³ÉÈËÂÛ̳

Collaboration

William intended to make his rule easier as the successor to Edward, with the co-operation of the English. In this, the English magnates readily acquiesced, remembering the lessons learned from the Danish Conquest 50 years before. After all, Edwin and Morcar were the grandsons of one of the most successful collaborators, and Waltheof had nothing to lose by supporting the new régime. We should also note that William did not move immediately against Stigand, despite the disapproval of the Pope. In fact, the two chief prelates of England were perhaps the staunchest supporters of William among the English magnates, once they had accepted William as God's chosen successor to Edward the Confessor.

William returned to Normandy in 1067, taking the three English Earls with him as hostages and leaving Odo of Bayeux and William fitzOsbern in charge of England. During these early stages of the Conquest, he was most concerned with the security of his newly won kingdom. He ensured this security by granting a compact area of land to trusted Norman nobles whose task it was to build a castle and guard it against all comers. These were the castleries. The earliest were the so-called 'rapes' of the south, granted to William's two half-brothers, Odo of Bayeux and Robert of Mortain as well as his two trusted followers the Comte d'Eu and William fitzOsbern.

Odo and the Bayeux Tapestry

The Bayeux Tapestry  © Odo was given the Rape of Kent, which included Dover and Canterbury. This greatly irritated Eustace of Boulogne, the one-time vassal of Edward the Confessor, who obviously thought that he had a prior claim on Dover and resented it being given to Odo. He tried to seize the town, but was beaten off by the locals and fled back to Boulogne at the approach of Odo and his men.

We know a great deal about Odo because until his fall from grace in 1082, he acted as regent of England whenever William was out of the country: first in conjunction with William fitzOsbern, then as sole regent after fitzOsbern's death in 1071. It was he who commissioned the Bayeux Tapestry, as a monument to his half-brother's achievement that was intended for display in his new cathedral at Bayeux.

The Bayeux Tapestry was actually made in Canterbury, and the story it tells follows the tradition followed by the chronicles in the Canterbury archive. It not only depicts Odo himself, several times, but also some of his most prominent personal retainers, whose lands can be traced in post-Conquest England. Vitalis of Canterbury, the man who brought news of Harold's approach to Hastings, was a prominent landholder in the Whitstable area north of Canterbury, and was friends with Wadard, depicted organising supplies for the landing on the Bayeux Tapestry. Turold, the man on the Tapestry who brought William's message to Count Guy of Ponthieu, became castellan of Rochester and was one of Odo's most trusted men and powerful tenants.

Odo was arguably the most powerful man in England after the King, with lands throughout England, but his main power base lay in Kent. His position there inevitably put him into conflict with the other great landowner of the area, the Archbishop of Canterbury. This developed into a personal feud between Odo and Lanfranc, the Archbishop after 1070, which was waged largely through the law courts. Great land disputes such as the epic three-day Trial of Penenden Heath saw these two great magnates vying with one another for control of Kentish land. In this trial, Turold is named as one of the agents of Odo most responsible for seizing land on his behalf. Turold ultimately became Constable of Bayeux, but the fortunes of his family were so intimately tied with those of Odo that it fell along with Odo at the end of his career.

Odo's fall was a long and protracted one. It began in 1082, when he attempted to take several Norman barons to Italy with him in a bid to buy the papacy. William could not allow this to happen, and with the help of Lanfranc, tried and imprisoned Odo for sedition. He was never reconciled with his half-brother, and Odo was only released after William's death. He repaid the generosity of the new King, William 'Rufus', by leading a revolt of the barons in favour of Rufus's brother, Robert. Rufus savagely suppressed this revolt and besieged Odo in Rochester Castle. In a fitting end to his career in England, when Odo surrendered he came out of the castle to the jeers of his English subjects demanding the hangman's noose. He was exiled and died on crusade with Robert in 1097.

Orderic Vitalis

Orderic Vitalis: The jeers of the English outside Rochester reflect one attitude to the Conquest, expressed eloquently by Orderic Vitalis:

Undoubtedly all that he says is true, but Orderic exaggerates. He himself was the result of a successful Anglo-Norman liaison: his father, a French clerk from Orleans in the service of Roger de Montgomery, married an English woman and Orderic was born and brought up in England. His own history illustrates just how 'English' the Norman conquerors could become, for despite being a second-generation 'Norman', he grew up thinking of himself as 'English', and when his father sent him off to the monastery of St Evroult in Normandy, he felt as if he was going to a foreign land:

Wigot of Wallingford

He was not the only example of assimilation: Wigot of Wallingford, the man who had surrendered the Thames ford to William, was canny enough to realise that he would not keep his lands in such a vitally strategic spot, so he promptly married his daughter off to its new Norman castellan, Robert d'Oilly. This enabled him to keep his old land in the hands of his family. In fact, his proven loyalty to the new régime seems to have benefitted all his family, as his son, Toki, is recorded as a personal squire to King William himself at the siege of Gerberoi in 1079. Sadly, Toki's loyalty stretched to the ultimate sacrifice. He was killed bringing a spare horse to William during a particularly vicious arrowstorm.

Robert D'Oilly

Robert d'Oilly himself was an interesting character. A minor Norman noble, he, too was a vassal of Roger de Montgomery, as well as being linked to William fitzOsbern - William's two best friends. He distinguished himself in Normandy's wars with its neighbours prior to 1066, and also shone at Hastings. As a result, William trusted him with the important task of guarding Wallingford.

Robert threw himself energetically into building a complex polygonal motte and bailey fortress out of wood there. When he was given the opportunity to marry the English heiress of his newly acquired land, he jumped at the chance, since it would secure his new holdings and ensure the loyalty of the locals now under his control. By 1071, Wigot of Wallingford was dead, and Robert had inherited the thegn's lands in neighbouring Oxfordshire as well. He moved to Oxford in 1071, as its sheriff. There, he became a great patron of the city, founding one of the religious houses that would eventually form the University of Oxford and building a new stone castle there in 1073. One of his original Norman towers still stands on the castle site today. His daughter, Matilda, married another Norman noble called Miles Crispin who took over the castle of Wallingford.

Land seizure

However, Robert did not acquire all of his lands by such 'amicable' means. The Domesday Book is a unique document which was commissioned by King William near the end of his reign in 1086. It lists all of the land in England, telling us who owned it prior to 1066, who owned it in 1086, and often telling us how and when it changed hands. One entry from the Domesday Book for Berkshire tells the poignant story of one Azor, who was once the bursar of King Edward the Confessor:

This graphically illustrates the other side of the Norman Conquest. Instead of sending his army home and maintaining the status quo, William's Normans stayed and began to take over English lands, edging out the old ruling aristocracy. William could not and would not stop them, for two good reasons. First, he owed them a share in the spoils of Conquest: so he actively co-operated in the parcelling out of English land, granting the entire lands of dead or dispossessed thegns to Norman knights. Secondly, William tried to work closely with the local governors of the shires: the reeves and the sheriffs; which inevitably cut across the old rights and privileges of the English Earls. The result was unavoidable: the interests of the new Norman conquerors and the interests of the old English establishment were incompatible.

On a local level, this translated into land seizure. At its most blatant, a lord like Robert d'Oilly could turn up at the table of the local tax collector and plonk a bag of coins on the desk whilst his men bundled poor Azor out of the way. Azor would then have three days in which to lodge a complaint to the sheriff before title to the land passed over to the new lord. However, since the local sheriff was usually in the pocket of the lord involved (or actually was the lord himself) there was really very little that the Azors of this world could do.

The Sheriff of Cambridge

There is one celebrated case involving Picot, the infamous sheriff of Cambridge. When a king's thegn called Ulfkell seized the manor of Isleham Priory from the Bishop of Rochester at the instigation of Picot himself, the sheriff bullied the shire court into finding against the bishop in the subsequent court case. The bishop took his grievance to Odo of Bayeux (his local lord as well as the regent of England), who settled the matter by getting six of the court members to swear on oath that they had made the decision freely. However, one of them accused the others of perjury, and the case was taken to London. There in front of an assembly of 'most of the better barons of all England' they were found guilty and fined £300. The bishop of Rochester got his land back, and Picot got off scot free.

It has to be said that Picot was a particularly nasty example of his kind: he was characterised as: 'A hungry lion, a ravening wolf, a cunning fox, a dirty pig and an impudent dog' by the Abbot of Ely, with whom he had more than one run-in. Many sheriffs under William must have been good and fair men, but we don't hear about them because they don't make good television programmes. We are told about the corrupt new men, like Picot and Robert d'Oilly, who have come up from obscurity and are making the most of their new and highly unusual position while they can. Nevertheless, rapacious sheriffs were not uncommon. By the reign of William's third son, Henry I, we hear of a whole group of them being thrown out for exceeding their authority.

The Rebellion of 1069

The English Earls certainly felt that William's new sheriffs were exceeding their authority and muscling-in on areas which had once been the jurisdiction of the Earls alone. By 1069, three years after the Conquest, the situation had become intolerable. Until then, uprisings against the new Norman régime had been confined to local spats prompted mainly by the heavy-handed actions of overzealous castellans. The sons of Harold had tried two abortive raids against Exeter from Ireland, but now they had given up.

A Herefordshire thegn called Eadric the Wild had rebelled when the castellan of Hereford expropriated his lands and was fighting an equally unsuccessful guerrilla war on the Welsh Marches. Yet there was no central figure around which the English could rally, and so these uprisings were limited to a little local difficulty. In addition, as Orderic explains, the main obstacle to a successful English resistance was the castles themselves:

All this changed in 1069 when the people of Northumbria made a bid to throw off the English yoke. Northumbria had long resented English rule, and their revolts against Tostig in 1065 and Harold in 1066 had been part of an ongoing history of continuous rebellion. So, despite being centred around the 'Bonnie Prince Charlie' figure of Edgar Aetheling, this was not so much an English revolt against William as a Northumbrian revolt against the English. Making common cause with their traditional allies, the King of Scotland and the King of Denmark, they surprised the Norman garrison of Durham outside its new castle and massacred it to a man. Then they moved south and laid siege to York.

This proved the spark to ignite the flame. Smouldering with resentment over the way they had been treated by William, Earls Edwin, Morcar and Waltheof declared their independence. In the same year, the men of Shrewsbury joined a raid on the town by Eadric the Wild to rise up against the new castle built there by Roger de Montgomery, and the men of Peterborough under the command of Hereward the Wake raided the cathedral, carrying off its treasures. The whole of northern Britain was in revolt, uncoordinated and opportunistic, but nonetheless united in its opposition to the Norman king. It was the most dangerous threat to King William's rule so far.

Retribution

Clifford's Tower, raised by the Normans in York  © William reacted with his customary brutal efficiency. Leaving Roger de Montgomery to deal with the Welsh raid of Eadric on his own, he himself marched north to York, building new castles at Warwick and Nottingham on the way. Once again, the castles did the trick. Simple motte and bailey structures of mounded earth and timber, which could be erected within as little as 6 days, they formed easily defensible strongpoints from which the Normans could exert control, and were potent psychological symbols of authority. The Mercian revolt crumbled.

Edwin and Morcar went on the run, and Eadric the Wild retreated back into Wales, unable to do any more than set fire to the surrounding town of Shrewsbury. William's northward march against the Northumbrians was as swift and surprising as Harold's on Stamford Bridge three years before. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle deals with it in two simple lines:

He did more than ravage just the city. Having spent Christmas up in York, rebuilding the castle and pacifying the area, he ordered the most notorious act of his reign: the so-called Harrying of the North. Northumbria was systematically ravaged, laying waste to the land, burning the crops and destroying the houses. The action caused a famine in Yorkshire which is graphically described by a chronicler in Durham: corpses decaying, survivors eating cats and dogs, no village left inhabited between York and Durham. Orderic Vitalis was not the only one to roundly vilify William for this act of cold brutality, though once again he is the most eloquent:

Consolidation in the north

Northumbria was devastated and the loss of life must have been enormous. Even so, enough remained of the local infrastructure for William to establish four new castleries in the aftermath of the revolt. He placed his old friend William fitzOsbern in charge of the new castle at York, and gave the key strategic fortress of Richmond into the hands of his kinsman, the Breton Count Alan Rufus. Count Alan saw Yorkshire as virgin land he could exploit. He moved himself lock, stock and barrel up to Richmond and carved out his own private feoffdom, where he exercised huge private patronage. The castle he built there is one of the most spectacular Norman castles in the country, and though the present keep dates from 1126, there was a stone one there from 1088 onwards.

In an attempt to further boulster his hold on the north, Alan entered into negotiations with King Malcolm Cranmore of Scotland (the Malcolm of Macbeth) to marry Malcolm's daughter, Edith, who was residing in a nunnery at Wilton (Wilts). This alliance was vetoed by King William, but also residing in the nunnery at Wilton was Gunnhild, the (probably illegitimate) daughter of King Harold. She eloped from the nunnery and took up house with Alan at Richmond. Since they prudently did not get married, the situation seems to have been accepted with equanimity by the King and Archbishop Lanfranc. However, when Count Alan died, Gunnhild refused to re-enter the nunnery and instead took up with Alan's brother, who had succeeded to his estates, prompting a furious letter from the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Anselm:

Treachery of the Earls

The year 1069 was a turning point in the Norman Conquest, for the treachery of the Earls seems to have snapped William's patience. He stripped Earls Edwin and Morcar of their titles and replaced Archbishop Stigand in Canterbury with his old friend and confidant from Normandy, Lanfranc. At the same time, he installed a Norman into the archbishopric of York, left vacant by the death of Ealdred in that year, and replaced four other English bishops implicated in the uprisings with Norman prelates. Yet he was still prepared to use Englishmen in his administration. Wulstan of Worcester was the most prominent English bishop remaining, whilst William seems to have recognised that Earl Waltheof had joined the rebellion in an effort to win Northumbria as his rightful inheritance, taken from him by Tostig in 1055. He installed Waltheof as Earl of Bamburgh and Northumbria, marrying the earl to his niece, Judith, in an attempt to secure family loyalty.

It was a vain hope. Waltheof was implicated in the last great revolt of William's reign; the Revolt of the Earls in 1075. This was an uprising planned by the Norman Earl Roger of Hereford and the Breton Ralph de Gael of Norfolk, who were once again dissatisfied with the encroachments of the sheriffs on their traditional prerogatives. The revolt was a disaster: Ralph was bottled up in Norfolk Castle, from which he fled to Brittany (leaving his wife to surrender); Earl Roger was stopped in Herefordshire by a force led by two English bishops, among them Wulstan of Worcester; and Waltheof fled to Normandy to expose the plot and throw himself on the King's mercy. He seems to have become caught up in the ongoing feud between his patron, Archbishop Lanfranc, and Odo of Bayeux, because after a year of imprisonment, he was beheaded in the King's absence by a powerful group of his enemies led by Odo. His skald, Thorkell, wrote a telling lamentation for his dead master, which given the foolishness of his actions does not seem truly deserved:

Hereward and the Isle of Ely

Ely Cathedral  © Waltheof was the last of the English Earls. In the wake of 1069, Earls Edwin and Morcar had gone on the run. Edwin was murdered by his own men, but Morcar, accompanied by Bishop Aethelwine of Durham took refuge with Hereward the Wake on the Isle of Ely in 1071. Hereward is one of the better known figures to come out of the Norman Conquest, because a chronicle of his life survives in a collection of documents preserved by the Abbey of Ely . The son of a King's Thegn called Leofric, he was exiled at the request of his father by Edward the Confessor. He travelled around Europe for a time, but returned to England after the Conquest, probably in 1069. There, he was horrified to find his father and his brother murdered, and his lands stolen. We shall let the Gesta Herewardi take up the story:

Outraged at the murder of his younger brother and the abuse inflicted on his mother, Hereward entered the manor in disguise, where its new lord and his men were celebrating their good fortune, and slew all fourteen of them single-handed. He then fled into the fens, where he was harboured by Abbot Thurstan of Ely, who was afraid that William was about to replace him with a Norman prelate.

Hereward and his family seem to have been the traditional protectors of the religious houses in the area. So in 1069, following the death of Abbot Brand of Peterborough, he led a band of the abbey's men into Peterborough Cathedral to rescue the abbey treasures before they could fall into the clutches of the new Norman abbot, Turold, on his way to take over the see with 50 men. Needless to say, the Norman sources see this as an act of outlawry, and they are helped in their case by the fact that Hereward seems to have used the treasure to try and buy Danish support - who promptly sailed off with the loot and weren't heard from again.

The taking of Ely

It was the arrival of Earl Morcar that escalated this local problem into a national one. William could not afford to let such a high-profile rebel remain at large, and despatched a fleet and army to besiege the rebels in the marsh. The Normans built a causeway over the marsh seven miles south of Ely at a place called Aldreth Causeway, but it collapsed under the weight of the Norman knights. They then resorted unsuccessfully to a sorceress, before the Isle was finally taken by treachery.

Abbot Thurstan, fearing for the future of his abbey, struck a deal and showed the Normans the secret way across to the Isle. Morcar and Bishop Aethelwine were taken, but Hereward escaped with a handful of men, and held out until King William was persuaded to come to terms and give him his land back (which we can find in Domesday Book). In this, Hereward was much like Eadric the Wild, who also made his peace with the King once his land was restored to him, and even went on campaign with William in Scotland. These thegns had no argument with William as King: it was the theft of their lands which troubled them.

English exiles: the Varangian story

Not all the English were quite so sanguine. There were some for whom collaboration was not an option. Some fled to Scotland to join Edgar Aetheling, the Bonnie Prince Charlie of his age, but even he was eventually forced to come to terms with William after a series of disastrous attempts against the Normans, and spent his final years in exile in Norman Italy. Others fled to Denmark, amongst whom was one Aelnoth of Canterbury who wrote a biography of King Cnut the Holy, Swegn's son, which vilifies the Normans for their conquest of England. Yet the most colourful group is a band of Englishmen led by a thegn called Siward who decided to sell up their land and sail to Byzantium to join the Varangian Guard. Their story, told in an Icelandic saga, neatly sums up the English experience of the Norman Conquest.

After an epic voyage, their fleet of 350 ships arrived at Byzantium to find its capital, Constantinople, besieged by the Turks. Having driven the Turks away, they were offered land and positions in the Varangian Guard by the grateful Byzantine Emperor. Many took up the offer of the land, but others leapt at the chance to join the Varangian Guard when they heard that the Normans had invaded Byzantium and were besieging the city of Durazzo (Durres in Albania).

The Imperial army marched out to meet them, led by the Varangians, eager to get into the fight. Their story is told by Anna Comnena, daughter of the Emperor who kept a chronicle of the events in her life. On the 18th October 1081, the English clashed with the Normans. Anna Comnena says that the men from 'Thule' (as the Byzantines called Britain) were quite as warlike as the Normans and even braver. This was the problem. In their eagerness to get at the enemy, they broke formation and charged ahead of the rest of the army. Tired and out of breath when they reached the Norman line, they were hacked to pieces. So ended the great exodus; from one ignominious defeat at the hands of the Normans to another.

Domesday Book

The great convocation took place at Old Sarum  © For many, the crowning glory of William's reign was Domesday Book, the great catalogue of land and ownership compiled in the final year of his life. It has generally been seen as the culmination of the Norman Conquest, in which William commissioned a great survey of all he now ruled and had it presented to him at a great convocation in Old Sarum at Salisbury, setting the final seal on the Conquest of England. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle certainly views it in these terms:

Defending the Conquest

Compiling Domesday Book was a huge endeavour, which entered the folk memory because almost everyone was involved. At least 62,000 witnesses gave evidence throughout the enquiry; and it is easy to see why the chroniclers, writing with hindsight in the knowledge that William died as it was finished, should have accorded the Domesday survey with such significance. Yet behind it all lay some very mundane reasons which speak volumes about the security of the kingdom and the foundations of lordship upon which it was based. It is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which provides the real purpose of Domesday in the preceding paragraph of its 1085 entry:

Cnut the Holy was the son of Swegn Estrithson. He had threatened England in earlier years, joining his father in the raids of 1069 and 1070, and raiding York on behalf of Swegn in 1075. Now Swegn was dead, and William was afraid that Cnut was preparing an attempt to repeat the achievements of his namesake. So he needed to billet a large army on his people in preparation for the feared invasion and raise a Danegeld to pay for it. Domesday Book put this assessment on a firm basis, so that everyone knew what was owed both to them and by them: without this quid pro quo, William's lords would never have co-operated. Government at this time was all about personal relationships, and the King could not simply demand such a huge sacrifice without giving something back. So Domesday Book was not born out of a desire to 'set the seal' upon the Conquest of England, but out of a desperate need to defend the conquest from yet another threat, this time by a foreign power.

Find out more

About the author

Dr Mike Ibeji is a Roman military historian who was an associate producer on Simon Schama's A History of Britain.