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História da Língua Inglesa   

Conquered –

How the Anglo-Saxons became second class citizens in their own country.

by Michael Wood

King William was a hard man determined to impose his will by force. The Anglo-Saxons became second-class citizens in their own country.

A new order

After the defeat at Hastings, the Anglo-Saxon ruling and land-owning class was systematically removed: a thorough-going revolution, which as so often happens in history, was driven by a great figure - William the Conqueror. You may not like William (and who did?) but you have to admit that this hard, inflexible and unlovable man was politically the master of his world. And the fascinating thing about the Norman invasion is that it is still known as 'The Conquest'. If you live in England, even now, more than 900 years on, that is all you have to say - everyone knows what you are talking about.

The Conquest has always been the subject of debate between historians.

The Conquest has always been the subject of debate between historians. They used to argue whether it was a good thing or a bad thing: in effect, arguing whether Anglo-Saxon England was an archaic backwater only brought into the mainstream of European civilisation by the Norman invasion.

These days, the debate tends to focus not on praise or blame or regret, but on the textual and material evidence. Fortunately, the period is served by an incredibly rich series of sources. There are the Norman accounts, but also valuable, if in short supply, are English reports from the time. Then there are the words which flow from various people over the next 50 years. They are looking back on events and trying to make sense of one of the great turning points in English history, much as we still do today.

All the eye witnesses and near-contemporaries agree that these were terrible events. Enslavement and devastation of the countryside; deliberate burning of fields, refugee crises, famine, people surviving on insects and rats: these were the news stories of the day. Their descriptions match the worst horror stories of modern war reporting.

Then, as time passes, we begin to read chroniclers who offer a wider overview as things seemed to them, a generation or two later: though not primary sources written in 1066, their snapshots are fascinating insights into the way the next generation saw things.

I have cruelly oppressed them and killed innumerable multitudes by famine or the sword.

William of Malmesbury, for example, who wrote in the 1120s, had a Norman father and an English mother, so he was caught between the two sides. He writes that this was 'a fateful day for England, the melancholy havoc of our dear country', because it fell under foreign lords. Around the same time, another historian of mixed descent, Orderic Vitalis, reports the deathbed confession of William the Conqueror. According to Orderic, this is what William said:

'I've persecuted the natives of England beyond all reason, whether gentle or simple. I have cruelly oppressed them and unjustly disinherited them, killed innumerable multitudes by famine or the sword and become the barbarous murderer of many thousands both young and old of that fine race of people.'

Did William ever say that? It seems hard to believe that Orderic really had access to an eye-witness account of the Conqueror's last words. Most likely this is what the English would have wanted him to say. But his text certainly shows us how some people felt 40 years on from William's death, 60 odd year after Hastings. And perhaps this is a pointer to why the tale persisted in myth for so long afterwards.

Brutal occupation

The Normans were brutal, ruthless occupiers. The problem was that William had promised his allies and friends a cut of the cake, but first he had to hold on to England and consolidate his grip. This was done with a network of Norman castles right across the country, fighting platforms gouged into the landscape. From these the native population could be terrorised and intimidated, and any local risings snuffed out.

Hereward has been immortalised in ballads and stories and Victorian novels, but he was a real person.

Not surprisingly there was a lot of local resistance in those opening years and of course some of the resistance stories went down later in legends such as the story of Hereward the Wake and the siege of Ely. Hereward has been immortalised in ballads and stories and Victorian novels, but he was a real person: an Anglo-Saxon land-owner from the fens. His allies in that resistance were real people too - we can identify them and their native villages. And even today, you can go to what was the edge of the Cambridge fens, around the villages of Willingham and Over, north of Cambridge, and you can still see traces of Duke William's siege causeways which were driven through the fen to overwhelm the Anglo-Saxon resistance on the old 'isle of eels', Ely. Not a man to cross!

Famine and the sword

The siege of Ely was one of many local acts of resistance against the Normans. The most bitter and sustained warfare was in the north. When the Northumbrians rose against William in 1069 he punished them by deliberately devastating the entire province. He marched through Northumberland burning crops, destroying villages and driving the people off. That is what Orderic Vitalis meant when he speaks of William's murderous campaign with 'famine and the sword'.

'King William was a hard man', as the chronicler says, 'sunk in greed'.

In fact we can see just how he wasted Northumbria by looking in the pages of Domesday Book, the survey of England made for the Conqueror in 1086. In its pages you can follow the track of William's army beyond the Humber and up the Great North Road through Yorkshire, a track visible in the devastated villages whose value had plummeted between 1066 and 1086 - and had not recovered. Even 17 years after the devastation of the north, many of these places were worth nothing. Northumbria would take a long time to recover. And the loss was across the board. We lack, for instance, the ecclesiastical archives for Northumbria going back to the 7th century, most of which were lost in 1069. Looking back one can only sympathise with the Anglo-Saxon chronicler who remarks grimly, that these were hard times. 'King William was a hard man', as the chronicler says, 'sunk in greed'. A man ruling an alien land, determined to impose his will by force.

A medieval apartheid

How many Normans came over during those first 20 years or so? No one knows, but maybe 20,000 more troops followed the original army. How many others migrated from Normandy and Brittany is anyone's guess. There would have been merchants, dealers, labourers, entertainers, and so on. All were needed to provide the service industries for the new settler state. What we do know now is that for the next century or more they maintained themselves rigidly apart in terms of marriage and intermixing - a form of racial separation that has been compared to the apartheid system.

Of the 1,400 tenants-in-chief in Anglo-Saxon England, only two were still in place by 1086.

The Old English were relegated to the lower social classes. The manors of the Anglo-Saxon ruling and land-owning classes, including huge tracts of land, were given to the main Norman leaders. Of the 1,400 tenants-in-chief in Anglo-Saxon England, only two were still in place by 1086. Of the several thousand lesser thegns (freemen and women) below them, some still held their family lands in 1086, but often owing service to a Norman overlord. A few middling families continued to hold local influence. The descendants of Thurkell of Arden in Warwickshire, for example, would be the ancestors of the great Tudor gentry family, the Ardens (of which Shakespeare's mother Mary was a distant kinswoman). But for most, the situation for the first generation or two was unremittingly grim.

There is one vivid detail in the Domesday Book which describes an Anglo-Saxon farmer at Marsh Gibbon in Buckinghamshire, a man called Aelfric. At Marsh Gibbon, the compiler noted, Aelfric had held the land freely in 1066, 'but now holds it off William, a Norman - graviter et miserabiliter - miserably and with heavy heart'. If only we had Aelfric's autobiography!

Continental influence

It would be easy to think that such racial antipathies were the simple product of prejudice born of ignorance, shaped by a complete lack of knowledge of each other's culture. But the reverse is true. For long before the Conquest, Anglo-Saxon England's relationship with the Continent had been close. Over 200 years before, the common threat posed by the Vikings had brought the Carolingian kings of Francia and the kings of Wessex and Mercia together. There had been royal marriages between the West Saxons and the Carolingians, and intellectuals and churchmen had frequently moved between the two courts. Later on, Ethelred the Unready had married a Norman wife, and his son, Edward the Confessor, had a Norman mother. There were many Normans and French present in Edward's England as there probably had been in the 10th century when there were already merchant colonies from Rouen and Ponthieu living in London. So, a certain amount of Normanisation had already happened in Anglo-Saxon England. Indeed, the English had always been receptive to foreign culture, foreign architecture and foreign ideas.

The rulers spoke only French and made no attempt to learn English.

But the Conquest was a different matter altogether. This was a foreign military takeover of an older and superior civilisation by a ruthless war leader who had gathered support by offering his followers their share of the possessions of the vanquished. Henceforth, it was often said, the Normans seemed to treat the English as inferiors. There are accounts which say as much from as late as the 13th century, still complaining that the rulers spoke only French and made no attempt to learn English, which is how it seemed to Robert of Gloucester:

'The Normans could then speak nothing but their own language, and spoke French as they did at home and also taught their children. So that the upper class of the country that is descended from them stick to the language they got from home, therefore unless a person knows French he is little thought of. But the lower class stick to English and their own language even now'.

French ruling class

Another 13th century writer, Robert Manning, says 'the English have been held in subjection ever since the Conquest'. And the feudal system he sees as a consequence: 'For all this thralldom that now on England is, through Normans it came, bondage and distress.' The idea of a distinct ruling culture which spoke French and had all the best jobs for them and their people was always dismissed by historians in the past as being special pleading and fantasy. But recent scholarship on intermarriage shows that this distinction was maintained for a very long time. It seems that in this case the old stories are true.

And of course, when we look at the broud spectrum of evidence, this makes sense. The archaeology, the texts, and the administrative records all show that the Conquest was a cataclysmic and traumatic event. The people of England were dispossessed and the ruling class displaced. The likes of William of Malmesbury and Orderic Vitalis were speaking, in the 1120s, from the comfort of their monasteries. And they tell us it was a catastrophe even from the side of the winners. So perhaps today we have to think in terms of Bosnia and Kosovo to understand the psychological impact of the Conquest. The difference is that Anglo-Saxon England was an old society, an established and ordered state, which had created a sense of allegiance long before 1066. It is not surprising then that the wound was apparent for a long time afterwards.

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