The Cataclysm of the Conquest

In the meantime, we should never underestimate the cataclysm that overwhelmed English society after 1066. The phrase ‘The Norman Conquest’ should not be allowed to reduce events to euphemistic miniature, masking a period of violence and expropriation never to be repeated in English history, even at the height of the Tudor ‘revolution’ of the 1520s or the Civil War of the 1640s. The ‘Conquest’ after 1066 invites comparison not so much with the later history of England as with the nineteenth-century ‘Scramble for Africa’, with England as the land raped and pillaged by foreign colonialists. In part through simple greed, in part from fear of an English backlash, the victors of Hastings very rapidly shifted from accommodation to conquest. Within twenty years, they had dispossessed all but a tiny number of the greater English landholders. Our chief reference point here, the Domesday survey of 1086, makes plain that, by the 1080s, mostly during the 1070s, something like ninety per cent of land held in 1066 by English thegns or English lords had been seized by King William and his followers.

The process of seizure was neither uniform nor well-documented. Some of the greater honours carved out from the spoils of 1066 were centrally organized. Thus in Sussex, guarding the Channel approaches, in Holderness, protecting the Humber estuary from the threat from Scandinavia, or in Cheshire and the Welsh Marches, looking towards the threat from the Welsh and the Irish, massive new estates were created for William’s most trusted followers. The King’s half-brothers Robert of Mortain and Odo of Bayeux obtained vast swathes of land, for Robert in Devon, Cornwall and Dorset, for Odo in Kent. Hugh of Avranches was granted not only Chester and the northern parts of the Welsh March but land in twenty English counties, the origins of the future great earldom of Chester. Roger of Montgomery, another of King William’s closest lieutenants, scooped not only two of the new divisions of Sussex, known appropriately enough as the Sussex ‘rapes’ (from the Anglo-Saxon word for the ‘rope’ which marked out the meeting place of a local court), but a large part of Shropshire and the town of Shrewsbury, protecting the central Welsh Marches. All of these estates, known then and since as ‘honours’, were royally approved. The honours system, then as now, depended upon the crown. Today it involves the bestowal of medals and titles. In the 1060s and for many centuries thereafter it involved the much more solid resource of land.

Even so, not all of the great post-Conquest honours were created or even necessarily sanctioned by the King. In some parts of England, in Yorkshire, for example, following the brutal harrying of the north, equally vast estates were carved out by Norman lords acting on their own initiative, grabbing what they could, evicting the former English landlords, and where necessary defending their plunder against other Normans who might otherwise seize the spoils. This was a Darwinian struggle, in which dog ate dog. It was still in full progress as late as 1086, when the Domesday survey reveals large numbers of manors still disputed between two or more Norman lords. Indeed, one purpose behind Domesday may have been the identification and regulation of such disputes, with the survey, made as the result of cooperation between king and barons, being intended to draw a line under the chaos of the 1060s and 70s and to lend a veneer of royal approval to a process that, at the time, had lain far beyond the control of the King, in the hands of many dozens of greedy and unscrupulous local land-grabbers. If the Battle of Hastings marked a Norman victory rather than a Norman ‘Conquest’, then in the 1070s and 80s there was not so much a single Conquest as a whole host of conquerors seizing what spoils they could. This was the greatest seizure of loot in English history, speedier and even more intense than the process by which the Angles, Saxons and Jutes had conquered post-Roman Britain five centuries before.

In the process, many of the territorial divisions of late Anglo-Saxon England were melted down and entirely reforged. Some of the Norman newcomers laid claim to the estates of particular English lords. In Northamptonshire, for example, the lands of an Englishman named Bardi were claimed virtually in their entirety by the new Norman bishop of Lincoln. Those of a woman named Gytha formed the nucleus of the new Northamptonshire honour of William Peverel, those of a thegn named Northmann, the estate of Robert de Bucy. More often, however, the tenurial map of 1066 was simply torn up and new estates created from the manors and lands of a diversity of Anglo-Saxon landholders. In Suffolk for example, the lands previously held by one of the greatest of Anglo-Saxon thegns, Eadric of Laxfield, were divided between at least four major new Norman honours. In the process, there was a massive transfer of land out of the hands of the late Anglo-Saxon earls and into those of the King and his immediate circle. Whereas the landed resources of Edward the Confessor had been dwarfed by those of the Godwinsons and the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, King William by 1086 was far and away the richest landowner in England, with ten times the wealth even of his half-brothers who themselves, with £5,000 of land, held twice as much as the £2,400 of the next richest landholding family, the Montgomeries.

The outcome was a total reversal of the baronial stranglehold over royal action that had done so much to create the inertia and tensions of the 1050s and early 1060s. By the 1080s, it was the King rather than his earls and barons who held the clear balance both of wealth and power. The more successful baronial families acquired estates across England, scattered collections of manors, rents and lands which thereafter had somehow to be controlled by a single lord. One unintended consequence of this shattering of the landscape into many thousands of family holdings was to emphasize and enhance the significance of royal authority. The primitive institutions of the state and of royal government, the sheriff, the hundred bailiff and the courts of the hundred and county were the means by which an intensely localized society could be made to respond to the needs of landlords with estates now scattered not only across England but on either side of the Channel.

Barons holding directly from the King are known as tenants-in-chief. They could be super rich, modestly wealthy or relatively poor. Thus there was a vast distinction to be drawn between a man like Hugh of Avranches, ancestor of the later earls of Chester, with over £1,000 of land recorded in Domesday Book, and a humble serjeant like the ancestor of Roland the farter, confined to a few hundred acres of land in the Suffolk manor of Hemingstone, held for the service of making a leap, a whistle and a fart before the King every year on Christmas Day. The services attached to such serjeanties are often peculiar – keeping the king’s hounds or hawks, polishing the king’s boar spear – and some have survived even into modern times. At the coronation of King Edward VII in 1911, for example, the Dymoke family continued to advance claims to serve as King’s champion. The office of champion was a relatively modern one, first recorded at the coronation of Richard II in 1377. Even so, serjeanties held for service as baker, cook and crossbowman were already in existence by the 1080s.

Such men were small fry, of course. England after 1066 was dominated by between a dozen and twenty great families, many of them closely related to the King. Between them, these families, of which about a dozen were in due course granted title as earl, controlled more than half of the wealth of England. Inequality has always been an English characteristic, and the vast disparities in landed wealth between rich and poor were far greater in the eleventh century than in the early twentieth century when inheritance taxes were first devised, in theory as a means of levelling the playing field. As earls, the first being the King’s half-brothers Odo, Earl of Kent, and Robert, Count of Mortain, and his cousin William fitz Osbern, Earl of Hereford, such men had an obligation to oversee the King’s affairs in their own particular region or county. In practice, the duties of an earldom were far outweighed by its privileges, save at moments of particular national crisis.

Beneath the tenants-in-chief, reaching downwards to the humblest of freemen and those barely distinguishable from peasants, stretched a vast array of lesser tenants, holding sometimes, as with the serjeants, directly from the King, more often from one or other of the greater tenants-in-chief. The most significant of these subtenants were the knights, holding their lands in return for military service. By the last decade of the eleventh century, such landholdings were already being described as ‘fees’ or ‘knights’ fees’, and in theory their holders were obliged to send a knight for forty days of military service each year whenever summoned to do so by their lord. Once again, however, theory and practice swiftly diverged. Some knights’ fees represented extensive landed estates, the bare minimum required to support a knight, his horse and his armour being assessed at about £5 of land. In practice, almost as soon as the knight’s fee first emerges into the light of day, in the returns to a survey conducted on the estates of the Archbishop of Canterbury, we find men assessed not just for whole but fractional fees: a half, a quarter, later sometimes as little as an eighth or a twentieth of a knight’s fee. Clearly, someone holding an eighth of a fee was not responsible for supplying an eighth of a physical knight to serve in his lord’s army. What was being assessed here was not a military but a fiscal unit.