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

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СКАЧАТЬ of the land’) had joined together in the king’s name against an Anglo-Norman earl. The revolt now collapsed. Ralph succeeded in fleeing abroad while Roger was captured and imprisoned for life. But William’s full vengeance was saved for the Englishman, Earl Waltheof.

      Waltheof ’s career was a switchback. Youngest son of Earl Seward of Northumbria, he had been an enthusiastic participant in the northern revolt, and, at the battle of York, had personally slaughtered many of the Norman garrison, ‘cutting off their heads one by one as they entered the gate’. Nevertheless, he was pardoned by William, who then went to great lengths to keep his loyalty. He gave him his father’s earldom of Northumbria, as well as the earldom of Huntingdon, which he had been granted by the Confessor; he even gave him his niece, Judith, as his wife. In the face of such generosity, Waltheof ’s participation in the Bride’s Ale revolt, hesitant and quickly regretted though it seems to have been, was unforgivable. He was beheaded at Winchester on 31 May 1076 and reburied at Crowland Abbey, where, as with the victims of earlier Anglo-Saxon political deaths, a popular cult quickly developed at his tomb.

      The drama of Waltheof ’s execution, the pathos of his position as the last surviving English earl and his posthumous reputation for sanctity have conspired to obscure the real significance of the Bride’s Ale revolt. It was not the last stand of the English. On the contrary. The English, or at least some lesser East Anglian landowners, had been actively loyal to William. Instead, the threat to the king was Norman. It came from within the Norman establishment; and its motives seemed to have been characteristically Norman as well.

      For what had apparently outraged Earl Roger was that the king’s sheriffs had been holding pleas in his lands. The office of sheriff had first appeared in the early eleventh century. The sheriff acted as immediate deputy to the earl; he was also the king’s direct representative in the shire, presiding in the Shire Court and supervising the collection of the geld and the dues from the royal estates. The office had become necessary with the creation of the great earldoms of Cnut’s reign, which embraced many counties and turned their holders into figures of central, even more than local, politics. In Normandy, as we have seen, the aristocracy had got control of the equivalent office of vicomte in the reign of William’s father, Duke Robert. But in England, the king kept it firmly in his grasp – and no king more firmly than William.

      All this makes it important to understand what changed in the socio-political structure of England, and what did not, with the Norman Conquest. There was, indisputably, a revolution in the aristocracy, by which a native Anglo-Saxon elite was replaced, almost entirely, by a foreign, Norman-French ruling class. These newcomers brought with them a new language, new values and new attitudes. But did these importations include what historians call ‘feudalism’? For the great Victorian scholars, such as Stubbs and Freeman, it was axiomatic that they did: English feudalism was a Norman invention. More recent scholars reject this idea. They point out that Anglo-Saxon England, as King Alfred’s works alone make clear, was fully familiar with the idea of ‘lordship’. The earls acknowledged the king as their lord, probably in a formal ceremony of homage; the thegns, in turn, were the ‘men’ or vassals of the earls, and so on down the social scale. And each relationship of lord and vassal involved the granting of land by the lord in return for the supply of troops by the vassal.

      In this sense of the word ‘feudalism’, little of substance changed at the Conquest. Noble estates, it is true, probably became larger. In part, this was a matter of necessity, since the Norman military innovations of the castle and the mounted knight were more expensive than their Anglo-Saxon equivalents. But it was also a question of opportunity, since, with the mass expropriation of the Anglo-Saxon elite, there was so much land to distribute among such a comparatively small group of people. This exceptionally rapid and wholesale turnover of land, and the fact that it took place in a foreign and often hostile environment, also meant that practices which had developed piecemeal and over time in Normandy became more explicit and schematic in England.

      All of this, however, is far from the ‘Feudal Revolution’ imagined by the Victorians. Nevertheless, they were right, I think, to insist that something had changed. For feudalism has another sense. It is not simply the hierarchical ordering of society as a chain of lords and vassals; it is also the displacement of ‘state’ structures by ‘feudal’ ones – so that, for example, lords take over royal powers of justice and taxation. This tendency was present, too, in Anglo-Saxon England, as, once again, King Alfred’s writings bear witness. But in England, unlike France, the tendency was resisted, and resisted effectively, by the king.

      But the Conquest made this resistance much harder. For it introduced, and lavishly endowed, a French ruling class who had a very high opinion of French practices in government, as in everything else, and a very low one of English. Hence Earl Roger’s rebellion against William. And hence the increasing difficulties William had with the new Norman elites and with his own family most of all. The English found themselves caught in the middle. But for most the choice was easy. They would support the king, even a Norman king, against a feudal noble, especially a Norman one. And it was this occasional, mutually self-interested, alliance between king and people against a foreign aristocracy that marks the beginning of the English recovery from the shame of defeat and dispossession.

      Chapter 7

       Sons of Conquest

       William II

      WILLIAM HAD THREE SONS who survived to maturity: Robert ‘Curthose’, born in about 1053; William, born in 1060–5, and Henry, born in 1068. Robert, the most personally attractive of the siblings, had been acknowledged as heir of Normandy while still a boy. But his father was reluctant to allow him any real power. Robert was also jealous of the favour William showed to his second son and namesake, William ‘Rufus’. Finally, there was a clash of personalities between father and eldest son: between the driven, ruthless king, and the brave, charming, dissolute prince. These are not qualities calculated to impress historians. But they did make Robert a hero for many of the younger members of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy. They also ensured that his career exemplified the dangerous, egotistical factiousness which the Normans brought with them to England.

      I

      The quarrel between father and son became open in 1078, and early the following year they met in battle at the castle of Gerberoi on the southeastern frontier of Normandy. The two fought in personal combat and Robert wounded William in the hand. William’s horse was also killed under him. But an English thegn, Toki, the son of Wigot of Wallingford, brought him another. Toki had, almost certainly, saved William’s life – but at the cost of his own, as he was killed on the spot.

      William and Robert soon patched up an agreement. But the dispute flared up again and in 1084 William banished his son from his domains. Meanwhile, other members of the family were drawn into the quarrel. Queen Matilda tried to protect Robert and mediate between him and his father. She got little thanks from William, who threatened to blind one of her servants who had acted as intermediary with Robert. She died in 1083, and William made a great show of grief, which may have been sincere. Matilda had been one of his principal coadjutors in government; the other was his brilliant, ebullient half-brother Odo. But Odo, too, leaned to Robert, and in 1083 William had Odo arrested. At his trial, Odo protested that as bishop of Bayeux he was exempt from William’s jurisdiction. William retorted that he respected his sanctity as bishop but was trying him as earl of Kent. The earl-bishop was condemned and imprisoned.

      These family quarrels offered a field day to William’s many enemies: France, Anjou and Scotland. Even the Danes joined in, and in 1085 Cnut, son of King Swein, threatened an invasion of England in alliance with the count of Flanders. William was in Normandy when the news arrived and his response was characteristically vigorous:

      He went into England with so large an army of horse and foot, from France and Brittany, as never before sought this land; so that men wondered how this land could feed СКАЧАТЬ