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

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СКАЧАТЬ depended on personal circumstance, family connection and even chance. But, by and large, administrators, like the Anglo-Saxon chronicler himself, who ‘lived sometime in [William’s] court’, chose compromise, as did the financiers and moneyers, while the political aristocracy joined Hereward in the last ditch. In the course of 1071 both the Mercian brothers, Earls Edwin and Morkere, renounced their allegiance and went underground, ‘roam[ing] at random in woods and in fields’. Edwin was ‘treacherously slain by his own men’ on his way to Scotland, but Morkere made it ‘by ship’ to Hereward’s last redoubt in the heavily fortified monastery of Ely. There he was joined by the rump of Northumbrian resistance, led by Bishop Æthelwine of Durham, who came ‘with many hundred men’. William now launched an all-out amphibious assault. Ely was blockaded to the north by ships, while, to the west, the land attack took place along a specially built, two-mile-long causeway. Trapped, most of the rebels surrendered. Morkere was imprisoned for life; Æthelwine was deprived of his bishopric and sent to the monastery of Abingdon, where he soon died, while the lesser rebels were imprisoned, blinded or had limbs amputated ‘as [William] thought proper’. Only Hereward and the diehards refused to bow the knee; instead Hereward ‘led [them] out triumphantly’ – to escape no one knows where and to live in legend for ever.

      With the fall of Ely and the extinguishing of the last spark of English resistance, William was free to turn against Scotland. Malcolm III owed his very throne to Edward the Confessor. Moreover, in 1069 he had married Margaret, sister of Edgar the Æthling. She was a powerful character, who became a force in Scottish politics in her own right. For all these reasons, Malcolm had been happy to offer protection and occasional assistance to English refugees from William. William now determined to close this back door into his kingdom. In 1072, he led a joint naval and military expedition to Scotland. At first, Malcolm retreated before William. But, beyond the Forth, the two kings met on the borders of Perthshire and Fife and agreed the Peace of Abernethy. Malcolm became William’s vassal; surrendered hostages and, almost certainly, agreed to stop supporting his brother-in-law, Edgar the Æthling.

      But the process of disengagement was handled slowly and with due regard to decorum. Edgar returned to Scotland in 1074 from his then place of exile in Flanders. He was given a warm reception by the king and queen but was encouraged to seek a reconciliation with William. Edgar did as he was advised and William graciously accepted his overtures. Loaded with gifts, Edgar was then dispatched to William in Normandy. ‘William received him with much pomp, and he was there afterwards in his court, enjoying such rights as he confirmed to him by law.’

      At least Edgar’s cage was golden.

      It remained only for William to take over the English Church and Normanize it as completely as the English state. This, of course, was a battle which had to be fought with spiritual weapons. But William proved as adept at deploying these as fire and sword. Back in 1066, he had begun by a determined campaign to win papal support for his claim to the English throne. William’s arguments were given a mixed reception in Rome, as Hildebrand, then an archdeacon and a leading figure of the papal court, reminded the king in a subsequent letter:

      I believe it is known to you, most excellent son, how great was the love I have always borne you … and how active I have shown myself in your affairs; above all, how diligently I laboured for your advancement to royal rank. In consequence I suffered dire calumny through certain brethren insinuating that by such partisanship I gave sanction for the perpetration of great slaughter.

      The premonitions of the ‘certain brethren’ were of course right. Nevertheless, the then pope, Alexander II (1061–73), was persuaded to give William’s expedition his blessing and to equip it with a papal banner.

      And the pope proved equally accommodating after William’s victory by sending two cardinal-legates to oversee the reform of the English Church. The legates arrived in England in the spring of 1070 and were met by William, fresh from the Harrying of the North, at Winchester. There they celebrated Easter and the king and legates presided jointly over a council of the English Church. It began with William receiving – like the Carolingians but uniquely for an English king – a second, papal, coronation at the hands of the legates. Then the business of reform began. King and pope saw this differently. For the papacy, it was a question of removing unworthy bishops and abbots, who were incompetent, sexually incontinent or owed their appointment to anti-popes. For William, it was simpler: he wanted to get rid of politically unreliable Englishmen from high ecclesiastical office. Fortunately, the two different objectives coincided in practice, and when the council was over only two Englishmen retained bishoprics: one, Wulfstan of Worcester, would become a saint; the other, Siward of Rochester, was senile.

      A second council, held at Whitsuntide, started to fill the resulting vacancies. William’s favourite churchman, Lanfranc of Bec, was made archbishop of Canterbury in place of the deprived, disgraced and now imprisoned Stigand; while York, left vacant by Archbishop Ealdred’s death in 1069, was given to Thomas, a canon of Bayeux, who was doubly qualified as both a former pupil of Lanfranc and a protégé of Bishop Odo.

      There is no doubt that Lanfranc and the rest were infinitely superior as churchmen to those they replaced. But it is also the case that they were outsiders, with an outsider’s indifference or even hostility to native customs and traditions. Buildings that the Anglo-Saxons thought venerable they saw merely as old-fashioned; locations that were sanctified by memory and the experience of countless English generations were merely inconvenient. The result was a wholesale relocation and rebuilding that transformed both the physical and the organizational fabric of the English Church. The seats of one third of English bishops were moved, from the countryside into thrusting towns. And everywhere, with the Norman fondness for glossy and grandiloquent structures, new buildings replaced old. The fate of Ely is typical. Within ten years of Hereward’s final defeat and disappearance into legend, there was a Norman abbot at Ely and work had started on the building of the present vast church, whose massive walls and piers seem to crush out even the memory of revolt and transform the last centre of Anglo-Saxon resistance to William into an eloquent symbol of the Conquest and the permanence of Norman power. Work at Lincoln, whither the see of Dorchester had been transferred, started a decade earlier in the 1070s, while the foundations of Durham were ceremonially laid on 11 August 1093, after the Anglo-Saxon church had been entirely demolished the previous year.

      We think of cathedrals as noble monuments to God and the Christian faith. Norman cathedrals, however, were ecclesiastical versions of Norman castles: at once centres of Norman administration, advertisements for a new, Norman, way of life, and monuments to the permanence of Norman power. Above all, they were visible proof that God was on King William’s side.

      IV

      The 1070s were the nadir of England and the English. It was, wrote Henry of Huntingdon, who was himself half-English, an insult to be called English; William, despairing of his new subjects, abandoned his attempts to learn their language; while God Himself, it seemed, had ‘ordered that they should no longer be a people’ (iam populum non esse iusserit).

      But, at the same time, there were signs of movement in the opposite direction. These eddying currents find their clearest expression in the so-called Bride’s Ale revolt of 1075. The revolt took its name from the fact that it was planned at the marriage of Earl Ralph of East Anglia to the sister of Earl Roger of Hereford. It was a marriage at the highest level of the Anglo-Norman elite: Roger was the son of William’s closest aristocratic ally, William fitzOsbern; Ralph, the son and heir of one of Edward the Confessor’s Breton favourites, Ralph ‘the Staller’, while it was William himself who had arranged the match. Nevertheless, at the marriage feast at Norwich talk quickly turned to treason: there was ‘Earl Roger and Earl Waltheof and bishops and abbots; who there resolved that they would drive the king out of England’. Earls Roger and Ralph were the prime movers and both tried to raise their earldoms against the king. But neither enjoyed much success and Ralph, in particular, confronted a remarkably hostile coalition: ‘the castlemen that were in England and also the people of the land came against him, and prevented СКАЧАТЬ