Tag Archives: 1066

Why the Normans invaded England–not to mention how

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The usual path to the Norman invasion runs through the invaded country and begins with Edward the Confessor–very nearly the last of the Anglo-Saxon kings. But you know what? We’re not taking that route. We’ll go through France and start with a French king named Louis the Stammerer.

Louis had reason to stammer. He’d secretly married a woman his father, Charles the Bald, hadn’t selected. (Bad prince. Daddy’s very displeased with you.) He and his contraband wife had two sons with boring names, then Charles the Bald had the marriage annulled and got Louis the Stammerer married to a woman he–that’s Charles the Bald–had chosen. They had one son, Charles, later known as Charles the Simple, who wasn’t born until after Louis the Stammerer died. 

Have you ever wondered whether the introduction of family-based last names improved life? Using only the evidence we have on hand, I’d argue that it did.

Charles the Simple was considered the legitimate heir, since officially speaking an annulled marriage was rolled backwards until it had never happened, but it was a long time before C the S could do much more than eat, shit, and cry, which is another way of saying that even after he’d gotten himself born it took a while before he was any sort of political force. That left a blank spot and Wife Number One–the annulled wife–stepped into it: In 879 she maneuvered her sons onto the throne as joint rulers. 

Want to make your own Bayeux Tapestry? You can do it online, thanks to Leonard A-L, Matieu, and Maria, whoever they are. Thanks, folks.

The brothers and the successors

The country the brothers were supposed to rule–that’s France, in case you’ve forgotten–had been beset by Viking raids for something like forty years and had been alternately fighting the raiders and buying them off. Neither approach worked for longer than forty minutes.

When the second of the co-kings died, France’s nobles installed Charles the Fat as king. We’re up to the year 884 now. Charles the Fat was the son of Louis the German, which isn’t particularly relevant but I can’t leave out anyone who has a good name. 

C the F wrecked his reputation by not just paying the Vikings to end their siege of Paris (so far, so familiar) but also suggesting they go raid Burgundy instead. That did it for C the F and the nobles installed someone who was competent enough but had a dull name but had no family ties to previous kings. That problematic DNA meant he couldn’t be real a king, so to hell with competence, after ten years they got rid of him and installed Charles the Simple, who’d had the wisdom to emerge from an approved womb. He was nineteen.

To say Charles was simple wasn’t to say he was simple minded. It meant he was direct. Even so, the act he’s remembered for wasn’t his own idea but his nobles’: He made a treaty with a Viking chief who’d stayed in France after the siege of Paris and was using it as a base to conduct even more raids. The deal was that the Viking–Rollo the Walker–would recognize Charles as his king, convert to Christianity, marry Charles’s daughter, and stop with the raiding. In return, he was to become duke of the land now known as Normandy–from Norman: the Norsemen; the Vikings–and make it into a buffer state against future Viking raids. 

Before formalizing the agreement, Rollo puffed up his fur, showed Charles how scary he was, and did some last-minute renegotiation, but he did put an end to the Viking raids on France and build a stable, Viking-inflected state in France.

From there Charles the Simple passes out of our story and we’ll follow Rollo for a few minutes, because he’s the three-times great-grandfather of William the Conqueror, the guy who invaded England.  

 

Rollo

What do we know about Rollo? Not bloody much. He lived, he raided France, he became the Duke of Normandy and the three-times-great etc. of someone much better known. And he died.  He was known as Rollo the Walker because–so rumor had it–he was too big to ride a horse. A trash-inflected web site that leans heavily toward explaining the history behind a marginally historical TV show tells me he was (or was said to be) 2 meters (that’s 6½ feet) tall and 140 kilos (that’s 308 pounds) in weight.

Well, other than weight what would he be 140 kilos in? Debt? Love? But don’t blame the trash-inflected site for that phrasing. It’s mine. I’d change it to something more graceful but I’d rather make fun of myself.

If you’re a fan of not knowing much about public figures, Rollo’s your guy. When archeologists opened the tomb of Rollo’s grandson and great-grandson, hoping to establish where Rollo himself came from (Norway? Denmark? Jenny Craig’s Weight Loss Clinic?), the bodies they found were some 200 years older than grandad/great-grandad himself. 

Does it matter? To us, no. All we care about is that we’ve gotten the Normans settled into France, where they intermarried with the local population, integrated into the French power structure, and curled up in bed with a nice cup of hot chocolate. 

 

The invasion

Okay, I’ll be honest with you: chocolate hadn’t made its way to Europe yet, and maybe that’s why William the Bastard–later known as William the Conqueror, which he probably preferred–got restless at being nothing more than the duke of Normandy, so that when Edward the Confessor died, having neglected to produce an heir, William decided to be a king in England as well. I mean, why not? Didn’t he have  a marginally credible tale linking himself to Edward’s empty throne? 

The problem was that another contestant lived closer and parked his hind end on it before William could, leaving an invasion as the only way to claim the fancy chair. 

But invasions aren’t simple, so let’s go through the steps he had to take. First, he counted up the forces he could call on–his vassals and all their knights and assorted foot soldiers–and decided they weren’t enough, so both he and the vassals scooped up mercenaries, either paying them or promising them plunder in England. Wars were a business opportunity back then. Aren’t you glad we live in enlightened times? 

The next step was to get everyone across the Channel, which is wet, even on a calm day.

Knowing we’d ask how he did that, English Heritage maintains a site telling us how to invade England. This isn’t a security risk. It’ll only help the modern invader who knows how to scroll technology back to what was available in 1066. 

William needed enough ships to get 7,000 men across the channel. Or 5,000 to 8,000 if we go with a different source. Either way, it was more men than you’d want to invite home, even if they hadn’t been the kind of thugs you’d hesitate to let in the door.

Quick interruption: The combination of endemic sexism and the English language have, historically speaking, encouraged people to say “men” when they mean people, leading to no end of confusion, but this was a testosterone-soaked adventure and the men involved were biologically male. I can’t swear that there wasn’t a woman or two tucked into the invasion force, but they’d have been either add-ons or well hidden. (Yes, there is a history that’s only recently being uncovered of women going to war in disguise. That doesn’t mean one joined William, but I’d raise the possibility even if it’s for no better reason than to mess with our assumptions.)  

Not all those men-of-the-male-persuasion would’ve been knights or even foot soldiers. To function, an army needed servants of various kinds. Nothing was automated or prepackaged. Everything that was done had to be done by hand. And it needed sailors–people who know how to keep the ships right side up. 

In addition to all those people, William had to make room for the knights’ horses, because if you take away the horses, knights weren’t knights anymore. So let’s say 2,000 horses, And all those people and horses had to be fed and watered or they’d be no use to anyone. And the humans had to have alcohol or they’d get grumpy.

Or maybe they didn’t all have alcohol, but William did. He brought wine. 

He also needed space for weapons, armor, and tempers. With all those mercenaries, you can figure that not everyone knew each other, liked each other, acted the same way, or spoke the same language, so we can pour a few regional and national rivalries into the human mix and stir in some alcohol. 

I’m convinced they had alcohol.

By now we’re probably talking about 700 to 800 ships. One chronicler wrote that William had 3,000 ships, but we can take that as a poetic way of saying “a shipload of ships.” Even using the lower number, though, it really was a lot of ships and Normandy didn’t have enough, so they had to build them. You can see little figures in the Bayeux Tapestry cutting the trees to make the planks to construct the ships that lived in the house that Jack built.

Sorry. My mind skipped a groove there. The story has no Jack. That’s a children’s rhyme.

 

What happened next?

The fleet sailed. The fleet landed. The invaders took over the country. But this wasn’t a case of one population overrunning another, it’s is a tale of one elite displacing another, leaving the people on the bottom of the heap in place so they could keep working to support the people at the top. Without people at the bottom, the country wouldn’t be worth having. So all but a handful of Anglo-Saxon nobles lost their land and William’s most important followers gained it. Job done.

How well did William’s less important followers–the foot soldiers and mercenaries–do? The details of how spoils were divided is a bit hazy, but rank weighed heavily in the process. It’s a fair bet that the foot soldiers who lived through the fighting were better off than they would have been if they’d stayed home, but they wouldn’t have vaulted up the social ladder. To each according to his station. 

So William’s key followers were paid off in land, but they weren’t given the power that in other situations would have gone along with it. The land was William’s to hand out, but the people he gave it to held it at his pleasure. In other words, he could also take it away. He’d created a highly centralized state, with himself–surprise, surprise–at the top. 

*

Following the Norman invasion from the Norman perspective has made me realize that in most of the respectable histories–at least until recently, when the pattern’s started to break apart–tales of colonization and invasion are told from the invader’s perspective. New Zealand? Start with England and Captain Cook. The Americas? Africa? Asia? Start in Europe. Ireland? Start in England. The Norman invasion, though? This tale starts in England. That may be heavily flavored by my own limitations, because I don’t read French well enough to tackle anything above the level of a comic book, and they’re more work than they’re worth, but working through the process from this direction reminds me how much nationalism and other biases shape what we accept as history and how easy it is to forget there’s more than one way to tell the tale.

So the Normans invaded England in 1066. What happened next?

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Most people who know any English history know about the Norman invasion, that moment when Anglo-Saxon (and, um,yeah, somewhat Norse) England was taken over by French-speaking colonizers, guaranteeing that Frideswide and Aelfgifu no longer top the English list of popular baby names. But what happened after the conquest to make the country cohere?

More than I have space for, but let’s snatch a few stray bits of paper from history’s gale-force winds and see what we can do with them.

And by we, of course, I mean me, since you’re not actually here as I type this.

 

Obviously relevant photo: This is Li’l Red Cat, not William the Conqueror, but you can see why a person might get confused.

The replacement of the ruling class

Ten minutes before the Norman invasion, England’s old ruling class was Anglo-Saxon with a bit of Norse embroidery. By the time the conquerors solidified their hold, most of it had been replaced with Normans. William the Conqueror had followers to reward, and the thing about followers is that if you don’t keep them happy, they’ll turn on you. They’re big, they’re armed, and they can get nasty. And there are always more of them than there are of you. So he needed to hand them goodies, and we all know where goodies come from after a war: the people who lost. 

The land belonging to most of the Anglo-Saxon ruling class was confiscated and given to William’s followers. And since land and wealth were pretty much the same thing, we’re not talking about a new, Norman ruling class.

I’ll come back to that in a minute.

 

The non-replacement of the ruling class

But no story’s ever simple. William made efforts to keep the old ruling class on his side and pretty much limited his confiscations to the nobles who rose against him. So there was an Anglo-Saxon elite that collaborated with the Normans, kept their lands, and adopted the French language and culture. They became Frenchified and separated from the commoners. English was now the language of the peasants and French of the landlords.

 

Why didn’t England rise against the Normans?

The English outnumbered the Normans a hundred to one. So why didn’t they resist?

People who haven’t a clue what’s involved always seem to ask this about the conquered, and if you listen carefully you’ll hear a hint that it might be the conquered people’s own damn fault. They didn’t fight back, did they? They didn’t have the old warrior spirit. Or their weapons were too primitive. Or–well, you know, something.

The thing is, the Anglo-Saxons did rise against the Normans. Multiple times, and some of the uprisings presented serious threats. The thing is, they lost, and for multiple reasons. 

The leaders of all or most of the rebellions were the old aristocracy. At the time, there was an inevitability about that. The aristocrats weren’t just the governing class, they were also the warrior class. We’re still hundreds of years away from ordinary people leading their own rebellions. This was a hierarchical society. Soldiers fought. Peasants peasanted. Maybe their lords drafted them in to carry agricultural tools onto the battlefield and shout threatening slogans in front of the cameras, but they weren’t trained soldiers. So for the time being, the aristocrats are the people to keep your eye on. 

But after the Battle of Hastings, where the native English government was defeated, a big chunk of the aristocracy died. That was inconvenient, not just for them individually but for the chances of a successful rebellion, because there went its leadership. 

According to one theory, so many of them died because the Anglo-Saxons were behind the times militarily. The Normans swept into the Battle of Hastings using a new European tactic, the heavy cavalry charge, with the lances used for charging, not throwing. 

So although people did rise against the Normans, the rebellions were crushed. The leaders who didn’t die fled the country. 

Which was convenient for William, who handed their lands to Normans.

Another factor weighing against the rebels was that England was a country with a history not just of division but of outright warfare between the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse

Okay, not just warfare. They threw in a fair few massacres just to demonstrate how serious everyone was about this. So they wouldn’t have been an easy bunch to unite. And for many ordinary people, peace under a brutal leader who spoke a language no one understood might have looked better than more warfare.

The church would’ve been another place ordinary people looked for leadership, but it took the Normans’ side. So no help there.

Landscape may or may not have worked against the rebels. In some accounts,they melted into the woods, Robin Hood-like, emerging to fight a guerrilla war. In other accounts, southern England had no natural hiding places where a rebel army could base itself. I’m not sure how to reconcile those two accounts. It’s possible that the land could hide small bands, but not whole armies, but I wouldn’t take my word for that. It’s a reckless guess. I’ll leave it to you to resolve the contradiction.

Or not.

 

And those defeats led to what?

According to David Horspool, in The English Rebel, the risings against the Normans were persistent and serious, and one outcome was that William the Conqueror abandoned his early efforts to enlist the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy in a Norman government. 

“The top of England’s post-Conquest society, both lay and ecclesiastical, became almost entirely Norman,” he writes.

They also led to a longstanding mythology of English rebellions, which holds that before the Conquest England was a free land. Then the Normans came and all that freedom died. 

That the Normans brought extensive suffering is unquestionable. That Anglo-Saxon England was a land of freedom, though, is at best open to argument. Especially since slavery was deeply woven into the structure.

 

A note on sources and theories

I’m drawing from two books here: The English Rebel, by David Horspool, and The Shortest History of England, by James Hawes. It may not really be the shortest–I found one with a lighter page count, but it may have more words. I confess that I haven’t counted them. They’re both well worth reading. 

Hawes’ argues that intermarriage meant the English elite was more open to new members than any other elite in Europe. All you had to be was rich, fluent in French, and willing to speak it at all social and political occasions. 

Of course, you also had to start as part of an almost-parallel elite. Entry wasn’t open to a serf. Or even, say, a free glove maker.

In the long run, this relative openness had important ramifications, one of which was that the Anglo-Saxon elite separated itself from the Anglo-Saxon commoners, leaving them leaderless. Another was that culture became synonymous with Norman culture. The Anglo-Saxon culture and language were left to people who–in the eyes of their rulers–had no culture.

Hawes says this it was an unusual pattern in Europe until England grew up and visited it on its neighbors when it became their colonizers.

Hawes is the only historian I’ve found who talks about the Normans having a technological edge in battle. Everyone else talks about Harold–the king who lost at Hastings–having just marched from the  north, where he fought off one invasion, to the south coast to fight with exhausted troops. They talk about his decision not to rest before this second fight. 

I have no idea if Hawes is onto something there. Again, I’ll leave it to you to figure out who’s right.

English history: how heavy was the Norman yoke?

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In the years before 1066, English history was chugging along very nicely, thanks, with the Anglo-Saxon and Norse royal houses at each other’s throats, as they had been for long enough that everyone thought, Well, families, you know. They’re like that. Because by then they were family, and that was part of the problem. They’d intermarried enough that it wasn’t always clear who was supposed to inherit the chairs, the dishes, the crown. 

It wasn’t what you’d call peace, but at least everyone knew more or less what to expect. 

Then the Normans invaded. In no time at all (as history measures these things) the family broke apart. The Norse became distant relatives who the Anglo-Saxon didn’t see anymore–except, of course, for the ones who’d settled in England. A lot of them had done that in the north, and the Anglo-Saxons saw them all the time but they didn’t seem quite as Norse as they once had, what with the Normans stomping through. By comparison, they seemed positively–English.

Or so I like to think. You won’t find that in any of the history books. 

Just something to break up the text. It has nothing to do with anything.

Irrelevant photo: erigeron

The new outsiders, the Normans, replaced England’s governing class (with themselves, you’ll be surprised to learn), along with its language (sort of; it’s complicated and we’ll leave it alone for now) and its social structure (mostly; everything’s complicated when you give it enough thought). People who’d once been free became serfs–tied to the land and subject to the lord of the manor and his whims. 

See the end of the post for the grain of salt that goes with that last sentence.

Some 600 years later, during England’s Civil War, people who wanted to level out the country’s massive inequalities (called, surprisingly enough, the Levellers) talked nostalgically about the time before the Norman yoke was imposed on free Anglo-Saxon England. That was what they wanted–the freedom the land and its people had once known.

So just how free was Anglo-Saxon society?

Well, it depended on who you were. Free men were free. Free women were freer than they’d be again for many a century, or at least free women upper-class women were. Less is known about free women further down the social ladder. Slaves, though, were anything but free, and although the poorest peasants weren’t slaves, their situation sounds a lot like serfdom, which is somewhere between slavery and freedom.

Let’s work our way through it–or at least as much as I’ve been able to wring out of the internet and the books I have at hand. It won’t be a full picture. So much about Anglo-Saxon England has been lost.

Slavery

In Anglo-Saxon England, people could be born into slavery or they could be enslaved as a penalty for some crime. They could be captured in war, and capturing slaves was as important a reason to go to war as capturing land was. Finally, children could be sold into slavery by their parents and adults could make themselves into slaves. Both of those were probably desperate steps that people took in the face of famine.

There was a well-established slave trade, both within England and to other countries. So slavery’s roots reached deep into the economy. Bristol was a slave port, trading with the Viking merchants based in Ireland.

Slavery wasn’t necessarily a permanent condition, although it could be. Slaves could buy their way out; they could marry out of slavery; or they could be freed by their owners. It wasn’t uncommon for people to free a few slaves in their wills. Sally Crawford, in Daily Life in Anglo-Saxon England, speculates that people freeing slaves in their wills could, at times, have been done it with an eye toward not imposing the liability an older, unproductive slave on their heirs. She doesn’t offer any hard evidence for that, just raises the possibility. Either way, freeing a slave seems to have been considered a pious act. 

Not that Christianity pitted itself against slavery. Toward the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, ecclesiastical landowners had more slaves than lay people did. 

What did slaves do? They were plowmen, stockmen, beekeepers, dairymaids, swineherds, seamstresses, weavers, domestic servants, concubines, cooks, millers, and priests. 

I’m not sure what to make of priests being on that list, but it’s very much a part of the picture.  

Crawford writes about Anglo-Saxon slave owners having reciprocal obligations to their slaves–primarily to keep them fed and clothed, but also, possibly, to train some of them for skilled jobs. They also had the power to beat their slaves–not, she says, because slaves were considered a lower form of human but because Anglo-Saxon law punished transgressions with fines, and they couldn’t fine someone who couldn’t pay, so they fell back on physical punishment. 

Is she right about the reciprocal nature of Anglo-Saxon slavery? I’d have to hear it from the slaves before I’d be convinced, but they left no record. 

HIstory Today paints a less forgiving picture. “As Old English law codes make clear, slaves could be treated like animals: branded or castrated as a matter of routine and punished by mutilation or death; stoned to death by other slaves if they were male, burned to death if they were female.” 

According to Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger in The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, no line clearly divided slaves from the “other members of the labouring classes.” They wouldn’t have lived separately, and “almost everyone was beholden to someone more powerful than themselves.”

As the years ticked away and we come closer to the Norman invasion, Crawford says, slavery became less widespread. Free labor was available to do the same work and slaves had become an economic liability. The Domesday Book, which counted every chicken feather in England so that the new Norman king would know just how many chicken feathers he’d amassed in his conquest, counted slaves as 12% of the population. 

History Today isn’t convinced that slavery was on the wane and estimates that slaves made up 20% to 30% of the population. 

I’m staying out of this. Can we say that slaves made up a significant portion of the population and stop squabbling, please? 

Non-slavery

Just above the slaves on the social ladder were people who owed service to their lords. Most of them were serfs. 

Cottars were one step up from slaves and many of them might have been freed slaves. (You notice how hazy that got? “Many”; “might have been.” We can’t know, so let’s not pretend we do.) They worked on the lords’ estates in exchange for some land they could work for themselves. It was often marginal land. 

Above them came bordars, or geburs, who are in italics because the word’s Old English (it means tenant farmer) and Old English is foreign enough to a modern English speaker’s ear that we treat it like a foreign language and use funny-looking letters. Bordars don’t come in italics because the word crept into Norman usage, although most of us won’t recognize it. 

Look, don’t ask me to explain it. I’m following Crawford’s system of italics and inventing explanations as I go. You shouldn’t trust me too far on this. 

Have we gone off topic? Of course we’ve gone off topic. It’s what we do here.

The  bordars/geburs weren’t as poor as cottars but still owed work to the lord. Some were brewers or bakers. 

Above them came the coerls–small freeholders. They paid taxes, sat on juries, and owed public service, all of which marked them as free, but they also owed service to a lord. They may or may not have been armed and may or may not have fought with their lord when called on. It’s not clear. 

The word coerl comes into modern English as churl–a peasant; someone who’s rude or mean spirited, probably because from the Norman point of view, all Anglo-Saxons working the land looked alike and sounded alike. And were inherently rude and mean spirited, not to mention muddy, and so they could all be treated like dirt.

Coerl didn’t bring any italics with it. I’m only using them here to talk about it as a word, the same way I italicized churl.

And that, my friends, has nothing to do with our topic. Don’t you just love the way I keep us focused?

Under Alfred the Great’s version of Anglo-Saxon law, you couldn’t treat a free person like a slave–couldn’t whip him or her, say, or put him or her in the stocks. If you did, you’d be fined. You also couldn’t cut his hair–and here we’re only talking only about his hair, not hers–“in such a way as to spoil his looks” or to leave him looking like a priest. You also couldn’t cut off his beard, which is one of the things that convinces me that his really does mean his here. 

Anglo-Saxon pronouns were gender neutral. Without the beard, you can’t tell a his from a hers.

The point of the law, apparently, was to keep a lord from forcing a free person into the ranks of slaves, because the hair and beard were marks of a free man. 

Free boys, when they turned twelve, had to swear an oath to the king–at least from the time of Athelstan onward–and the king’s shire reeve visited every community once a year to hear them swear.

What they swore wasn’t just loyalty, but to favor what the lord favored, to discountenance what he discountenanced–and to turn in anyone who didn’t. “No one shall conceal the breach of it on the part of a brother or family relation, any more than a stranger.”

So that’s what freedom looked like.

The Norman conquest

Crawford’s reading of the transition from Anglo-Saxon to Norman society was that the lives of serfs and slaves might not have changed much. Rural life still focused on the manor and the lord, even though the manor would have been owned by a new lord, who’d have spoken Norman French. I can’t help imagining that those new lords, given a huge amount of power and surrounded by a language and a culture that frustrated them and made no sense to them, would have been ruder than the old ones–more churlish, if you like irony. They were conquerors, and conquerors do tend to act that way.

I said earlier that people who’d once been free became serfs after the conquest, and that seems to be the general belief, but I can’t document it. Lots of things from that time can’t be documented. Be cautious about how much belief you pour into that particular juice glass. If I had to guess–and I don’t but I will anyway–I’d guess that it was the coerls who dropped down the scale into serfdom. If that’s true, it would have been a loss of both freedom and status.

As for the Anglo-Saxon elite, they lost their lands and their status, and many fled abroad. Some lost their lives in various rebellions. I haven’t seen anything that says they became either serfs or slaves. Aristocrats recognized other aristocrats, even those who were their enemies.

The lives of both the poor and the rich were massively disrupted–or ended–by the harrying of the north, the Norman response to a rebellion. The Domesday Book lists land in northern village after northern village as waste–valueless and unoccupied. But we’re not talking about whether the transition to Norman rule was brutal–it was–only about whether life, once things settled down, became less free than it had been before they came. 

To weigh against any losses of freedom, it was under the Normans that slavery gradually died out. 

If people ceased to be slaves and became serfs, did their lives improve? Possibly. Probably. But again, they left us no documents. We can’t know.

So although my heart’s with the Levellers, I’d have to say that the picture of Anglo-Saxon freedom and Norman oppression was photo-shopped.