20

The Green Tree

Towards the end of the Life of King Edward, the author describes how the sleeping Confessor had woken on his deathbed and described to those around him a vivid dream. In this dream, two monks whom he had known during his youth in Normandy had come to him with a message from God, telling him that all the top people in England – the earls, bishops and abbots – were actually servants of the Devil. God had therefore cursed the whole kingdom, and within a year of Edward’s death, ‘devils shall come through all this land with fire and sword and the havoc of war’. When the king replied that he would warn his people about God’s plan in order that they could repent, he was told that this would not happen. In that case, the Confessor asked the two monks, when could the English expect God’s anger to end? ‘At that time’, they replied,

when a green tree, cut down in the middle of its trunk, and the felled part carried three furlongs from the stump, shall be joined again to its trunk, by itself and without the hand of man or any sort of stake, and begin once more to push leaves and bear fruit from the old love of its uniting sap – then first can a remission of these great ills be hoped for.

When those who were present heard this, says the author of the Life, they were all very afraid. For it was impossible for a tree to move itself or repair itself in the way the monks had described – at least with man. With God, for whom nothing was impossible, such a thing might be possible, but that could only happen when the English had repented. ‘Until then,’ the author wondered, ‘what can we expect but a miserable end in slaughter?’¹

What indeed. To judge from the tone of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, matters had improved very little by the time of the Conqueror’s death. The violence might have subsided, but the Norman takeover had left the English in no doubt that they were an underclass in their own country. William’s writs addressed his subjects as two separate peoples, Angli et Franci, and, as Henry of Huntingdon explains, ‘it was even disgraceful to be called English’. True, the Domesday Book shows that the economic situation had improved in some parts of the country by 1086: in Bury St Edmunds 342 houses are recorded on land that had been arable two decades earlier. But against this the year that followed had brought fresh disasters. A great fire had destroyed most of London, including St Paul’s Cathedral, and there were apparently also fires in almost every other important town and city – whether accidentally or deliberately started we are not told. The Chronicle also notes that the appalling weather of the previous year had brought famine and pestilence in its wake. ‘Such a malady fell upon men that nearly every other person was in the sorriest plight and down with fever: it was so malignant that many died from the disease … Alas! A miserable and lamentable time was it in that year, that brought forth so many misfortunes!’²

Nor was there much improvement during the generation that followed. The Conqueror’s hopes for the English succession were fulfilled in 1087 when William Rufus ascended to the throne, but his fears about the other members of his family also proved to be well founded. Robert Curthose, once installed as duke of Normandy, plotted to replace Rufus as England’s new ruler, aided by his uncle Odo. This plot failed, but the struggle between the Conqueror’s sons continued for many years. The story of Rufus, Robert and their younger brother Henry in the decade after their father’s death is a sorry saga of betrayal and double-crossing. A temporary peace prevailed after 1096 when Robert left to participate in the First Crusade and pawned Normandy to Rufus in order to pay for his passage. But four years later Rufus was killed, slain by a stray arrow while hunting in the New Forest (a fact not lost on English chroniclers, who observed that the hated institution had now claimed two of its creator’s sons). Henry was crowned as England’s new king, Robert returned from the east and the struggle for supremacy resumed. It was ended only in 1106, when Henry defeated and captured his brother at the battle of Tinchebray. Robert spent the rest of his life in prison, dying in 1134. Henry ruled a reunited England and Normandy until his own death the following year.³

None of this was particularly auspicious for relations between the English and their new Norman masters. Robert, it is true, had struck up a remarkable friendship with Edgar Ætheling since the latter’s submission to the Conqueror in 1075 – they were virtually foster-brothers, says Orderic. But this closeness between the new duke of Normandy and the last Old English claimant caused both Rufus and Henry, in their capacity as kings of England, to regard Edgar and his ilk with more caution. Rufus, for example, had arrived in England in 1087 accompanied by Morcar and Wulfnoth, recently released from their long captivity, but his first act on disembarking had been to have both men re-incarcerated.⁴

More generally, the struggle for the Conqueror’s inheritance meant that Rufus and Henry had frequent occasion to tax England heavily, just as their father had done, and this remained equally true after 1106, as Henry sought to defend Normandy from both rebellion and invasion. In addition, the fact that from this date Henry, like his father, ruled both England and Normandy meant that the king of England continued to spend much of his time overseas. William had spent sixty per cent of his reign in Normandy and the same figure is true for Henry after 1106.⁵ Both these trends – high taxation to pay for foreign wars and absentee kings – would persist for the rest of the twelfth century. The political union of England and Normandy during this time had far-reaching cultural and economic consequences: England was drawn inexorably into the European mainstream, dominated by Frankish arms and customs. For some merchants in southern England this was a cause for celebration; but others were left lamenting the loss of the old ties to Scandinavia. For Ailnoth of Canterbury, writing in Danish exile in the 1120s, the failure of the Danes to invade in 1085 remained a matter of lasting regret. Cnut IV, he felt, would have been the liberator of an English people, freeing them from French and Norman tyranny.⁶

During the reigns of the Conqueror’s sons the English regarded themselves very much as the subject people in a Norman colony. ‘This was exactly seven years since the accession of King Henry,’ wrote the Anglo-Saxon Chronicler in 1107, ‘and the forty-first year of French rule in this country.’ William of Malmesbury, writing two decades later, could in this respect see no change in the sixty years since the Conquest. At one point in his history he retells the story of Edward the Confessor’s deathbed dream, with its prophecy of the severed Green Tree, and feels he can only agree with the pessimistic interpretation of the original author. ‘The truth of this we now experience,’ he says, ‘now that England has become the dwelling place of foreigners and a playground for lords of alien blood. No Englishman today is an earl, a bishop or an abbot; new faces everywhere enjoy England’s riches and gnaw at her vitals. Nor is there any hope of ending this miserable state of affairs.’⁷

And yet, despite Malmesbury’s pessimism, there were signs of change. He may have been right about the earls and bishops, but he was wrong to say that there were no English abbots. Although most had been replaced by Normans, there had still been a handful of English abbots at the end of the Conqueror’s reign, and this continued to be the case during the reigns of his sons. More importantly, within the monasteries themselves a large proportion of the monks remained English, and many of them retained or obtained positions of power (it is not uncommon, for example, to find a Norman abbot with an English prior as his second-in-command). In the monasteries English and Normans were living together at close quarters from the very beginning, and although this created some notorious clashes (such as the massacre at Glastonbury) in general it meant that the cloister was probably the foremost arena of assimilation. This meant that there was also frequent contact between Englishmen and their new foreign bishops, thanks to the uniquely English institution of the monastic cathedral. Lanfranc, in particular, liked this idea, and after the Conquest the number of monastic cathedrals increased from four to ten.⁸ According to a letter written not long after his death in 1089, the archbishop eventually came to regret the harsh line he had taken towards English customs at the time of his arrival, and towards the end of his career had become an enthusiastic devotee of St Dunstan. We can see a similar softening elsewhere: when the giant Norman cathedral at Winchester, begun in 1079, was completed in 1093, the bones of St Swithin were reinstated with great honour.⁹ And when, during the latter year, another new cathedral was begun in Durham, it was a very different proposition from anything that had gone before. Norman in its scale and proportions, Durham has none of the interior austerity of the new churches of the immediate post-Conquest period. Instead, it is decorated in a style that is unmistakably pre-1066, its columns carved with the linear patterns that are so characteristic of Old English art. Architecturally, we are already witnessing Anglo-Norman fusion.¹⁰

By the early twelfth century there was an evident yearning among some churchmen to build bridges across the divide created by the Conquest. William of Malmesbury may have bemoaned the divide in his own day, but he wrote partly in the hope of mending it, and the numerous surviving copies of his history suggest that he found a receptive audience, at least in other monasteries. So too did his clerical contemporary, Henry of Huntingdon, who wrote at the request of his bishop, Alexander of Lincoln, a man of Norman descent, at least on his father’s side. ‘At your command, I have undertaken to tell the history of this kingdom and the origins of our people’, the author told his patron, a comment which, with its inclusive ‘our’, raises the possibility that Alexander considered himself to be English.¹¹ Meanwhile, the monk of Ely who wrote the Gesta Herewardi in the early twelfth century did so with the clear intention of defending the honour of a defeated people. Hereward is presented as not only heroic but also chivalrous, a worthy adversary for his Norman opponents. The underlying message of the Gesta is that the English and Normans could coexist on equal terms. Indeed, in this version of the story, Hereward and the Conqueror himself are eventually reconciled.¹²

Because they wrote their histories in Latin, we might expect that, beyond the cloister and the cathedral close, the impact of such historians was fairly limited. Yet this was not necessarily the case: William of Malmesbury sent copies of his history to several leading lay people, including the king of Scots and the children of Henry I. The thirst for such information among the laity is confirmed within a decade or so by the appearance of Geoffrey Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis. As its title suggests, Geoffrey’s history was written in French – a remarkable fact, given that the French themselves had produced almost nothing in the way of vernacular literature by this date. Also remarkable is his attitude towards the English, which was entirely free from condescension. Geoffrey celebrated the lives of earlier kings of England, including Cnut and his sons, and even wrote up Hereward as a freedom fighter battling against Norman oppression. Yet he was commissioned by Constance, the wife of Ralph fitz Gilbert, a woman of impeccable Norman descent.¹³

Perhaps more than any other source, Gaimar’s history shows how, as the middle of the twelfth century approached, the descendants of the original Norman settlers had put down roots in English soil. The top tier of this colonial society – the king and the upper aristocracy – retained their links with the motherland, and had cross-Channel concerns and careers. But the majority of the 8,000 or so Normans revealed by the Domesday Book had no such interests, and probably remained resident in England for most of their lives. Two or three generations on, some of them did not yet regard themselves as English (‘we French’ and ‘we Normans’ are self-descriptions found in sources of the 1150s); but England was nonetheless their home, and so naturally, they were curious about its past, its landscape and its culture. And even if this was not the case, they still had to coexist and co-operate with their English tenants and neighbours. Domesday, with its emphasis on those who held their land from the king directly, and to a lesser extent his subtenants, can give the impression that the English had been virtually eradicated by the Conquest, but other evidence reminds us that the natives survived in great numbers, albeit in depressed circumstances. The lists of Domesday jurors, for example, reveal scores of Englishmen who were clearly of some standing in their localities, but who do not feature in the book itself. In order to prosper in the midst of this massive English majority, the few thousand Norman settlers must necessarily have learned to speak English, if only as a second language. Indeed, some linguists would go so far as to regard the English that we speak today as a Creole created by the social circumstances of the Conquest.¹⁴

There was also intermarriage between the two groups. Historians have tended to dismiss Orderic’s statement that such matches were commonplace during the years immediately after 1066, but as the product of a partnership that had clearly been consummated by 1074 we might give him the benefit of the doubt. Both William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon were also children of Anglo-Norman couples, and Malmesbury ventured the opinion that in general the Normans were happy to wed their inferiors. They may have done so for romantic reasons: Domesday mentions a Breton settler in Pickenham, Norfolk, ‘who loved a certain woman on that land and led her in marriage’. However, since the same entry continues ‘and afterwards he held that land’, we might infer that in this case, as in many others, love was not the settler’s sole motivation. Marriage to a female member of the native family they were displacing was another strategy used by new Norman lords to bolster their claims to legitimacy – one which also conveniently allowed the bride’s male relatives to salvage something from the wreckage of their expectations. Most spectacularly, this happened in 1100, when Henry I, just three months into his reign, married Edith, a daughter of Edgar Ætheling’s sister, Margaret. Thus, from the start of the twelfth century, the English had a queen of their own race – ‘of the true royal family of England’, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle pointedly put it.¹⁵

If marriage was one indicator of where one’s heart lay, burial was another. The first generation of conquerors, born and raised in Normandy, had by and large preferred to use their new-found riches to patronize monastic houses back home, and it was in these houses that they chose to be interred. (Though there were notable exceptions: Roger of Montgomery was buried in the abbey he had founded in Shrewsbury.) But in the generations that followed the balance tipped decisively in the other direction, with many Norman settlers establishing or endowing monasteries in England and naturally electing to be buried in them. The shift is neatly reflected in the final resting places of the Conqueror’s own family, with William himself buried in Caen while his sons are entombed in England. That Rufus was buried in Winchester, close to the forest in which he was killed, we might ascribe to chance rather than choice – since he founded no church of his own, his intentions are difficult to determine. But not so with Henry I, who was buried in England, even though he died in Normandy. After his death his body was shipped across the Channel, so it could be laid to rest in the abbey he had founded at Reading.¹⁶

Buried in England, born in England and married to an English princess: the Conqueror’s youngest son does appear to have been quite the Anglophile. He and Edith christened their daughter Matilda for the benefit of their Norman baronage but privately called her Æthelic, while their son, William, was accorded the Anglo-Saxon title of ætheling. Towards the end of his reign Henry appointed a certain Æthelwulf as bishop of the newly created diocese of Carlisle, and Edith was responsible for encouraging none other than William of Malmesbury to write his History of the English Kings. According to Malmesbury, such enthusiasm did not sit well with the Normans at Henry’s court, who openly mocked the king and queen, calling them ‘Godric and Godgifu’. But it must have played well with the great majority of Henry’s subjects across the country as a whole, which was perhaps the king’s intention. One is naturally bound to wonder what would have happened had his son, William Ætheling, half English and half Norman, succeeded to the throne.¹⁷

But one is left wondering, for William died in 1120, drowning along with many other members of the Anglo-Norman court when the ship carrying them across the English Channel foundered and sank, taking with it the hope of a peaceful transfer of power. Queen Edith had died two years earlier, and Henry, despite a second marriage in 1121, produced no more legitimate sons. In desperation the ageing king sought to fix the succession on his daughter Matilda, a dangerous experiment which brought disastrous results. When Henry died in 1135 Matilda’s claim was contested by her cousin, Stephen of Blois, who was in due course crowned, but who spent the rest of his reign struggling against his rival and her diehard supporters. For the best part of two decades England was embroiled in a deeply divisive civil war – a period when, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘men said openly that Christ and his saints slept’. There and elsewhere we read of war and waste, pestilence and famine, castle-building, oppression and torture. After the long peace of Henry I’s reign, the vocabulary of the Conquest had returned with a vengeance.¹⁸

It was not, therefore, until the death of Stephen in 1154 and the negotiated accession of Matilda’s son, Henry, as King Henry II, that Englishmen felt inclined to ponder afresh the question of national identity. But when they did so, at least some of them felt that a page had been decisively turned. In 1161, almost a century after his death, Edward the Confessor was belatedly recognized in Rome as a saint. Two years later the monks of Westminster, who had led the canonization campaign, celebrated their success by translating the king’s body to a new tomb, and also by commissioning a new account of the Confessor’s life. The author, Ailred of Rievaulx, elegantly reworked an earlier version from the 1130s, itself based on the original Life written at the time of the Conquest, adding, cutting and paraphrasing freely, but essentially adhering to the story and spirit of his source. When, however, he came to the account of Edward’s dream, and the prophecy of the Green Tree, he rejected the pessimistic interpretations of previous writers, and insteadsupplied his own reading which argued that the prophecy had finally been fulfilled.¹⁹

In Ailred’s version, what had been a holy mystery is transformed into a historical metaphor. The tree divided from its trunk, he explained, represented the kingdom divided from its royal family, and the trunk carried off for three furlongs signified the reigns of Harold and the two Williams, none of whom had been directly linked to the Confessor’s line. But when Henry I had chosen Edith as his queen, Ailred continued, the tree and its trunk were reunited. The tree had pushed forth new leaves in the shape of their daughter, Matilda, and finally borne fruit in the form of Matilda’s son, Henry II. ‘Our Henry’, as Ailred calls him, ‘is a cornerstone joining both peoples. Now without doubt England has a king of the race of the English.’²⁰

This was part wishful thinking, part propagandist nonsense. Henry may have been Matilda’s son, but she herself was only one-eighth English, and her second husband – Henry’s father – had been Geoffrey Plantagenet, count of Anjou. The new ‘king of the race of the English’ had been born in Le Mans and brought up on the Continent. Two years before his accession he had married Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose inheritance had made her new husband the ruler of a huge swathe of south-western France, and this, combined with his own ancestral titles, meant that Henry’s empire stretched from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees. Inevitably, therefore, the new king spent even more time on the Continent than his namesake grandfather, and when he came to be buried it was at the abbey of Fontevraud, in his father’s county of Anjou.²¹

And yet, despite all his personal disqualifications, there is little doubt that, when it came to healing the breach of the Conquest, Henry’s reign was a watershed moment. It was during this period that England’s ancient laws, altered and amended on account of the Norman preoccupation with land, were finally codified and committed to writing, becoming ‘the Common Law’.²² At the same time, the king’s legal reforms strengthened the power of the Old English shire courts and undermined the private baronial courts that the first generation of conquerors had intruded. By the 1170s English had clearly become a language spoken by all classes, whatever their ancestry: we find bishops and knights of French extraction who were demonstrably bilingual (including, in the latter case, one of the killers of Archbishop Thomas Becket). And, a century on from 1066, the intermarriage that had occurred from the start had blurred the lines of national identity. ‘In the present day’ wrote Richard fitz Nigel, the treasurer of the Exchequer, in the late 1170s, ‘the races have become so fused that it can scarcely be discerned who is English and who is Norman.’²³

Only at the extremes of society was the distinction still obvious. As fitz Nigel observed, you could tell a person was English if they happened to be an unfree peasant; at that level, clearly, there had been much less intermingling. Perhaps because of this association of Englishness with baseness, those at the opposite end of the social spectrum still hesitated to identify wholeheartedly with England: ‘You English are too timid’, remarked Henry II’s son and successor, Richard the Lionheart, to some of his troops in 1194, implying that he himself was neither. At the end of the twelfth century, the upper echelons of the aristocracy in many cases still had lands in Normandy and would often accompany the king during his frequent foreign absences. Besides his celebrated activities in the Holy Land, Richard spent almost all of his reign on the Continent, defending the extensive demesne that he had inherited from his parents.²⁴

The Lionheart’s untimely death from a crossbow bolt in 1199 was thus of crucial significance, for it led to the succession of his younger brother, the famously inept King John, during whose reign most of the Continental empire was lost, including the duchy of Normandy. After 1204, no baron in England, no matter how proud his pedigree, could regard his links with Normandy as anything other than historic. In one respect John recognized this new reality, dropping the Angli et Franci formula from his writs and charters, implicitly admitting that all his subjects ought now to be regarded as English. But for the rest of his reign he struggled to recover his lost inheritance, demanding overseas military service from his subjects and taxing them harder than any of his forebears. As a consequence he succeeded in creating a sense of common identity in England of a kind not seen since before the Conquest, as men of all degrees came together to resist the power of the Crown. The result was Magna Carta, the charter of liberties extracted from John in 1215, a document which has been described as ‘the classic statement of regnal solidarity’.²⁵

If we follow Ailred of Rievaulx’s interpretation of the Green Tree prophecy, with the stump as England and the trunk as its royal family, then it took two more generations before the pair were properly reunited. In the mid-1230s, King John’s son, Henry III, became intensely devoted to the cult of Edward the Confessor. In the decades that followed he would decorate his palaces with images of the sainted king, commission books about him, and arrange the rhythms of the royal court around the celebration of his two annual festivals. His single greatest achievement was to rebuild Westminster Abbey, replacing the Confessor’s Romanesque church with the great Gothic edifice that still stands today. And, in 1239, when Henry came to christen his firstborn son, he rejected the names of his Norman forebears and called the boy Edward. As the adult Edward I, he would be the first king of England since the Conquest to bear an English name, speak English and lead a united English people.²⁶

If, on the other hand, we disregard Ailred, and see the tree simply as the kingdom traumatized by the Conquest, then its restoration should come earlier: if not by the 1170s then certainly by the time of Magna Carta. The Charter, so far as we can tell, was not issued in English – official documents had to wait another generation for that development – but by 1215 English was already making a comeback as a language of literature.²⁷

It was not the same English that had been spoken before the Conquest, because it was not the same England. The tree had not been restored to its former self. Much of it, indeed, was barely recognizable, for a wholly new stock had been grafted on to the severed trunk. England’s aristocracy, its attitudes and its architecture had all been transformed by the coming of the Normans. The body of the tree, too, had in places been twisted into new forms: the laws of the kingdom, its language, its customs and institutions – these were clearly not the same as they had been before. Even so, anyone looking at these institutions could see in a second that their origins were English. England was everywhere studded with castles, but it was still a land of shires, hundreds, hides and boroughs. The branches were new but the roots remained ancient. The tree had survived the trauma by becoming a hybrid. Against all expectations, its sap was once again rising.