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.

695-756: After Theodore - The Church Established

Once Archbishop Theodore had established the Church of Rome as a cultural absolute for the English, any lingering controversy could end and England could find its saints and shrines. We have already noted how retiring kings (perhaps saving themselves from a grisly end as power slipped away from them) became monks or found themselves migrating to Rome - Cenred of Mercia in 704 (in Rome by the next year) and Ine of Wessex who died in Rome in 726 being two examples. Aristocrats were also active in founding new establishments - Ine of Wessex's sister, Cuthburg, founded a religious community at Wimborne in 718 - so the integration of Church and aristocracy is becoming ever more close in the half century before Offa.

Wilfrid outlives Theodore by almost two decades in 709 but without any essential change to the settlement created by his old rival. He is buried at Ripon, presumably reconciled to the facts of the matter. He is succeeded at Ripon by his chaplain Acca in 710. Former John Archbishop of York (retired 717), reckoned to be a kind man, dies in retirement at Beverley (a monastery he had founded) in 721, showing that monasticism was also a means of retiring from the cares of office.

Theodore's successor at Canterbury, Brihtwold (there are many variants of the name), died in 731 after a very long incumbency (he had been appointed in 693) and is succeeded by Tatwine who has a very short incumbency (he dies in 734). Another short incumbency for Nothelm (735-739) is succeeded by another long one for Cuthbert (740-760).

This was not a conciliar period until 746-7 with the first Council of Clovesho (the first of several quasi-synods in England). The location is unclear but was probably in Mercia and it involved not only religious figures but political figures such as kings and aristocrats. Some have claimed this to be the earliest version of an English Parliament not without justification and the Clovesho Councils were to meet periodically through the second half of the eighth century and first quarter of the ninth. As far as we can gather this was primarily a dispute-resolving, administrative and advisory body to kings and shows again how the Church was becoming essential to the construction of the rules by which society would be ordered. Religious matters remained a matter for the Church alone but it seems that kings and nobles welcomed this intervention by the spiritual wing of the system as a means of securing power at the cost of some civilised restraint of their own impulses.

As for saints and shrines, at the beginning of the period (695), Abbess Sexburga, sister of Saint Etheldreda (Aethelthryth) founder of the convent at Ely in 673, places her sister's body in its Abbey Church and so created a shrine. To this day, there is a Catholic St. Etheldreda's Church in Ely Place in London - the oldest Catholic Church in London - in a building that was the town chapel of the powerful Bishops of Ely in the later Middle Ages. Another Fenland saint is Guthlac of Crowland who died at his hermitage in 714 on which site Crowland Abbey was to be founded only two years later. Six churches alone are dedicated to him in Lincolnshire today and others in nearby counties.

The Lindisfarne Gospels date from this period (late Seventh Century). England is culturally starting the process of matching the experience of the Irish Celtic Church and contributing to a later Charlemagnic Europe with its fine illuminated scholarship, piety toward spiritual exemplars and monasticism.  This is also the period of Bede's important source The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731 four years before his death in 735. His death marks the closing of a spectacular flowering of Northumbrian art and scholarship.

There is a defintely a humanising influence going on here even if the lot of the peasantry was probably only marginally improved - the real improvement (a betterment felt across Europe) was the Church's ability to defuse the sheer violence of a warlord society by imposing at least some restraint on barbarism, building a society of rules without the requirement for terror (an alternative model to Chinese legalism of which the West knew nothing thankfully), permitting a non-violent way out for yesterday's men and allowing scholars to retire in moderate security. The best of them tried to show respect to the poor and educate the brightest for the new administration - not quite mandarins in the making perhaps but still providers of rule-making and administrative services to rulers who had been little more than pirates and thugs not so long ago.