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.