Wealth Flows into Normandy

As this suggests, wealth flowed in huge quantities from England into Normandy. Much of it, we can assume, was squandered on wine, women and song, as popular after 1066 as after any great military campaign. Even so, a great deal of treasure still came to rest in Normandy. Many of the best and most luxurious Anglo-Saxon manuscripts survive today not in English but in Norman libraries, acquired by Norman monks and their patrons after 1066 and sent back as souvenirs of conquest to the home country. For the Norman economy, we have few reliable statistics, but those we do possess suggest a vast influx of cash into the duchy. Receipts from tolls on the bridge of St-Lô, where the bishop of Coutances constructed a new ‘bourg’ or trading settlement, are said to have increased from 15 livres to 220 in the period between 1048 and 1093.

Without displaying quite that degree of megalomania and vulgarity that led the church builders of England to besiege heaven with their vaults and towers, the Church in Normandy acquired many new buildings and new religious foundations. Large quantities of land in England were given over directly to Norman monasteries or to the greater monastic confederations of the duchy. The abbey of Bec, for example, acquired land in nearly twenty English counties and on several of these estates founded priories directly dependent upon Bec’s rule, from St Neots in Huntingdonshire to Chester on the border with Wales. The significance of this influx of wealth to Normandy can perhaps best be judged by the effects upon the Norman Church, a century and half later, when these English resources were suddenly cut off. The register of Archbishop Odo of Rouen, recording the archbishop’s year by year perambulation of his diocese from the 1240s onwards, provides vivid testimony to the collapsed towers, the leaking roofs and the ruinous state of a large number of religious houses in Normandy that had previously depended upon revenues from their English estates, now difficult or impossible to raise. As for the building programmes undertaken in England, the folie de grandeur of those who undertook them even now threatens to bankrupt English Heritage or whatever other public body is entrusted with the care and upkeep of the greater cathedrals raised on the spoils of the Conquest. A rationalist would no doubt have had them all pulled down and something more convenient, and less expensive to heat and light, raised in their place. Precisely these sorts of plan were entertained by the Cromwellians of the 1640s, who did indeed draw up a scheme for the demolition of Winchester Cathedral, in some ways the whitest elephant of them all.