Crown and Country: A History of England through the Monarchy. David Starkey

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СКАЧАТЬ motte or mound, which is crowned with a wooded stockade. The motte was one essential feature of the castle. The other was the bailey or stockaded enclosure at the foot of the motte.

      These motte-and-bailey castles, like the mounted knights and archers who had won Hastings, were another mark of the Normans’ military superiority. They were standardized, quick and easy to build using forced labour and the plentiful supplies of local timber; and, above all, they were effective.

      On his march to London after the battle of Hastings, William strengthened the fortifications of Dover and, from his residence at Barking, he used the first weeks of 1067 to supervise the construction of another castle at London, to the south-east of the City on the site of the present Tower. William’s first two English castles, at Hastings and Dover, were designed to secure his communications with Normandy; his third, at London, was intended to overawe the capital city. Now Odo from his base at Dover, and Robert from his at Norwich, were building more.

      Anglo-Saxon England had seen nothing like them. The burhs, or fortified towns, were designed to protect the people. The motte-and-bailey castles were there to intimidate them. And they did. With their raw earth and wood, set in a tree-denuded landscape, each was the symbol of a profoundly alien military occupation.

      But, despite the castles and the heavy-handedness of William’s two regents, the prospects for Anglo-Norman cooperation still seemed reasonably good when William returned to England on 6 December 1067, in time to celebrate the feast of Christmas in his new kingdom. Early in the new year, there was a little local difficulty at Exeter, where Harold’s mother, Gytha, had taken refuge with her household. The town held out against the king for two weeks, despite William’s typical tactic of having a hostage blinded within sight of the walls, and the defenders inflicted heavy casualties on William’s troops. Nevertheless, they were granted easy terms: yet another castle was built; otherwise, William wanted to show that life could return to normal under his rule.

      Indeed, by April William felt secure enough to bring his wife Matilda to England. And, on Whit Sunday, 11 May 1068, ‘Archbishop Ealdred hallowed her for queen at Westminster’. William’s reunion with Matilda was evidently a happy one and their youngest son, the future Henry I, was born within the year. The political climate equally seemed set fair. The court that gathered for the coronation was unusually full and it was evenly balanced between Norman and English magnates.

      But, within a few months, this fair weather turned to foul and any hopes for an Anglo-Norman state were dead. In the course of the summer, some of the most distinguished English elite chose exile: Harold’s mother, Gytha, ‘and the wives of many good men with her’, went to St Omer in Flanders; while Edgar the Æthling with his mother Agatha and sisters Margaret and Christina took refuge in Scotland at the court of Malcolm III. But others turned to rebellion: Earls Edwin and Morkere rose in the Midlands and Gospatric in Northumbria, where William had made him earl. Both their motives and strategy are obscure. And William, as usual, moved too fast for whatever plans they may have had to mature. First he advanced to Nottingham. This cut Edwin and Morkere off from their northern allies and they had no choice but to surrender. Then William marched to York, at which point Gospatric and ‘the best men’ fled to join Edgar in Scotland. Finally the king returned south via Lincoln. And everywhere he went he built a castle, as The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports:

      He went to Nottingham, and wrought there a castle; and so advanced to York, and there wrought two castles; and the same at Lincoln and everywhere in that quarter.

      Most ambitiously of all, he set up a Norman, Robert de Commines, as earl of Northumbria, with another new castle at Durham.

      With the north apparently settled, William and Matilda returned to Normandy in late 1068. But it proved to be a lull before a far greater storm. Early in 1069, the Northumbrians rose against Earl Robert; took Durham Castle; murdered the earl and slaughtered the garrison. Most ominously, having been joined by the exiles in Scotland, Edgar the Æthling and Earl Gospatric, they took York, where, with the agreement of the citizens, Edgar was proclaimed king. At the same time, aid was solicited from King Swein of Denmark, who still persisted with his own claim to the English throne.

      This was even worse than the Northumbrian revolt of 1065. Then, the Northumbrians had chosen their own earl; now they had elected their own king. Once more, William made a lightning march to York and took the rebels unawares. He captured and sacked the city, not sparing the Minster, and then, after refortifying and regarrisoning it, returned south.

      But the leaders had escaped and were still at large when the Danish fleet landed in the Humber in September 1069. The Danes and the English rebels, who now included Earl Waltheof, joined forces and on 20 September captured York, where they demolished William’s castles and slaughtered the French garrison. It was the third time that the city had changed hands within the year. And William had to set out on his third northern expedition to recover it. He was determined that it should be his last.

      First, he came to terms with the Danes. Lacking the ships to attack their fleet, William bought them off with a Danegeld, in return for which they promised to leave before Easter. This distraction out of the way, he turned to settle accounts with his own subjects. Once again, his weapon was terror. But this time the scale was infinitely larger. On his march north through Yorkshire, he systematically ravaged the countryside: destroying crops, killing livestock and burning villages. He reached York in time for Christmas. The city was a ruin, but William kept the feast with his accustomed splendour and wore the crown and regalia which had been brought up specially from the treasury at Winchester. The north, he was determined, should know who was king, even if he were king of a wasteland.

      After the celebrations, the destruction was carried still further north, far into Durham. Eighteen years later, the countryside still bore the scars and the Domesday Book describes dozens of villages between York and Durham as wasta (‘waste’). ‘Waste’ is a technical term. It does not necessarily mean that the land had been devastated; rather, that it was uninhabited, uncultivated and hence untaxable. This technical distinction is important. But it was William’s actions that had made so much of the north wasta in whatever sense of the term. And, in so doing, he had killed tens of thousands by the sword, starvation and disease.

      The Harrying of the North, as it became known, shocked an unshockable age. Even the twelfth-century chronicler Oderic Vitalis, an Anglo-Norman and a self-consciously balanced writer, is unreserved in his condemnation:

      Never did William such cruelty; to his lasting disgrace, he yielded to his worst impulse, and set no bounds to his fury, condemning the innocent and the guilty to a common fate.

      ‘I assert’, Oderic concluded, ‘that such barbarous homicide could not pass unpunished’ – by God, if not by man.

      But, whatever its morality, the terror achieved its purpose. The north would not trouble William again.

      III

      The centre of resistance now shifted south to the Fenlands of East Anglia. Its many monasteries, such as Peterborough and Ely, saw themselves as guardians of Anglo-Saxon faith and culture; while the landscape of marshes and islets, criss-crossed by a watery maze of rivers, streams and meres, provided ideal territory for guerrilla warfare. The leader of the Fenland revolt was a local thegn, Hereward, who was joined by a large and shifting coalition. His first allies in 1070 were the Danes, who had broken their promise to return home. Hereward joined forces with them to sack Peterborough and to strip it of its treasures to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Frenchman Thorold, whom William had appointed abbot. This sacrilegious attack, by an Englishman on a great English monastery, opened up a gulf between last-ditchers, like Hereward, and more cautious compromisers, like the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, himself a monk of Peterborough, who denounced ‘Hereward and his gang’.

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