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

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СКАЧАТЬ all this land among his subjects, who fed them, each according to his quota of land.

      In the event, after dissension in his own ranks prevented Cnut from launching the attack, William stood part of his mercenary army down, but kept the rest on stand-by over winter.

      This security scare and the resulting difficulties in billeting troops formed the background to the most extraordinary administrative achievement of the reign: the great survey known as the Domesday Book. The decision to launch the survey was taken at a great council (as the witan was now known), which met at Gloucester immediately after Christmas:

      The king [had] a large meeting, and very deep consultation with his council about this land; how it was occupied and by what sort of men.

      Once the scope of the survey was agreed, groups of commissioners were dispatched to cover all England south of the Rivers Ribble and Tees. They proceeded county by county, finding out who held what land, now and in 1066; what the estate was worth, again in 1066 and 1086; its assessment for the geld; the number of peasants who worked it and with how many ploughs; its stock of animals and its other amenities such as mills. Each individual landowner or his representative was interrogated and the information they supplied checked with the juries of the Shire and Hundred Courts. But it did not end there since, in some areas at least, second groups of commissioners were sent out to control the work of the first. These were deliberately chosen from men with no local connections who could be expected to operate without fear or favour.

      Finally, the information was collated and written up fair for presentation to the king: ‘Little Domesday’, which deals with the East Anglian counties of Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, and ‘Great Domesday’, which covers the rest and is beautifully written and elaborately rubricated (highlighted in red) for ease of reference.

      And all this was done in a mere seven months.

      The result astonished contemporaries. ‘There was not one single hide,’ the Anglo-Saxon chronicler writes, ‘nor yard of land, nay, moreover (it is shameful to tell, though [William] thought it no shame to do it), nor even an ox, nor a cow, nor a swine was there left, that was not set down.’ And it still astonishes. It is a tribute to the Anglo-Saxon systems of local administration and national taxation, on the one hand, and to Norman energy, ambition and efficiency, on the other. Above all, it represents the closing chapter of the Conquest. The chaotic turnover of land ownership of the last twenty years was now over, it signalled; instead, an entry in the Domesday Book would represent secure title, both then and for ever.

      All this is no doubt true. But it is the Anglo-Saxon chronicler who goes further and grasps the essential. For he sees Domesday as a product of William’s covetousness. The king had devoted the best years of his life to the acquisition of England, while the means he had used to get and keep it had risked his immortal soul. Now, at last, it was his and Domesday enabled him to hold it, literally, in his hands.

      The survey was presented to the king on Lammas Day, 1 August 1086, at the great court held at Old Sarum in Wiltshire. The court was attended, not only by the council and the magnates, but also by ‘all the landsmen [landowners] that were of any account over all England’. And there they all, each and every one, performed homage to the king. It was an extraordinary scene, and the Anglo-Saxon chronicler describes it with the precision of an eyewitness:

      They all bowed themselves before him, and became his men, and swore him oaths of allegiance that they would against all other men be faithful to him.

      At first sight, this mass act of feudal homage looks like the ultimate Normanization of English politics. But the appearance is deceptive. For at Salisbury William received the oaths, not only of his own immediate vassals, or tenants-in-chief as they would later be called, but also of their tenants and sub-tenants as well. This looked forward to the idea of liege homage but it also looked back to the practice – which was as old as Alfred’s time at least – of every free man swearing an oath to the king in the Hundred Courts. The result was to give English feudalism a decidedly English twist.

      William left for Normandy immediately after the Oath of Salisbury. It was to be his last visit to England, and he left in typical fashion, having first exacted a heavy geld. The money was needed to finance William’s struggle with the king of France, Philip I, who had taken advantage of the quarrels within William’s family to try to cut his over-mighty vassal down to size. William’s campaign went well, and in August 1087 he captured Mantes. The lightly defended town was sacked and fired, and many of the inhabitants, including two especially venerated hermits, perished in the flames.

      This calculated use of terror was, as we have often seen, business as usual for William. But this time something went wrong. William’s horse bolted in the chaos of the burning town and he was struck hard in his now-protuberant stomach by the pommel of his saddle. He was carried to Rouen, where he lay for three weeks. He remained lucid throughout and was expected to recover. But in early September his condition deteriorated and on the 9th he died.

      The Anglo-Saxon chronicler honoured the dead king with a magnifi-cent obituary. It is based on personal knowledge – ‘we who often looked upon him’ – and it is nuanced and balanced. The chronicler praised his wisdom and wealth, which were very great; his piety, which built and endowed so many monasteries; his dignity, which manifested itself in the crown-wearings which took place three times a year when he was in England; his force of will, which brooked no opposition, and struck down bishops, abbots and earls and even his own brother Odo. But, above all, he admired his harsh yet equitable justice, which brought peace and tranquillity to a distracted kingdom. To set against all these qualities, however, were William’s vices: his insatiable covetousness, his inordinate pride and his addiction to hunting, which, for his mere pleasure, inflicted so much suffering on his subjects.

      The chronicler extenuates none of these faults. But, finally and justly, he acknowledges William’s stature as England’s greatest king: ‘he truly reigned over England’, he concluded, and was ‘more splendid and powerful than any of his predecessors’.

      From an Englishman, this was high praise indeed.

      But great king of England though he was, William remained a Norman at heart. As he requested, his body was taken for burial to the Norman abbey of St Etienne at Caen; all the bishops and abbots of Normandy were present at the ceremony, and the sermon was preached by the Norman bishop of Evreux. But a final hitch occurred. As the manner of his death makes clear, William had grown very fat in his later years. But his sarcophagus, probably made long before, took no account of the fact and some force was needed to fit the body in. The result was described by the Anglo-Norman monk, Oderic Vitalis: ‘the swollen bowels burst, and an intolerable stench assailed the nostrils of the bystanders and the whole crowd’. Not even the clouds of incense could mask it and the service was rushed to a conclusion.

      It was a humiliating end for a man who had been so conscious of his dignity in life.

      II

      The three weeks William lingered on his sickbed at Rouen left him plenty of time to arrange his affairs and divide his estate among his sons: despite their quarrel, Robert, he decided, should have Normandy; William, England; while Henry was ‘bequeathed immense treasure’. It was a decision that was guaranteed to perpetuate the divisions in the royal house long after his own death.

      William II’s accession was smooth. His father dispatched him to England before the life was out of his body and gave him sealed instructions for Archbishop Lanfranc. These were executed to the letter. Lanfranc anointed and crowned William at Westminster on 26 September and all the magnates did him homage. William then rode to Winchester; opened and viewed the Treasury; distributed the lavish bequests to monasteries, churches and the poor of each county which his father had made for the good of his soul, and released all political prisoners. СКАЧАТЬ