European Connections

The idea that William brought England for the first time into proper or natural connection with European affairs is highly misleading. England, before 1066, had never been an island entirely sundered from the European main. During the century that preceded 1066, it had faced crises provoked by Danish, Norwegian, Norman and northern French neighbours. Its laws were a combination of Germanic and late Roman. Its Church, first implanted by Frankish missionaries, looked to Rome as its ultimate authority. Edward the Confessor built Westminster Abbey and dedicated it to St Peter in direct commemoration of Rome and the prince of the apostles. He was buried there in 1066 wearing eastern silks and a pectoral cross (or ‘encolpion’) clearly of Byzantine workmanship, carrying images of the crucifixion and housing a relic of the True Cross, itself advertised as the greatest relic of the Christian world, acquired for the city of Constantinople in the fourth century by Helena, mother of the emperor Constantine the Great, herself reputed to have been a native of Colchester in Essex.

Edward’s Queen Edith, daughter of Earl Godwin, patronized the German bishop of Wells, and may well have played a part in the election of other foreign bishops. In 1050, she had supported the removal of the south-western bishopric from Crediton to Exeter under the rule of the continentally educated bishop Leofric. Even Harold Godwinson had visited Rome and the Holy Roman Empire in Germany. His religious patronage was directed chiefly towards the canons of Waltham in Essex, living under a discipline derived from the reformed clergy of the Rhineland (the central region of the medieval Empire, named Lotharingia by association with Lothar, one of Charlemagne’s grandsons). To present Harold as patriotic defender of the national cause against the foreigner, William of Normandy, is significantly to miss the point. Harold’s own family owed its rise not to its Englishness but to the patronage of the Danish King Cnut. Harold’s brother, Tostig, had no qualms in making common cause with the Norwegian King, Harold Hardrada, and Tostig’s widow was subsequently remarried to Duke Welf of Bavaria, scion of one of the greatest aristocratic houses of eleventh-century Europe. The Battle of Hastings itself derived its name from a Sussex port where land already belonged to the monks of Fécamp, a Norman monastery which for much of the eleventh century had been ruled by a succession of Italian or Burgundian abbots.

If England, before 1066, was a great deal less isolated from Europe than is sometimes supposed, then afterwards it retained a peculiarity that does not accord with the generally accepted idea of a French-speaking aristocracy dragging the English reluctantly into the European limelight. Two great conflicts came to dominate the affairs of Europe in the late eleventh century: the disputes between popes and emperors (the so-called Investiture Contest), and the summoning of a crusade after 1095 to ‘liberate’ Jerusalem from the hands of the Islamic infidel. Normans, particularly the Normans of Sicily, played decisive roles in both of these conflicts. Englishmen, or indeed Norman lords with English connections, were almost entirely absent. It was the very isolation of England from the papal–imperial disputes of the 1070s and 80s, that rendered those disputes so bitter in England when they did belatedly cross the Channel. Then, as today, the English economy and English politics marched to a significantly different rhythm to that sounded elsewhere in Europe. Even the idea that the French language somehow ousted English as the mother-tongue of William’s new realm fails to account for the extraordinary way in which the English language itself mutated after 1066, and in which the Normans came to adopt an early form of Franglais in their daily dealings.