The Norman Conquest, Part Two
"Thus lo came England into Normandy's hand"
Last week, I told of the first part of the Norman Conquest of England: how William of Normandy invaded and killed King Harold Godwinson of England to become William the Conqueror.
But the Norman Conquest wasn’t just that battle, or even that campaign. It continued through King William the Conqueror’s reign.
Thus lo the English folk for nought to ground came... Thus came lo England into Normandy’s hand.
— Robert of Gloucester, c. 1300
William took his time to march on London. He had time; while there were men who could have united to oppose him, there was no clear leader nor trained housecarls. He gradually circled around it over the next two months, making his presence known and receiving the submission of one after another of the demoralized Englishmen.
A hasty Witengemat met in London and elected the teenage Edgar Aetheling, the last nephew of Edward the Confessor, as King of England. He received messages of support from Earls Edwin and Morcar, the most prominent surviving English nobles. But his support quickly dwindled - Edwin and Morcar ended up not sending a single man to fight for Edgar. Disappointed, all three eventually submitted to William.
So, by the time William entered London, none were there to oppose him. On Christmas Day, he was crowned in Westminster Abbey which King Edward had so lately built. Every King of England to follow him would be crowned in the same place1.
And Bishop Odo and Earl William stayed behind and built castles far and wide throughout this country, and distressed the wretched folk, and always after that it grew much worse.
William was crowned King of England, but he governed as a foreign invader.
He had promised rich English land to the men who followed him, and he kept those promises. By 1086, twenty years later, the Domesday Book records that 95% of land south of the Tees2 was owned by Normans or other foreigners. The English farmers, now tenants, found their rights and privileges getting fewer and fewer until the distinctions between freemen and serfs all but vanished.
Whether or not William enjoyed his tyranny, he certainly had work to do to keep it.
Rebellions frequently erupted, but all were violently suppressed. In 1068, the largest rebellion erupted in Yorkshire, led by the new Saxon Earl Cospatrick and Edgar Aetheling himself. But it failed; Edgar and Cospatrick both fled to Scotland.
William responded with the “Harrowing of the North”, destroying the whole area enough that it could still be seen years later. The earldom, like all other earldoms, would henceforth be held by Normans.
(Edgar’s sister, Margaret, would later marry Malcolm King of Scots. He would later invade England ostensibly in Edgar’s name; she would later be canonized St. Margaret of Scotland due to her piety and charitable works. Margaret and Malcolm’s daughter Matilda would later marry King William’s son Henry I, thus giving all later Kings of England as well as Scotland a descent from the ancient English royal house.)
Much later, during the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution, when the English Parliament was searching for ancient precedents to throw against the king in the name of liberty, they would articulate the theory of the “Norman Yoke”: that under Saxon rule, everyone had lived in liberty, but the Normans had enslaved them all under royal power. This was an exaggeration, articulated for political purposes. But, there was something very real at the root of it. The Norman Conquest was, indeed, a disaster for many Englishmen.
The old English nobility had few castles; the Normans had many. Every Norman earl and knight feared the common people and wanted to fortify their homes against them.
We can see something of that even in the English language. The words “cow” and “pig” are the native English words dating back to Old English. But when the animal is cooked and put on the table, its meat is called “beef” or “pork” - French words, brought in by the Normans. This shows how firmly rooted it was that Englishmen watched the live animals, but only Normans got to eat them.
Norman saw on English oak.
On English neck a Norman yoke;
Norman spoon to English dish,
And England ruled as Normans wish-- Sir Walter Scott, “Ivanhoe”
The Normans also imported their quarrels, which changed the destiny of England.
The concept of quarreling English nobles wasn’t new. England had only started becoming united under Alfred the Great in the late 800’s, and completed under his grandson Aethelstan in 927. Even afterwards, there were battles fought between the different earls. Godwin himself had once threatened Edward the Confessor. The Normans might have taken it to a new degree - aided by the castles they built against their new subjects - but they were building on an already-established foundation.
What did change England’s destiny was their outside quarrels.
From his coronation on, William the Conqueror was both King of England and Duke of Normandy. He separated those titles on his death, giving Normandy to his eldest son Robert and England to his third3 son William II. But when both of them died without surviving legitimate issue, both titles again united in William the Conqueror’s fourth and youngest son, Henry I.
From that point through the Hundred Years’ War, England would be fighting in France - first pushing its claims to a larger and larger Normandy (just like William had been doing before conquering England), and later claiming the crown of France itself4. England would be firmly involved in Continental politics, and Continental culture, in a way it had not been before. English soldiers would be almost-continually fighting in France for the next four hundred years.
And continental culture came too, even down to the English language. Linguists say that Middle English, and the Modern English we speak, are descended primarily from the Old English spoken in England before the Norman Conquest. That’s not wrong; any English-speaker can confirm that Dutch - a close relative of Old English - sounds very close to English. But Middle English also included a huge amount of vocabulary from French by way of the Normans. In fact, at least one computer analysis of languages classified English as a relative of French on the basis of that vocabulary! That’s why English has so many synonyms, more than any other major language I’m aware of: from “good” and “benefit” through “ghost” and “spirit” to “heaven” and “paradise”.
And with the changes of language would have come so many other changes of culture and thought. To pick just one example, Old English alliterative poetry vanished, to be replaced by the meter and rhyme of French poetry.
We don’t know what would have happened without the Norman Conquest. The Norman and French cultural influence had already started under Edward the Confessor; the Viking age that had given rise to so many previous Norse invasions of England was already dying; we never got the opportunity to see sort of king Harold Godwinson would have been in time of peace (let alone his son5).
But without Norman rule and Norman claims on French land, England would have had more opportunity for peace and less resources drained in foreign war. It would also have had less income from French plunder, but it’s unclear at least whether that was any net benefit to England historically. Perhaps a continued Saxon England would have gotten involved elsewhere, but this could easily have led to more prosperity.
And, without a rapacious Norman upper class, that prosperity would have benefitted the common peasant much more.
Did William the Conqueror intend any of these effects? Many of them, he absolutely did. He intentionally parceled out English land to his Norman supporters; he intentionally involved England in wars against his neighbors in France; he bound the English peasants around with stern laws. He probably didn’t intend the linguistic changes or longer-term cultural changes, but he set up the conditions for them.
Did anyone in England foresee any of this? Everyone at least knew the plundering that invaders did, and it was known that William of Normandy had promised lands in England to people who supported him in his invasion. King Edward the Confessor, in late 1065, was more foresighted than most when he said he had seen visions of disaster coming over England after his death - but by early 1066, it didn’t take much foresight to see this.
The Conquest could maybe have been averted in so many ways. If Harold had waited before fighting William... if Harald Hardrada of Norway had invaded at any other time, or if the traitorous Tostig hadn’t convinced him to invade at all... if William’s fleet had sailed earlier while Harold was waiting for him on the coast... If any of those things had changed, the battle would’ve been different, and the English would’ve had a better chance to win.
Realistically, William would’ve tried to invade in some way; he was that sort of person. But the invasion absolutely did not need to come out as it did.
We don’t know whether King Edward had, years before, promised the throne to William. No one knew except Edward himself, and William, who either grabbed hold of that promise or made it up altogether. But if King Edward had - blithely overlooking how he had no right to make such a promise - he certainly didn’t intend anything like what happened.
And if he had made that promise, his foretelling of doom makes me think he regretted it. No one hoped for what happened, except for William the Conqueror and his fellow warriors.
Except for Edward V and Edward VIII, who weren’t crowned at all. Edward V was murdered in mysterious circumstances (traditionally attributed to his uncle Richard III); Edward VIII abdicated before his coronation. I also leave out Jane Grey, who isn’t considered a rightful queen at all.
In what's now the far north of England; the border with Scotland fluctuated over the centuries.
His second son, Richard, had predeceased him, dead in a hunting accident (separate from how William II was later assassinated on a hunting trip.)
Thanks to a marriage with a daughter of the French king, which left the King of England the closest heir… if you let the crown be inherited through the female line, which the French disputed.
What historically happened was that one son was taken captive by William, and eventually released upon William’s death; another son eventually found refuge in Norway. There were more children - we know Harold had at least five children with his informally-wed wife Edith Swan-Neck - but we don’t know what happened to them.