It was the most total, complete victory that the English had ever won over the Vikings. But there was no time for celebration as, immediately after Stamford Bridge, the wind turned and William was able to set sail. He landed unopposed at Pevensey on 28 September and occupied the old Roman fort of Anderida. Then he moved a few miles north-east to the more strategically important site of Hastings, where he erected a wood-stockade castle.
What would Harold do? To fight two major battles within days of each other was unheard of. But that was what Harold resolved on. After returning from the north, he spent about a week in London, gathering more men and resting such crack troops as he had brought down from the north. Then, before his preparations were fully complete, he force-marched south towards Hastings. His intention seems to have been to repeat the success of Stamford Bridge and take William unawares. Instead, William got news of his approach on 13 October and the two sides took up battle stations the following day: Harold on top of the hill where Battle Abbey now stands; William on Telham Hill. The English fought on foot, forming a shield wall as at Maldon, which they defended with battleaxes and throwing spears. The Normans attacked with mounted and armoured knights and foot archers. As they clashed the Normans cried Dieux aide (‘God help us!’), while the English chanted Ut, ut! (‘Out, out!’)
The two sides were evenly matched and the balance, insofar as the different, contradictory accounts can be disentangled, swung this way and that. Harold’s brothers, Earls Leofwin and Gyrth, were cut off and killed. But then a large detachment of Normans were worsted and threatened to flee. They were rallied by William’s half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, waving his baton (baculus). More confusion was caused by a rumour that William was down, and he raised his helmet to identify himself. This seems to have been the turning point. Perhaps the English had broken ranks to pursue the apparently fleeing French. Perhaps the steady rain of arrows was beginning to tell. At any rate, first Harold’s bodyguard was slaughtered; then the king himself was killed, disabled apparently by an arrow in the eye and then cut down with a sword-blow to the thigh. With the death of the king, the English fled and William was master of the field – and, as it turned out, of England.
The result was the death of one world and the birth of a new. Anglo-Saxon England had been a nation-state, in which rulers and ruled spoke the same language. This now ceased and, for the next four centuries, England was administered in Latin and governed in French. Anglo-Saxon, instead, became the patois of the poor and dispossessed. On the site of his victory William founded Battle Abbey. It was built on the hill where the English formed their shield-wall phalanx and the high altar is said to mark the spot where Harold fell. The size of the abbey also tells its own story: like the Normans themselves, it dominates the landscape and crushes the nearby settlement. Even its name is foreign and French: Bataille.
But what of the ideas and institutions of the Anglo-Saxon state, with its notions of consensual politics, of participatory government and a monarchy that, as 1014 had shown, was in some sense responsible to the people? How would these fare under new rulers with a new language and new values? Would they vanish? Or would they transmute and survive?
PART II
THE MEDIEVAL MONARCHY
Chapter 6
Subjugation
William I
THE FIRST PART OF THIS BOOK traced the history of Anglo-Saxon England from its beginnings to the crisis of the Norman Conquest, when, as one contemporary put it, ‘God ordered that the English should cease to be a people’.
But the institutions of the Old English state proved more resilient and, within forty years of Hastings, the English could celebrate the English conquest of Normandy and the rebirth of an English nation. It was polyglot and multicultural and found itself retelling the Anglo-Saxon past in Latin or Norman French. But it was, finally, the values and practices of Anglo-Saxon politics which survived and came to dominate the history of medieval England.
I
William the Conqueror is perhaps the greatest man to have sat on the throne of England; he is certainly one of the most unpleasant. He was covetous, cruel, puritanical, invincibly convinced of his own righteousness and always ready to use terror as a weapon of first, rather than last, resort. He was also deeply pious and sure that God was on his side.
And the extraordinary course of his career gave him every reason for this belief.
William was born around the turn of the year 1027–8 in Falaise, Normandy. His father, Robert, was younger brother of Duke Richard III of Normandy and his mother, Herleva, was the daughter of a furrier or skinner. Six months later, Richard was dead, some said of poison, and Robert succeeded him as duke. Robert was not an effective ruler. During his reign the great Norman landed families seized the leading offices in the ducal household and made them hereditary. They likewise took over the local position of vicomte or sheriff. This last was especially important. Since the vicomte controlled the local administration of finance and justice, it meant that the duke was losing control of his dukedom – just as his own independence vis-à-vis the king of France was a symptom of the fragmentation of the kingdom into a series of largely independent territorial principalities.
Robert’s personal life was more successful. He and Herleva never married but their relationship was close, perhaps even loving, and Robert always treated William as his son. Shortly before he left on pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1035, he had the Norman magnates swear fealty to William as his heir and had the bequest confirmed by his overlord, Henry I, king of France. Robert never returned from his pilgrimage, and later in 1035, William succeeded as duke. He was still only in his eighth year.
Predictably, his minority was troubled. Two of his guardians were killed; his steward, Osbern, was murdered in the duke’s bedchamber as William slept, and in 1047 he was saved from deposition only by the personal intervention of King Henry I, who joined with William to defeat the rebels in battle at Val-ès-Dunes.
William was twenty and his victory marked his coming of age. He was now his own man and he quickly made his mark. In about 1050 he married Matilda, daughter of Count Baldwin V of Flanders; in 1051 he was apparently offered the throne of England by Edward the Confessor, and in the following year he was strong enough to go on the offensive against his enemies. These were headed by Count Geoffrey Martel of Anjou, who in 1051 conquered the county of Maine. This made him William’s immediate neighbour with, thanks to the revolt of the lord of the castles of Alençon and Domfront, a back door into Normandy itself. William resolved to close it. Geoffrey backed off from battle and William was able to pick the disputed castles off, beginning with the lightly defended Alençon. The defenders beat pelts on the walls in mocking reference to William’s birth. Once he had captured the place, William retaliated by cutting off their hands and feet. Domfront then surrendered without a struggle.
William had got what he wanted. But, in so doing, he had aroused a fear and loathing that he was never able to shake off. The immediate result was a renversement d’alliances in northern France, as Count Geoffrey and King Henry, hitherto inveterate enemies, went into alliance against the upstart. Two invasions of Normandy took place which William had difficulty in fighting off. But in 1060 both Geoffrey and Henry died and were succeeded, respectively, by a weakling and a minor. William never looked back from this extraordinary stroke of luck, which gave him a free hand in France and, it turned out, in England. He seized the county of Maine in 1062, claiming, as he was to do in England, that the late count had nominated him as his heir if he died childless. Then in 1064 he launched a successful attack on Brittany, in which, as we have seen, Earl Harold of Wessex had distinguished himself. Finally, in 1066, he won the battle of Hastings.
But winning the battle was not the