notes with satisfaction, was the common fate of most of the leaders of the revolt: ‘many Frenchmen also abandoned their lands and went overseas; and the king gave many of their lands to the men that were faithful to him’.
The crisis over, William’s promises to the English were forgotten. When he was taxed with this by Archbishop Lanfranc, the king smoothly retorted: ‘who can be expected to keep all his promises?’
Despite his broken word, William was able to deploy the men and money of England to re-create and even to extend the Conqueror’s empire. He first forced an effective division of Normandy, by taking the east of the duchy and leaving Robert with only the west. Finally, in 1096, Robert mortgaged him the whole of Normandy to finance his participation in the First Crusade. The price was 10,000 marks of silver. And it was raised, needless to say, by an English geld at the rate of four shillings per hide.
Even more remarkable was the fate of Scotland. As we have seen, Malcolm III had married Margaret, sister of Edgar the Æthling. The hope must have been to exploit Margaret’s Anglo-Saxon royal blood to make England Scottish. The result instead was to make Scotland English or, at any rate, Anglo-Norman. In part, this was the work of Margaret herself. She was passionately Anglo-Norman, in both culture and church-manship, and imposed these values when and where she could in Scotland. This inevitably led to a native Gaelic backlash and King Malcolm found himself caught in the middle. A complicating factor was Edgar the Æthling’s reconciliation with William the Conqueror, which led, in effect, to his becoming an honorary member of the Norman dynasty.
With both his wife and his brother-in-law as Anglo-Norman agents, the pressure on Malcolm was intense. And it was not made any easier by William II’s high-handed approach to his northern neighbour.
In the event, however, it was Malcolm who threw the first stone by taking advantage of William’s absence in Normandy in 1091 to launch an invasion of England, which, after making considerable headway, was repulsed by William’s regents. But then, as Malcolm’s ill-luck would have it, William and Robert sank their differences and decided to celebrate their new-found friendship by joining in a punitive expedition to Scotland. The English fleet was destroyed in September. But the army swept into south-eastern Scotland and it was clear that Malcolm would have to submit. Duke Robert and Edgar the Æthling acted as intermediaries and it was agreed to renew the Peace of Abernethy, in return for which Malcolm performed homage to William on the same terms that he had done to his father.
But William, probably sensing Scottish weakness, had no intention of keeping his side of the bargain. Next year he came north with a large army; captured Carlisle and built and garrisoned the castle. He also rebuilt the town and planted an English colony around it: sending ‘a vast number of rustic people with wives and with cattle … thither, to dwell there in order to till the land’.
The establishment of Carlisle as a fortified outpost of England altered the whole balance of power along the vague and unstable Anglo-Scottish border. Malcolm had to respond. But, having learned the lesson of Anglo-Norman power, he tried negotiation and came under safe-conduct to the crown-wearing at Gloucester. There, however, William chose to inflict deliberate humiliation on him. ‘But when he came to the king, he could not’, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reported, ‘be considered worthy either of our king’s speech, or of the conditions that were formerly promised him.’
Malcolm returned to Scotland and, intent on revenge, launched a destructive raid on England. But the raid ended disastrously. Malcolm was entrapped near Alnwick and killed by Morel of Bamborough, the steward and kinsman of the earl of Northumberland and Malcolm’s own intimate friend. Malcolm’s son and nominated heir, Edward, was killed at the same time. The death of both her husband and son was too much for Margaret, who, almost maddened with grief, died a few days later. There followed a powerful Gaelic reaction in which Donald III Bane (White- or Fair-haired), Malcolm’s backwoodsman brother, was made king and ‘drove out all the English’. A counter-blow was struck when Duncan II, Malcolm’s son by his first wife, briefly regained the throne as an English client. But he was soon forced to dismiss his foreign entourage and was then murdered and replaced once more by Donald III.
William, meanwhile, put his own house in order by bringing Robert de Mowbray, the rebel earl of Northumberland, to heel. But the earl’s castle of Bamborough proved impregnable. Instead, William built a counter-castle, which he called Malvoisin, ‘Evil Neighbour’. Earl Robert unwisely ventured outside his stronghold with a raiding party and was captured. William then forced the countess, who was mounting an intrepid defence of Bamborough, to surrender by resorting to one of his father’s favourite tricks and threatening to blind the earl in front of the castle walls. With the surrender of the great fortress, William enjoyed greater direct power in the north than any previous king.
It remained to deal with Scotland. William’s chosen instrument was Edgar the Æthling. He was dispatched north in 1097 with a large army; defeated and captured Donald III Bane, who was later blinded, and installed his namesake and nephew as King Edgar I.
Scotland was now, effectively, an English protectorate. A vassal-king, who was half-English in blood and wholly English in culture, had been put on the throne by an English prince at the head of an Anglo-Norman army. And under Edgar’s ten-year rule, the English language, English colonizers and English ways of doing things spread far into the Lowlands. The result, paradoxically, made Scotland, as a mirror-image of England, all the more able to resist England when the time came.
Wales also suffered the relentless expansion of Anglo-Norman England. But here the consequences were different. In Scotland, the aftermath of the death of Malcolm III led to the eventual creation of a strengthened kingdom that was, in essential respects, another England. In Wales, in contrast, the death of the dominant native prince of south Wales, Rhys ap Tewdwr, also at the hands of a Norman and also in 1093, marked an end: ‘and then fell the kingdom of the Britons’, the Welsh chronicler lamented; or, as an English writer put it, ‘from that day kings ceased to bear rule in Wales’.
The result was that ‘English’ Wales became the most purely Norman area in Britain. Here were feudal lordships, each based on a castle, that feuded ceaselessly with each other and with the king. And they did so more or less without restraint since the structures of royal government, which held firm over most of England, had never been imposed there.
III
Probably more important than these events on the periphery, both to the king and his subjects, was his redevelopment of London. It was, as we have seen, Edward the Confessor with his building of the Abbey who had taken the first crucial step in the establishment of London/Westminster as the political capital. But William II’s building programme comes close behind. The programme included the construction of the first curtain-wall of the Tower; the rebuilding of London Bridge, in a piece of advanced engineering; and, most importantly of all, the erection of a new Great Hall at Westminster.
The Hall, at 240 feet long by 67 feet wide, was one of the largest secular buildings north of the Alps, and, reroofed and reskinned in the fourteenth century, it still stands as the most impressive surviving monument of the Anglo-Norman monarchy. One curious feature, however, is the lack of alignment between the fenestration on the two long walls, so that the windows on the west wall are four feet further north than their equivalents on the east. This has never been satisfactorily explained. It cannot, for example, be a question of the Hall’s size defeating the technical ability of eleventh-century masons, since, big though it is, many English cathedrals are even bigger. One possibility, however, is that the problem was caused by building the new Hall round Edward the Confessor’s hall, which was left standing and operational. Certainly we know that Westminster Hall was built in a rush, taking little more than the year 1098–9. This required plentiful use of forced labour, and, according to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, cost numerous lives: ‘many men perished thereby’.
The Great Hall was finished in the first half of 1099. When he first saw it, one of the king’s attendants is supposed to have said that, though it was impressive, he felt it was rather too big. William crushed him with his retort. It was, the king said, ‘too big for a chamber but not big enough for a hall’. The remark was worthy of a Nero; indeed, the crown-wearings, for which the Hall was principally intended, were