Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History.
For weekly bonus episodes, ad -free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much -loved chat community, go to therestishistory .com and join the club.
That is therestishistory .com.
This episode is brought to you by Shopify.
Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet.
Shop pay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer carts going abandoned and more sales going cha -ching.
So if you're into growing your business, get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are.
Visit Shopify .com to upgrade your selling today.
Whenever I need to send roses that are guaranteed to make someone's day, the only place I trust is 1 -800 -Flowers .com.
With 1 -800 -Flowers, my friends and family always receive stunning, high -quality bouquets that they absolutely love.
Right now, when you buy a dozen multicolored roses, 1 -800 -Flowers will double your bouquet to two dozen roses.
To claim this special double roses offer, go to 1 -800 -Flowers .com slash Spotify.
That's 1 -800 -Flowers .com slash Spotify.
What makes a great pair of glasses?
At Warby Parker, it's all the invisible extras without the extra cost. Their designer quality frames start at $95 including prescription lenses, Plus, scratch -resistant, smudge -resistant and anti -reflective coatings.
And UV protection, and free adjustments for life.
To find your next pair of glasses, sunglasses or contact lenses or to find the Warby Parker Store nearest you, head over to Warby Parker .com.
That's WarbyParker .com.
Harold had fallen as his valiant brothers had fallen before him.
The event too truly showed that England had fallen with the Sons of Godwin, that as ever in this age everything turned on the life of one man and that the one man who could have guarded and saved England was taken from her.
Such being the case, it is from that memorable day that we may fairly date the overthrow, what we know to have been only the imperfect and temporary overthrow of our ancient and free Teutonic England.
In the eyes of men of the next generation, that day was the fatal day of England, the day of the sad overthrow of our dear country, the day of her handing over to foreign lords.
From that day forward the Normans began to work the will of God upon the folk of England, till they were left in England no chiefs of the land, of English blood, Till all were brought down to bondage and to sorrow, Till it was a shame to be called an Englishman And the men of England were no more a people.
So that was one of the great historians.
It was Edward A. Freeman.
It was the man with whom ten episodes ago we began our account of the Norman Conquest. Now you can't argue Edward A.
Freeman, because he was Regius Professor of History at Oxford. His book on the Norman Conquest, the history of the Norman Conquest in England, not just the best, but more importantly the longest history of the Norman Conquest at six volumes published to mark the 800th anniversary, and he correctly identified the Normans as the absolute filth of Europe and England, and its democracy and love of country, he identified those, Tom, as the motor of all history.
And what is more, he pointed out quite rightly that it doesn't matter about the masses in history and millions of people.
It's really about one man.
And that man is Harold Godwinson, the one man who could have guarded and saved England.
This is the best episode of The Restless History we've ever done.
But are you going to now say that this is all tosh and rubbish?
Yeah. So, I mean, very much your kind of guy, he loves Harold Godwinson.
he writes enormously long books, just go on and on and on and never stop.
Yeah very much your kind of guy.
So clearly he is mourning the death of Harold.
He sees the two as being you know, interfused.
Harold is the one man who could have guarded and saved England and now he is dead.
So is he right that Hastings was a catastrophe for England?
I mean did it result in the extinction of her ancestral freedoms. Was everything that Anglo -Saxon England had been destroyed at Senlock Hill?
If you'd agreed with all this bloke Freeman, the Roundheads, people in the 17th century who believed in the Norman yoke.
Dominic, we will be coming to that we'll be doing a bonus on the way that 1066 and the Norman conquest was interpreted so there will be more about that if you're a member of the Restless History Club, but for now, we're going to try and answer some of those questions that I just put, but a reminder first of all of where we ended the previous episode.
So it is 1654 on the 14th of October, Saint Callixtus's Day, 1066, and the sun has just set.
And the sun, Dominic, has also set On the fortunes of the Godwins and of England.
Ah, terrible. The slopes and the summit of Senlac Hill are piled with the bodies of the dead and the dying and the mud reeks of blood and emptied bowels.
Cries fill the darkening twilight and already you've got to imagine pillagers creeping up through the dark starting to strip corpses of their male shirts, their weapons, their clothes, anything that might be of any value, and the killing is not yet over even though darkness is now over Sussex because the English have turned and fled.
But this of course is when the Norman cavalry comes into its own because they can pursue the fugitives and hunt them down.
You'll be glad to hear Dominic, they don't have it all their own way, because it does seem, despite the garbled nature of the various accounts, there seems confusion us to exactly what happens.
But it's clear that a body of, um, of English warriors, either fugitives or perhaps new arrivals, make a stand perhaps on some ancient earth works.
It's not entirely clear.
And they inflict a number of casualties on the Normans.
And there is one report that, useless of Boulogne, uh, William's mate, who, according to the earliest account we have, was actually responsible for the death of Harold, that he received a blow between his shoulders that led to blood gushing out from his nose and mouth in a great fountain.
That's good news. That's great news.
And there are later counts that report an entire ditch ending up filled with Norman casualties and that it was called the Malfos, the evil ditch, a great ditch that had been covered with brambles.
So the killing does go on through the night.
But when dawn comes on the 15th of October, what it reveals is a spectacle of carnage that is so terrible that even the Normans are kind of stunned by it.
A bit like the English after Agincourt and we should remind ourselves that the English will go on to win a victory over the French in due course.
We had the last laugh.
William of Poitiers writes about the battlefield, I've said MacHale, far and wide the earth was covered with the flower of the English nobility and youth drenched in gore.
And William orders the Norman dead to be buried.
but does he order the English dead to be buried?
Dominic, he does not.
He leaves them as food for worms and wolves, birds and dogs, as the karmen puts it.
He does however give orders for the bodies of Harold and his two brothers Girth and Leahwine to be found and they are treated with more respect, although there are so many differing stories about what happens to them and how William chooses to treat them that's actually, again, very hard to make sense of what may actually have happened.
So there is one brilliant late story that Harold's body has been left so mangled that no one can identify it.
So they send for Edith Swan Neck, his lover, mistress, concubine, first wife, whatever you want to call her.
In the words of the chronicler, she had a more intimate knowledge of his body than anyone else.
If those previous accounts in the last episode are true then that would avail her nothing.
Right. Well, but maybe they found them as well and kind of brought them back and stuck them on, we don't know.
The Carmen, which is the source closest in time to Hastings, recounts how William has Harold's body wrapped in purple linen, and then Harold's mother Gither, comes and offers to pay William Harold's weight in gold if she can be given the body.
Again, a possible classical allusion there to Achilles and Hector and everything.
I mean, is it being modelled directly on them?
Is Gither thinking of that?
we don't know, but according to the Carmen, William doesn't give Gith her son's body and instead he orders it to be buried on top of a cliff looking out over the channel and somebody raises a stone, one of the Normans, and scribes on it by command of the Duke you repose here, King Harald, so that you may remain guardian of the shore and ocean.
And if that's true, I mean, what's interesting is that William is being described as a Duke and Harald is still being described as a king.
So I don't think that would have lasted very long.
There are other accounts of what happens to Harold's body.
So a late account says it was given to Giffa who buried it in Waltham Abbey in Essex, which Harold had re -founded under his own kind of patronage in 1060.
So that's, I mean, we don't know.
And there is a modern theory that it's in the Sussex port of Bosham, which had been Harold's birthplace and it's shown in the Bayeux Tapestry, Harold sails from it for his disastrous trip to France.
So within an Arrow's flight of Keith Richards' house in West Wittering.
Yes. That's the version I like to believe.
Yeah and I imagine Keith Richards would be interested in this.
Keith Richards loves his history.
So he'd have been all over the fact that in 1954 an Anglo -Saxon coffin was found in the church there and it apparently was the skeleton of a formidable looking warrior.
So who knows. I think Keith Richards because he seems to be very much an Anglo -Saxon man, not a Norman.
Yes. I think Mick Jagger more of a Norman.
Agreed. Very interested in money.
Yeah, exactly. Cold -eyed.
Cold -eyed. By Keith Richards, very much a man who would have sported an excellent moustache in the 11th century.
There are Norman accounts that the um, the English, on the night before Hastings, spend it getting wasted.
Brilliant, there you go.
That's quite Rolling Stones.
Anyway, however, All these stories, we don't really know which of them is true, there's inevitably an also report that Harold survived the battle and became a hermit, which is traditional in such cases, but whatever, whatever the truth, he is gone and the big question that everyone presumably is asking at this point is does this mean the war is over?
Right. Because it could continue, right?
I mean William Irley has the tiniest tiniest bit of England, a little foothold and there's a lot of England and England has a very sophisticated state and it's got a lot of people and it's got a martial tradition.
to be, um, so why does, this is an interesting question, why does the Norman Conquest basically, why is this a game over?
Well we laugh perhaps at the way that Victorians insist on, you know, great men, the fate of great men, um, affecting the course of nations.
I think in this case he's not far wrong.
I think the war absolutely could have still been prosecuted, um, and won.
Had there been in anyone left in England, competent to continue the resistance to William and by implication be accepted as king.
So you need someone who's competent and can rule as a legitimate king.
But the problem is there isn't really anyone.
So Gieth and Leofaen are dead.
Edwin and Morca, if they were at the battle and nobody mentions it, they certainly haven't hung around.
Whether they're coming from Hastings or whether they're coming from the Midlands, they go to London and they rescue their sister, Harold's widow, and take her away up to Chester.
There is Edgar Atherling, who is Edward the Confessor's great nephew.
You know, he has the blood of the West Saxon kings in his veins, and we're told in the Anglo -Saxon Chronicle.
Archbishop Aildred, so that's the Archbishop of York.
And the people of London wish to have him as king, as indeed was his right by birth.
But you know, he's a teenager.
He lacks any military resources of his own, whatsoever, and he is now facing the best general in Europe, who's just won a very, very bloody battle.
So I think that when Freeman says the one man who could have guarded and saved England was taken from her, namely Harold, I mean he's not exaggerating, really.
Had Harold survived, even the loss at Hastings might have been, you know, might not have been fatal.
Quick question, is this not the moment where Edward and Morcar could step up and claim their place in history?
And actually they don't.
and this was their opportunity.
Maybe, but they don't.
I mean that's the salient thing.
And presumably they don't because they feel they haven't got the backing.
Does this mean then that William has won?
Again, not necessarily.
Because as you said English is huge.
It has immense resources of manpower.
William's force relative to the manpower available to a native English King is small and smaller than it was when it landed because they've, you know lots of people have died in the great battle.
He still has no declared allies in England and of course winter is closing in.
So, he's still not in a secure position and effectively he has to seize command of the kingdom, which means being recognised by the Witann, by the magnates and the leading bishops and archbishops of the kingdom, before winter sets in, or he's in real trouble.
So, what does he do?
First of all he sits and waits for the Witann to offer him the crown and a week passes, two weeks pass, and still there is nothing from the Witan.
So he decides, hang this.
I'm not putting up with this.
So he raises camp and he heads eastwards for Dover, and on the way he makes sure to proclaim to the English what the fruits of opposing him will be.
So they go past the coastal town of Romney where some of the Norman ships had landed by mistake and the locals had slaughtered them.
And William now exacts a terrible vengeance on them by putting the town to the torch. He then advances on Dover, which surrenders at the very site of his army and so clearly despite all the casualties that the Normans had suffered at Hastings, they're still a very, very intimidating site.
And William stays there maybe for a week, one source says for three weeks, improving its fortifications, getting reinforcements.
Dover, of course, is, you know, I mean it's the shortest crossing.
So a very useful stronghold for an invader of England to control.
And then having secured Dover, he then goes on to secure two crucial prizes.
So the first of these is Canterbury, which submits to him in person.
So William is marching from Dover to Canterbury towards London.
And Canterbury of course is the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
So the great focus of English sacrality.
And he also gets Winchester, which falls to a flying column of men that he sent.
And Winchester, you know, it's the capital of Alfred the Great.
It's been slightly displaced as the capital by London but it's still a very very significant place for the West Saxons.
And so to control that, that's a very good sign.
And it's all the more significant because it is now, as both Canterbury and Winchester submit to him, that news reaches William that Edgar Aetheling has been elected king by the Witan.
So that's a moment that's often elided in their stories of the Norman Conquest that's barely mentioned in a lot of accounts, which is that suddenly we do have an alternative king and yes, you said he was a teenager.
That said, teenagers have often won thrones before and Edmund Ironside had been a teenager when he'd been fighting Cnut.
And William had been a teenager when stamping down resistance in Normandy.
So a lot of listeners to this would be like, well, who's this bloke?
I've never heard of this bloke.
I mean, don't try and pretend he's a big player in this story because because I've never heard of him.
And again, it's a dog that doesn't bark.
I mean, Edgar Atherling is in London, which is the great prize, which is the capital.
So and actually, when William marches on London from Canterbury and says surrender, London does not surrender.
So why does this story not go anywhere?
Why doesn't Edgar Atherling hold out, raise an army, and then the next 10 years be a great civil war between Edgar Atherling and William?
So he's one of those kind of ambivalent Kings.
I suppose he's kind of the Anglo -Saxon Lady Jane Grey, who never quite sure whether to include him in the list of English Kings or not.
I mean, I think the answer is is that clearly he lacks the charisma and the resources to meet William in the field, which is why when William marches on London, he stays immured within the walls.
William occupies Southwark, so the southern stretches of the Thames, south of London Bridge, Bridge, does not try and force London Bridge and enter London, but he makes sure to put Southwark to the torch so that everyone in London who are around Edgar can witness the fact that this new king is powerless to resist William's advance.
And he then carries on heading westwards into the heartlands of Wesssex and he adopts this policy that we've already quoted but I'll quote it again William of Poitiers describing the Norman way of war striking fear by laying waste the crops fields and domains capturing all the towns that lay in his path putting garrisons in them in short to assault given region relentlessly and engulf it in a great multitude of troubles and this is now the fate that is visited on Wessex which is the heartland of England of course it's the kingdom that had been ruled by Alfred and by uh Athelstan and it was the great stronghold
of the godwins. Harold had been earl of Wessex, and so William is making, you know, he is rubbing the noses of the English in the fact that the heartbeat of the English kingdom is now his to do with as he pleases.
And so he ravages the whole way westwards as far as Wallingford in Oxfordshire and as the name of Wallingford suggests it's a ford, a fortified ford across the Thames.
Alfred had built walls around it was one of his kind of fortified burs, but the local faines surrender to William.
Just one glimpse of William at the head of his army and he's, hey, please come in.
You know, I'm not hanging around here.
And so, William occupies Wallingford, and it is there that he receives a key submission and this is Stigand, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Toby And that must be a big moment because Stigand brings the authority and the legitimacy of the English Church. Well bear in mind that Stiggend is a very controversial figure.
The fact that he is simultaneously the Bishop of Winchester has been used as one of the reasons for why William should be given a papal banner.
So the fact that Stiggend, who knows that he is in the crosshairs of William, that he chooses to surrender is I think doubly significant.
As you say he represents the English Church but also he's a figure who has every reason to try and continue the fight, and he hasn't.
He's basically kind of given in yeah, Edgar though Still no sign of him.
And so William continues with his ravaging and from Wallingford he now turns back eastwards towards London kind of closing in on the city from the north and The news of what is happening, of course, you know reaches London.
Everyone is thrown into a state of absolute terror You've got refugees fleeing the advance of the Norman Knights They're bringing tales of all the horrors that are being inflicted by the invaders people They all beg Edwin and Morka to march and defend them.
They refuse and clearly the whole situation is hopeless.
And Edgar essentially realises he has no prospect of holding out.
And so he, Eildred, the Archbishop of York, Edwin, Morka, they all congregate and they go in procession to Burcombestead in Hertfordshire, where William's army has camped.
There isn't a bur there and so they're busy building a moat, great mound of earth on which they will build a bailey, a fort.
You can still see it to this day.
And in fact, Geoff, my fishing coach, lives there and he's very proud of the modern bailey there.
So good to get Geoff in.
Anyway, so Edgar Atherling and all the chief men of London, Edwin and Morcar, the Archbishop of York, they all come to William at Berkhamsted and the Anglo -Saxon Chronicle describes their submission in tones of naked contempt.
they submitted out of necessity after most damage had been done so that's all the the ravaging that William has inflicted and it was a great piece of folly that they had not done it earlier since God would not make things better because of our sins and they gave hostages and swore oaths to him and he promised them that he would be a gracious liege Lord and yet in the meantime they ravaged all that they overran they being the Normans maybe the Normans so just a quick question before we move on to the submission of Clearly, Edwin and Morkar, they'd lost that battle to Harold Hardrada, listeners
may remember. Edgar Atherling is clearly just a bit of a waste of space.
He just hasn't got the killer instincts.
Had one of those three men be what Logan Roy would call a serious person, i .e., they would see the opportunity and they would say, right, I'm the man, rally the people of England, we're going to fight this guy and really we're going to drive him from our shores and let's do this.
Edmund Ironside, let's say.
Is it plausible that Norman Conquest might, you know, William could have lost a second battle.
I think they would have had to be a very serious man because William, he is a very, very serious man.
I mean he is completely ruthless.
He is completely convinced of his own justice and he feels that he has a licence from God to do whatever it takes to force the English to submit.
And when you're up against someone as able as that and with as formidable a war machine behind him.
I mean as I say you've really really got to to be a serious person and I think it's clear that Edwin and Morcar both probably look in the mirror and think I don't really think I've got what it takes.
So here's the thing, Edward Augustus Freeman was quite right.
Individuals do matter in history and this is an example where the lack of such an individual really matters for England.
Anyway, I took you off the narrative.
No, because I think you home in, from the English point of view, the great tragedy of the situation.
They could have fought if someone had been there to command the resources that England still undoubtedly has.
Because William has a strategy, a campaigning plan that is tried and tested, and the English don't know what's hit them, they have never come up across armored horsemen with the capacity to build castles.
This, of course, was what Harold had been so worried about.
It's what had led him to make the ultimately disastrous decision to go and fight the Normans in front of Hastings.
But Harold had understood what the English were facing.
I don't think anyone else had.
And so I think the impact of, you know, reports coming into London of towns and farms on fire.
I mean it's the kind of War of the Worlds situation.
Terrifying invaders.
Burning all around.
These are more formidable, more terrifying even than Harold Hardrada's army.
So you can see why they would submit.
And of course with the submission of London and of Edgar Aetheling, we come to the climax of 1066, of this most fateful of years.
William has achieved what he set out to achieve, he has secured the heart of the kingdom before winter sets in very badly.
And by the time it is Christmas so Christmas was the day that Charlemagne of course had been crowned, William is ready to be crowned himself.
So he enters London a few days before Christmas, there is a massive military presence.
No one in London can have any doubt that they are living in a city under occupation.
And immediately and inevitably William orders the construction of a castle on the south -east corner of the city walls by the Thames.
And this castle is the castle that today we know is the Tower of London.
But of course it's not only London itself behind its Roman walls that has fallen into his hands so too has the great palace complex built by Edward the Confessor to the west of London and it's not just a palace it's a minster or an abbey so Westminster and it is in Westminster abbey on Christmas day that William is crowned almost a year since Harold had presumably being crowned there and everything seems utterly changed so outside the abbey as William is being crowned you have ranks of mailed French -speaking foreigners standing guard over the coronation of a King of England.
Inside the Abbey you have another French innovation, the Archbishop of York and then a Norman Bishop both step forward and ask the congregation if they will accept William as King, Aildred the Archbishop of York in English of course but the French Bishop in French. And there is a great answering acclamation from the congregation in the Abbey And outside the abbey, this results, it is reported in chaos.
William of Poitiers claims that the guards who are standing outside the abbey interpret the acclamation as English treachery.
I mean it's equally possible, in fact, probable that they've already – they're just going on the rampage, that they've just begun attacking people.
And certainly whatever the reason for it, there is looting, and there is burning of houses around Westminster Abbey.
ANTHONY An incredibly ominous and dramatic scene.
ROGER Very ominous.
And members of the congregation hurry out to help fight the flames, and Odric Vitalis, who is this Anglo -Norman, identifies as English, writing in Normandy, he says of this, that only the bishops and clergy, along with the monks, stayed terrified in front of the altar, but the service still goes ahead and William is anointed, crowned, and then he sits on his throne, even though the pews pretty much empty and there are screams and the crackling of flames coming from outside the abbey doors.
But he could sit there and think, well, you know, my gamble, the odds were so immense but his gamble has succeeded.
He's no longer a duke, he is now an anointed king.
And when his followers salute him as they do now that he's being crowned.
They do so in terms that place him on a level, basically with only two other rulers in Latin Christendom, and that is the Emperor and the King of France.
So this man has gone from being a duke, to being an anointed king whose followers hail him in these terms to the most serene William the great and peace -giving King crowned by God, life and victory.
So for William to be hailed in this way I mean it is the ultimate fruit of conquest and yet the weird thing is so we talked about whether Hastings finishes Anglo -Saxon England off for good the weird thing is that William's Coronation in Westminster Abbey is actually a symbol of continuity as well as of rupture.
Explain that. Well, let's see what William is thinking.
So Audric Vitalis tells us that as he's being consecrated, so as he's being anointed, he trembled violently and people have often wondered what, you know, why and lots of people have suggested that perhaps he was reflecting on everything he'd done to, to seize the throne, you know.
He knows he's going to hell.
and maybe the flickering of flames outside the doors of the Abbey only enhance that.
But I think it's unlikely, I don't think William is the kind of person to have doubts at the climatic moment of his triumph because I think it's much more likely that he is feeling awe before the God -given scale of his responsibilities, that God has entrusted into his hands against all the odds.
So he is a conqueror.
He will come to be known as The Conqueror.
But he's not being crowned as a conqueror.
I think that the sense in which, in William's own opinion, he is being crowned as the heir of Edward the Confessor tends to be obscured.
Because everything about that coronation is proclaiming that he is being crowned not by virtue of the victories he's won with his sword, but by right.
That he is the legitimate heir, not just to Edward the Confessor, but to the line of kings that stretches back to Alfred all the way to Curdick.
That he is truly the anointed king of England.
So it's being held in Westminster Abbey, built by Edward the Confessor.
The coronation ritual, although there are a few interpolations that come from French practice in the main, it's exactly the consecration rite that had been staged at Bath when Edgar had been crowned right back at the beginning of our story.
And he is consecrated as the ruler of the Anglo -Saxon Icky, the Anglo -Saxons.
And this is a formula that goes back to Alfred.
So he is being crowned as king of the Anglo -Saxons of England.
Just to be clear, they absolutely use the term Anglo -Saxons.
So if there's any very excitable American academics listening.
Listen to those words and reflect on your behaviour.
And I think you're right to fix on that.
I mean, it doesn't gel with our sense of what the Norman conquest is about, that William is being crowned as King of the Anglo -Saxons.
And that's because of course, 1066 is probably the profoundest rupture in English history.
It's a year of invasion, of bloodshed, absolutely.
Of conquest. But it is also a year which ends with this very public very ringing insistence that, you know, there is continuity as well as rupture.
And even though it's obvious that William's rule depends on mailed force, you know, that's what all those soldiers are doing outside the Abbey, it does also depend on him showing respect for the history and the traditions of his new kingdom, because it's that history, it's those traditions that give him his status as a consecrated king.
If he dumps on them, then that status means nothing.
For William himself, clearly a very difficult balance to strike, and I don't think that we can really finish an account of 1066, this remarkable year, without looking at how in the years that followed 1066 William did try to strike a balance between his role as conqueror and as anointed king.
Brilliant. Let's do that after the break, Tom.
So come back after the break to find out how William strikes the balance and ends up ruling his kingdom.
Listeners to The Restless History will know that we do love a good sequel on the show.
So, A Hundred Years War, sequel.
French Revolution, sequel.
Captain Cook and Nelson haven't had the sequel yet, but I promise they're on their way.
And I'll tell you what else is on its way.
Our second Sunday Times bestselling book, The Restless History returns.
It's out in paperback in May and in its pages what we do is to take you, the beloved reader, through an alphabetical miscellany of history's best and most bizarre moments from Cortez to Chaucer, from fashion to Freemasons, from Mitford's to monkeys.
And on top of that, there's a pub quiz and there's a whole host of puzzles to test your historical mettle.
So, if you enjoy a sequel as much as we do, why not send your future self a little treat and pre -order your paperback.
Off the rest is history returns now.
After pentecost, the king travelled about so as to come to Salisbury at Lammas.
And there his councillors came to him and all the people occupying land who were of any account over all England, whosoever's vassals they might be.
And they all submitted to him, and swore oaths of allegiance to him, that they would be faithful to him against all other men." That was the Anglo -Saxon Chronicle, which was still going after the Norman Conquest and is describing an event on the 1st of August 1086, so we have moved on, we've jumped forward in time, two decades since that tragic year when William of Normandy became king of the English people.
So 20 years on, this is a good point for us to stop the narrative and to say what's happened in the intervening period, how deep and how profound has the rupture in English history really been?
So Tom why that scene in particular?
Well partly it's set in Salisbury, so always good to get Wiltshire and the Salisbury area into the podcast. But also, because this is a key moment in understanding what has happened to England and how William's regime is functioning.
And I think we can begin by trying to work out what has changed by imagining that we are riding with the great crowds of landowners who have been summoned to Salisbury and are flocking from all corners of the kingdom.
And if we imagine ourselves riding with them, we could look around and see who, you know, what do these landowners look like.
Well, they don't have moustaches, they don't have long hair.
Lots of them are wearing their hair in a fashion that derives ultimately from hipsters in Aquitaine in the south of France.
So they have a kind of floppy fringe and the back of the head shaved, and this marks them out as Normans, not as English.
And why is it that there are no English?
Why is it that all the landowners are Norman?
And we get an answer from Henry of Huntingdon, this Anglo -Norman historian, so a lite William of Marsby writing in the early 12th century, about 50 years later.
He spells out in a single sentence what has happened over the course of William's reign since his coronation in 1066.
There was scarcely a noble of English descent in England, Henry writes, But all had been reduced to servitude and lamentation, and it was even disgraceful to be called English.
But is he exaggerating?
Is that really true?
Okay well, let's say let's look at the facts and the figures.
So, the great dynasties who had dominated England in 1066 before Hastings, they have gone.
So the Godwins, Harold, Tostig, Blair -Fwine, Girth, they all died in 1066.
Harold's mother, Githir, who had tried to get their bodies and probably been refused by William, she had fled into exile in 1067 after encouraging an abortive uprising in Exeter.
Varius of Harald's sons, who had fled to Ireland and there tried to raise armies to reconquer England, they've either been killed or taken prisoner and are languishing in William's jails.
Really the only prominent member of Godwin's family who has survived is Edith, so Edward the Confessor's wife, and she survives because she is Edward the Confessor's wife.
So that gives her a status.
Williams claims his descent from Edward, and so that enables Edith to kind of continue to enjoy a sort of spectral authority in Winchester as Edward the Confessor's widow, and she had lived Winchester and had died in 1075.
So 11 years before this great ceremony in Salisbury.
What about the great Mercianel?
So Edwin and Morcar, we've been talking a lot about them.
Well, they had missed their chance.
I think it's fair to say to stop William.
They could have done it in 1066, perhaps, but they definitely can't by the time that William has established his regime more securely.
And 1071 they try and raise a rebellion and it all goes horribly wrong.
And Edwin is forced to flee to Scotland, but en route he is murdered by a member of his own retinue, and Morcah is captured and again is imprisoned and is languishing in prison in 1086.
They were not serious people.
No, they were not. And also, a man not as serious as his father, is this guy called Walthioff, who was the son of Earl Seward. So Seward was the Scandinavian Earl who had helped overthrow Macbeth, he appears in Shakespeare's Clay, had died, and had left a son who hadn't succeeded him, because of course Tostig has.
But William had looked after Walthioff, had kind of talent spotted him, had thought that, you know, he could employ him as the Earl of Northumbria.
So in 1072 had appointed him in that role.
But three years later, he's implicated in a plot against William, perhaps a little bit unfairly.
It seems that he confessed that he had been approached, he hadn't actually participated eliminated in it, but William is having none of it.
Um, so Walthjóf had been arrested, tried, convicted and beheaded.
So all the great earls have been eliminated in one way or the other.
And in fact, of the 1000 richest landowners in England, so these are all the people who are coming towards Salisbury in 1086, only 13 are English.
So the Thanes, You know this this body of the the kind of the elites have effectively been destroyed as a social order and There is barely a corner of England where Norman lords have not replaced the native landowners And there are some amazing figures to illustrate this so two hundred Normans Hold half the land in England and ten Normans hold a quarter of it so ten Normans hold a quarter of England I mean this looks like it that looks like a colonial takeover there's no other way of putting it.
I mean we would describe this as the epitome of colonialism.
Yeah. And a foreign elite have moved in, displaced the original people who owned the land and taken it all for themselves, right?
And so where have the English landowners gone?
Well, lots of them have fled to Constantinople where they have enrolled in the Varangians, as Harold Hardrada had done.
So that stuff about the Varangians, English Varangians in Constantinople, that's one of the big themes of The Last English King, the brilliant novel about this, Julian Rathbone, which is full of anachronisms and stuff, but is absolutely brilliant on the sense of this seismic shock, isn't he?
Yeah, so the Normans in that are kind of Nazis, he's casting it as the equivalent of the Nazi occupation of Poland.
And I mean, the stories of the English lords who flee to Constantinople, I mean, are really very dramatic in themselves.
The Byzantines often find themselves fighting the Normans and the poor old English keep losing this one terrible battle where they get trapped in a barn and get burnt to death.
And some of them, some of them end up in Crimea, where they found a city called New York.
So it's the first New York to be founded.
Yeah, I love that fact.
That's a very good fact.
So it is effectively a complete decapitation of the native aristocracy.
And was this always William's plan?
So was it always his intention to replace the English aristocracy with his own men or was he aiming to do as Canute had done and try and arrive at accommodation with the native aristocracy.
What makes this different from because that's 1016 right?
I think that the evidence makes it pretty clear that William was not what he… he did not want to eliminate the English aristocracy, I mean he want… clearly he had to reward his followers with lands and the death of the Godwinsons gave him perfect opportunity to do that but he was hoping that the English aristocracy would collaborate with him but instead they just keep rising in insurrection after insurrection.
And so year after year there are these bushfires of rebellion across England and year after year, brutal man that he is, um, William stamps them out.
And it's not just the native aristocracy who suffer terribly from this process.
So lots of the, uh, of the peasantry in England suffer as well.
And the most notorious example of this, um, is a series of campaigns that were waged in Northumbria, southern Northumbria in the winter of 1069 to 70.
Which is remembered as the harrying of the north.
Very, very notorious kind of mass destruction, mass looting, the deliberate targeting of food supplies so that over the course of the winter, maybe 150 ,000 people may have died of starvation, 80 ,000 oxen, these are the kind of the likely figures.
and even William's admirers were shocked so to quote Aldrich Vitales famous famous passage he wrote My narrative has frequently had occasion to praise William, but for this act which condemned the innocent and guilty alike to die by slow starvation I cannot commend him.
For when I think of helpless children young men in the prime of life and hoary greybeards perishing alike of hunger I am so moved to pity that I would rather lament the grief and sufferings of the wretched people than make a vain attempt to flatter the perpetrator of such infamy." So that's punchy stuff.
It is punchy and it's not my normal thing to sort of defend, William.
But I'm reminded of the thing we talked about with Harold Hardrada in Norway.
You remember when he was chastising the farmers of the uplands who had not paid their taxes?
And maybe you could argue this is simply what a ruthless 11th century king does when he's, you know, it's part of the assertion of royal authority, you know, when you've got the emergence of stronger and stronger kingdoms, and you've got kings who are serious people as Harold Hardrada and William the Conqueror clearly were, and you know you step out of line and they will, I mean, they will kill you.
Paul The other thing, and this again is a contrast with Harold Hardrada, or indeed with Canute, is that the harrying of entire populations, which Harold Hardrada absolutely had done, is not the only thing that William can do to secure his rule over England, because of course William comes as the representative of this new military culture that is hugely investing in the construction of castles.
So again let's go back to imagining that we're traveling with the Norman landowners to this great assembly convened by William in Salisbury on 1st of August 1086.
And what would we see ahead of us?
So we are not those who know Salisbury.
Now the town is down by the Water Meadows where the great cathedral with its tall spire stands.
There's nothing there at this point.
Salisbury is a great Iron Age hillfort at the place that is now known as Old Seram and it had been re -fortified by Ethelred and he'd set a mint up there, so it was a fortified point for the Anglo -Saxon kings, but William has inevitably made it even more impregnable.
He's built a massive mott and bailey right in the centre of Old Sarum and it is ruled directly by the king.
So we've mentioned the Norman landowners, but by far the largest landowner is William himself.
So huge, huge direct control over vast rays of estates and fortifications.
And Salisbury is one of them.
Windsor is another.
the Tower of London, another still royal fortresses to this day.
But William of course is not the only castle builder.
Pretty much every Norman landowner is building them.
And of course they're doing this because they're a tiny minority surrounded by exceedingly hostile natives, and the fact that they are able to protect themselves in these fortifications.
I mean that sets them apart from say the Viking warlords who had done this before, and who very rapidly had kind of merged into the of the English who surround them.
This is not the case with these Norman landowners.
They are very obviously physically separate from the people they're ruling because they're surrounded by, you know, these ramparts.
And this is recognised by the English themselves straight away.
So, the entry for 1066 in the Anglo -Saxon Chronicle it recorded how Norman warlords built castles far and wide throughout this country and distressed the wretched folk and always after that it grew much worse may the end be good when god wills but here's the thing so visitors to a major english town and what was what would have been a major medieval town if they go today there are actually two structures that will often dominate the town so one will be the castle or the ruins of the castle but the other is often obviously the cathedral or or a big church and that's the side of this, isn't it?
So it's partly military power but there's also, as you've described so often, a kind of spiritual power.
So there's a religious dimension to this conquest as well.
There is and so again if you're coming up to Old Sarum, you're coming up to Salisbury, you'd see the castle but you would also see a half completed cathedral which is massive.
Workmen have been toiling away for pretty much a decade.
And as you say it's part of a huge program of church building in England that is, I mean, completely unprecedented in the scale of its ambition.
And most of the medieval cathedrals that still dominate English cathedral towns to this day were almost all of them either founded or actually constructed in the main in the immediate wake of the conquest, or you know, a generation or so after it.
And of the Anglo -Saxon minsters, I mean, barely a brick of those was left standing.
And the Norman cathedrals that were built on the site of the Anglo -Saxon cathedrals, I mean, they don't just obliterate the memory of the Anglo -Saxon church, but they establish an imprint on the country that was designed to last. And in fact, the cathedral that's being built on Old Serem, I mean, it's one of the very few examples of a cathedral over the course of the Middle Ages that gets replaced in its entirety, because ultimately people decide that Old Sarum is too inconvenient.
And so they move down to the lowlands below Old Sarum, which is where Salisbury Cathedral, as it stands today, is then kind of rebuilt.
So this program of church building is the kind of the physical expression, as you said, of a kind of great revolution in the affairs of the English Church more broadly.
And so just as the aristocracy, the English aristocracy, has been eliminated, so, too, have English bishops had been removed from the commanding heights of the church, and in fact by 1086 you have only a single English bishop still in office, and the justification for this is the sense that the English church had been very very sick and corrupt.
So the fact that Stigon, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had surrendered to William doesn't stop him from being deposed in 1070.
And he gets replaced by this Italian monk who had been talent spotted by William and recruited to serve him in Normandy as the abbot of an abbey in Caen.
And this is a guy called Lanfranc, and if Stigand had been a byword for corruption, Lanfranc is the greatest theologian of his day.
I mean, an incredibly impressive figure.
And he is the embodiment of everything that is most radical, most innovative, most kind of spiritually impressive, to be honest, about this kind of process of reformation that is associated with Gregory VII, the extraordinary Pope, and this kind of reform movement, and which the English, now that they've been defeated, have no choice but to submit to.
And I think because they are demoralised, every time we quote an English chronicler commenting on their defeat, they all say, you know, this is because of our sins, this what God wants.
We are being punished for our sins, and so I think for that reason they are prepared to accept the fact that clearly their church was not pleasing to God and therefore perhaps the Aegean stable has to be cleansed.
So that is also part of the great revolution that the Normans have brought and that castle, that half -completed cathedral, they are absolutely the symbols of the rupture, that the conquest has precipitated.
And a further evidence for the scale of the rupture is there in the reason that these landowners have been summoned to Salisbury on Lammas, say the first harvest of the year, so the 1st of August 1086.
So we're told by the Anglo -Saxon Chronicle, why were they gathered there?
To submit to him and swear oaths of allegiance to him that they would be faithful to him against all other men.
So this is again a consolidation of William's power as king that is radical and revolutionary.
The Anglo -Saxon king, we talked about this, did not hold all of the land of England but effectively this is what William is instituting, because with this oath every landowner in England is now accepting publicly that that he holds his land directly from William.
Tom I fear that we're teetering on the brink of a discussion of the feudal system, which would be a terrifying prospect.
It would. So let's not use abstract nouns, I mean you'll find it unusual for me to say that.
Let's just look at what it means in practical terms for these landowners who are coming and swearing this oath.
So what it does is these landowners have gone through enormous turbulence.
You've had rebellions, you've had the native aristocracy rising up, being eliminated, being forced into exile, whatever.
And so the legal documents that might enable these new Norman landowners to feel secure in their possessions are not really there.
And so this is what William has been trying to rectify, and for seven months his agents have been going around England and recording who owns what land.
And these agents are recording two key details.
So they're recording who owned land when Edward the Confessor died on the 5th of January 1066 and who are the land owners now, and observant listeners will note that that completely eliminates Harold.
So Harold has been erased from the historical record, and these records after this great meeting at Salisbury will be copied out by a single scribe and come to be known in due course as Doomsday Book, and it's likely that that name is being applied to it very very early on.
And it is called Doomsday Book because the presumption is that what has been recorded is unalterable, like the judgments that will be delivered at the end of days, you know, the day of judgement.
And what the Doomsday Book stands for is the recognition that there's an entirely new order, right?
That there's been a massive transfer of property and power from one social group to another, from the English aristocracy to the Norman aristocracy.
And the point is that, like the cathedrals and the castles, this is going to last forever.
There's no turning back now.
That was 20 years ago.
And there's, like, it's set in it's set in stone literally in the, in the case of the castles and the cathedrals.
Absolutely. And everybody accepts that, do you think by this point.
So, I mean, there may be a few people who in their cups late at night, look back to the old days, but by and large, everyone accepts the world has changed.
changed. Yes, maybe, although one of the things that has precipitated William's desire to compile this great legal record is the fact that, for about a year, William's hold on England has actually seemed quite precarious.
And the reason for that is one that you touched on in your account of Harold Haldrada, where you said he is the last of the Vikings.
Well, actually, no, he's not, because there are still Scandinavian kings who aspire to conquer England, and this is very evident in the circumstances that give birth to the Doomsday Book.
So what prompted it is the prospect of an invasion by the Danish King Cnut.
So this is the Cnut, the nephew of the famous Cnut who'd been the great adversary of Harald Hardrada, and still very much on the scene, and is threatening to launch a full -born amphibious invasion of William's kingdom.
And so William, very like Aethelred, wants to know how much money he's got, and where he can obtain it from.
And he does this in the full consciousness that Scandinavian warlords are still on the scene.
So in 1069, Sweyn, the Danish king, had sailed up the Humber and William had paid the Danes off, just as Aethelred might have done.
And obviously William is not Aethelred.
But again and again, throughout his reign, he is doing as Æthelred had sought to do which is essentially to exploit to the full the incredible wealth and administrative know -how of his kingdom.
And so in that sense the Doomsday Book, as well as being the final nail in the coffin of Anglo -Saxon England, as you said, kind of a public proclamation that everything has changed, is also the kind of the last hurrah of that Anglo -Saxon state.
And the Anglo -Saxon Chronicle, writing about it, I mean, he expresses shock at how intrusive William's agents are.
Right, so very narrowly did he have everywhere investigated that there was no single hide nor yard of land, nor indeed it is a shame to relate, but it seemed no shame to him to do.
One ox, nor one cow, nor one pig was there left out and not put down in his record. But even as the Anglo -Saxon Chronicle is complaining about this.
What it is recording is a measure of governmental sophistication that is only possible in the Kingdom like England.
It couldn't, you know, Doomsday Book could not have been compiled anywhere else in Latin Christendom, which is why it's so exceptional.
And it marks William out, not just as someone who is a conqueror, but also as someone who is exploiting the resources of his kingdom far more ably than Athelred or, you know, whether the confessor had been able to do.
And so in a sense the strength of his monarchy is a reflection of the very kingdom that he's conquered.
And I think you could, I mean, you know, there are other examples as well where things that are notorious as markers of William's conquest of England, you can place it in a line of descent from what Anglo -Saxon kings were doing.
So the Harrying of the North, for instance.
I mean the most notorious episode of his reign as king, but he's behaving as Edgar had done.
You know, we began this series with Edgar.
Edgar the Peaceable.
Edgar the Peaceable, the Pacificus, and Edgar is called Pacificus, because he guaranteed order.
And William is called Pacificus, you know, those anthems that get sung to him after his coronation.
He's hailed as peace giving exactly as Edgar had been.
And William is peace giving because he also deals out death and destruction to those who rebel against him.
And that is very Anglo -Saxon.
And yet, maybe we could push that too far, because we do know, because it comes up in English chronicles and things, that the English, the native -born English, do have a profound sense of trauma that has passed down the generations because of this.
So, we could dress this up and say oh it's a lovely balancing act and you know they're working around the Saxon state but this is a genuinely kind of traumatic and it's a massive rupture for if you're living through this you feel it as a huge rupture don't you and William he i mean he he knows this as well as anybody.
I think it's pretty clear that William does suffer a slightly guilty conscience about it so we've already mentioned how he pays penance for the slaughter at Hastings by building a great Abbey on the site of the battle, with the altar supposedly marking the place where Harold had made his last stand, and according to Audrey Vitalis, on his deathbed, he confessed that he had persecuted the people of England beyond all reason.
But it is traumatic.
It's devastating, particularly if you're, you know, an Anglo -Saxon landowner.
I mean, completely traumatic.
But I think it is something to put in the counterbalance that the Norman Conquest does end up bringing an end to many of the tribulations and evils that we have been describing over the course of this entire series.
So William's reign does effectively see the end of Viking invasions, of disputed successions, of feuding among rival magnates within the of England.
There's no equivalent of the rivalry between the Ils of Mercia and the Ils of Wessex. Both those ranks have gone.
And more than that, I think it's a mistake to see the new regime that the conquest ushers in purely as characterized by brutality and greed.
So, Julian Rathbone in the Last English King compares the Normans to the Nazis in Poland.
I think that is grotesquely unfair on the Normans.
I mean they are fearsome adversaries, but they are also, and this may sound very strange to people, but they are, they are the embodiments of a change in attitude towards victory and conquest in war that will become hugely significant over the course of the centuries to come.
So we talked about the possibility that William may personally have been involved in the butchery of Harold at Hastings, but possibly covered it up and whether that's true or not is by the by.
That it can even be counted as a theory reflects the fact that the age when slaughtering your enemies and cutting them up into pieces – and this could be praised, that this is fading into history because the codes of what will become chivalry are already making their mark in France.
William does not actually slaughter large numbers of magnates.
The only one he has executed is Wolffioth, the son of the Earl of Northumbria who had been in rebellion against him.
Edgar Afflling, despite being implicated in countless insurrections, kind of lives to a ripe old age.
He's the kind of the Richard Cromwell of Anglo -Saxon England.
Even Stiggen, I mean he's in prison, but he's not executed.
And when Audreyk Vitalis condemns the Harrowing of the North he's judging it by William's own standards.
The standards that had prevailed in the Anglo -Saxon period, no longer prevail.
It's no longer seen as acceptable to go around harrying entire counties.
You don't think that the Anglo -Saxon Chronicle would have reported it in a similar vein if it had been done by Edward the Confessor or by Ethil Reddy or whoever?
That no, I mean, the Anglo -Saxon Chronicle reports a lot of harryings and ravageings.
I mean, just to quote a really fascinating an essay by Malcolm Strickland in a recent book of essays on the Norman conquest. And he observes how in Britain and Scandinavia in the 11th century, enemy warriors were generally killed without quarter in combat or executed on capture, while women and children were enslaved.
And any who might hinder the effective transport of this human booty such as the old sick or very young were put to the sword. By contrast in Normandy, as in France, the enslaving of captives in wars between fellow Franks or other Christians, had become regarded as unacceptable.
And in that light, it's interesting to note that one of the most vivid social changes that is revealed by Doomsday book is the decline of slavery.
We know that the English kings, the Anglo -Saxon kings, were absolutely in the habit of enslaving their enemies.
Bristol, long before it became a great center for the Atlantic slave trade, was a massive booming entrepot for slaves who'd be exported to the or wherever, and lots of these are harvested from England.
So Harold at Hastings is certainly not defending the freedom of the ten per cent of the population of England who lived as slaves, whereas William as king does take active steps to prohibit the slave trade.
So this is William in a sense is the first great abolitionist in English history.
This is a direction I did not expect this serious taking.
Woke William the Conqueror It highlights why this story is so brilliant.
I mean it is clearly a thrilling story.
We keep harping on that.
It's one that extraordinary tales of heroism and sodden through with bloodshed.
But it is I think a morally complex one, too.
Which is what makes it so fascinating.
Wonderful story, Tom.
And brilliantly narrated.
We've done 10 episodes in total on the last days of Anglo -Saxon England, on Cnut, on Harold Hardrada, on William of Normandy, Harold, and so on.
I've learned an enormous amount and enjoyed it hugely, so congratulations to you, hats off to you.
And actually this isn't the end of the Normans and the rest is history, right, because you have plans for future Norman episodes.
Well we might as well carry on the story so we could look at how William dies.
Famously horrible, horrible accident involving a swelling corpse in a coffin, so that's fun.
And his two sons William Rufus and Henry I are great figures.
And then England gets torn to pieces in another civil war by Henry I's daughter Mathilda and William's grandson Stephen.
So we've got that to look forward to.
There's this extraordinary story of how the Norman adventurers who we've occasionally been referring to in southern Italy and Sicily conquer a great kingdom there.
And also lurking behind all this, the notion of Holy War, the idea that warriors can do God's purpose by felling their enemies is the extraordinary story of the First Crusade and that also we must definitely do at some point.
But I think in the meanwhile we've had enough of Normans so we will say goodbye!
We will say goodbye.
Goodbye.
