This Sceptred Isle: Trollheart's History of England

[Trollheart]

The Revolt of the Earls: Marital Strife Becomes Martial Strikes

I mentioned earlier that, having secured his position as the new King of England, William almost immediately fucked off back to Normandy, and left his new kingdom in the hands of some of his most trusted nobles. At least, he assumed they were to be trusted, but as ever in such a situation, as a famous Irish sports commentator once stated, give a man a hat...

In this situation, that could have been amended to give a man a wife, or rather, refuse to give him a wife, and it is this refusal that is at the very root of the open rebellion among his court which led to what became known as the Revolt of the Earls. Whether it was a case of love at first sight, boy meets girl or simply boy wants girl, or what I don't know, but Ralph de Guader fancied one Emma, daughter of the Earl of Hereford, and sought permission to marry her. William, very busy frogside showing everyone there how clever he was and relating tall tales about how wet and miserable England was (possibly leading those who listened to him to wonder why he had bothered conquering the place if it was so shitty) either ignored his request or turned it down. Either way, it really didn't matter, as Ralph thought to himself, His Majesty is over the Channel and I want to get my leg over, so fuck him. And, in short order, fuck her. Every night. And so he married Emma, without royal permission.

Big mistake.

When the Earl of Northumberland, Waltheof (who had been one of those greeting Sweyn at the Humber with Edgar) rose in revolt, and Roger de Breteuil, Earl of Hereford, joined him, Ralph, now related to him by blood, joined Roger in supporting Waltheof. He turned out to be what medieval historians technically term a little bitch, going ratting to the Archbishop of Canterbury about the plot, and dropping his mates right in it. As a result, Roger was held at the river Severn by a paid army of free Saxons (why were they fighting for the Normans? Didn't you see the word "paid"?) led by the one remaining Saxon bishop who had not been dismissed, and whom the Catholic Church would later canonise, Wulfstan.

With one of the triumvirate of rebels having betrayed them, the remaining two were running out of luck. Roger was excommunicated by Lanfranc, the aforementioned Archbishop of Canterbury, while Ralph's army ran into not one, but two bishops, one of whom was William's brother, Odo of Bayeux, and the distressingly-obsessed with cutting people's feet off Geoffrey de Montbray at Cambridge, and had to retreat to his castle in Norwich. Here, he literally asked Emma to hold down the fort while he sailed to Denmark to request assistance from Sweyn. The Danish king sent him a fleet, and two of his sons (again) but they were no help, and Ralph had to flee to (no, not Flanders for once) Brittany with Emma when his wife managed to negotiate terms of surrender. These included, of course, the loss of all their lands, and his title.

He, it turned out, was the lucky one.

Roger was imprisoned and later beheaded, though not until after William had also passed on to that Great Throne Room in the Sky, while crybaby turncoat Waltheof lost his during the king's reign (William perhaps, amusingly, crying "Waltheof with his head!" No? Fair enough), making him the only English noble to be executed during the reign of William the Conqueror, a milestone I'm pretty sure he would rather not have crossed. Needless to say, both men also lost their lands and titles, in addition to their heads. Waltheof, perhaps due to being, as I said, the only Englishman to be executed on the king's orders, later became a martyr, and all sorts of miracles were said to have been performed at his tomb, though as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle sensibly points out, these reports were in all likelihood ye pile of bollocks.

What's not a pile of old bollocks is that the Revolt of the Earls was seen as the last significant rise against William's reign, though it seems nobody told the Danes about that. And back to them we go.

[Trollheart]

The Return of the King. Of Denmark

To some extent, you have to feel for William. Getting on in years now, possibly sitting more on the throne for support as to prove his kingship, he had in fact only two years to live when Sweyn's son, Cnut, decided it was time for a rematch, and, gathering allies from Flanders (Count Robert I) and Norway (King Olaf III) he prepared for a final attempt to regain his grand-uncle's throne and re-establish the rule of the House of Denmark over England. This time they meant business, their fleet numbering a thousand ships, which even back then was recorded by contemporary historians as being "fucking huge".

William, on the other hand, seems not to have had much of a navy. I wonder why? Didn't he come to England originally with a shit ton of ships? What happened to them? Hmm. Doesn't say, but yes, over exaggeration as it may have been, William is said to have sailed with three times that number - 3,000 ships - so where did they go? Perhaps when he had, as he saw it, subdued England he no longer needed them and sent them back to Normandy? I suppose a navy has to be paid for, and what point shelling out the wages if you don't need them? At any rate, the accounts say he had no major navy, certainly nothing capable of opposing the combined Danish, Norwegian and Flemish fleet, so instead he employed mercenaries from France and stationed them on the coast.

In the end, it came to nothing as, rather like the projected invasion by Hitler's Germany almost nine hundred years later, and that by the Spanish five hundred years later, events conspired to ensure England's shores would never echo to the footfall of the invader. Well, other than the invader who was already there, of course, and in control. Olaf and Cnut fell out, as any good Viking worth his salt will, and the Danish king also had problems dealing with overtures from the Holy Roman Empire, leading, perhaps, but certainly resulting in his passing in the year 1086, helpfully assisted through the gates of Valhalla by rebels (possibly loyal to Olaf, though it doesn't say) who ended his reign, his life, and, by extension, the threat to England. The massive fleet had never left harbour, and William stood his army down, confident that the danger was passed.

It was, and there would never be another. Small consolation to him, I guess, as he would himself pass beyond the veil the following year, though at least he would do so as the uncontested King of England.

Note: Though there was plenty of unrest in France that William had to deal with, this is the History of England, and so I'm not going to go into that in any detail. We've probably spent longer on William the Conqueror than I had intended anyway (not that he doesn't deserve it) and we've still a thousand years of history to write about - well, close to it anyway - so we're leaving it at that.

What did the Normans Ever Do for Us?

While it can't be denied that the invasion by and subsequent rule of William the Conqueror began a whole new chapter in English history, it also destroyed forever the grip of Anglo-Saxon England, relegating its names, heroic figures, practices and even its language to, as I heard someone say yesterday on a documentary about Hitler, the dustbin of history. The Norman occupation of England would give rise to the legend of the greatest rebel and hero of them all, Robin Hood, but even the fabled outlaw (if he existed) would be unable to break the power of the Normans over England, and they would rule in an unbroken line for the next seventy years. Which, I have to admit, doesn't really seem all that long. But I guess the point is that while the actual House of Normandy would end with Henry I in 1135, the legacy they had built is still with us today. Principle among which is...

Norman Castles

It was rather to my own surprise that I learned the very word castle had not been in the English language until the arrival of the Normans, but in short order the previously-dominant Anglo-Saxons were shown just what that meant. Huge, frowning edifices of brick and stone, many hundreds of feet high, protected by high walls manned by garrisons of troops, with forbidding portcullis protecting the entrance and a drawbridge further restricting access across a moat in which an attacking army could drown or be easy targets for archers, Norman castles were the Death Stars of their day. Okay, they couldn't fly through space and they didn't launch hordes of fighters at you, but they were all but impregnable, and a single glance at the high, unscalable walls must have been enough to have had an opposing army turn away in dejection. Perhaps they could be more properly compared to aircraft carriers (minus the aircraft of course); a self-contained world which was mostly self-sufficient, all food, fuel, ammunition and other materials needed stored behind its vast gates, all but a mini-town of its own, keeping out intruders and undesirables.

One of the most famous of these Norman Castles is the Tower of London, which was begun just after 1066, and to which William had added the White Tower in 1078. In contrast to the timber fortification, the White Tower is made of stone, and of course, as everyone knows, stands today, and has been used by many subsequent kings and queens of England/Britain as a prison, a dungeon, an armoury and a place of execution. The idea quickly took hold of a castle as a place not only of fortification and defence, but of permanent habitation too. These were places armies could live in and places lords, nobles and monarchs could call their home. With the advent of the castle also came the somewhat revolutionary idea of towns, England having been previously divided up into shires, hides and other sections of the land.

William also brought with him Norman laws, such as the right to hunt. Under Norman law (or certainly, royal law) all of the forests and woods were the protectorate and possession of the Crown, and so anyone hunting there was guilty of stealing from the king. This law may have had two foundations: one the one hand, it kept the common Saxons in check and showed them who was boss, and on the other, it preserved all the game in the English forests for the exclusive use of the king, or those he allowed to hunt there. William, like many French nobles, was a big fan of hunting, and under his law many a man lost a hand or an eye for daring to trespass and hunt (poach) on this land. This, you'll not be surprised to hear, led to the genesis of the legend of Robin Hood, who, it is said, not only traversed and hunted Sherwood Forest with impunity, but made his base there, turning the king's forest against him and his officers, a Saxon two fingers to the Crown. But that's later in the story.

Although the accepted King of England, William did not renounce his French title, and so when he travelled to his home country he acknowledged that he was loyal to the French Crown (even if the French king was at various times attacking him or supporting rebels who rose against him), something, I believe - though I could of course be wrong - no other English king ever did after him. When Henry V, for instance, travelled to Calais he did so as the King of England, owing no fealty to the French throne - believing, in fact, that he should be on that throne as King of England and France. I suppose William's origins were unique in that aspect, though further down the line another William, he of Orange, did not, I believe, react similarly to the Dutch king, if he ever visited Holland again after being crowned. William also moved the royal capital, for the very first time, from its traditional location at Winchester to London, which has been ever since both the capital of England and the residence of the sovereign.

The Domesday Book

The first, and certainly most detailed account of landholdings in England, the Domesday Book was commissioned by William and completed a year before his death, in 1086. And yes, it is pronounced "doomsday", the idea being that its contents could not be altered until the dawning of Judgement Day itself. Originally called Liber de Wintonia, or The Book of Winchester, it was a record of every shire or county in the kingdom, listing each lord's landholdings, serfs, agricultural equipment, livestock etc, so that the king could know the actual value of the land and thereby  how much tax was owed to the Crown. I suppose in some ways it was both the first Norman accounts ledger and the first Royal Census, though the Saxons didn't count as anything other than numbers - nobody cared what their names were, what they did or anything about them: they were, quite simply, resources, and one could say all but property, slaves in all but name.

Under Norman law, all the land in England belonged to the king, and so he was like a "super-landowner", hiring out the land to his "tenants", the nobles and  lords who "held" it for him, thus the description of them as "holdings" or "land holdings". In return for his granting them the tenancy of the lands, of course, His Majesty expected them to cough up the bucks, and the Domesday Book laid out in clear, precise terms (if in Latin) how much each lord owed. Naturally, the more land, workers, cattle etc any lord or noble had, the more he owed and would be expected to pony up.

Oh, and in case you want to know, just as words such as "terrific" had a far different meaning back then to the one they have now, the word "doom" itself did not carry the dire and dread implications we attribute to it now. Don't take my word for it: here's Henry II's treasurer, Richard FitzNeal, writing in 1179: "The natives call this book "Domesday", that is, the day of judgement. This is a metaphor: for just as no judgement of that final severe and terrible trial can be evaded by any subterfuge, so when any controversy arises in the kingdom concerning the matters contained in the book, and recourse is made to the book, its word cannot be denied or set aside without penalty. For this reason we call this book the "book of judgements", not because it contains decisions made in controversial cases, but because from it, as from the Last Judgement, there is no further appeal."

Another thing that occurred in England during Norman times - perhaps not intentionally, but with the rise of the Norman noble classes and the fall into servitude of the Saxon lords it was bound to happen - was the rather rapid loss from history of names associated with Saxon England. As already noted, names such as Aethelbert and Aethelstan vanished, the very idea of pairing A with E given the elbow sharpish, and names more linked with France such as Henry, William and Robert came more into vogue, this being of course due to the important children being born all coming from noble (Norman) families, and therefore given Norman names. A few names did persist, such as Albert, Edward, Edgar etc., but they lost the old spelling and had to "Normanise" themselves.

But the main change in names wasn't to do with first names but last, as wealthy French families were rewarded with land which had previously belonged to English ones, and so the French way of denoting son (de/of) became more popular, with De Courceys and De Montfort, and other suffixes and prefixes like Fitz and De La. The links between England and Scandinavia, which had persisted for almost three hundred years, were severed forever as William forged closer ties with his native country and paid off the last of the Danish fleets to try to invade England, the last, as we saw, never making it out of the harbour.

[Trollheart]

The Final Years of William the Conqueror

In 1082 William had his half-brother Odo arrested. Nobody knows why, but we can probably guess. Apart from it being more or less the done thing to have your siblings arrested, tried, and possibly imprisoned or executed (or, if you were feeling particularly magnanimous, secure in your power and merciful, exiled), the chances are that the two did not get on, and that William would have seen him as a threat. Odo was also said to have tried to enlist some of his half-brother's vassals to participate in an invasion of Italy, with the idea of making himself pope. This would not have gone down well with the king (or the current pope!) for two reasons: one, Odo seconding his vassals would have weakened the authority of the king and two, probably, he already had Rome onside with regard to his rule of England. Were Odo to become the next pope, and decide to invalidate that seal of approval, it could have caused untold trouble for William. Also, had the new Pope Odo (or whatever name he might have chosen) then opposed, even attacked his half-brother, William would again be fighting for his new country, and to be quite honest about it, and to quote Danny Glover, he was getting too old for this shit.

So into a dark cell he was thrown, not to be released until the king's passing, but William's problems did not end there. Like all good sons, his own, Robert, rebelled, and with the help of the French king, another rebellion a year later by Hubert de Beaumont-au-Maine, and the passing of his wife Matilda (whom he seemed to have genuinely loved), pushed him into an early grave. Accounts of his death vary, and nobody really knows how he died, but there are some disturbingly macabre and gory details and some rather black humour attending his funeral.

Having fought against Robert in Mantes, west of Paris, William either "fell ill" (nice and vague) or was "injured by the pommel of his saddle", presumably falling on it? Yeah I don't really see how that would kill him. I thought maybe a saddle pommel was sharp or something, but I see a picture of one and it's not. Mind you, that is a modern saddle, and I'm sure there were plenty of changes in the design over almost a thousand years, so maybe. Ah, right. Another book tells me knowledgably that his horse stepped on a burning cinder, reared and threw him forward onto the - iron - pommel. Well, as Bart Simpson has said on several occasions, that's gotta hurt! At any rate, he died on September 9 1087, and that's where it begins to get interesting.

I certainly don't understand why, but maybe with the man opposing the French king now dead people did not want to be seen to be associated with him? At any rate, it's said that few people stayed with his body, each person leaving the deathbed at Rouen and "hurrying off to tend to his own affairs." If any of these were English, or Normans who had an interest in the succession, perhaps they wanted to get home and jockey for position, as was usual when a monarch died, or maybe they were anxious to make new alliances or break old ones. As I say, the body was left in France and, perhaps looking at each other and then shrugging, the monks must have found or been told of the English king's last wishes, to be buried in the Benedictine monastery of Abbaye-aux-Hommes (literally, can you believe it, abbey for men?) also known as the Abbey of Saint Etienne, in Caen, which he had founded. The king's body was thereafter conveyed there, and his funeral took place.

Everyone who was everyone was of course there, as was some wanker who claimed his family owned the land the abbey was built on, and demanded to be paid for it, saying he had been stiffed by, well, whomever. Possibly to shut him up and keep scandal to a minimum, possibly also hissing "this is a fucking funeral, mon ami, and not just any funeral - the funeral of the King of fucking England! Can't we sort this out later?" to be told that "Non, m'sieu, we cannot, because then you will refuse to pay me, whereas now, all you want to do is get rid of this annoying grotty little man who is stinking up your royal funeral, non?" And so they got rid of the annoying grotty little man, but the funeral was, sadly (and, I have to admit with a little guilt, humorously) about to be stunk up even worse.

Seems when they lowered the corpse into the grave, some idiot hadn't measured properly, and the king's body was too wide to go in. So, like all good workmen the world over, not just Frenchmen, I stress, they used their initiative and, well, forced it. Let me just take a step back and give you a personal view of how we all do this. I remember we were waiting for a taxi to take my sister Karen to a dental appointment, and I had stressed that we needed a wheelchair taxi. I had also made it very clear that we needed a large van, as she could not get out of the wheelchair, as some disabled people can, and would have to sit in it while in the back of the van. Come the day, they sent a small vanette. It had a wheelchair ramp, yes, but you entered through the side, not the back, and simply put, the wheels on Karen's wheelchair made it too wide to go in.

With no idea what to do, no chance of booking another wheelchair taxi for that day, and facing not only a cancellation of her appointment with the dentist - and who knew when we would get another? - but also the prospect of her being in pain for at least another day, I did what every desperate idiot does who has completely run out of ideas and has no clue how to proceed: I tried to force her chair through a gap that was clearly too narrow to allow such a thing. Talk about greasing the sides with butter! I nearly did. I was determined that this would not thwart us, that we would make the best of a bad situation, that I would get her in. I never, of course, gave any thought to what would happen, should I against all odds manage to force her in, when it was time to get her back out again. Oh no: I just kept pushing against the chair, trying by sheer force of a combination of stubborn will and gross stupidity, and a defiant refusal to see the truth, to push her through a gap she could not possibly pass through. It wasn't till the taxi driver put his hand on my shoulder and said "Son, she isn't going to fit" that I finally realised how truly thick I was being, and gave up, no doubt to Karen's relief, having felt like a square peg being forced into a hole which was decidedly not square.

So really, to some extent, I can't fault or laugh at or condemn the gravediggers for doing what they did, but when you step back and consider what happens when you try to force an object into a space for which it is far too small, you'd think they would have seen it coming. But they didn't. In a matter of moments though, they certainly smelled it, as the king's body burst, a smell which, I think, would have taken a whole lot of Airwick to cover! What a revolting and humiliating and entirely inappropriate end for the man who conquered England and brought an end to Saxon rule! Had those Saxons back home heard about this incident, I venture to suggest there would have been cheering and sneering laughter echoing from Land's End to John O'Groats.

That wasn't to be the end of the indignities for William the Conqueror, as in 1562, almost half a millennium after his burial, during the Wars of French Religion, about which I know nothing and about which I need to know less, his grave was reopened and his bones scattered around and lost, the only remaining relic being one thigh bone. Well, I suppose it's better than poor old Alfred the Great, of whom we have only a pelvic bone to remember him by! The thigh bone was reinterred almost a hundred years later, but the architects of the French Revolution weren't having that: the bones - sorry, bone - of an oppressive English king buried in the sacred (well, not sacred, as we don't follow any religion now, but you know what I mean, citizen) soil of France! So they destroyed it again.

A war of succession ensued, almost inevitably, after William's death, and we'll be tackling this in the next chapter. We'll see that as always, nature abhors a vacuum, and kingdoms in particular abhor a power vacuum, but luckily (or unluckily) there's always more than enough people rushing to fill it. William had begun and indeed mostly accomplished the conquest, for the first (and only) time of England by a French king. You might think this would strengthen ties between the two countries, but on the contrary, as we all know, it led to a rivalry that exploded into wars between both - which often pulled in or latched onto the conflicts being fought between other European powers, such as Holland, Spain, Portugal or Germany - and would, in time, raise England, and later Britain, to the status of a major player in European, and later world politics.