The Norman Conquest Read online

  What ultimately seems to have compromised Harthacnut’s kingship, however, was his attempt to raise extortionate sums of money. Although in the event his accession had occurred by peaceful invitation, he had come to England accompanied by his pre-prepared invasion fleet, manned by mercenaries who still expected to be paid. Thanks to the initiative of King Æthelred, the country had a tax system specifically designed for such purposes, but Harthacnut seems to have pushed it much harder than any of his predecessors. As one version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle explains (in astonishing detail), the new king paid his troops at the customary rate, established in the days of Cnut and continued during the reign of Harold. But whereas these earlier rulers had each maintained a permanent fleet of sixteen ships, Harthacnut had arrived in England with sixty-two. Thus the sum he raised in taxation during his first year—a credible-sounding but nevertheless gargantuan £21,000—represented something like a fourfold hike; another version of the Chronicle described it as ‘a severe tax which was borne with difficulty’. Perhaps worse still, the punishment looked set to continue indefinitely. The following year the new king dismissed thirty of his ships, but exacted a tax of £11,000 to pay the thirty-two that remained. Even his reduced fleet meant a tax demand double the size of the old days.39

  Such a rapacious level of taxation seems to have had disastrous effects on the kingdom’s economy. ‘Wheat rose in price to fifty-five pence a sester, and even higher’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, expecting us to share its outrage, and unwittingly giving us the first recorded instance of price inflation in English history. In order to compel payment Harthacnut sent his housecarls out into the provinces to act as collectors. The two that went to Worcester were chased into the cathedral and killed by an angry mob, leading to royal retribution that was still vividly recalled some eighty years later. So enraged was the king, says John of Worcester, that he dispatched a great army of earls and housecarls, ‘ordering them to slay all the men if they could, to plunder and burn the city, and to lay waste the entire region’. Luckily, the people of Worcester received advanced warning of the army’s coming, allowing most of them to withdraw to Bevere, an island in the middle of the River Severn, which they fortified and successfully defended. Nevertheless, the king’s forces spent four days looting and burning the city before his anger was slaked.40

  Needless to say, none of this did much good for what we might call Harthacnut’s public relations. ‘All who had been zealous on his behalf,’ says the Chronicle, ‘now became disloyal to him.’ And that was merely in response to his initial demand of tax in 1040; the following year the Chronicle also complained that the new king had betrayed one of his earls, Eadwulf, having guaranteed his safety, ‘and thereby became a breaker of his pledge’. Tax-raiser, pledge-breaker, harrier of his own people: small wonder some powerful people started to look at Harthacnut and wonder if they might have made a mistake.41

  The king’s rapidly diminishing popularity is that background against which we have to try to make sense of the extraordinary events that followed. At some point in the year 1041, Harthacnut apparently invited his half-brother Edward to come over from Normandy, in the words of the Encomium, ‘to hold the kingdom with him’. Something like this certainly happened: Edward in due course crossed the Channel and was, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘sworn in as king’.

  There is no wholly satisfying explanation as to why Harthacnut should have wished to act in this way. The Encomium says it was because he was ‘gripped by brotherly love’. It also calls Harthacnut, Edward and Emma herself ‘sharers of rule’, comparing them to the Holy Trinity that rules in heaven, and seeks to reassure its readers that there is ‘no disagreement between them’. As usual, this is almost as good as having a statement from an independent witness that there was disagreement of some sort between Emma and her two sons, and this in turn raises the possibility that Harthacnut may have had little choice but to recall Edward, the half-brother he had almost certainly never met before.42

  This impression is reinforced by a short description of Edward’s return to England in 1041 that occurs in a twelfth-century legal text known as the Quadripartitus. When Edward arrived, says the anonymous author, ‘the thegns of all England gathered together at Hursteshevet, and there it was heard that he would be received as king only if he guarantee to them upon oath the laws of Cnut and his sons’. ‘Hursteshevet’, it has been persuasively argued, should be read as ‘Hurst Head’, and identified with the spit of land near Southampton, at the western end of the Solent, where Hurst Castle now stands. Edward, in other words, seems to have been met at a point of disembarkation, almost before he had set foot in England itself, and obliged to make a promise of good governance. Moreover, it was a promise made to what sounds like a large, representative body—‘the thegns of all England’—which raises intriguing possibilities. Edward’s return and Harthacnut’s increasing unpopularity are usually seen as connected, but it is generally assumed that it was the king’s own decision to share power. Yet we only have the Encomium’s word for this. The author of the Quadripartitus attributes no initiative at all in the business of Edward’s return to Harthacnut; rather, the matter is said to be the work of Earl Godwine and the bishop of Winchester. Plausibly, therefore, this may have been a decision that was forced upon Harthacnut by his disgruntled subjects, with Godwine figuring as a key player.43

  There is a third and arguably simpler explanation, which is that Harthacnut may have been mortally ill in 1041. A later Norman writer, William of Poitiers, implies as much in his account of affairs leading up to the Norman Conquest. If this was indeed the case, it is conceivable that Harthacnut may have needed Edward to act as a regent in the first instance and to succeed him in the event of his death. There are, however, difficulties in accepting this tidy solution. The first is that William of Poitiers, as well as being late, is far from being an entirely reliable witness; it seems quite likely, though by no means absolutely certain, that he imagined that Harthacnut suffered from ‘frequent diseases’ simply because he knew how the king’s story ended. The second difficulty is that William’s picture of an ailing Harthacnut is contradicted by that of John of Worcester, who says that the king was ‘merry, in good health and great heart’ up to the very end. This turned out to be a wedding feast held at Lambeth near London in the summer of 1042. Harthacnut, says John, was standing with the bride and a group of other men when ‘he suddenly crashed to the ground in a wretched fall while drinking’. ‘Those who were nearby took hold of him’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘but he never spoke again, and passed away on 8 June.’ A good Viking way to go, to be sure, but also one with more than a hint of suspicion about it, given his massive unpopularity, and the cup that had been in his hand. Sinister or not, Harthacnut’s death resolved the anomaly of the recent experiment in joint rulership. In due course the dead Dane was lowered into the ground in Winchester’s Old Minster, alongside the bones of his father. ‘Before he was buried’, says the Chronicle, ‘the whole nation chose Edward to be king.’ As a hurriedly revised version of the Encomium observed, the wheel had turned full circle.44 Against all odds, England’s ancient royal house had been miraculously restored.

  * Because the Chronicle was copied at different monasteries, it exists in different versions, which historians have labelled alphabetically, A—I. The ones that cover the period for this book are C, D and E. Often, as here, these three versions have a different take on events.

  3

  The Bastard

  Bad as things had been in England in the wake of Cnut’s death, they had been worse in Normandy after the death of Duke Robert.

  The duke had set out for the Holy Land in 1035 knowing full well that he might not return, and so had taken steps to safeguard Normandy’s succession. Although he had never succeeded in finding a suitable duchess, he had once enjoyed a liaison with a girl from the town of Falaise called Herleva.1 Later chroniclers romanticized this relationship, reporting that Robert had been smitten as he watche
d Herleva from a distance (dancing in one version, washing her clothes in another), but the truth was probably more prosaic. The most reliable account states that she was the daughter of Fulbert, described on different occasions as an undertaker and a ducal chamberlain. Robert probably began their affair before his accession in 1027, for in that year, or possibly the next, Herleva bore him a son. The new duke chose to honour the memory of his great-grandfather, and called the boy William.2

  Little William, of course, had a glorious future ahead of him. After his death he was commonly called ‘the Great’, though posterity would eventually settle on ‘the Conqueror’. Contemporaries, however, preferred to describe him with reference to the circumstances of his birth: as a young man he was reportedly taunted on account of his mother’s humble origins, and chronicles composed towards the end of his life— non-Norman ones, at least— routinely call him ‘the Bastard’.3 Whether his parentage was a problem at the start of his career is a more open question. A strictly contemporary French writer, Ralph Glaber, seems to have been in two minds about it, one minute assuring us that Duke Robert’s lack of a legitimate child was ‘a cause of great distress to his people’, but then explaining in the same breath that the Normans had always accepted rulers who were the products of unions with concubines (which was quite true). Probably by the time William was born opinion was becoming divided: Glaber’s further comment that the custom might be thought an abomination suggests that some sections of society considered it so, and William of Jumièges was clearly embarrassed by the practice, for he refers to earlier Norman dukes taking wives ‘in the Danish manner’ (more Danico) and makes no mention at all of Robert’s liaison with Herleva.4

  But if monks were bothered by bastardy, secular society seems to have regarded it with equanimity. The English, as we have seen, originally preferred Harold Harefoot, son of Cnut’s concubine, over Harthacnut, the son of his anointed queen. Similarly, although Robert ended his relationship with Herleva soon after his accession as duke, he promoted her male kinsfolk to honourable positions at his court, and found Herleva herself a respectable husband called Herluin de Conteville, by whom she had at least two more sons. Most tellingly of all, Robert made it known that his own son by Herleva was to be his heir, and seems to have had no difficulty in persuading the rest of society to accept this decision; before the duke left for the Holy Land the Norman magnates swore an oath recognizing William as their future ruler.5

  According to Ralph Glaber, William’s status as Robert’s heir was also officially sanctioned by the king of France, Henry I, who had recently been restored to power thanks to Norman assistance.6 Such was the kind of co-dependent relationship that the two powers had developed in recent decades: the kings of France had frequently looked to the dukes of Normandy for military support, and the dukes had always looked to the kings for legitimization. Strictly speaking, though, ‘France’ did not exist in the eleventh century: the earliest reference to the ‘kingdom of France’ does not occur until over a hundred years later, and the kings of France did not style themselves as such until the thirteenth century. Prior to that point, the title they used was Rex Francorum — king of the Franks.7

  The Franks, originally, were one of the barbarian tribes who had dwelt beyond the fringes of the Roman Empire. After that empire crumbled in the middle of the first millennium, it was the Franks who eventually made themselves Europe’s new masters. Under the leadership of a succession of warrior rulers, they expanded from their homelands in what is now north-eastern France and conquered more or less everything in their path, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic to the Elbe. This expansion reached its zenith during the reign of the celebrated Frankish king Charles the Great, or Charlemagne as he is better known. Charlemagne’s power was such that in AD 800 the then pope crowned him as a new emperor, and by the time of his death fourteen years later, his empire stretched 1,500 miles from north to south and a similar distance from east to west. Historians call it the Carolingian Empire, from Carolus, the Latin for Charles.

  But very soon after Charlemagne’s death his empire began to collapse. For all its imperial pretensions, it was a dominion founded on predatory warfare: plunder, booty and tribute. While the treasure and the slaves kept pouring in, the Franks willingly turned out to swell their emperor’s armies. Once there was nothing left to conquer, and only a hostile frontier to defend, they tended to stay at home. Added to this was the problem of dynastic rivalry. Rather like we do today, the families of early medieval Europe expected inheritances to be shared, at least among the male descendants of the deceased. In 843, barely a quarter of a century after Charlemagne’s death, his feuding grandsons agreed to split the empire into three. A few decades later, having been briefly reunited (by Charles the Fat), it was divided again, this time into two, and this time for good. The eastern part would eventually become Germany, the western half France.8

  But in the meantime West Francia (as historians call it) continued to disintegrate. Denied the ability to plunder their neighbours, the Franks took to fighting against each other. They also found themselves in the uncomfortable situation of being attacked, by Vikings from the north, Saracens from the south, and even Magyars (Hungarians) from the east. There was no sense in summoning great imperial armies against such fast-moving, hit-and-run raiders, so Frankish kings delegated the responsibility for defence to their great men in the localities— their counts and dukes. But, of course, such power and authority, once relinquished, is hard to claw back. The great counts and dukes of France still governed in the king’s name, but increasingly without reference to him. They began building their own fortifications, holding their own courts, even minting their own coins. Royal authority was also eroded by further dynastic division. For much of the tenth century, the throne of West Francia passed between the direct Carolingian line and a rival branch called the Capetians. Eventually, in 987, the Capetians established themselves decisively as the new royal family, but by then the kingdom they ruled was only a shadow of its former self, and their authority was confined to a small area of northern France. ‘Although first among the Franks’, a sympathetic bishop told King Robert II (996–1031), ‘you are but a serf in the order of kings.’

  But it was not just the king who witnessed his authority ebbing away. In a society that had been militarized by the raids, the dukes and counts of West Francia soon found themselves in exactly the same predicament of being challenged from below. Power ultimately devolved to those who could marshal the resources to resist their supposed superiors, while at the same time repressing those beneath them. The clearest manifestation of this trend was fortification. During the time of the Viking raids, the dukes and counts had built large fortresses, generally called castella, in order to protect whole communities. In the second half of the tenth century, however, a new breed of castella emerged, built not so much to protect communities as to dominate them. What we, in short, would regard as castles.9

  Some of these new castles are easily identified as such today: along the valley of the River Loire stand several giant stone towers built around the turn of the first millennium by the buccaneering Fulk Nerra, count of Anjou, whose grasp of the potential of this new weapon transformed him from a comparatively minor figure into one of West Francia’s greatest regional rulers. The wonderful thing about castles, however, from the point of view of the ambitious potentate, was that they did not have to be fashioned in stone, laboriously and expensively, in order to be effective. It was equally possible to dominate a particular area on a fraction of the budget by raising earthworks to form protective enclosures, and topping them with wooden palisades. Instead of a stone donjon, castle-builders could opt for a single large mound of earth, known as a motte, topped with a simple wooden tower. Such innovation (both the great stone tower and the motte have no precedents) enabled men of comparatively modest means— cadets of established noble families, or ambitious men of non-noble rank— to resist their overlords, assert themselves against their neighb
ours, and to impose their own lordship— however debatable or unwelcome— on their localities.10

  Provided, that is, they had the men with which to garrison them. If the appearance of a new species of fortification was one indication of the changes occurring in Frankish society around the turn of the millennium, the other was the appearance of a new breed of warrior. Again, change occurred initially as a consequence of the Viking raids. The switch from offensive to defensive warfare meant that it was no use relying on a system where armies had to be called up from among the local aristocracy; effective defence required men who were armed and ready all year round, and accordingly dukes and counts began to recruit such full-time professionals into their entourages. Of course, great men had always retained warriors; what seems to have happened as the millennium approached, and traditional structures of authority in West Francia continued to crumble, is that they began to increase the size of their retinues. As society became ever more dog eat dog, the top dogs were those who could maintain the biggest military followings. In search of extra muscle, lords reached out beyond the ranks of the nobility, recruiting the landless and sometimes even the unfree, and issuing them with swords, mail shirts and horses. Because they were mounted, such men were sometimes referred to in French as chevaliers. In England, they would be known as knights.11