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

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СКАЧАТЬ earl of Northumberland, to heel. But the earl’s castle of Bamborough proved impregnable. Instead, William built a counter-castle, which he called Malvoisin, ‘Evil Neighbour’. Earl Robert unwisely ventured outside his stronghold with a raiding party and was captured. William then forced the countess, who was mounting an intrepid defence of Bamborough, to surrender by resorting to one of his father’s favourite tricks and threatening to blind the earl in front of the castle walls. With the surrender of the great fortress, William enjoyed greater direct power in the north than any previous king.

      It remained to deal with Scotland. William’s chosen instrument was Edgar the Æthling. He was dispatched north in 1097 with a large army; defeated and captured Donald III Bane, who was later blinded, and installed his namesake and nephew as King Edgar I.

      Scotland was now, effectively, an English protectorate. A vassal-king, who was half-English in blood and wholly English in culture, had been put on the throne by an English prince at the head of an Anglo-Norman army. And under Edgar’s ten-year rule, the English language, English colonizers and English ways of doing things spread far into the Lowlands. The result, paradoxically, made Scotland, as a mirror-image of England, all the more able to resist England when the time came.

      Wales also suffered the relentless expansion of Anglo-Norman England. But here the consequences were different. In Scotland, the aftermath of the death of Malcolm III led to the eventual creation of a strengthened kingdom that was, in essential respects, another England. In Wales, in contrast, the death of the dominant native prince of south Wales, Rhys ap Tewdwr, also at the hands of a Norman and also in 1093, marked an end: ‘and then fell the kingdom of the Britons’, the Welsh chronicler lamented; or, as an English writer put it, ‘from that day kings ceased to bear rule in Wales’.

      The result was that ‘English’ Wales became the most purely Norman area in Britain. Here were feudal lordships, each based on a castle, that feuded ceaselessly with each other and with the king. And they did so more or less without restraint since the structures of royal government, which held firm over most of England, had never been imposed there.

      III

      Probably more important than these events on the periphery, both to the king and his subjects, was his redevelopment of London. It was, as we have seen, Edward the Confessor with his building of the Abbey who had taken the first crucial step in the establishment of London/Westminster as the political capital. But William II’s building programme comes close behind. The programme included the construction of the first curtain-wall of the Tower; the rebuilding of London Bridge, in a piece of advanced engineering; and, most importantly of all, the erection of a new Great Hall at Westminster.

      The Hall, at 240 feet long by 67 feet wide, was one of the largest secular buildings north of the Alps, and, reroofed and reskinned in the fourteenth century, it still stands as the most impressive surviving monument of the Anglo-Norman monarchy. One curious feature, however, is the lack of alignment between the fenestration on the two long walls, so that the windows on the west wall are four feet further north than their equivalents on the east. This has never been satisfactorily explained. It cannot, for example, be a question of the Hall’s size defeating the technical ability of eleventh-century masons, since, big though it is, many English cathedrals are even bigger. One possibility, however, is that the problem was caused by building the new Hall round Edward the Confessor’s hall, which was left standing and operational. Certainly we know that Westminster Hall was built in a rush, taking little more than the year 1098–9. This required plentiful use of forced labour, and, according to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, cost numerous lives: ‘many men perished thereby’.

      The Great Hall was finished in the first half of 1099. When he first saw it, one of the king’s attendants is supposed to have said that, though it was impressive, he felt it was rather too big. William crushed him with his retort. It was, the king said, ‘too big for a chamber but not big enough for a hall’. The remark was worthy of a Nero; indeed, the crown-wearings, for which the Hall was principally intended, were imperial in both their origins and their pretensions. The king sat in the middle of the dais, crowned, robed and enthroned, while the Latin text known as the Laudes

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