19

Death and Judgement

Although we cannot say for certain how tall he was or what he looked like, it is hard to think of William the Conqueror as anything other than a formidable figure. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle describes him as ‘a man of great wisdom and power, surpassing in honour and strength all those who had gone before him, and stern beyond measure to those who opposed his will’. Another contemporary source suggests that his voice was harsh, and William of Malmesbury tells us that he used it to good effect, employing colourful oaths ‘so that the mere roar of his open mouth might somehow strike terror into the minds of his audience’.¹

After his return to Normandy in 1086, however, it appears that such theatrics were not having the desired effect. William was by this stage in his late fifties, which made him old by contemporary standards. He was also, according to Orderic Vitalis, extremely fat – a condition not uncommon among medieval aristocrats later in life, as the exercise of hunting failed to counteract the quantities of venison consumed. Moreover, William’s military reputation on the Continent had been nothing to brag about in recent years, following his defeats at Dol and Gerberoy. The king may have rushed home to defend his duchy from attack, but in the event his physical presence proved to be no deterrent.²

Trouble began in the Vexin, a region on Normandy’s eastern border which had served as a buffer with France until Philip I had fortuitously acquired it ten years earlier. At some point in 1087, presumably on the French king’s instructions, his garrison in the town of Mantes went on the offensive and made repeated raids into Normandy. According to Orderic, whose account looks to be very well informed, they overran the diocese of Evreux, harrying the countryside, driving off cattle and seizing prisoners. They grew bold in their arrogance, he says, and taunted the Normans.³

And, if we believe William of Malmesbury, the cruellest taunt of all came from the lips of King Philip. ‘The king of England lies in Rouen,’ he allegedly joked, ‘keeping his bed like a woman who’s just had a baby.’ William, the chronicler explains, had been confined to his capital for some time, on account of his stomach, for which he had taken a drug. Generally historians have understood this remark to refer simply to the Conqueror’s obesity, but the mention of confinement, bed rest and medicine make it sound as if the king was physically ailing. It may have been knowledge of this, above all, that had caused his enemies to start snapping at his heels.

But Philip’s insult, says Malmesbury, eventually reached William’s own ears, and stirred him into action. ‘When I go to Mass after my lying in,’ he swore, ‘I will offer a hundred thousand candles on his behalf.’ This was a grim joke on the part of either the king or the chronicler, for towards the end of July 1087 William assembled an army and invaded the Vexin, setting fire to the fields, vineyards and orchards as he went. His principal target was Mantes, the town from which the recent French raids had been launched, and this too was put to the torch. The castle was burnt down, as were countless houses and churches. A great many people perished in the consuming flames, says Orderic, and notoriously (for several other chroniclers mention it) at least one of them was a religious recluse.

Inevitably, therefore, some monastic writers saw what subsequently happened to the Conqueror as divine retribution. ‘A cruel deed he had done’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘but a crueller fate befell him. How crueller? He fell sick and suffered terribly.’ According to William of Malmesbury, some people said that the king was injured when his horse jumped a ditch, driving the front of its saddle into his overhanging stomach, but Malmesbury himself follows Orderic in stating that William succumbed to heat exhaustion caused by the flames and the warm summer weather. Quite possibly, since he appears to have been suffering since before the campaign’s outset, William was simply beset by the return of his earlier illness. Whatever the cause, suddenly in great pain, he sounded the retreat and retired to Rouen.⁴

Back in the capital, it soon became clear that the Conqueror was dying, and all his doctors could do was try to minimize his discomfort. Orderic provides a long but gripping account of the king’s final days, which he claims to have carefully investigated and truthfully described. Rouen, he says, was a crowded and noisy city, and so at his own command William was carried beyond its walls to the church of St Gervase which stood on a hill to the west. There he lingered for the rest of the summer, suffering terrible agonies but retaining the power of speech. ‘I was brought up in arms from childhood’, he groaned, ‘and am deeply stained with all the blood I have shed.’ These are, of course, Orderic’s words rather than William’s, but both statements are incontestably true. The king accordingly spent many hours confessing his sins to the bishops, abbots and monks who stood by his bedside, endeavouring to wash clean his soul. For the same reason he also commanded that his treasure be distributed among the poor and divided up among various churches, specifying precise sums for each, and paying particular attention to rebuilding the ones he had recently burnt down in Mantes. Finally he attempted to please God by ordering the release of all the prisoners in his custody – a list which included Earl Morcar and Earl Roger, Siward Barn, and even King Harold’s brother, Wulfnoth, handed over as a hostage as long ago as 1051 and held captive ever since. The only exception to this general amnesty was Odo of Bayeux, whom William insisted was still too great a threat to be at liberty. But after incessant pleading by his other half-brother, Robert of Mortain, as well as various other Norman magnates, the king eventually relented, and Odo was also set free.⁵

During these last days the king also made known his wishes about the succession. Among the throng of magnates and priests by his bedside were his two younger sons, William Rufus and Henry. Robert Curthose chose to stay away, remaining at the court of the king of France. Yet despite this final slight and his own forebodings about the future, the Conqueror in the end felt compelled to recognize his eldest son as his heir. As the king allegedly explained to those present, Robert had been invested with Normandy in 1066 and had received the homage of its barons; such bonds could not be undone.

But this was true only of Normandy – England was not part of the inheritance, but an acquisition obtained by conquest. And because it had been won with so much blood, William declared that he dared not transmit it to anyone. ‘I name no man as my heir to the kingdom of England,’ he concluded, ‘but entrust it to God alone.’ Again, these are Orderic’s words, but their content draws strong support from the fact that the king is known to have bequeathed the royal regalia he used in Normandy – his crown, rod, sceptre, chalice and candlesticks – not to any of his sons, but to his abbey of St Stephen’s in Caen. He did, however, express a personal hope that William Rufus would succeed him as king of England, if that turned out to be God’s will.

At last, on Thursday 9 September, the end came. Having slept peacefully through the previous night, William woke as the sun was rising over Rouen to the sound of a great bell tolling in the distance. On asking what time it was, he was informed that the hour of prime (6 a.m.) was being rung in the cathedral of St Mary. The king then raised his eyes and hands towards heaven, commended himself to Mary, and died.⁶

Because William had atoned so extensively during the previous weeks, Orderic felt that his death had been a noble one. The scenes that followed, however, were altogether lacking in nobility. Shortly before his death the king had sent William Rufus to England, armed with a letter to Archbishop Lanfranc that recommended he be crowned in his father’s place. Henry, who had been promised a compensation prize of £5,000, also left before his father’s death in order to secure his share of the spoils. Since there was still no sign of Robert Curthose when the Conqueror died a few days later, the result was pandemonium. Realizing that nobody was in charge, the wealthier men present rode off as quickly as they could to protect their properties, leaving the lesser attendants to loot the royal lodgings. Weapons, vessels, clothing and furnishings: all were carried off, says Orderic. By the time the frenzy was over, all that remained was the king’s body lying almost naked on the floor.

The citizens of Rouen, meanwhile, had entered a state of collective panic, running around as if an enemy horde was at the gates and trying to secrete their valuables. Eventually the monks and clergy mustered the courage to form a procession out to St Gervase in order to perform a funeral service, during which the archbishop of Rouen declared that the king’s body should be taken to Caen for burial. But since all the royal attendants had fled there was no one left to make the necessary arrangements; in the end a humble knight named Herlum paid out of his own pocket to have the corpse prepared and transported by boat. When the boat and its cargo reached Caen the citizens and clergy came out to meet it with a suitable display of reverence, but this too collapsed into confusion when a fire broke out in the town, causing almost everyone to rush back in order to put it out. Orderic does not draw the parallel, or indeed use the same language to describe the two episodes, but the similarities with the Conqueror’s coronation are striking. As on that occasion, it was left to a handful of monks to complete the unfinished ritual, and William’s corpse was carried to St Stephen’s through scenes of conflagration.

Even the funeral was farcical. A distinguished crowd of bishops and abbots had assembled inside the abbey to lay the king to rest, and the bishop of Evreux preached a long and eloquent sermon, extolling William’s many virtues. When he concluded, however, by asking the assembled crowd to forgive their former lord if he had ever done them any harm, an aggrieved local man stepped forward to complain in a loud voice that the land they were standing on had once belonged to his father, and had been violently seized by the Conqueror in order to provide for the abbey’s foundation. Claiming the land for his own, he forbade the funeral to go any further. After a hurried inquiry established that he was telling the truth the protester was appeased by an immediate cash payment and the service continued. But the greatest indignity was reserved until last. When William was finally lowered into the ground, it became clear that his bloated corpse was too big for its stone sarcophagus, and efforts to press on regardless caused his swollen bowels to burst. No amount of frankincense and spices could hide the resultant stench, and the clergy therefore raced through the rest of the funeral rite before rushing back to their houses.⁷

Orderic, in conclusion, drew the simple lesson that death deals with rich and poor alike. William, he reminds us, had been a powerful and warlike king, feared by many peoples in various lands, yet in the end he was left naked and needing the charity of strangers. In life he had ruled wide dominions but in death he had no free plot in which to be buried, while his shameful burial showed how vain was the glory of the flesh. Orderic did not, however, seek to make any link between William’s death and his character – quite thereverse, for he had begun his account of the king’s last days by praising him as a good ruler: a lover of peace who had relied on wise counsellors, feared God and protected the Church.⁸

But no judgement on the Conqueror could be separated from the Conquest, and here naturally Orderic found praise more difficult. He accepted the Norman argument that William’s claim to the throne was sound and that the invasion had been justified by Harold’s perjury. But, as we have seen, as an Englishman he could not condone the way that the new king had mercilessly crushed the opposition to his rule. The Harrying of the North in particular Orderic saw as a terrible stain on William’s record. ‘I chastised a great multitude of men and women with the lash of starvation, and was, alas, the cruel murderer of many thousands’ – such are the words that the chronicler puts into the king’s mouth in his deathbed monologue. Orderic also distinguishes between the Conqueror, whom he thought noble and peace-loving, and the Normans as a whole, for whom he reserved less favourable language:

They arrogantly abused their authority and mercilessly slaughtered the native people, like the scourge of God smiting them for their sins … Noble maidens were exposed to the insults of low-born soldiers and lamented their dishonouring by the scum of the earth … Ignorant parasites, made almost mad with pride, they were astonished that such great power had come to them and imagined that they were a law unto themselves. O fools and sinners! Why did they not ponder contritely in their hearts that they had conquered not by their own strength but by the will of almighty God, and had subdued a people that was greater and more wealthy than they were, with a longer history?⁹

Other chroniclers writing closer to the time had similarly negative things to say about the Conquest, and in some cases even harsher criticism. While those in France generally took vicarious pride in the Norman achievement, seeing it as a triumph of Frankish arms, elsewhere in Europe opinion was more mixed. A Bavarian writer called Frutolf of Michelsberg, for instance, thought that William had miserably attacked and conquered England, sending its bishops into exile and its nobles to their death. Worse still was the opinion of another German, Wenric of Trier, who in 1080 lambasted Gregory VII over his relationship with certain rulers. Some of the pope’s so-called friends, he said, had ‘usurped kingdoms by the violence of a tyrant, paved the road to the throne with blood, placed a bloodstained crown on their heads, and established their rule with murder, rape, butchery and torment’. No names are named, but the new king of England is clearly the ruler intended: during the same year Gregory himself wrote to William, lamenting the criticism he was having to endure on account of his earlier support for the Conquest.¹⁰

Contemporary Englishmen, by contrast, had less to say on the subject, probably because it was still too painful to contemplate. ‘So William became king’, sighed Eadmer of Canterbury around the turn of the eleventh century. ‘What treatment he meted out to those who managed to survive the great slaughter, I forbear to tell.’ The chief exception to this general reticence was the author of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, whose obituary of William has been used extensively in the preceding pages. Apparently written before 1100, it provides a long, detailed and evidently well-informed assessment of both the king and the Conquest. ‘We shall write of him as we have known him,’ the chronicler says, ‘we who have ourselves seen him, and at one time dwelt in his court.’ Like Orderic he praised William for his wisdom and power, noting that in spite of his sternness the king was kind to those who loved God. Religion, indeed, had flourished during his reign; he himself had built a new abbey at Battle, Canterbury Cathedral had been rebuilt, and so had many others. With the same note of approval the chronicler recalled that William had kept great state and maintained good order, imprisoning rebels and castrating rapists. The Domesday Survey is described in terms of awe, as is the king’s authority within the British Isles: Wales was in his dominion, and Scotland he had reduced to subjection by his strength. Had he lived only two more years, the author reckoned, William would have conquered Ireland as well.

But then the chronicler switches to a list of bad things, saying ‘assuredly in his time men suffered grievous oppression and manifold injuries’. Top of the list were the castles that the Conqueror caused to be built ‘which were a sore burden to the poor’. Then there was his apparent avarice – the hundreds of pounds of gold and silver he had taken from his subjects ‘most unjustly and for little need’. Lastly there was his introduction of the Forest, with its harsh law that oppressed rich and poor alike. William, concluded the chronicler, was too relentless to care though all might hate him. If his subjects wanted to keep their lives and their lands they had to submit themselves wholly to his will.¹¹

Even this fairly restricted summary of the Conqueror’s reign indicates that in the space of two decades William and his followers had wrought enormous change. By 1087 no fewer than nine of England’s fifteen ancient cathedrals had been burnt down or demolished and new Romanesque replacements were rising in their place. In the course of the next generation the remaining six would also be similarly rebuilt, along with every major abbey – the sole exception, of course, being the Confessor’s abbey at Westminster, which had pre-empted the revolution. And it was a revolution, the single greatest in the history of English ecclesiastical architecture. Visit any of these churches today, and you will not find a single piece of standing pre-Conquest masonry. So total was the Norman renaissance that no cathedral was entirely rebuilt in England until the early thirteenth century, when Salisbury was moved from Sarum. The next wholesale rebuilding after that occurred in the seventeenth century, when Wren rebuilt St Paul’s.¹²

A similar revolution had taken place in secular architecture with the introduction of castles. Again, with the exception of a handful of pre-Conquest examples built during the Confessor’s reign, England had never witnessed anything like it, which explains the bitterness of the Chronicle’s complaint. Famous royal fortresses like Windsor, Warwick, York, Norwich, Winchester, Newcastle, Colchester and the Tower of London – all of them had been founded by the Conqueror himself, along with scores of others too numerous to list. And that was just the royal ones. Across the country, wherever new Norman lords of any substance had settled, similar castles had been erected in their hundreds, to which their numerous surviving mottes and earthworks still bear witness. Because they are difficult to date with precision, the total number remains an estimate, but at a conservative count around 500 were in existence by 1100, the overwhelming majority having been built in the years immediately after 1066.¹³ When we add to the castles and the cathedrals the disruption caused by the creation of the new royal forests, which displaced thousands of people from their homes, or the deliberate devastation of northern England, which killed many thousands more and effectively reduced Yorkshire to a desert, it becomes easy to sympathize with the Chronicle’s lament.

Some modern historians, however, would dismiss such changes as short-term or superficial. Economies might have been devastated but they soon recovered; cathedrals and castles were essentially a cosmetic change. Contemporary chroniclers might complain loudly but, living through the events they describe, they lack any long-term historical perspective. At a fundamental level, say the continuists, the Conquest changed very little.

But in advancing this argument, such historians, willingly or no, are effectively siding with the Normans themselves, for the line maintained by William and his followers was precisely that nothing had changed. The Conqueror came to the throne claiming to be the true heir of Edward the Confessor. At his coronation, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recalled bitterly, the new king had sworn to rule England ‘according to the best practice of his predecessors’. A short time later he assured the citizens of London that their laws would remain as they had been in the Confessor’s day. And then, of course, there was the Domesday Book, which made every new Norman landowner the legal heir of one or more English predecessor, taking as its baseline ‘the day on which King Edward was alive and dead’.

But this was all a fiction. In reality, William had succeeded not Edward but Harold, and to do so he had fought the Battle of Hastings, one of the bloodiest encounters in European history. Yet nowhere in the official record is this reality admitted, nor the changes that had taken place as a result. King Harold, for example, is almost totally expunged from the Norman account of the Conquest. Apart from a few writs issued at the very start of the reign, no official document accords him his royal title: he is simply Harold, or Earl Harold. In the Domesday Book his reign has been almost entirely airbrushed from the record, the scribe accidentally alluding to it only twice in two million words. This was not sour grapes but rigorous legal logic. If the Conqueror was the Confessor’s direct heir, it followed that whatever had happened in the twelve months between Edward’s death and William’s accession must have been an aberration.¹⁴

The notion that nothing changed in 1066, in short, owes much to a rewriting of history by the Normans themselves. It was precisely what William wanted us to believe, such was his desire to be regarded as England’s legitimate king. And for a long time historians did believe it. Until quite recently, those who had delved into the Domesday Book emerged greatly impressed by the scale of continuity it appeared to demonstrate, with every Norman newcomer stepping neatly into the space or spaces vacated by his English predecessors. It took the advent of computer-aided analysis to reveal that Domesday’s formulae in fact conceal massive tenurial disruption. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, summing up the Conqueror’s reign, comes closest to recognizing that there was a great gulf between what the Normans said and what they actually did. ‘The louder the talk of law and justice,’ it complains, ‘the greater the injustices they committed.’¹⁵

Even if we reject (as some historians still do) the notion that the Norman settlement created a pattern of landholding that was radically different from the one that had existed before, what Domesday demonstrates beyond any question is how totally the Conquest had replaced one ruling elite with another. By 1086 the English were entirely gone from the top of society, supplanted by thousands of foreign newcomers. This transformation had almost certainly not been William’s original intention. His initial hope appears to have been to rule a mixed Anglo-Norman kingdom, much as his predecessor and fellow conqueror, King Cnut, had ruled an Anglo-Danish one. But Cnut had begun his reign by executing those Englishmen whose loyalty he suspected and promoting trustworthy natives in their place. William, by contrast, had exercised clemency after his coronation and consequently found himself facing wave after wave of rebellion. The English knew they were conquered in 1016, but in 1066 they had refused to believe it. As a result they met death and dispossession by stages and degrees, until, eventually and ironically, the Norman Conquest became far more revolutionary than its Danish predecessor. ‘In King William’s twenty-first year’, said Henry of Huntingdon, ‘there was scarcely a noble of English descent in England, but all had been reduced to servitude and lamentation.’¹⁶

From this change in the ruling elite, enormous consequences flowed, because the English and the Normans were two quite different peoples. William of Malmesbury, in a famous passage, describes the Battle of Hastings as a fatal day for England, a disaster which had caused the country to exchange ‘old masters for new’. He then goes on to outline the differences. The English, he says, were abandoned to gluttony and lechery, lax in their Christianity and addicted to wassail. They lived out their lives in small, mean houses, preferring to load their tattooed skin with gold bracelets, eating till they were sick and drinking until they spewed. The Normans, on the other hand, were well dressed to a fault, particular about their food and more obviously religious. A crafty, warlike people, they built great proud buildings in which they lived a life of moderate expense.¹⁷

Although narrow in its focus and infected with moral hindsight – the English here are sinners who clearly have it coming – in general this picture of two different cultures convinces. It was not just haircuts that distinguished the English from the Normans, but a whole range of practices and attitudes. Take, for example, warfare. Wherever we look in pre-Conquest England, the emphasis seems to be almost entirely naval. Edward the Confessor defends his people by sailing out from Sandwich every summer, and is appeased by a gift of a great, gilded warship. Taxes are raised on the basis of crew sizes, fleet and army are virtually interchangeable terms. We seem, in short, to be looking at a model that has much in common with contemporary Scandinavia. By way of total contrast, to read the sources for pre-Conquest Normandy is to enter a world dominated by cavalry and castles. Here the prestigious gifts are not ships but horses. Indeed, when ships are eventually needed in 1066, they have to be begged, borrowed or built from scratch.¹⁸

Similarly, the fact that the Normans built castles reveals that they had different ideas when it came to lordship, which they had come to equate with control over land. They strove to acquire new estates, built castles to defend them, and endeavoured to transmit them, unbroken, to their successors. So strong did the association between lord and location become, the Normans even started to name themselves after their principal holdings. ‘I, Roger, whom they call Montgomery’ is how the Conqueror’s old friend described himself in a charter of the mid-1040s.¹⁹

This desire for land was a matter of huge moment after the Conquest of England. Some of William’s followers, like those of King Cnut, had fought for money and gone home as soon as they had received it. But many thousands of others came wanting land, and ended up staying to create a new colonial society. They settled across England, tearing up the old tenurial patterns in the process, reorganizing their estates as manors and erecting castles to serve as their administrative centres. Naturally the colonists wanted to govern and control these new lordships according to their own familiar customs, and so further change followed. New baronies developed courts of their own, and sometimes even sheriffs, which stood apart from and cut across the existing English system of shire and hundred courts. New laws were introduced to reflect different attitudes towards inheritance, favouring the firstborn son so that the patrimony remained intact. Toponymic surnames, which had formerly found no place in pre-Conquest England, suddenly appear thereafter. In their determination to carve out new lordships, the Normans treated the surviving English harshly, forcing many men who had formerly held land freely to become rent-paying tenants, often on extremely onerous terms. Frutolf of Michelsberg may have erred somewhat in saying that the Conqueror had killed off the English aristocracy, but his claim that the king had ‘forced the middle ranks into servitude’ comes fairly close to the truth.²⁰

At the same time, another different attitude meant that the fortunes of those at the very bottom of English society were perceptibly improved. Slavery, which was already a thing of the past in Normandy by 1066, had still been going strong in England. Yet by 1086 there had already been a sharp decline: where Domesday allows us to compare figures, the number of slaves has fallen by approximately twenty-five per cent. Historians have generally ascribed this change to economics, pointing out that the Normans, in their quest for cash, preferred to have serfs holding land and paying rent rather than slaves who worked for free but who required housing and feeding. This may have been part of the reason, but another was certainly that some sections of Norman society felt that slavery was morally objectionable. William himself, as we have seen, had banned the slave trade, apparently at Lanfranc’s prompting, and is said to have freed many hundreds on his expedition to Wales. The ban cannot have been wholly effective, since ‘that shameful trade by which in England people used to be sold like animals’ was again condemned in an ecclesiastical council of 1102. Significantly, however, this was the last occasion on which the Church felt it necessary to issue such a prohibition. By the 1130s, slavery was gone from England, and some contemporaries knowingly attributed its absence to the Conquest. ‘After England began to have Norman lords then the English no longer suffered from outsiders that which they had suffered at their own hands’, wrote Lawrence of Durham. ‘In this respect they found foreigners treated them better than they had treated themselves.’²¹

And this was also true in another respect. With the sole exception of Earl Waltheof, no Englishman was executed as a result of the Conquest. Along with their belief that slavery was wrong, the Normans had introduced the notion that it was better to spare one’s opponents after they had surrendered. The English had been practising political murder right up to the eve of the Conquest, but very quickly thereafter the practice disappears. ‘No man dared to slay another’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, praising William’s law and order policy, ‘no matter what evil the other might have done him.’ The last execution of a nobleman on royal orders took place in 1095, and after Waltheof’s execution in 1076 no earl was executed in England until the early fourteenth century. The Conquest ushered in almost two and a half centuries of chivalric restraint.²²

Lastly, the Normans had brought with them their zealous commitment to the reformed Church. ‘The standard of religion, dead everywhere in England, has been raised by their arrival’, wrote William of Malmesbury in the 1120s. ‘You may see everywhere churches in villages, in towns and cities, monasteries rising in a new style of architecture, and with a new devotion our country flourishes.’ The statement that religion was dead everywhere is, of course, an exaggeration. Historians nowadays would point to England’s existing links with Rome in 1066, and argue that the boom in the building of parish churches had begun before the Conquest.²³ Yet there can be no doubt that the Normans accelerated these nascent tendencies enormously. William and Lanfranc saw an institution much in need of reform, and set about introducing separate Church courts, archdeacons and Church councils. Practices such as simony and clerical marriage were banned. And Malmesbury’s point about the rising number of religious houses is borne out by the figures. In 1066 there were around sixty monasteries in England, but by 1135 that number had more than quadrupled to stand at somewhere between 250 and 300; in the Confessor’s day there had been around 1,000 English monks and nuns; by Malmesbury’s day there were some four to five times that number. In the north of England, monasticism had been wiped out by the first wave of Viking invasions in the late ninth century, and there is no sign of any native attempts to reverse this situation in the century before the Conquest. Yet within just a few years of the Norman takeover – very soon after the Harrying – the north witnessed a remarkable religious revival, with monasteries founded or restored at Selby, Jarrow, Whitby, Monkwearmouth, Durham and York. There is no clearer example of how conquerors and reformers marched in step.²⁴

There is, naturally, a counter-argument to all of this. Some would say that all of these new attitudes – towards lordship, slavery, killing and religion – might have been adopted by the English even if the Conquest had not happened. But there we enter the realm of speculation. One can only point out that there is scant evidence of any strong trends in these directions before 1066, and state with certainty that the sudden replacement of one ruling elite by another caused these new ideas to be adopted very quickly. The speed of this change had profound knock-on effects, for these new attitudes were rapidly adopted in Norman England, but not in the Celtic countries to the north and west. Within a generation or two, men like William of Malmesbury were looking with a fresh and critical eye at their Welsh and Scottish neighbours, noting with distaste that they continued to slaughter each other and to seize and trade slaves. The resultant sense of moral superiority would help the English justify their own aggressive colonial enterprises in Britain during the centuries that followed.²⁵

It is easy for us, at the distance of almost a millennium, to assess the Conquest in this way, chalking up dispassionately what was gained and what was lost. The English at the time enjoyed no such luxurious hindsight. To them the Norman takeover seemed an unmitigated disaster – a ‘melancholy havoc for our dear country’, as William of Malmesbury put it. They saw their artistic treasures being looted and taken as spoils to Normandy. They saw the bones and relics of their saints being hidden from view, tossed away or tested by fire. They saw the demolition of churches which, however rude or outdated they seemed to the newcomers, had stood for centuries, in some cases since the first arrival of Christianity. ‘We wretches are destroying the work of the saints, thinking in our insolent pride that we are improving them’, wept Wulfstan of Worcester as he watched the roof being ripped from his old cathedral in 1084. ‘How superior to us was St Oswald, the maker of this church! How many holy and devout men have served God in this place!’²⁶

Men like Wulfstan also noted with dismay the sudden discontinuation of English as a written language. As we have seen, the king’s writing office abandoned the long-established practice of using English around the year 1070, for the good reason that most men of power by that date were French and therefore could not understand it. From then on Latin became the language of the royal chancery, and English was soon similarly abandoned in monastic scriptoria across the country. To take an obvious example, the C version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle ends in 1066, and the D version stops in 1080, leaving only the compilers of the E version to persevere into the twelfth century before the last of them finally put down his pen in 1154. We know that English would ultimately emerge triumphant, its variety increased by its freedom from written constraints, its vocabulary massively enriched by thousands of French loan-words. But in 1070 all that lay a long way in the future. Contemporary Englishmen saw only that a tradition that stretched back to King Alfred, intended to raise the standard of religion among the laity, was dying before their eyes. After the Conquest, there were no new vernacular prayer books or penitentials of the kind that had existed before, and so a vital bridge between the Church and the people was destroyed. ‘Now that teaching is forsaken, and the folk are lost’, lamented the author of one of the few surviving English poems to be written after 1066. ‘Now there is another people which teaches our folk. And many of our teachers are damned, and our folk with them.’²⁷

But the greatest cause for lamentation remained the enormous loss of life – the ‘bitter strife and terrible bloodshed’, as Orderic called it. Beginning with the carnage at Hastings, continuing with the crushing of rebellion after rebellion, and culminating in the deliberate sentence of starvation served on the population of northern England, the coming of the Conqueror had brought death and destruction on a scale that even the Danes had not been able to match. As the agents of this holocaust, the Normans appeared to the natives to be anything but civilized. ‘In their unparalleled savagery’ said Henry of Huntingdon, ‘they surpassed all other peoples.’²⁸

To those that survived, there was only one explanation for such suffering: the English had sinned and were being severely chastised by their Creator. ‘God had chosen the Normans to wipe out the English nation’, concluded Henry, and all of his countrymen agreed, even if they did not put it in quite such stark terms. We find similar comments in Orderic, Malmesbury, Eadmer and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The English had once been God’s chosen people, but they had strayed from the path of righteousness, and were being punished by the Norman scourge.²⁹

Most strikingly, we find this opinion expressed in the Life of King Edward, a tract begun shortly before 1066 as a paean of praise to the Godwinesons, but changed completely as a result of the Conquest and recast soon thereafter as a tribute to the Confessor.

Woe is to you, England, you who once shone bright with holy, angelic progeny, but now with anxious expectation groan exceeding for your sins. You have lost your native king and suffered defeat, with much spilling of the blood of many of your men, in a war against a foreigner. Pitiably your sons have been slain within you. Your counsellors and princes are bound in chains, killed or disinherited.³⁰

So great, indeed, is the anonymous author’s grief at the events he has just experienced he can hardly bear to confront them directly. ‘What shall I say about England?’ he asks. ‘What shall I say of generations to come?’