Confessor he was psychologically ready for an expedition of Caesar-like audacity, a seaborne invasion that would change England and the world forever.
There is no need to repeat the essentials of the campaign: how Harold was faced with simultaneous threats from Danes and Normans; how he rushed back south from the battle of Stamford Bridge and got an arrow in his eye at Hastings. All this is well known (or blooming well should be) to the average ten-year-old. What is much less clear is how William clinched the deal.
It was one thing to proclaim yourself the conqueror of a small hill on the Sussex coast, but ever since Alfred had restored the city and its fortifications, London held the key to the kingdom. London was the fat spider at the centre of the web of Roman roads, and it took William a surprisingly long time to make himself master of the city. Indeed, the closer you study the story, the more you wonder whether Hastings was as decisive as all that.
Perhaps Londoners could have held out. Perhaps they could have changed the course of history – had they not behaved so badly, or been so badly led.
‘London is a great city,’ says the twelfth-century ‘Song of the Battle of Hastings’, ‘overflowing with froward inhabitants and richer than the rest of the country. Protected on the left side by its walls and on the right side by the river, it neither fears enemies nor dreads being taken by storm.’ In the end, it was the cynicism and divisions among Londoners that handed the city – and the country – to William.
For about a month after Hastings William hung around, hoping that London would just drop into his lap. There was a pro-Norman faction behind the walls, and indeed the court of Edward the Confessor had shown Normanising tendencies. But for the time being these pro-Normans were outnumbered by the pro-Saxons, who favoured the claims of one Edgar the Atheling.
You have to understand that London was at this stage a bit of a multi-culti maelstrom. In the last seventy years they had chopped and changed so often between English and Scandinavian rulers that by the time William arrived at Hastings, London was milling with Anglo-Saxons and Anglo-Danes and Anglo-Celts and Anglo-Normans, to say nothing of the other international merchants in the city.
If you went into a shop and ordered a pound of offal, it is not at all clear what language you would be expected to speak. While Londoners bickered in their various tongues, William’s troops got dysentery. He tried to bring matters to a head by attacking the south of the city, burning much of Southwark to the ground; and yet somehow the victor of Hastings was repulsed – which shows, perhaps, what the Londoners might have achieved had they possessed more discipline.
William retreated south and west, and eventually crossed the Thames as far away as Wallingford in Oxfordshire, before wheeling across to Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. From there he issued a fresh invitation to the Londoners to pack it in – and again, the citizens delayed. By now it was late autumn of 1066, and disease and campaigning were surely taking their toll of the Norman army.
Behind the city walls the defences were organised by one Ansgar the Staller, who is named in some chronicles as the ‘mayor’ of London. The Staller had been injured at Hastings, and had been heroically carried into the city on a stretcher. For weeks, perhaps even months, Ansgar the Staller stalled away.
He might have stalled to victory had he not been let down by his allies. Edgar the Atheling – the Anglo-Saxon alternative – was supposedly backed by Edwin, Earl of Northumberland, and his brother Morcar. At the critical juncture they seem to have vanished back up north, taking their troops with them. Another Edgar backer, Archbishop Stigand, switched sides and went over to the Conqueror, and by December 1066 the Staller could stall no more.
Like Suetonius Paulinus, William marched down what is now the Edgware Road, but this time he turned right at (what is now) St Giles’s Circus and established his HQ at Westminster. There he constructed ‘siege engines and made moles and the iron horns of battering rams to destroy the City … to reduce the bastions to sand and bring down the proud tower to rubble’.
It is not clear what Guy of Amiens means by ‘the proud tower’, but he is presumably referring to the remaining Roman fortifications. Ansgar and Co are said to have put up a vigorous resistance, with what little soldiery they had left. But William’s knights were tougher. They ‘inflicted much sorrow upon London by the death of many of her sons and citizens’.
William was crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey, on Christmas Day 1066. It is a measure of the extreme tension in the city that the ceremony very nearly ended in disaster.
The turncoat Archbishop Stigand was given the honour of placing the English crown on Norman temples (even though he had crowned Harold in the same year), and he turned to the English contingent and asked them, in English, if William was acceptable as their king. They shouted their assent – as well they might, given that they were surrounded by Norman knights.
Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances then put the same question in French, for the benefit of those in the audience who could not speak English. The Norman knights shouted Oui! so loudly that the guards outside thought there was some sort of revolt going on. They torched the neighbouring buildings, and the congregation fled – some to fight the flames, some to loot the houses. A handful of clergy and monks were left to complete the consecration of the King, who was trembling from head to foot. As for Ansgar the Staller, his lands at Enfield were confiscated and he went on to have a quiet career as a minister in Westminster Abbey.
There are many senses in which Norman rule in London was merely a continuation of what had gone before. The new king issued a famous Charter for Londoners, in which he greeted all the burgesses, French and English, in friendly wise, and assured them that all the laws of Edward would continue to apply. ‘And I will that every child be his father’s heir after his father’s day and I will not suffer any man to offer you any wrong. God keep you,’ said the benign new ruler. London’s political system was kept intact, with the Saxon portreeve evolving into the Norman sheriff, and Londoners by and large retained the freedoms they had acquired in the reign of the Confessor. According to William of Poitiers, one of the more boot-licking Norman chroniclers, the English were absolutely thrilled to be conquered.
‘Many English received by his liberal gift more than they had ever received from their fathers or their former lords … He gave them rich fiefs in return for which they willingly endured hardship and danger. But to no Frenchman was anything given unjustly taken from an Englishman.’
It is not clear that the English saw it this way. William devastated the north of England, and on any objective reading the Norman Conquest was a cultural and political catastrophe for the Anglo-Saxons. Lands and titles were plundered and handed over to Norman noblemen. Many English aristocrats were driven to flee the country, some to Flanders, some to Scotland. Some turned up as soldiers in the Byzantine empire’s Varangian Guard, some were sold into slavery.
By 1086 the Norman cuckoo had shoved almost all the Saxon fledglings over the side of the nest, and the English aristocracy retained a pathetic 8 per cent of its original landholdings. Half the country was owned by one hundred and ninety men, and a quarter by just eleven men. All were Normans. Lovely Anglo-Saxon crafts of embroidery and metal working were lost. Above all, a foreign language was imposed on the country, and French was to be used by the ruling classes for the next three hundred years.
As Sir Walter Scott pointed out, the subjection of the Saxons is visible in the language today, where we use an English word for a farm animal, and a French word for the cooked meat it provides. So the Saxon servants would take a cow and provide the Normans with beef, or they would take a pig and offer them pork, or a sheep and offer them mutton. Scott composed a little ditty, which he put into the mouth of someone called Wamba. It was ‘Norman saw on English oak, On English neck a Norman yoke; Norman spoon to English dish, And England ruled as Normans wish.’
It was a humiliation, and I have always been fascinated by the politics of the Conquest. ‘Et fuga verterunt Angli’, it says on the Bayeux tapestry – and the English turned in flight. To any modern English-speaking person the message is clear: we, the English, lost. And the Normans conquered us, right?
I ask the Yeoman Jailer whether he thinks that we – the English – were conquered by