1173-1189: Henry II Part II - Securing the Plantagenets

The first major rebellion after Becket's death took place in 1173 and once again the Scots tried to take advantage of it with an invasion. Henry was forced into the expedient of using mercenary troops to put down the revolt. He succeeded and the reign was relatively untroubled by armed revolt from that point on but the rebellion may have strengthened the realisation in the immediate aftermath of the murder that division from the Church was unwise.

From the point of view of dynastic continuity, Eleanor of Aquitaine proved not only wealthy and formidable but also fecund. She secured the Plantagenets by ensuring there was no lack of heirs to the throne in an age when the first sign of weakness in the direct line would be seized upon by the barons to push their own agenda - even displace the monarch for a puppet or one of their own.

There were four players in the medieval political game, three of consequence and one to be watched with care lest it become troublesome - the indigenous English whose 'middle class' were embedded in the lower reaches of the Church. The barons (always incipient warlords) were only controlled through energetic use of power under conditions of dynastic strength allied to the ideological legitimacy that royalism was given by the Church in the local version of the Constantinian Settlement. Authority was vested in a secular overlord in return for the overlord's acceptance of the moral boundaries to be set by religion and the privileges to be accorded to its guardians.

The rapid acceptance that murdering Becket was an error is testimony to Henry's understanding that he needed the Church to rule. Another result of Becket's murder may have been a new sensitivity to the opinions of churchgoers on the part of the Crown. In 1177, for example, for whatever reason, a monk stole the bones of St. Petroc from Bodmin Priory and took them to Brittany. The King proved himself active in the search for them and their return.

Henry's sexual activity represented another facet of royalism - the need to strengthen the primus inter pares of the ruling family in any tussle with the barons where any debates over legitimacy might permit these barely suppressed warlords an opportunity to test their own strength against the centre and rivals alike. The swiftness of Henry's reaction to Strongbow's irruption into Ireland (which we will deal with later) is testament to his sensitivity to any one mainland-based aristocrat developing sufficient material strength to take advantage of weakness in the royal house.

Henry's second son (another Henry) by Eleanor of Aquitaine was born in February 1154 but William, the heir, died in 1156 (aged three). In the same year, they had a daughter, Matilda. Then, in 1157, Richard (Duke of Aquitaine and later to be King) was born. There was Geoffrey (Duke of Brittany) in 1158, Eleanor in 1161, Joan in 1165 and John (later King John) in 1167 so an already a healthy line of heirs and marriageable assets for the Dynasty existed well before the Becket crisis. The old Empress Matilda, meanwhile, had died in 1167.

The young Princess Matilda (who died in 1189) started the asset-building process by being married off to Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony in 1168 at the ripe young age of 12. Princess Eleanor (aged 17) was to be married off to Alphonso VIII of Castile in 1176. In 1170, Prince Henry, meanwhile, at the age of 16 was crowned 'King of the English' (even referred to as Henry III by some chroniclers but not to be confused with the later Henry III) in order to establish his position as heir-presumptive. He died in 1183 of a fever, leaving his brother Richard as heir. Geoffrey, next-in-line, died in a tournament in 1186. The attrition rate on royal heirs was high but when Henry died, he still had two sons who could succesively take up the Crown.

Becket's murder and the reining back of Henry's ambition to centralise judicial power at the expense of the Church and eliminate or reduce corruption and criminality in order to control the barons (which was the essential political purpose of the reforms in the earlier part of his reign as well as to connect the royal house with the people through direct rule) meant that many issues had to remain unresolved. Nevertheless, the King's commitment to reform continued in 1176 with the division of England into 'circuits', each with its own set of travelling judges. This system, adapted to the needs of each period, continued until reforms in the nineteenth century but the Assize system was not finally abolished until as late as 1972 (to be replaced by the Crown Court).

There was also a major reorganisation of the English militia with the Assize of Arms in 1181. The intention was to create a country force loyal to the King that would offset the retained forces of the barony but also preclude the need for mercenary forces with their attendant costs to the Treasury.  All freemen of England were to own and bear arms in the service of the King, swearing allegiance on pain of "vengeance, not merely on their lands or chattels, but on their limbs". The link between 'freemen' (basically the equivalent of the propertied middle class today) and the Crown on the one hand and the opposition to the Crown of the 'free' Barons with their individualism and attempts to constrain centralised power is perhaps the start of the great political division in the Kingdom between what were later to be called Tories (the party of the Crown or State) and the Whigs (the Party of increasingly tamed warlords and their retainers).

Money was always a concern and the King would expropriate where he could - evidently not from the barons but, in 1186, Henry had no compunction in appropriating the fabulous wealth of Aaron the Jew of Lincoln, whose wealth was said to exceed that of the King himself, on Aaron's death.

The Church, in its own self interest, had checked the growth of administrative order at its own expense (an order that also looked like tyranny to the freebooters in the aristocracy) and ensured that the royal attempt to transfer control of the population was limited. The Church's position, with its sixth of the population given clerical privileges, remained essentially unchallenged. The balance of power between barons, dynasty and church was thus very fine.

Caught between potential anarchy, incomplete order and ideology, the probability was that violence or the threat of it would return in some form as soon as the Crown weakened, a baronial faction achieved significant national power or the Church was instructed to intervene in politics from outside or decided to use its reserve ideological power to intervene for or against a King who 'went too far'. In fact, the 'the proto-Tories' could rely on the Church so long as they respected it and no doubt the Church's protective stance towards the 'free men' who attended mass helped cohere the population around the King, a process which eventually led to a coherence around the 'nation'.

Remnants of Old London Bridge

The second part of Henry's reign, though secure, was troubled by disasters (although how much the disasters were a result of better reporting through chroniclers and how much a genuine upsurge is a moot point). The Choir of Canterbury Cathedral was gutted by fire in September 1174 and its rebuilding (completed in 1185) saw the first appearance in England of the pointed arch introduced by William of Sens (which we will cover in a later posting) alongside other cathedral building. 1176 also saw the building of the first stone bridge over the Thames - the Old London Bridge. A great fire destroyed much of Rochester in Kent in 1177. Glastonbury Abbey was also badly damaged by fire in 1184, with rebuilding starting immediately. Lincoln Cathedral was destroyed in an earthquake in 1185 and in 1186 a great fire swept through Chester. One suspects a connection here between heavy use of wood in construction and increased use of artificial light (a sign of economic prosperity) which might lead to the heavier expenditure but greater security of stone for important building works.

Henry left England for the last time in 1188 and died at Chinon the next year to be succeeded by his son Richard.

1154-1172: Henry II Part I - The Problem of Becket

In December 1154, Henry II, founder of Plantagenet Dynasty (which will last until 1399), was crowned King and immediately appointed Thomas Becket as his Chancellor, apparently on the recommendation of Theobald Archbishop of Canterbury. Almost immediately as well, Henry began a campaign to limit clerical power as part of a wider project to restore power to the royal courts which had lost ground during the anarchic preceding two decades . In Becket, he seems to have misjudged, taking a perfect example of corporate man, loyal to obeying the role he has given like a caricature of Sartre's waiter, and misreading him as loyal to the person, himself, as Crown. This misjudgement was long masked by Becket's diligence in acting out his new given role as royal agent to the full in difficult negotiations with the Church. We all know the type - modernity certainly cannot survive without men who cease to be persons and become the roles they are assigned to - and, in this, Becket was a modern avant la lettre.

Henry perhaps thought he could solve the problem of appropriate jurisdiction by ensuring that Becket became Archbishop of Canterbury in June 1162 (Archbishop Theobald having died in the previous April). It is not that there was not a fundamental identity of interest between Church and Crown in the maintenance of social order. Quite the contrary. A hint that the English still need to be placated by their Continental rulers and shown the legitimacy of royal and Church rule through respect for English tradition is demonstrated in the almost standard performance art of honouring an English saint - in Henry's case, it was the transfer of the allegedly undecayed remains of St. Edward the Confessor to a new shrine built on the orders of the King.

The fact that the body was personally carried to its new resting place in 1163 by the King, the Archbishop and the Abbot of Westminster shows us how ideologically significant this bit of theatre was and perhaps how the former Chancellor was still thinking (as Archbishop) of political realities that served his King. At this point, it could be argued, Church and Dynasty were in perfect balance, holding on to the allegiance of the people at the expense of the conquering warlords whose excesses were something that Henry was determined to limit. The subsequent lack of co-operation by the Church in permitting the framework for the control of those excesses leads to a crisis in which the Archbishop was to be 'martyred' in order to ensure the Church's long term victory in drawing the line in the sand that suited it.

The crisis started with the January 1164 ratification of King's preferred national code of conduct, really a restoration of many practices normal in the reign of Henry I, at the Council of Clarendon. However, the Church had accrued an increased social and judicial power in the period of anarchy between the two Henries. Archbishop Becket, backed by his Bishops, rejected 'The Constitutions of Clarendon' because they limited that power. The breach between King and Archbishop became so serious that nine months later, following the Council of Northampton (October 1164), Becket was tried and found guilty of feudal disobedience. This brought into the open the issue of the primacy of Becket's fealty as a former Chancellor to the feudal chain of command or his fealty to 'God' through the Church. Since the trial was conducted within a feudal context, Becket justifiably feared for his life and he made a night time escape to Grantham. He was in voluntary exile in Europe within the month.

The King was not in the wrong as far as the restoration of national order was concerned. The absence of leading aristocrats on the crusades and the confusion created by the civil war had resulted in a considerable degree of continuing lawlessness. An enforceable legal structure that was national (and therefore royal) in scope was required to ensure order and order was, on balance despite its oppressive and brutal nature, mostly in the best interests of the people. Henry ordered an enquiry into the rise of criminality (shades here of periodic modern state panics about such things) and, at the Assize of Clarendon (1166), he introduced reforms that shifted the legal system from one dominated by ordeal or combat to one dominated by evidence-gathering and the jury operating under oath although the process, even here, was to be gradual. Some minor elements of the older Germanic system of trial by strength rather than the Roman system of 'justitia' would persist into the early nineteenth century. Power was to be transferred from local barons to appointed royal judges but the same process threatened to bring the sixth of the population classed as clergy under royal jurisdiction. In this matter, the Church was deeply reactionary, as much as the barons who were to try to claw back their power under King John (it is perhaps ironic that the reactionary Magna Carta is seen now as such a progressive document when this was never its intention).

It is at this point that Becket decided to return to Canterbury in December 1170, only to be murdered at the end of that month by four of Henry II's knights (Reginald Fitzurse, William de Tracy, Hugh de Morville and Richard Le Breton), almost certainly on Henry's orders. If this was an attempted coup against the English Church, it failed because Henry had underestimated the ideological power of the Church and its ability to disrupt the system of fealty owed to the Crown through proferring an alternative legitimacy based on the magical thinking of Judaeo-Christianity to which the vast majority of the population was culturally bound. A secure royal system was now at the point of potential destabilisation. Henry, who was clearly no fool even if he had miscalculated on this occasion or perhaps had lost control of his own retainers, was quick to change course, understanding that, at the end of the day, the Church needed the Crown as much as the Crown needed the Church.

There was no benefit or possibility for a medieval monarch in trying to create early modern monarchical absolutism against a Church that mediated between it (the Crown) and what passed for the middle classes and which acted as restraint on any number of minor and major barons ready to go back to the life of plunder that they had enjoyed in the recent Civil War. Not for the first time, the Church created a link between itself and the people and pacified popular feeling by creating a cult around Becket at Canterbury Cathedral where a shrine in the crypt recorded 14 miraculous cures within months. The boil of potential for instability was lanced by the King offering contrition for the acts of his agents and the Church exploited the situation to halt the drive against its privileges. In return, the Church then played its role in dampening down popular discontent by diverting it into the opiate of cultism. Things haven't changed much since the Angevin era if you substitute the terms State for Crown and Media for Church.

1134-1154: Between the Two Henries - Civil War, Stephen and Matilda

The history of Anglo-Norman feudalism is simple enough - a strong king held the system together. To become strong, the king had to overcome the centrifugal tendencies created by the ambitions of his strongest vassals whether as individuals or in coalition. When Henry I died in Rouen in December 1135, his chosen heir, Empress Mathilda (she had been married first as a child bride to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry V whom she had outlived but who had given her the right to call herself Empress) was married to Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, with a two-year old son who would later become Henry II. The Angevins were not popular with their peers and were challenged by the barons' preference, the initially popular Stephen, Count of Blois, grandson of William the Conqueror. Stephen quickly crossed the Channel and was crowned within three weeks. Noting Stephen's first mover advantage, we should note that both candidates were based in Northern France and that England was still just a prize asset to be added to family businesses with a first allegiance to lands on the other side of the English Channel. England still had the characteristics of occupied territory.

The eventual rise of the Plantagenets would confirm that the dynastic focus would be on straddling the seaways as if they were a mere inconvenience. We will be able later to speak of an Angevin Empire stretching from the Scots borders southwards to cover the bulk of Western and Northern France. The 'Anarchy' of the second quarter of the twelfth century in England was little more than a struggle to see which branch of the trans-channel ruling elite (of which the Frankish kings were just another component) would get the English asset - the line of Blois-Boulogne or the line of Anjou. In the first half of the twelfth century holdings in Normandy and France would always be of more consequence to the status and wealth of major vassals than holdings in England.

The expected result was civil war between two competing baronial coalitions as well as the Scots invasion that we noted in the last posting. The early years of Stephen's reign appeared successful enough but the Welsh rebellion was not brought under control, the Normanised Scots retained excessive influence in the North, the monarchy had serious financial problems and many barons were beginning to feel insufficiently rewarded for their loyalty. The plots started in earnest in 1137 with Richard of Gloucester, Henry I's illegitimate son, whose activities were in the interest of his half-sister Matilda. Matilda landed in England two years later, now openly supported by the Earl of Gloucester, triggering full-on civil war. In 1141, Stephen was captured at the Battle of Lincoln but gained his freedom in return for that of Richard of Gloucester and the war started up again almost immediately. Gloucester died in 1147, the campaign faltered and a disheartened Matilda left England for the Continent the following year, leaving behind her son Henry to carry on the struggle.

Matilda's husband Geoffrey of Anjou died in 1151 and was succeeded as Count of Anjou by Henry. The death of his father pulled Henry back from England to deal with his estate. In the next year, Henry married Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the wealthiest and most powerful women in Europe who had only recently obtained an annulment of her marriage to Louis VI, King of France. Stephen's son Eustace (inclined to pursue his own claim to the throne) died in the same year, opening the way for Henry to invade England again in 1153, with fresh resources, to claim his rights. He gets them in the Treaties of Wallingford, Winchester and Westminster under which he is promised the English succession. This would not necessarily have ended the civil war if Stephen had lived longer but Stephen died the following October. Henry was back in England by December 8th and was crowned Henry II on the 19th.

There is one incident from this era that needs mention because it is often taken as one of the most significant instances of medieval anti-semitism - the murder in 1140 of a skinner's apprentice, the 11 year old William of Norwich, which was blamed locally on the Jews residing in the town. The murder was framed by locals as a ritual sacrifice and a wave of antisemitism followed. The issue is complicated by politics and later by Church greed (since the Church gained revenue from the cults of saints). William is canonised although there is no evidence of a specifically antisemitic aspect to this minor and localised cult.

What is probably more significant is that the attack on the Jews was linked to an attack on the King and his agents, noting that Norwich had recently been the centre of conflict between Stephen and the Duke of Norfolk (1136). Jews tended to speak French and to live close to the castle where they were under aristocratic protection. The accusers seemed to have been Anglo-Saxon origin families from 'married priestly' families. Something had boiled over. It may be that a genuine family tragedy rapidly got drawn into political struggles linked to English resentment of the Norman King and his corrupt agents. If so, the Church's cult may be seen less as an endorsement of antisemitism than as a potentially profitable placatory act designed to divert popular feeling into something more private and harmlessly ritualistic for a class of lower middle class clerics 'feeling the pinch'. The story may be less interesting as a precursor of the European anti-semitism narrative as it was to play out in the crimes of the twentieth century and more as an incident expressing the same sort of social tensions that we see in the Robin Hood legend.

1093-1165: Scotland & the English Question

Back to Scotland. Malcolm III was succeeded by Donald Bane (1093-1097), his brother. Malcom's wife, later to be Saint Margaret (canonised 1250), died that same year. Donald Bane was deposed and replaced, after an intervention from William II of England, with Edgar (1097-1107), Malcolm III's son. This is interesting because this made the Scottish monarchy a half-English dynasty through Margaret, a Princess of Wessex. The Norman monarchy to the South seemed to have no difficulty in supporting the claims of a prince from the line of Wessex when it suited it.

As we will see, the ties between royal families were often close even as they were competing. There was more in common between the line of the House of Wessex, the Kings of Scotland and the Norman Kings of England than any of these had with their own populations. These were family businesses treating their subjects as units of taxation and labour in what we would recognise today as 'healthy business competition', albeit that people got killed in a way unacceptable today. An analogy with modern organised crime is probably closer.

Edgar is succeeded by his brother Alexander I (1107-1124). His reign is only noted here for the murder on Eglisay in Orkney of Magnus (later Saint Magnus), Earl of Orkney. The story is interesting because Magnus is presented as an exemplar of piety and gentleness which the Norwegians who dominated the far North West of Britain considered cowardice. He was actually murdered in a fit of frustration about his co-rule with his brother, Haakon. The full story is not relevant. The creation of a gentle Christian hero who fell foul of Viking mores is what is going to be important here because it shows us how Christianity and Kingship were constantly being merged at the frontiers of European society in order to create more stable societies based on the rule of dynastic and church law.

A leader now had to be not only strong but 'good' and a strong king who was not 'good' (meaning accepting of Roman Catholic ideology) was implicitly worse than a weak leader who was 'good' in the rhetorical world of medieval culture. The reality, of course, was that strength had priority but a strong 'bad' king (as defined by the clerics) would be damaged in the eyes of posterity. That was no idle threat in a culture still mired in pagan notions of honour. The Church could dishonour you after your death if you did not play ball with the people who wrote the history and this is what the Church always did with the ending of bardic courtly literature. The power of the Church to dictate the perceptions of kings will become clearer in the Becket story. Eventually, Christian ideology and the culture of honour would merge in chivalric literature in which tamed aristocratic behaviour and 'goodness' became as one in an ideal that still lingers on in modern Western notions of appropriate sexuality.

Alexander was succeeded by David I (1124-1153) who was instrumental in introducing Anglo-Norman culture and feudalism into Scotland during the so-called 'Davidian Revolution'. This transformation strengthened Scotland as a potential military power. It is at this point that English and Scottish history become interwined so that it will be hard to speak of one without the other. The Normanisation of Scotland is one with the Orkney story told above - a process of creating a working ideology (a process happening all over Europe and cross-connected to the aggression of the Crusades) for a new class of aristocrats in transition from pure predation to a sense of their own worth as agents of the divine.

This ideologisation and justification of predation through its moderation by faith-based intellectuals who offer administrative benefits is pretty standard fare in the human story. The British Empire, primarily a trading and predatory operation at its start, went through the same process in the nineteenth century resulting in the pompous aristocratic Tory imperialism of Curzon which presaged the destruction of that which it claimed to preserve. The Divine Right of Kings would be a similar high point for feudalism leading to its destruction in turn in a slew of revolutions but this is half a millenium in the future. History tends to speed up with modernisation.

The Scots, now with the cultural technology to be effective organisers under a strong warlord and adopting a suitable ideology to be called 'civilised', start to become imperial predators exploiting any sign of English weakness. There was an attempted invasion in 1135 as soon as Henry I died and another in 1138 which led to the Scots' defeat at the Battle of the Standard. David's persistence paid off with the cession of Northumbria to Scotland in 1149. However, the Scots did not find it easy to stand up to a unified England under a strong King such as Henry II. Henry II recaptured Northumbria in 1157 during the reign of David's successor, Malcolm IV (1153-1165), only twenty-four when he died.

What is happening here is a political call-and response that will continue through the Middle Ages. All things being equal, England is always stronger than Scotland but, when England is weak, it is only a matter of time before the Scottish Kings try to exploit the situation. It is also only a matter of time before the English Kings are going to feel it necessary to use their superior strength to bring Scotland under English suzerainty. This pattern of threat and response (where the English are not necessarily strong enough actually to crush Scotland any more than Scotland is strong enough to do more than harry the north) continues throughout British history until the Union of 1707 and even after insofar as the Jacobite Rebellion can be seen as part of the same pattern.

It may not have ended yet since the basic truths remain in force even as Scotland moves to independence. England is stronger than Scotland but when England weakens, the Scots take advantage of that weakness - and yet the English can never truly control Scotland. It is like a dysfunctional marriage whose history can be traced even further back into the mists of Anglo-Saxon and Roman tension between the prosperous South and the barbarian North with the Borders and Northumbria the play thing of whoever happens to have the whip hand that year. Only the British Empire, in which the Scots found themselves with a lucrative minority stake, permitted a viable peace between the two major cultural centres of Great Britain. The third centre of power, weaker than both Scotland and England, that is, Ireland, will emerge as an issue for the English soon enough.

Perhaps Scotland will have something to fear (economically) from a resurgent England that chooses on June 23rd to remove its dying Empire from the state-planned integration into the ramshackle European Imperium. The interests of England may always be sacrificiable to the illusion of empire in the long run. Perhaps the ideology of dynastic feudalism and 'romanitas' lives on in the plan to make the country a prosperous province of something larger. We are probably and in practice being led by the belief of the British State that a safe transition from one imperial state to another may be the only way to hold the island (the 'family business') together through acquisition and merger though the business analogy would suggest that the acquired company won't exist for long afterwards. Another view, of course, might be to ensure that England remained strong in its own right and left Scotland (and Ireland) to pursue their own devices happy in their independence. So a great deal is at stake on June 23rd. The issue, as at the time of writing, remains uncertain.

1100-1154: Cathedral Building and Abbey Foundations

Archbishop Anselm died in 1109. His see remained vacant until Ralph, Bishop of Rochester, was appointed to it in 1114.We will not otherwise list the Archbishops of Canterbury and York and will only refer to those who are the most prominent or interesting from a political point of view. The accession of Henry II in 1154 will eventually bring out the inherent tension between Crown and Church. This would be expressed in the tense and ultimately violent relationship with Thomas A Becket and the King which we will review in a later posting. Until then, the symbiotic relationship between national Church and the miltary Norman aristocracy continued regardless of civil strife. Indeed, it is the return of a strong Kingship that precipitates a crisis - and we should remember that the Church was largely staffed at the highest levels from the literate members of the same international class whose Anglo-Norman branch ran England.

As we have noted in our posting on Henry I, cathedral and church building began again after a long gap following the start of construction of Durham Cathedral in 1093: Southwark Priory (1106 - the basis of the later Southwark Cathedral), Southwell Minster (1108), Exeter (1112), Peterborough (1117) and with Llandaff and Bangor asserting Church authority in Normanised Wales (1120). Building work then shifted to Abbey foundations within a couple of decades: Hexham (1113), Tintern (1131), Quarr (1131), Buildwas (1135) and Jervaulx (1145), all but the first Cistercian in origin.

These buildings are not to be assumed to be under direct royal patronage by any means (for example, the Cistercians were introduced to England by Walter Fitz Richard, of the powerful Clare family who funded Tintern Abbey) but there is always a political aspect to the foundations if only in terms of aristocratic status. It is not accidental that the last two of the new cathedral foundations were in the borderlands with Wales which were in the process of being 'tamed'. The slowing down of cathedral foundation after 1120 was both a sign of internal civil strife but also of the natural expansion of Norman power to its English and Welsh limits at that time. Internal strife (as we will see in the next posting) was as much a sign of the collapse of any form of English alternative to Norman rule as of the potential for anarchy arising from a warlord Norman aristocracy during periods of central weakness. Similarly the abbey foundations represent the exploitation of the conquest by aristocrats and churchmen alike.

An example of the growing militarisation (albeit defensive) of religion and its close marriage of interest to the Anglo-Norman aristocracy and their English subjects comes from the Battle of the Standard in 1138 where it is Archbishop Thurston of York who organises an army to counter a Scottish invasion. The Archbishop himself carried into battle the banner of St. John of Beverley alongside those of St. Cuthbert, St. Peter of York and St. Wilfred, all hung from a large pole 'like the mast of a ship' on a four wheeled cart on which the Archbishop stood. The Battle was a resounding victory for the English.

This is also the period of the Second Crusade (1147-1149) which offers us yet another example of the militarisation of religion as if the civilising influence of the Church on barbarian use of unbridled force had been bought at the cost of the Catholic Church itself becoming an agent for the redirection of that violence onto the 'other', in this case the Muslims and often the Eastern Orthodox Church. The period is also notable for having the first and only English Pope in Nicholas Breakspear, elected in December 1154 as Adrian IV, although this only tells us what we knew already - that the Catholic Church was a Universal Church (at least in Western Europe). What is more interesting perhaps is that there was no English Pope after the middle of the Twelfth Century.

Cathedrals and Minsters under Henry I

[Please note, once again that, the Norman element in these buildings, unless specified, is usually well hidden under later accretions. Many Cathedrals, such as Exeter, were fundamentally rebuilt later in the Middle Ages.]

Norman Nave of Peterborough Cathedral started after 1117

The Nave of Southwell Minster started in 1108

Norman Arch in Llandaff Cathedral started after 1120

Norman Nave of Durham Cathedral started in 1133

Abbey Building in the First Half of the Twelfth Century

Hexham Abbey rebuilt as an Augustinian Priory in 1117

Tintern Abbey founded in 1131

Ruins of Quarr Abbey founded in 1131

The Norman Holcroft of Fountains Abbey started in 1132

Rievaulx Abbey founded in 1133

Buildwas Abbey founded in 1135

1100-1135: Henry I

Henry, fourth son of William the Conqueror, was quick to seize the English treasury at Winchester and was crowned at Westminister Abbey within a few days of his brother William Rufus' death. You may recall William's agreement with their elder brother Duke Robert of Normandy that the domains of the first to die would go to the other so it is no surprise to find Robert landing at Portsmouth in July 1101 to claim his inheritance. The barons of Norman England took different sides according to interest and allegiance but a negotiated settlement at Alton saw Robert withdraw on a pension of £2,000 in return for renouncing his claim to the throne.

Henry's first major political act, in 1102, was a bit of a political theatre of the sort medieval kings loved to employ in order to establish their cultural legitimacy. Later it would be fun and games with King Arthur but at the start of the Twelfth Century, Norman Kings remained keen to establish their legitimate position as English Kings. The tomb of Edward the Confessor was opened and his body found 'miraculously' not to have decayed. Bishop Gundulf of Rochester, a significant figure in Norman construction works, was allegedly rebuked by Abbot Crispin for a rather unseemly attempt to pull out some tufts of King Edward's beard to add to his relic collection. This was not the only act of respect to the English past. In 1104, the bones of Saint Cuthbert were buried in the yet-to-be completed Durham Cathedral. From 1106, another round of cathedral building began in a pattern familiar from the previous reigns. We will outline these foundations in a later posting.

Henry is, however, disinclined to shell out £2,000 per annum on what probably appeared to him to be an unnecessary extortion so he brought the matter to a head by invading Normandy in 1106, defeating Robert at the Battle of Tinchebrai, acquiring the Duchy for himself and imprisoning his brother (for the rest of his life which lasted until 1134) in Cardiff Castle. What he has acquired, he must defend so, for example, he is forced to spend the entire of 1118 in Normandy successfully fighting off the King of France, the Count of Anjou and the Count of Flanders.

This is still defensive activity. We are not yet beginning that long history of dynastic involvement in imperial adventures on the Continent of Europe - an extension of the gangsterdom we have seen as at the heart of early medieval state formation but one that was also to became central to the myth of English nationalism and the formation in response of its French counterpart. However, the seeds of that story are about to be planted in the manouevres over the succession required to maintain the integrity of the family business.

Tiverton Castle begun under Henry I in 1106

While Henry was away in France, England was governed by a Vice-Regal Council but Henry was always a strong and effective King. Unfortunately, following the loss of his Queen in 1118, the 'family firm' suffered a further and more significant tragedy when Henry's heir and only legitimate son, William, drowned when the ship he was travelling in (The White Ship) was wrecked in the English Channel. Henry remarried in 1122 but this second marriage was childless leaving him with a succession problem and his domains with the prospect of anarchy.

Only a very strong and ruthless King would be capable of controlling the barons. Henry had only one legitimate heir, a daughter Matilda, who was married off at 14 to Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou. The barons were forced to swear that they would recognise Matilda as Queen on his death in 1128. Henry forced the issue again with another such ceremony in 1131 showing just how problematic her acceptance would be. Matilda's son (later to be Henry II and first of the Plantagenet Kings) was born in Le Mans in 1133. In December 1135, Henry I died leaving an unstable situation with the Norman barons in England restive, a woman as heir and a two year old male grandson.

We should note here the death in 1125 of Edgar the Atheling, grandson of Edmund II Ironside, last member of the Royal House of Wessex, probably in Scotland. It cannot be said that Edgar was ever really a threat to the Norman hold over England. He was even released and pardoned by Henry I after his involvement against the King in his struggles with Robert Curthose. Thus ended the line of Wessex and 'authentic' English Kingship although we should really see Edgar as less of an English figure and more of an aristocratic figure who lost the game.

1087-1100: William II 'Rufus'

We are about to move into a duller period of English history, one of state formation in slow motion, two steps forward, one step back, a succession of dynasts, rebellions, civil wars and spats between Church and State, punctuated by major external events like the Black Death. This was the history of Britain between two revolutions - that of the introduction of feudalism by the Normans and that of the expulsion of the Roman Church under Henry VIII. England now moved from being a divided state with periodic bouts of unity constantly besieged by foreign warlords and kings to a unified state, with periodic bouts of division, that imperialistically expanded both against its own Celtic fringe and into Europe itself. From being the predated, it becomes the predator - a testament in itself to the Norman Revolution.

The Conqueror died at Rouen after falling from his horse in 1087. His third son William II, known as 'Rufus' or the Red, was crowned within a few weeks that same January. His right to rule was challenged by his eldest brother, Robert Curthose, Duke of Normandy. There was never much love lost between the brothers - it is said that Robert's rebellion against his father in 1077 was caused by  his brothers pouring a full chamber pot over his head and the failure of his father to punish them for the misdeed. It was also said that William only reluctantly granted the Duchy of Normandy to a son who was widely regarded as weaker than his siblings. There was a failed rebellion in England in 1088 in Robert's favour - a number of barons preferred a weak king to a strong one - but the Duke failed to turn up to lead it. William then took the war to Robert in Normandy, leading to the Treaty of Caen in 1091 in which the brothers agreed that the survivor of the two would inherit the other's domains.This would create a problem a decade later when William died before Robert.

Rebellions also took place in 1094 amongst both the Welsh and the barons while William was frequently absent from the Kingdom, treating the country like a milch cow from afar. The long absences reached their peak when Robert of Normandy decided to join the First Crusade in 1096. Desperately short of funds (he was said to be so poor that he stayed in bed because of a lack of suitable clothes), he mortgaged Normandy to his brother for 25,000 marks (about 25% of William's English and private revenue) which William covered by levying a burdensome tax on England. This was the first but not the last of many fiscal depredations on the English people by post-Norman dynasts and their successor States. It would later become part of the legend of the Norman Yoke that would play its role in the English Civil War of the seventeenth century. William acted as regent in Normandy until his death in a hunting accident in 1100. Whether he was murdered or not will never be known for sure but there are circumstantial reasons for believing that this very unpopular figure's demise was no accident. Robert returned to Normandy within a month.

1035-1100: The Anglo-Norman Church

We have already seen the pattern by which English Kings, including Danes who became English Kings, consolidated their rule. Once they had established power by brute force and the support of the aristocracy they would make an accommodation with the English Church, the provincial branch office of Rome. Certainly since Charlemagne, English Church and, better, Roman Church approval of a succession added significant lustre to the Crown and made it very much more difficult for a challenger to make an alternative claim although we should be in no doubt that it was the sword that counted in the end. The question of whether the English Church was always to take orders from Rome was another matter, one which became very relevant in the power struggles before and after the Norman Ascendency that emerged after the abortive English revolts of 1069.

The Church may have had no role to play in establishing power but it had a considerable role in maintaining power securely. Its role was to ensure order (since disorder was generally crueller even than a cruel autocracy for most people most of the time) on behalf of its charge, the mass of the population, and on behalf of itself given the financial and landed patronage necessary to maintain its mission. The general population had, of course, little or no say in this authoritarian structure. It wanted the order of Kingship but not necessarily the consequent taxation. Sections of the wider population also needed the limited welfare, celibate employment and protection that the Church could provide.

The people's own resources were, as often in history, redistributed to its own poor through a bureaucratic mechanism for the sake of peace with a 'take' for the clerics that grew larger with time. The similarities with twntieth century bureaucratic European socialism are clear for those with a mind to see them. The clerisy and its economic claims would grow larger with time until this thing that was 'too big to fail' got gutted by Henry VIII who saw that a bit of redistribution back to the English middle classes might secure his own base more effectively than relying on the Church to do so.

The Church never, of course, offered the threat of potential rebellion - this is not what it does, at least not while kings remained within the faith - but it did legitimise royal rule through explicit divine sanction in the coronation. Its preaching of quietitude and submission sat alongside its delivery of alms and its creation of meaning for existence and death as guarantors of a conditional order. "You give us the people", implied the Church, "and we will give you their submission and, incidentally, also save them from your brute plundering". It is the perhaps unhappy and unsatisfactory compromise required for a society that remained poor in resources and education and within which there are still few constraints on the exercise of force by those with weaponry on their side. The history of the liberation of the people from the whims of aristocratic brutes is one story. It takes a lot longer to effect liberation from the hollow ideologies of the Church. This scarcely starts for another half a millennium.

The creation of national saints is an essential part of this process. Our period starts with the canonisation of Archbishop John of York (died in 721) in 1037, known for his kindly concern for the poor. This sent its own signal in the middle of the brutal infighting that took place between the reigns of Cnut I and II that the ruling elite cannot and should not sink to its habitual and instinctive 'pagan' barbarism. Similarly, within a year of the burning down of Worcester Monastery by Cnut II after a tax rebellion (with the rebels inside it), Bishop Wulfstan had started to rebuild it on a larger scale in defiance of the royal sacrilege. The relationship of the English Church to the English people, manifest in the war of defence against the Danes, seems to have created a problem for the Normans in 1069-1070 and to have resulted in the latter's call on the Papacy to help bring the Church to heel.

Westminster Abbey in the Eleventh Century

The Church is never not part of the struggles for power at the very heart of the dynastic State. As we have seen, its leadership could be decisive just as it was in the power struggle that started in 1051 between the Anglo-Danish interest of the Godwin family and the pro-Norman position of Edward the Confessor. The shift in that year (temporarily) to the Norman interest was expressed at the highest level with the appointment of the Norman Robert Champert of Jumieges to the Archbishopric of Canterbury. There is something going on here in terms of Edward the Confessor's own sense of what sort of cleric will support him and his vision of a 'civilised' (perhapsd Charlemagnic) European monarchy. Edward is very active in his patronage of the Church. He founds Westminster Abbey (completed in 1065), which will be the future centre of the royal cult in England, in 1052. Waltham Abbey is completed and consecrated in 1060.

Battle Abbey - ruins of the East Range.

The political significance of the Archbishopric is demonstrated when the return of the Godwin interest under Godwin's son Harold Godwinson, after a brief Norman ascendency at court, results in the expulsion of Robert of Jumieges and his replacement as Archbishop of Canterbury with Stigand who is also Bishop of Winchester, still the primary see of the Wessex interest. We have covered this elsewhere. When William of Normandy became King, he quickly used the Church to seal his position by commissioning the Abbey at Battle on the site of his victory over Harold but he initially lets the Church continue as it had done under Edward until the rebellions of 1069-1070 break out.

His response is to invite three Papal Legates to Winchester in 1070. These legates gave him virtual carte blanche over the English Church after a ceremonial crowning. He promptly called a number of Church Councils and undertook a purge of Anglo-Saxon churchmen, deposing Stigand as Archbishop of Canterbury and replacing him with Lanfranc, a celebrated Italian jurist. What is going on here is also perhaps a Papal-driven frustration with the independence of the English Church, represented by the 'Anglican' Stigand (who was to be imprisoned). The reasonable suspicion here is that Rome saw the Norman Ascendency as an agent for imposing its control on a Provincial Church that had shown too many signs of independence in the recent past. The war crimes 'up north' would not have figured in the Church's moral reasoning at this point.

Church-State politics continued to calibrate in the years after the Norman coup. A controversy over the primacy of Canterbury over York, initiated by Lanfranc, was settled in 1072 at the Council of Winchester although not finally (the dispute would continue until the Fourteenth Century) but it is clear that both King and Papacy found this tiresome. In 1080, Pope Gregory VII tried to push his luck with William I by demanding that the King do him homage as his vassal in an attempt to make feudalism work for the Papacy. William simply refused. Such homage had not been offered by his predecessors. This in itself is interesting. William remembers that his Conquest was based on a right of succession to a line of English kings. He does not allow the Papacy to make the mistake that his power was owed in any way to the Pope. This tension, similar to that emerging from medieval interpretations of Charlemagne's coronation, between the inherent right of kings to rule by dynastic succession and the right of the Papacy to give God's blessing on kings would be a constant theme in European history as the balance of power between Church and State shifted and changed. However both sides agree that thrones can no longer be seized by warlords claiming right by mere conquest.Or at least if a warlord does this, he would soon want the Church to sanctify his seizure as legitimate.

Canterbury Cathedral - Norman Arcade

Much as we have come to expect, when kings cut
deals with the Church the subsequent years see a massive redirection of funds to building major churches. Following a fire that destroyed the old Anglo-Saxon Cathedral in 1067, Canterbury Cathedral was rebuilt and 'Normanised' from 1070. Recompense is also made for the plundering of monasteries that took place in 1069 as the Normans put down a Saxon rebellion that may have had some succour from parts of the English Church. New cathedrals are started at St. Albans (1077), Old Sarum (1078), Winchester (rebuilding - 1079), Hereford (1079), York Minster (1080), Rochester (1082) and Ely (1083). The commitment continued under William I's successor, William II: Worcester (1089), Chichester (1093), Lincoln, Chester & Tewkesbury (1092), Durham (1093) and the completion of Norwich and the start of the Crypt at Canterbury in 1096. This commitment of investment is massive and it indicates the equally massive political comitment to partnership with the Roman Church that helped transform England into a catholic feudal dynastic State although much of these funds are not onlybased on land grants from kings but also from powerful aristocrats in a feudal state that was never entirely an autocracy.

It should not be assumed that the relationship between Church and State was ever an easy one. The tension over their respective rights between King and Papacy under William the Conqueror became something more serious in the four years after Lanfranc died and before Anselm finally agreed to be Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093. Relations between King and Archbishop worsened further. William II attempted to bring Anselm to heel in 1095 by convening a Council at Rockingham but Anselm defied him by appealing over his head to Rome, stating that he could not be tried in a secular court. In 1097, Anselm finally quit Canterbury, leaving the Church's estates in the hands of the King, in order to confer directly with the Pope. He chose exile rather than total submission and so left the problem of the relationship of Church and State to the next King Henry I. For Anselm, the Church was universal with the absolute right to maintain its own internal authority whereas for William II the issue was one of ultimate royal control of both Church and State. What we have here is a culturally strong Church but one not as materially strong as any warrior King, albeit that many warriors, worried by the immortality of their souls, would continue to bequeath estates and property to the King's main rival for power. This ideological tension will be one of the grand themes of English history until the Reformation.

The Norman Cathedrals

(Note that the original Norman (or Romanesque) element in these Cathedrals has sometimes to be extracted visually from beneath later Gothic accretions and in one or two cases has been largely overwhelmed. Nowever, Norman architecture can generally be recognised by its simpler 'blocky' and less ornamented style with more rounded arches.)

St Albans' Cathedral started in 1077

Ruins of Old Sarum started in 1078

Norman Transept of Winchester Cathedral started in 1079

Norman Nave of Hereford Cathedral started in 1079

Nave of York Minster started in 1080

Nave of Rochester Cathedral started in 1082

Norman Nave of Ely Cathedral started in 1083

Norman Arch of Worcester Cathedral started in 1089

Chichester Cathedral started in 1091

Norman West Front of Lincoln Cathedral started in 1092

Norman Arch at Chester Cathedral started in 1092

Norman West Front at Twekesbury Cathedral started in 1092

Durham Cathedral started in 1093

Norwich Cathedral completed as a Norman Cathedral in 1096

Norman Crypt of Canterbury Cathedral started in 1096

Saint Margaret of Scotland

There is an additional footnote of interest in the career of Margaret of Wessex, sister of Edgar Atheling, in exile in Scotland. Canonised in 1250, it was she who ordered the rebuilding of Iona Abbey in 1072 and was credited with civilising her husband Malcolm III and with bringing Scotland closer to Rome under the influence of Lanfranc. This alone suggests that it would be foolish to position Lanfranc as anything other than servant of the Papacy. Her story also reminds us that the Church was a solace to aristocratic women married to near-barbarian warlords and that the aristocracy of the day bore no ethnic petit-bourgeois grudges once it was clear how the power game had played itself out. We cannot read ethnicity back too easily into contemporary power relations where being part of a universal Church and of an aristocratic and kingly caste was of far greater importance than one's racial origin.

1066-1087: The Conquest of England

The year 1066 marked a revolutionary watershed. It was to be more than a dynastic shift, albeit not immediately. Initially it was just another foreign kingship for the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. This had changed within a few years into the effective dispossession of an elite which persisted in challenging the claims of the incomers. There would eventually be no more compromises between ethnic elites, Dane and Anglo-Saxon, but rather the imposition of a Norman elite and the introduction of a new feudal culture imported from the Continent. This took place through an exceptional ruthlessness in the exercise of centralised power based on superior military technology and administrative skills. William the Conqueror was just very good at what he did - the exercise of power.

The year started with the death of Edward the Confessor which triggered the expectations of William, Duke of Normandy. As far as the English Witengemot is concerned, his claim was of no consequence. Harold Godwinson was immediately chosen as Edward's successor. He was the natural national choice. He had the backing of his people or rather of the aristocracy that dictated terms to the people. That Autumn, the events unfolded that would cost Harold his throne. It started with the invasion of Northumbria in September by Harold's alienated brother Tostig, backed by a Norwegian army led by Harald Hardrada, King of Norway. King Harold defeated the invaders at the Battle of Stamford Bridge but, within days, William of Normandy had landed in Pevensey Bay on the English South Coast to enforce his claim to the throne.

Harold undertook a forced march south and met William near Hastings where his men lost the battle, partly from exhaustion and partly because of tactical errors on the field. Harold was killed and the Witengemot quickly chose Edgar Atheling, grandson of Edmund Ironside, to succeed him. William equally quickly moved around London and approached it from the North long before the Anglo-Saxons could raise a fresh army. Edgar Atheling and representatives of the Witengemot met William at Berkhamsted in October, accepted the reality of their situation in military terms (and, no doubt, fearful of the impending sack of London) and offered him the Crown. William was crowned King in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. The coup had succeeded within barely three months.

The White Tower begun in 1067 as it looks today

William was secure enough in his position by February to leave England for the rest of 1067 although he took care to commission the massive fortress (the White Tower) that would become the basis for the Tower of London complex that still dominates the eastern river side of the merchant City of London. He also commissioned Battle Abbey to commemorate his victory and to seal his side of a pact with the Church.

The only rebellion at this stage was in Kent led by Eustace II, Count of Boulogne. Eustace was not an Anglo-Saxon but a disgruntled leading ally of William, probably the provider of the ships that brought William over the year before and now dissatisfied with his share of the loot. He was able to mobilise the Kentish, with whom he no doubt had trading relationships, against the new regime. His rebellion failed. He forfeited his land grants. Some were later restored in what looks more like the settlement of a business dispute than anything recognisably political.

Up to this point, William had come to a modus vivendi with the local aristocracy but more serious rebellions started to break out in Mercia and Northumbria in 1069 leading to the notorious and genocidal 'harrying' of the North over the winter of 1069-1070. The Danish element in the rebellion was bought off but the Anglo-Saxons, now under Edgar Atheling, decided to fight on. William's response was to starve them out through a brutal scorched earth policy directed at the civilian population. The estimates of the deaths caused are disputed. Some historians believe that the numbers have been accidentally exaggerated but there is no doubt that William used famine tactics deliberately (part of the contemporary armory of warfare). Otherwise sympathetic chroniclers such as Orderic Vitalis considered it as a stain on his reputation. It is also noted as the only occasion when he used such brutal tactics, indicating a degree of desperation in dealing with a major threat to the basis of his power in England.

His relatively tolerant attitude changed in other respects as we will see in our account of his handling of the Church. We can summarise the tale we will tell there by saying that, in the wake of Anglo-Saxon revolt, William effectively cut a deal with Rome, purged the English Church of recalcitrant 'Anglicans' and started a massive programme of patronage in the form of cathedral building. The Conquest of England by the Normans became nothing more nor less than its co-reconquest by Rome from 1070 even if Pope Gregory VII started to push his luck by 1080. Roman interest in the fate of the English North seems to have been minimal even if the chroniclers were to shed their crocodile tears after the event. 1070 is thus a moment when we see a radical Europeanisation of England by means of the sword, enforced famine and terror and the deliberate purge of anyone able to speak for the people through the Church, the latter all with the knowing connivance of Rome.

There is one last significant English revolt - that of Hereward the Wake, presumed to be an Anglo-Saxon noble in the English Fens, based on Ely in 1071/2 which had linked up to another abortive invasion by the Danes who had sought to exploit Northern discontent. William secured his position quite quickly. He then did what every strong southern ruler eventually did: he mounted an attack on Scotland where he defeated Malcolm and achieved his main aim which was the expulsion of Edgar Atheling from the Scottish court and so from a base of operations within the British Isles.

From this point on, William is to have more problems with his own ambitious Norman aristocracy than with the defeated Anglo-Danes. His own son Robert of Normandy rebelled in 1079 in order to force his father to cede the Duchy to him before the latter's death. This family quarrel is patched up after a defeat for the son by his father in the field. This was also the period of the Domesday Book, the 'Great Survey' of the King's assets in England and Wales undertaken in 1085/6. We can take this as a sign that the King was a remarkably forward-thinking political businessman, perhaps giving us the point when we can say that entrepreneurial feudalism was being replaced by managerial feudalism.

The King died in Rouen in September 1087 following a horse-riding accident and was immediately succeeded by his third son William Rufus. In 21 years, the Normans had collectively tamed a very troublesome province of the informal Roman Christian system. They had centralised power to an extent never seen before around an administratively capable and ruthless leader, albeit reliant on an oligarchy of militarised nobility. The Anglo-Norman settlement, based on an imported feudalism, was to prove extremely resilient, sufficient to make England a power that invades rather than is invaded.

1035-1066: The Godwin Ascendency & The Last Years of an English Kingdom

1035 saw two events of significance for the future destiny of England - the death of King Cnut which saw the disintegration of his Empire, much as the deaths of Offa and Brian Borum had seen the disintegration of their achievements, and the accession to the Duchy of Normandy of William. In England, Harold of England, Cnut's illegitimate son by Aelgifu of Northampton, became Anglo-Dane Regent but the country split into its older North-South resentments as Mercia and Northumbria organised against Wessex. The following year, apparently seeking to exploit the situation, Ethelred's sons, Alfred and Edward, returned to England but Alfred was seized by Harold, savagely blinded and died at Ely. Edward understandably returned to the safety of Normandy which he seems to have considered more his natural home than England.

The Witenagemot, a council of the ruling elite, sought to resolve the situation in 1037 by making Harold King of England [Harold I] but Harold died three years later in 1040 to be succeeded by Harthacnut [Cnut II], another son of Cnut (by Emma). In 2014, Cnut II's tax collectors were murdered in Worcester and the Danes burned the local monastery to the ground suggesting tensions that ran deeper than mere squabbles between members of the aristocratic elite. Cnut II himself seems to have pragmatically seen Edward, known as 'The Confessor', as his natural successor so that there seems to have been an implicit policy that the Kingdom was best held together by an 'understanding' between the natural leader of the Danish interest and the natural heir to the English interest. What is clear from subsequent years is that the pious Edward was not holding onto power by the force of his personality. He was not a natural representative of the native English or Danish interest and consistently looked to the Continent for his values. He was legitimate, convenient and circumscribed. Cnut II died in 1042. Edward, 'the 'King's brother', son of Ethelred the Ill-Advised, was crowned in 1043 and married his powerful sponsor's [Earl Godwin] daughter, Edith in 1045.

Godwin made Edward King and expected him to continue to defer to the most powerful noble in the land. Godwin was certainly the power behind the English throne by the 1040s. Earl Godwin had risen under Cnut I as the loyal English fixer for the Danish interest and almost certainly the architect of the merger of Anglo-Danish interests into one national force. However, something went seriously wrong in 1051, when William of Normandy visited England. Edward made a fateful and foolish promise of the English succession to the Duke of Normandy during what appears to have been a court quarrel between the Godwin interest and Edward over the latter's preference for Norman advisers and friends. One senses that Edward, a weak King by most standards, was looking to his old friends from his exile to counter the constraining influence of the Anglo-Danish aristocracy who represented a past of which he had nothing but bad memories, noting that his own brother had been effectively murdered by someone from that interest in 1036. The dynastic is the personal in early medieval England and this ill-understood personal dimension would eventually seal the fate of the English line of Kings.

Godwin is not only exiled but a Norman, Robert Champert de Jumieges, is appointed Archbishop of Canterbury although he lasted only eighteen months. Whatever the religious meaning of this, its political meaning was that Edward was hook, line and sinker committed to the Norman interest as counterplay to the Anglo-Danish interest. The trajectory that leads remorselessly to the seizure of England by the Normans started in earnest in these political struggles of 1051. There is another change of fortune when Early Godwin dies accidentally. Some balance is restored with his son Harold's commitment to the King's cause although we can safely assume that the pragmatic and cynical Harold was far more committed to his own and his family's interest.

Harold is leader of the English army. This represented a considerable force within a polity constantly threatened by invasions at the first sign of weakness and the nation craved order after the experiences before Cnut came to the throne and in the difficult period between his death and the Kingship of Edward. Edward, it would seem, was the creature of his aristocracy and his brief break out in 1051-1052 was clearly unsustainable. The result was a decisive shift against the Norman interest. Archbishop Robert of Canterbury was forced into exile and replaced with Stigand, clearly no Norman.

The power of the Godwin interest expanded when Harold's brother Tostig was appointed Earl of Northumberland on the death of Siward. No doubt the intention was to have the Godwins control Northumbria, the English army and the court in a triple encirclement of a weak King in anticipation of the succession. The systematic extension of Godwin power takes another turn in 1057 when Leofric, Earl of Mercia, dies and his son Aelfgar succeeds at the price of ceding East Anglia to another brother of Harold, Garth (although Aelfgar is succeeded in turn by his young son Edwin in 1062 without incident). Yet another brother, Leofwine, takes an Earldom that covers the counties surrounding London. Looked at from Normandy, these manouevres seemed destined to make Edward's personal promise of the succession to Duke William meaningless without decisive military action by the Duke.

There is another factor in the game - the Norwegians on the other side of the North Sea. Their intervention will eventually prove decisive if not to their benefit. An attempted Norwegian invasion is repulsed in 1058 but they are ever-present as a threat that almost destroyed England in the past and could do so again. But, after a decade of Harold's military victories against Welsh and Norwegians alike, an unfortunate accident brings matters to a head. Harold, still only a military leader and the leading aristocrat answerable to the king he serves, is shipwrecked off the Normandy coast (1064) and falls into the hands of Duke William. Duke William takes the opportunity to make him swear an oath to accept the promise given by Edward during the brief Norman ascendency at the English court in 1051-52. Oath-keeping is important to the Franks and Normans but a more contingent matter to the Anglo-Danes, especially when extracted in a situation where there was little choice in the matter, so, returning to England, Harold has little intention of keeping his promise, especially when his military leadership is no less proven that of William.

What is about to happen now is a perfect storm for Harold. He has alienated the greedy and ambitious Normans, he has had his eye off the ball because of his accidental absence overseas and the Norwegians are lurking on the margins waiting for an opportunity for plunder. At this point, the Northumbrians revolt against the imposed Godwin brother Tostig (1065) who is then forced into exile. The personal is again the dynastic as Tostig becomes enraged at Harold's failure to support him and then, inopportunely, King Edward dies.

980-1093: A Note on the British Margins

Regular readers will have noted that we have hardly referred to the areas outside England. There is good reason for this.The prosperity of the British Isles is concentrated in Southern Britain. England has reached a higher level of state formation at each stage in our story than its margins and it became much more linked to continental civilisation as Rome restored its moral authority. It is not a matter of disrespect but simply a recognition that the warlords and small kingdoms of the rest of Britain are still lagging developmentally behind even the rough and ready English polity and that descriptions of their infighting until the eleventh century would be about as instructive as that of African kingdoms only minimally connected to the global system in the Middle Ages.

However, Scotland has by this time become a much more developed Kingdom under Malcolm II (1005-34) and Duncan I (1034-1040) than hitherto but even Malcolm is forced to acknowledge the overlordship of Cnut of England, Norway and Denmark in 1031 without a fight. King of Scotland gives us the wrong image because what is now Scotland was carved up between multiple small kingdoms (not only Scotland but Strathclyde, Moray and the Norse-Gael 'kingdoms' of the North West as well as English eorldoms). This was not a very different situation from Ireland under Brian Boruma or Wales before the brief flowering of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn.

Famously (thanks to Shakespeare), Mac Bethad mac Findlaich murdered Duncan in 1040 and made himself King but there is no romance in this - it is just the standard competitive thuggery of petty kings (much worse was happening in England as we shall see in the next posting). 'Macbeth' is interesting, however, for his introduction of feudalism to Scotland under the influence of Norman exiles and the introduction of feudalism may have had asignificant role in ensuring the resilience of the Scottish State. Mac Bethad found himself embroiled in the struggles for power in England and an English invasion in 1054 resulted indirectly in the Kingship of Malcolm III (1058-1093) since the English appear to have restored Malcolm, son of the murdered Duncan I, to the Kingship of Strathclyde in that year while Mac Bethad's stepson Lulach lasted barely a year as King of Scotland.

Understandably, the successful Norman invasion of England and the brutal conquest of the North of England by the Normans changed the balance of power in Britain considerably. Although Scotland remained an independent entity for the vast bulk of subsequent history (until the Union in 1707), it often had to fight for that independence. The outcome was never certain. Both Wales and Ireland, on the other hand, moved steadily from near-anarchy to Anglo-Norman domination over the centuries, largely missing out (except for very brief experiments by strong men) on the national state option. We might say that Scotland got into the state formation business in the nick of time even if, in the end (or is it the end?), it had to 'sell out' (literally) to the more material business of satisfying its trading interests as the deliberate choice of its own elite in a form of quasi-submission to the Crown.

This Scottish decision, freely made by those who purported to be the leaders of its nationhood, could be seen as a dry run for the current predicament of the United Kingdom in its relationship to the larger if ramshackle European Empire - after all, what invasion could not achieve, elite greed for gold  might deliver. As for the Celtic fringe, its binding to England in a dynastically driven Union only started to unravel seriously within the last hundred years, a process that is still unfolding as we write. In the end, all that may be left will be England and its satellites, Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, the Falklands and a few tiny Crown Colonies - oddities within the new Unholy Roman Empire over the Channel. As the English elite transfers its sovereignty to a larger empire, the 'Celtic fringe' becomes an important factor in shifting the democratic' balance against popular English desire for the same sort of sovereign independence that the 'Celts' have apparently made their 'raison d'etre'. For the Celtic elites, submitting to the European Empire is almost an act of defiance against past and present submission to the British Empire while the poor bloody English, ruled by foreign imperial masters since 1066, and only getting a quasi-democratic State through perpetual struggle over some 350 years, find themselves shunted willy-nilly into the next Empire that comes along. The English may yet end up being the last people on earth to be liberated from any Empire! To the Celts, this is poetic justice. To the English, perhaps the final injustice.

Meanwhile, William the Conqueror was able to turn his attention to Scotland in 1072. Malcolm made obeisance and gave his son Duncan up as a hostage. When the Conqueror's successor, William Rufus, was distracted by a civil war in Normandy, Malcolm tried his luck with an invasion of England in 1091. He was faced with an Anglo-Norman army that was so formidable that he came to his senses and recognised Rufus as overlord, thanks to the mediation of Edgar Atheling and Robert Curthose. However, Malcolm and Rufus quarrelled over property rights and war broke out again. Malcolm was killed in 1093 in an Anglo-Norman ambush. Nevertheless, although defeated, Malcolm can be reasonably said to be Rufus' equal or near-equal to all intents and purposes. Whatever the balance of power, it is true that, by the end of Malcolm's reign, Scotland was holding its own as a viable State. This was not quite the case in Wales and Ireland.

Wales was no different from Scotland a century or so earlier, or indeed England before and even after Offa, in being, normally, a quasi-anarchy of small principalities. Harold Godwinson waged a campaign against Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, King of Gwyneth and Powys since 1039, in 1056, one year after Gruffydd had become King of Wales, following the same trajectory as Brian Boruma and indeed Offa in England. In all these cases, a strong man made himself lord over a whole people but the whole enterprise then collapsed into its former state on his death (in this case, in 1063). The Danish Empire of Cnut (as we shall see) similarly fell apart on his death in 1035. In Gruffydd's case, the English clearly saw his emergence as a potential threat and mounted a further invasion in 1063 after an surprise attack on his court the year before. Gruffydd was forced to hide out in Snowdonia and was murdered by some of his own men in what appears to have been a vendetta. Wales seems to have presented no direct threat to the Anglo-Normans by the time of their arrival on the scene and was relatively easily contained.

In Ireland, the Danish presence around the city that they founded at Dublin (analogous to the trading centre of York or Jorvik in Northern England), alongside the unifying campaigns of King Brian Boruma, helped to kick start the process of state formation in the second island of the British Isles even if it was mostly to prove abortive. By the final quarter of the century, the Danish presence is fully Christianised and mostly committed to peaceful trading so what we have is not the struggle we saw in England between rival ethnic communities. Southern British Kings, both English and Danish, had access to more significant resources in their struggle to own a much more valuable asset than Ireland. Brian Boruma represented only the first stage in Ireland's potential for statehood through his steady, often bloody, slow but still only partial unification of the country as a proto-polity. It is a chaotic business - Boruma dies at the great battle of Clontarf (1014) that is supposed (wrongly) in legend to have defeated Danish raiders and 'saved' Ireland. Ireland is more conceptually united after than before his death but it cannot be called by any stretch of the imagination a coherent well administered state and the unification process stalls as the English equivalent once did after Offa.