In the town of Falaise, Robert, Duke of Normandy, was gazing down from his castle tower. The comely Herleva (also called Arlette), a tanner’s daughter, was washing clothes in the river and caught his eye…
Or so one legend accounts for the illegitimate birth in 1027 of William, who in 1066 would bring convulsive change to the kingdom of England.
In 1034 Duke Robert, who still had no legitimate heir, left on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He made his lords swear fealty to William (‘the Bastard’) and accept him as their future ruler – a wise move, as Robert never returned. Following a few turbulent years, by the age of 20 the young William had asserted control over his Normandy dukedom.
So why England?
Across the Channel, Edward (‘the Confessor’) had succeeded to the throne of England in 1041. By 1051 he and his wife Edith still lacked an heir. He invited his young cousin William to visit him and promised him the succession to the throne of England. Or so William clearly believed, though historical records from the time are unreliable, and historians disagree how or even whether this actually happened.
Edward’s wife Edith was a member of the powerful Godwin family. Her brother Harold had been to Normandy, probably in the spring of 1064 and possibly following a shipwreck. He visited William and indeed fought alongside him. Norman sources assert that he swore fealty to William, undertaking to support William’s claim to the English throne.
When Edward died on 5 January 1066, however, it is (fairly reliably) recorded that on his deathbed he committed his wife and his kingdom into Harold’s care. The royal council duly selected Harold as successor and he was crowned the following day. News of this reached a furious William, who began to plan an invasion to claim the throne he saw as his.
Hastings
William assembled, over six months, an invading force of around 700 ships. The Bayeux tapestry shows that they did not have oars, relying on sails. (A replica of his own ship is currently being constructed in Honfleur by the La Mora project, using the techniques William’s shipbuilders would have used.) After a long spell of unfavourable winds, the fleet left Normandy on 27 September.
The workshop (photo by Catherine Scrivner) and the figurehead (photo by Peter Moore). Photos used with permission.
Meanwhile Harold, who had been assembling his own army in readiness, had to rush over 220 miles north, gathering an army as he went, in order to repel a Norwegian invasion at the battle of Stamford Bridge on 25 September. Learning of William’s arrival, he then marched south again, fast, and gathering reinforcements. His army was exhausted by the time it met the Normans at Hastings on 14 October. In fierce fighting, Harold died, which signalled the defeat of the English (the arrow in the eye is not historically established).
No open arms for William
William’s hold on the kingdom was still far from secure. The English elites resisted him and his forces as they travelled east along the coast, then west up the Thames, ravaging as they went. He was finally able to cross the Thames unopposed at Wallingford and shortly after, a crowd of magnates, bishops and citizens came to him to surrender. At the end of the year, William entered London to be crowned.
Resistance and consolidation
William wanted to be seen as Edward’s successor, but he also needed to assert his authority, and this meant replacing English elites with Normans. Anyone who had fought with Harold at Hastings lost their lands, which were given to his Norman followers. Those who surrendered got away with a payment. None of this endeared him to his new subjects.
During 1067–68, resentment at the invasion simmered and boiled over into rebellion in the Welsh borders, Kent, the West Country, then in the Midlands, and in the North. The Norman invaders quashed rebellion violently. In order to shore up their dominance, William and his followers built new castles in key places on their new land holdings, especially where there was any resistance. In 1066, even before he was crowned, William ordered the construction of a wooden keep on the London site that would become his iconic White Tower in 1078.
In East Anglia, it seems likely that the construction of a castle in Norwich was initiated during a 1067 expedition to establish William’s authority in the region. The stone castle we have today was built by his sons, William II and Henry I, who used it as a royal palace, as magnificently displayed in the newly opened Royal Palace Reborn.
Other castles were built in the years after the invasion – several initially motte-and-bailey wooden fortresses – to consolidate the Norman rule. They include Clare (built by Richard Fitz Gilbert); Thetford (the ‘Red Castle’, built by Ralph Guader); Colchester (Gundulf, Bishop of Rochester); Hedingham (Aubrey de Vere); Bungay (William de Noyers); Eye; and Cambridge, Ipswich and Walton, none of which still exist.
Colchester Castle. Image by Peter Broster via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)
Cambridge Castle, 1575. Image by Hogwesrd via Wikimedia Commons (CC0)
The harrying of the North
The murder of William’s appointee Robert de Commines as Earl of Northumbria in 1069 sparked a rebellion, aided by Danes hoping to mount a successful invasion. The unrest spread across the North and then towards Wales and the West Country. William capitulated temporarily, permitting the invaders to settle along the coast for the winter, provided they left by the spring.
Once the deadline had passed, William comprehensively sabotaged any future invasion. According to the chronicler Orderic Vitalis, “he commanded that all crops and herds, chattels and food of every kind be brought together and burned … so that the whole region north of the Humber might be stripped of all sustenance.” Harrying was a common practice, but William was unusually ferocious. Orderic estimates that over 100,000 died in the subsequent famine.
During the invasion and the subsequent rebellions, many of the remaining Anglo-Saxon elites deposited their valuable goods and chattels and their titles to land for safe deposit in monasteries – which William had no compunction in plundering, claiming that the valuables were forfeit since their rightful owners were rebels.
East Anglia’s last stand
East Anglia was the site of the final resistance, in 1071, against the Norman interlopers, under the leadership of a local lord in the fens near Ely, Hereward ‘The Wake’. He and a small force of Danes who had not left the east coast in 1070 together ‘rescued’ stored Anglo-Saxon valuables and church treasures from the abbey in Peterborough, as a token of resistance to the imminent arrival of a new Norman abbot. Some of the treasure the Danes took home, some was lost at sea, and some ended up, surrounded by the fens, on the Isle of Ely with Hereward, who was hailed as a hero for protecting it from the grasping hands of the Norman invaders.
William’s Norman lords from across East Anglia reacted to this last pocket of rebellion. They blockaded the Isle of Ely, while Hereward and his band of local rebels, who knew the dangerous fens, mounted guerilla-like resistance, becoming an increasingly strong force that was legendary across the region. A strong causeway built across the fens finally enabled William’s forces to reach Ely and defeat the rebels. Fierce retribution was served on the leaders – except Hereward, who escaped into legend.
Domesday
At Christmas 1085, William ordered the Domesday Survey to report on every person, land holding, and livestock animal in the country. Land distribution following the Conquest had led to much confusion in land tenure, so the survey would help provide clarity. The survey documents who laid claim to a particular holding under “King Edward”, and – as was pointed out by the author Levi Roach in a recent episode of the Gone Medieval podcast – then records who held it under “King William”.
Harold’s claim to the throne is blotted out of history: the few times he is mentioned he is “Earl Harold”.
On 1 August 1086 at a huge gathering at his court in Old Sarum, William ‘launched’ the results and received oaths of allegiance from all the landowners whose tenure was now clearly recorded. By the same token, William’s position as king was secured. Crucially, he gained useful information that would enable him to levy taxes from his subjects.
The Domesday Book is remarkable window into the life of those early years of the Norman Conquest. You can search it here to see who was living in your town or village in the 1080s.
To his contemporaries William was not so unusual, but he seems to us now to have been violent and cruel in his claiming of England. The legendary status in English history of his unique Domesday Survey has probably partially redeemed his image.
The international Year of the Normans in 2027, marking the millennium of his birth, may bring him into clearer focus.
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