Battle of Hastings, The (25 page)

But there were still possible English appointees left, especially in the Church where a particularly clean sweep of senior English clerics was made; this was no doubt done in part to honour
whatever promises may have been made to the Vatican in 1066 (though whatever these were, William maintained Stigand in office as archbishop until 1070). But it certainly caused considerable
resentment, since the new Norman bishops and abbots were rarely demonstrably superior to the Englishmen they supplanted and were very often inferior. Edward, Archdeacon of London, who took monastic
orders under Lanfranc at Christ Church, Canterbury, is said to have tried to abscond, because he could no longer bear the irritation of being corrected by men less learned than himself. Lanfranc
would hardly have come into this
category; but then he was a Lombard, not a Norman. The learning and eminence of Lanfranc, previously Abbot of St Stephen’s, Caen, and
before that prior of Bec, to whose school the students of Europe flocked, was indeed one of the mitigating benefits to England of the conquest. His appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1070
was to be an unqualified advantage to the English Church.

However, there was strong Norman disapproval of the English houses of secular, very often married, canons, set up under the influence of the Lotharingian canonical revival, and a desire to
reform them as celibate Benedictine monasteries. The reluctance of some Norman churchmen to accept the old English saints as legitimately canonical was another cause of friction, among both clergy
and laity. A certain degree of scepticism was pardonable among the new masters, it was a period in which many things, previously accepted, were being questioned. The great French scholar Abelard
even queried the sanctity of France’s patron saint, St Denis. But in England, it was also a period in which English sensitivities were very raw. In many monasteries and parishes, the lower
clergy, the monks and parish priests, kept their places but in general under foreign superiors. The language gulf between higher and lower increased the English sense of inferiority. English abbeys
and churches were pillaged of their treasures, especially if they had had connections with the old regime. King Harold’s foundation of secular canons at Waltham Abbey (in which he was
probably buried) was stripped of the relics, manuscripts and gold and silver plate with which he had endowed it to enrich William’s own foundation of St Stephen’s, Caen. Eadmer
expresses the general feeling of English churchmen:

By 1087, when William died, the only pre-conquest English bishop still in office was St Wulfstan, Bishop of Worcester.

At what one might call the administrative civil service level, English officials held on to their posts initially; as long as the language of government continued to be English, this was
essential, and even after this there is ample evidence in the Domesday Book that, at the middle levels of society, Englishmen continued to hold positions, mainly as minor officials, under the new
foreign lords. But as soon as Latin was substituted for English for official purposes, both in the Church and in government writs, the way was open for Normans and other foreign clerics to take
their place. William’s control over church appointments was rigid, understandably, since it was his senior churchmen whom he used most often as regents during his frequent absences from
England.

It would be pleasant, though difficult, to believe in the deathbed speech attributed to him by Orderic Vitalis in which he owned that he had

He then, according to Orderic, handed his second son, William Rufus, a sealed letter addressed to Lanfranc on his wishes regarding the appointment of the successor to the throne
and recommended him to cross the sea immediately to secure the crown for himself. Even in death, it is hard to break the habits of a lifetime.

It is easy to exaggerate the resentment and humiliation experienced by the native population as the rule of the conquerors was established. It is likely that intermarriage between the conquerors
and the conquered began fairly soon after 1066, possibly in some cases to reinforce title to lands granted to new masters. There must have been many widows available. To what extent such marriages
were freely entered into cannot now be known. The official dispensations later granted to Englishwomen who had entered convents and in some cases taken vows to escape the predatory attentions of
the incomers indicates that such marriages were not always voluntary. However, to the majority of a mainly agrarian population (if they did not have the misfortune to live north of the Humber) life
probably continued much as it had always done, perhaps with rather more emphasis on the collection of taxes, but subject to the same contingencies of bad weather, war, harrying and sickness. There
was presumably the added irritation of being ruled by lords who no longer spoke
a language they could understand and who were very often absentee landlords, more concerned
with the lands they also held in Normandy or Flanders or with the wars they were fighting on the other side of the Channel, and with the money they could extract from their English estates to pay
for them, than with the welfare of their English tenants. It was at the level of the thegns and king’s thegns that the new domination would bear hardest. Many of the younger surviving members
of these families emigrated, either to Scandinavia or to Constantinople to serve in the Varangian Guard where they would have further chances of fighting the Normans, even if it had to be those of
southern Italy.

None the less, what is remarkable is not how much of Anglo-Saxon England was destroyed, but how much in the longer term survived. English laws, language, literature and political and
administrative institutions are still recognizably inherited from pre-conquest times. William may have replaced all the chief English office-holders with Normans, Bretons, Flemings and other
members of his rather miscellaneous host, but the chief institutions of government he wisely kept intact, since no such efficient and well-regulated arrangements existed at that time in his own
duchy. It was these institutions that had made England such a wealthy and desirable country, and since he desired the wealth, he maintained the institutions and to a certain extent, the people who
operated them.
^cxv
It seems to have been in the cities that the higher classes of the English maintained their standing more than elsewhere. It has been
pointed out that, after the conquest, most of the moneyers continued to be English; the family of London moneyers who struck coins for Edward the Confessor and Harold II also struck them for
William I, William II and Henry I. Certainly, the standard of the English coinage both before and after 1066 was far higher than that of the Norman
coinage and was much more
respected internationally. But in general the situation was as summarized by Sir Frank Stenton:

It is impossible not to try to guess what would have happened if the battle had gone the other way, as it so easily might. If King Harold had thrown the Normans back into the
Channel, he would probably have been secure for the remainder of his reign, as Cnut was. After his death, there would almost certainly have been another disputed succession. He had sons by Edith,
who would not have been accepted by the Church as legitimate, and he had at least one much younger posthumous son by Aldyth, sister of Earls Edwin and Morcar, who was legitimate. The former would
certainly have put in a claim for themselves, and the claim of the latter would have been supported by his uncles. Depending on when Harold died, there would also have been a strong case for the
Atheling Edgar, who would probably have been much of an age with Harold’s illegitimate sons, and no older than his great-uncle Edward the Confessor had been when he had succeeded.
Harold’s election had been prompted by the exceptional dangers threatening England when Edward died, and with those dangers safely surmounted, there would have been nothing against and much
to be said for returning to the old royal line. The speed with which the remaining chief men of the kingdom turned to Edgar
as soon as Harold’s death at Hastings was
known indicates that his claim would probably have been strongly supported, especially if the alternative was an internecine contest between members of the Godwinson family. And Edgar, if elected,
might perhaps have proved as durable as his great-uncle, as canny a king, and might have done better in the matter of providing an heir. Even as a homeless exile, a wanderer through England,
Scotland and France, he outlived almost all the other players in this tragedy.

What would not have happened is easier to guess. The empire constructed by William did not outlast his own life. Normandy was inherited by his rebellious eldest son, Robert; England, which, as
he had acquired it by his own efforts he believed (despite his hypothetical deathbed speech) to be his to dispose of at will, went to his second son, William Rufus, and, when William Rufus died
childless, to his third son, Henry. Robert’s desire to reunite Normandy and England under himself led to a continuous state of war between him and his younger brothers, ending in his loss of
Normandy altogether and, eventually, its acquisition by the rival house of Anjou. The fratricidal wars between Robert and his siblings in which England was perforce involved placed the new English
aristocracy in a very difficult position. Most of them, certainly the most powerful nobles, held land in both Normandy and England. Those who fought for William Rufus or, after him, Henry risked
having their ancestral Norman possessions confiscated by Robert; those who fought for Robert equally risked the loss of their new English lands. Prudent fathers who were able to do so divided their
inheritance between two sons, Norman to one, English to the other, thus saving each of them the trouble of choosing sides, though risking the possibility of their later meeting, like the brothers
they served, face to face on the battlefield. Many could not or did not do so, and to the curse of
being ruled by an alien governing class was added the problem of absentee
landlords who expected their English tenants to fight for their masters’ lands on the other side of the Channel. The family feuds fought out first between William and his eldest son and,
after his death, between all his sons and, indeed, his grandchildren, dragged the English into continuous wasteful and irrelevant warfare, for which in general England paid in lives and money. The
situation was not much improved by the accession of Henry II, the first of the Angevin kings and the one who contributed most to the post-conquest development of England, since his continental and
family feuds and those of his successors were as incessant as those of his Norman predecessors. England, unconquered, would have been spared all these continental squabbles, although it might have
had some succession contests of its own. It is highly unlikely that, on past showing, they would have been as destructive as the civil wars between Stephen and Matilda, after which the direct
Norman line died out. More importantly, there would almost certainly have been no Hundred Years War, no English claim to the throne of France, no Agincourt, no burning of Joan of Arc. It might all
have been relatively peaceful for England.

It has been suggested that Harold’s reign would have turned England politically and culturally more in the direction of Scandinavia, further from the influence of France that was to mean
so much to England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This need not have been the case. Harold himself appears to have been a man of some culture, who travelled widely and spoke several
languages easily. The English language would almost certainly have developed differently – possibly into something much closer to German or Dutch. Before 1066, English was still heavily
inflected; when it re-emerged from obscurity after the
conquest, it had lost most of its inflections and agreements. This might have happened spontaneously anyway, though the
example of German throws some doubt on the idea. What literature might have been written in it can only be guessed at, but there is no reason to suppose that it would not have been receptive to the
new literary fashions on the Continent. Anglo-Saxon England had never been closed to continental influence. Before the conquest, there was (as far as we know) so little vernacular literature
elsewhere in Europe that the question hardly arose, but in the other arts there was certainly no isolation. The few artefacts that survive indicate an openness to what was happening elsewhere in
Europe that would probably have continued just as easily after 1066 if there had been no invasion – indeed, possibly, much more easily, given the cultural insensitivity of the Norman
conquerors in all spheres except architecture. The Carolingian influences in the stole and maniple of St Cuthbert and the work of the extraordinarily beautiful Winchester school of illumination as
illustrated in the benedictional of St Æthelwold show to what extent continental examples affected pre-conquest English workmanship.