbey church and seized its treasures – crosses, altar-fronts and shrines, all made of gold and silver, as well as money, books and vestments – which they carried off in triumph to the Danish camp at Ely. ‘They said they had done this out of loyalty to this monastery’, says the E Chronicle with evident bitterness. Hereward and his companions appear to have convinced themselves, if not the monks, that they were acting like prototype Robin Hoods, confiscating the abbey’s valuables to save them from expropriation by rapacious Normans. It was not, to be fair, a wholly implausible pose: Hereward and his men were tenants of the abbey, and the Conqueror’s raid on English monasteries at the start of the year was still fresh in everyone’s memory.²⁴

Having torched the town and looted the abbey, there may have been some talk among the outlaws and their Danish allies of holding Peterborough against the Normans. The E Chronicle says that ‘the Danes, thinking they would get the better of the French, drove out all the monks’. Yet when the new incumbent, Abbot Turold, arrived a short time later, he found the place deserted, the raiders having returned to their ships. Turold, it must be said, was no ordinary monk: William of Malmesbury later described him as acting ‘more like a knight than an abbot’, while the Chronicle calls him ‘a very ferocious man’, and reveals that he arrived to take up his post accompanied by no fewer than 160 fully armed Frenchmen. All the same, it says little for the reputation of the Danes and their English allies that they chose to flee from a monk, however fearsome, and what was, in relative terms, a small Norman force.²⁵

In truth, Danish dreams of conquest had probably died many weeks earlier. It seems likely that on his arrival in England Swein had found the forces under his brother’s command in an extremely sorry state. Orderic Vitalis provides a long description of the privations they had suffered during the winter as a result of storms and starvation. ‘Some perished through shipwreck’, he says. ‘The rest sustained life with vile pottage; princes, earls and bishops being no better off than the common soldiers.’ This is almost certainly a borrowing from William of Poitiers, for it is clearly heavily biased. At one point, for example, we are told that the Danes could not leave their ships for fear of the inhabitants, which is hardly the impression given by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Moreover, the same account misleadingly omits all mention of Swein’s own arrival, saying only that the remains of the Danish army returned home to tell the king the sad story of their losses. Nevertheless, even when all such allowances are made, the essential point that the Danes were in trouble is likely to be true enough. In the wake of the Harrying it must have been very difficult for these men to have found sufficient food to sustain themselves.²⁶

Swein must have quickly realized that the remnants of his great fleet were inadequate for mounting a conquest: seen in this light, his decision to send Asbjorn into East Anglia looks less like the start of a military campaign, and more like a conventional Viking raid intended to recoup costs. At some point soon after the attack on Peterborough (which occurred on 2 June), William offered terms, and the Danish king readily accepted. His fleet sailed around the east coast, put into the Thames for two nights, then sailed back to Denmark. By midsummer, barely a month since his arrival, Swein was gone, leaving his English supporters high and dry, their hopes of regime change once again confounded. If Hereward and his fellow outlaws had ever truly regarded themselves as simply the temporary trustees of Peterborough’s treasures, now was the moment that they were disabused. ‘The Danes left Ely’, says the E Chronicle, ‘taking all the aforementioned treasures with them.’ The monks had to console themselves with the knowledge that their plunderers did not go unpunished. On its return voyage the Danish fleet was scattered by a great storm, so that only a small fraction of the booty ended up in Denmark, and even that little was lost to fire a few years later. Earl Asbjorn, meanwhile, was accused of having compromised the invasion by accepting William’s bribes, and sent into exile.²⁷

William, certainly, seems to have thought that Swein’s departure marked the end of the matter. At some point towards the end of the summer or in the early autumn, the king left England and sailed to Normandy. On the Continent, trouble was brewing: in particular, there was disturbing news from neighbouring Flanders, his wife’s homeland, where a succession dispute was threatening to descend into civil war. On the other side of the Channel, by contrast, all seemed quiet. ‘At this time,’ say Orderic Vitalis, ‘by thegrace of God, peace reigned over England, and a degree of serenity returned to its inhabitants now that the brigands had been driven off … No one dared to pillage, and everyone cultivated his own fields in safety and lived contentedly with his neighbour.’²⁸

‘But’, adds Orderic, ‘not for long.’ He was obliged to qualify his remarks because, once again, a new revolt was fanned from the ashes of the old. William seems to have assumed that, with the departure of the Danes, their English supporters would melt away, or be easily mopped up by local commanders like the redoubtable Abbot Turold. But the English resistance in the Fens proved extremely difficult to eradicate. It was no accident that the Danes had chosen to establish their camp at Ely, for in the eleventh century (and for many centuries thereafter) the town was an island, surrounded on all sides by marshes and accessible only by boat. With the Danes gone, Ely’s inhabitants were left feeling nervous, imagining that their collaboration would be punished with violent repression. According to the Gesta Herewardi (a far from reliable witness, but the only source that attempts to explain the genesis of the revolt), the abbot of Ely feared that he would soon join the growing list of English churchmen ousted in favour of Normans. Naturally, the monks looked to Hereward himself for help, and he in due course came to their assistance. But, as subsequent events show, it was not only the local hero and his band who responded to Ely’s call. From all across the kingdom, other desperate men began to converge on the Fens. ‘Fearing subjection to foreigners’, says the Gesta, ‘the monks of that place risked endangering themselves rather than be reduced to servitude, and, gathering to themselves outlaws, the condemned, the disinherited, those who had lost parents, and suchlike, they put their place and the island in something of a state of defence.’²⁹

One of these desperate men was Æthelwine, erstwhile bishop of Durham. Æthelwine has something of the reluctant rebel about him. Implicated in the revolts of 1068–9 and subsequently outlawed, he had fled from the Conqueror’s armies during the Harrying and led the people of his bishopric to a temporary refuge on Lindisfarne. By the spring of 1070 he had returned to the mainland but, according to Simeon of Durham, he did not intend to stay for long. ‘Observing the affairs of the English were everywhere in confusion, and dreading the heavy rule of a foreign nation, whose language and customs he knew not, he determined to resign his bishopric and provide for himself wherever a stranger might.’ But even here Æthelwine met with no luck. When, later in the summer, he set sail from Wearmouth, hoping to reach Cologne, a contrary wind drove his ship to Scotland, where he found himself in the company of Edgar Ætheling, Mærleswein and their dwindling band of fellow exiles. A short while afterwards news must have reached them of the stand being made at Ely. By this stage the bishop must have felt that he had little left to lose: his brother Æthelric had been arrested the previous year, and his own outlawry had probably been confirmed by the papal legates during the spring. The fact that a new rebellion was being mounted at Ely may perhaps have exerted some emotional pull, for Æthelwine was a native of the Fens, having come to Durham from Peterborough. Whatever the precise cause, the bishop abandoned his plan of leaving England and elected to throw his lot in with the rebels. At some point early in the new year 1071, he sailed from Scotland to Ely, taking with him a northern English magnate named Siward Barn and several hundred other exiles, all determined to make a stand.³⁰

The Ely revolt might still not have amounted to much had it not been for the simultaneous action taken by earls Eadwine and Morcar. The two brothers had played no part in the English rebellions since their speedy submission in the summer of 1068. Indeed, they had played no discernible part in politics of any kind, all but vanishing from the subsequent historical record. A royal charter, probably drawn up in the spring of 1069, shows they were still at court and being accorded their titles. But to have called Eadwine ‘earl of Mercia’ or Morcar ‘earl of Northumbria’ must have been tantamount to mockery, for they plainly exercised no real power at all in their respective provinces. Rule in the north was now split between the Norman castellans of York and the recently rehabilitated Gospatric. Mercia, meanwhile, was governed by its new Norman sheriffs, supported by the garrisons of new castles at Warwick, Nottingham, Shrewsbury and Stafford. As early as 1068 Eadwine’s authority had been seriously compromised by the establishment of rival earldoms centred on Hereford and Shrewsbury for William fitz Osbern and Roger of Montgomery; since the start of 1070 it had been dealt a further and probably fatal blow with the creation of another new earldom based on Chester and given to Gerbod, one of the Conqueror’s Flemish followers. A comment by Orderic Vitalis that the two brothers had received the king’s forgiveness in 1068 only ‘in outward appearance’ rings true; one suspects that thereafter they may once again have had some form of restriction imposed on their freedom. Whether William’s return to Normandy in 1070 heralded some temporary weakening of such constraints, or whether because, as John of Worcester has it, they feared being placed in stricter custody, Eadwine and Morcar decided to make a break. At some point during the winter of 1070–1 they stole away in secret from the king’s household and set about trying to raise rebellion.³¹

It soon became apparent, however, just how far their fortunes had sunk, for it seems that no one rallied to their cause. Since the Norman takeover the brothers had failed in that most fundamental of a lord’s tasks, namely protecting their own men. Where had Eadwine been when the Conqueror’s armies had ravaged the Midlands, or Morcar when the north was harried? In this respect their behaviour compares unfavourably with that of Earl Godwine, who refused a royal order to sack his own town of Dover in 1051, or with King Harold, who rushed to Hastings in 1066 partly because his own tenants were being terrorized. During the years 1068–70 the two earls had left their followers to face either death or dispossession at Norman hands. The fact that the brothers probably had little freedom of action in this time might engage our sympathy, but can have been no consolation to those who had lost their lands or their relatives.³²

The failure of the earls’ rebellion reduced them to the status of fugitives; the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says evocatively that the brothers ‘travelled aimlessly in woods and moors’, and at length, says John of Worcester, they elected to go their separate ways. Eadwine went north, intending to reach Scotland and the other English exiles; Morcar went east to join the rebellion at Ely. It seems very likely, judging from the proximity of their lands in Lincolnshire, that Morcar counted Hereward among his commended men. If so, the outlaw was one of the few men on whom the earl could still count.³³

The flight of Eadwine and Morcar and the latter’s arrival at Ely were probably the crucial factors that decided William to return to England in 1071 in order to deal with the revolt personally. Sadly we are extremely poorly informed about the king’s movements during this particular year, so we cannot say precisely when this happened. Nor do we have any precise account of the military action that ensued. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, followed closely by John of Worcester, says that William called out both naval and land forces in order to mount an attack from all directions: ships were used to blockade the island on its eastern, seaward side, while to the west his army constructed a causeway or pontoon bridge to enable an assault across the marshes.³⁴ When it comes to the details of the assault, however, our reliable sources are unforthcoming. According to the Gesta Herewardi, the Normans made several attempts to storm the island but on each occasion were driven back by the superior military skill of Hereward and his followers. By way of total contrast, another twelfth-century source, the Liber Eliensis, would have us believe that the Normans, led by William himself, mounted an entirely successful attack across the bridge and put the defenders to flight. There is little to be said for either of these two accounts: the Gesta is compromised by its determination to entertain its audience and to cast Hereward in a favourable light, while the Liber is simply a horrendous Frankenstein’s monster of a text, stitched together from bits and pieces of other chronicles wrenched out of their original context. Its account of the storming of Ely is interesting only because it seems to draw on the lost ending of William of Poitiers. (Who else would start their account by seeking to assure us that Eadwine and Morcar had never enjoyed greater favour and honour than they had received at William’s court?) It may be, therefore, that there is something to be said for the story that the Normans mounted a successful attack.’³⁵

The Liber apart, however, our sources agree that the siege was ended by an English surrender. ‘The king took their ships and weapons and plenty of money’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘and did as he pleased with the men.’ Bishop Æthelwine was placed in custody at the abbey of Abingdon, where he died the following winter. Earl Morcar was also held in captivity for the rest of his life, a sentence that lasted far longer. As for the others who submitted to William, says John of Worcester, ‘some he imprisoned, some he allowed to go free – after their hands had been cut off and their eyes gouged out’. The only figure of note to escape these punishments was Hereward, who refused to surrender, and contrived a remarkable escape, stealing away undetected through the Fens with those who wished to go with him. ‘He led them out valiantly’, says the contemporary D Chronicle, demonstrating that Hereward’s heroism was not merely the product of later legend.³⁶

Orderic Vitalis, when he read William of Poitiers’ account of the fall of Ely, rejected it entirely. Morcar, he maintains, had been doing no harm to the king, who had tricked him into surrendering with false promises of peace and friendship. Orderic goes on to tell us that Earl Eadwine, when he heard the news of Ely’s fall, vowed to continue the fight, and spent six months touring England, Wales and Scotland in search of the support that would help him free his brother. But here Orderic is almost certainly wrong, relating a legendary pro-Mercian version of the story that may have been circulating for some time. Other more closely contemporary sources, such as the Chronicle, suggest that even before the siege of Ely had started, Eadwine was dead. The theme common to all accounts is treachery. ‘Three brothers who were his most intimate servants betrayed him to the Normans’, says Orderic, in what sounds like a passage borrowed from an epic poem. The earl, we are told, was caught beside a rising tidal stream which prevented his escape, and killed along with his small band of followers, ‘all fighting desperately to the last’. So ended the house of Leofric, brought down by those they had failed to protect, who could see no further hope in resisting the Normans.³⁷