William I: England’s Conqueror (Penguin Monarchs): Marc Morris
Is William the Conqueror one of the villains of English history?
The case for the prosecution goes something like this. When the Normans invaded England in 1066, they were being true to their barbaric Viking roots, however their long tenure in northern France had inured them to the more civilised ways of the countries to the south: the Norman invasion of England, though justified by a dynastic claim (itself won through an act of extortion), was another Scandinavian raid inspired by lust for land, gold and power. William, the brutal duke of Normandy, a bastard son of the last duke, had maintained his title through violence and intimidation; often achieving his conquests through the razing and pillaging of enemy lands, the taking – and where necessary murdering – of hostages, and the execution or mutilation of those who had crossed him.
Once he had won his battle – rather fortuitously, given that he was facing an English army tired out after repelling a vicious and unexpected invasion of Norwegians in the north, he was brutal and merciless with the defeated English, stripping most of the higher classes of their land and parcelling it out among his Norman and Breton followers, who then constituted an alien occupying power that was consolidated into a new ruling class, speaking a different language from the inhabitants and treating them as inherently inferior. Indeed, it was centuries before the kings of England spoke English as a second language again, by which time the language of the occupiers, Norman French, had changed the vocabulary and grammar of Anglo-Saxon into an entirely new language. The aristocracy and much of the gentry of England were of Norman descent for centuries after the conquest, and it is at least arguable that the stratified classes of modern England can be traced back to the conquest. It’s a bit more of a stretch, but it can also be argued that the expansionist ambitions of the English state and its aggression towards its Celtic neighbours is at root Norman.
The greatest stain on the conqueror’s reputation is the so-called ‘Harrying of the North,’ a sustained and brutal campaign to put down resistance in the restive north that would not accept his kingship, and that actively plotted with Scandinavian rulers to bring him down. So devastating was the campaign of reprisals and destruction, that the region was said to have lost a great proportion of its inhabitants – perhaps more than half. So great was the devastation on the region that when the Domesday Book was compiled at the end of the conqueror’s reign, many areas of Yorkshire were designated simply ‘waste’, while the lands north of the Tees were not even included in the survey.
All put, that’s a fairly convincing case for William the Conqueror – the Bastard, as his enemies termed him – being designated a villain, especially to an Anglo-Celt like myself, born and raised in the north east of England.
Nevertheless, reading Marc Morris’s William I in the Penguin Monarchs series, has very slightly increased my sympathy for the first Norman King, or at least lessened my dislike for him – and it has certainly enriched my understanding of the conqueror, his motives and his methods. Of the ‘case for the prosecution’ put above, much, perhaps most, is true, but needs to be understood in an eleventh century context, and there are some things about the Normans, and even about William himself that we should be thankful for.
He really was a bastard. This, it is explained, was not looked upon as a great problem in Norman culture, but was sniffed at in the rest of France and across Europe, including England. This aside, however, William the conqueror was not very much like the Viking warlords (and his own Norse ancestors) who had conquered and brutalised much of Western Europe over the previous two centuries. He was motivated by a genuine belief that he was the rightful heir to the throne of England, and that he had been cheated out of it by Harold. Harold, nominated heir by the previous king, had apparently promised the throne to William, under somewhat straitened circumstances. He was anxious to win papal backing for his enterprise, and keen to be acting properly according to Norman law and, once he was king of England, English law.
He was brutal, and often merciless, bit not more than the other rulers of his age, and, as Morris points out, he was never described as cruel. In his personal life he was more chaste than most contemporary and later monarchs. Even in his violence, he was certainly no worse than the Danish and Norwegian raiders who threatened to return England to Viking rule, and he was probably not much more brutal than the English themselves. In one way, he was certainly an improvement: it was William and the Normans who ended the practice of slavery in England, and in Wales too, most likely at the urging of his archbishop, Lafranc.
Marc Morris’s short biography of the first Norman King is focused and well-paced. The sources for the era are somewhat sparse, but Morris always informs the reader of the likely bias of the source, and we get a good sense of the king as a ruler and a man. Morris himself seems perfectly unbiased – whatever your opinion of the conquest, you can enjoy the book. For all Morris’s qualifications, I still rue the conquest and dislike the king. My favourite parts of the book are the coronation of the king and, particularly, his death, both grotesquely bad augurs of his reign and legacy. When the king died, ‘the great men who had been at his bedside rode off to protect their own lodgings. When the monks and clergy of Rouen eventually arrived […] they found the king’s naked body lying abandoned and half naked on the floor.’ At the funeral ‘the king’s body turned out to be too big for its sarcophagus and the monks’ attempt to force the issue caused his swollen bowels to burst, filling the church with such a stench that once again all except the officiating clergy fled.’
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