CHAPTER III
THE NORMAN KINGS, 1066–1154
The power of the kings in Norman England.S0 at last there was going to be a real government in this country, and it was going to do its duty. Few kings in the Middle Ages had any high idea of their ‘duty towards their people’ such as a great Roman Emperor had, or such as King George V has. They chiefly thought of their country as a property, or ‘estate’, which they were going to cultivate mainly for their own benefit. But the better a king's ‘estate’ was cultivated, the better off were the people on it; and, when I say the ‘people’, I mean every one except a few, perhaps a couple of hundred of the barons’ or greatest landowners. A King could only grow very rich and powerful when his country was at peace at home and well armed against foreign foes; his people could only grow rich under the same conditions.
Their struggles with the barons, 1066–1175.Not so the great barons. Each of them could most easily increase his riches at the expense of some other great baron or of the King; and the people who lived near him would be the first to suffer if he were allowed to do so. William had been obliged to allow his barons and earls to judge and govern their tenants in accordance with those ‘feudal’ customs which had come to be universal in Western Europe since Roman law had been lost and strong government with it. The great Kings who succeeded him slowly, painfully, out of scanty material, had to recreate a strong government, and, so, to give peace and order.
Now of the first four, whom alone we call ‘Norman’ kings, three were wise and strong,—William I, William II, and Henry I,—and the fourth, Stephen, was foolish and weak. So, while the first sixty-nine years after the conquest were a time of increasing peace and prosperity, the next nineteen were the most dreadful period in our history.
Remember that the Norman barons were only five or six generations removed from the fierce Danish pirates who followed Rollo to France. There, as there were no strong kings to restrain them, they had been accustomed to build castles and to make their tenants fight for them in their private quarrels. When they got to England, and grew richer in lands and tenants than they had been in Normandy, they expected to play their familiar game with even greater success. Their kings, however, from the first, determined they should not do so.
The people will help the King against the barons.William found, in the slow, undisciplined old Saxon life, several things which served him to keep his barons in order. The Sheriffs.For instance, there was an officer in every county called a sheriff; he collected the King’s rents and taxes; he presided over the rude court of justice which was held in every county; he was supposed to lead to battle the free landowners of that county. William made his sherifts much more powerful, and made them responsible for the peace of their counties. Castles.In England, too, there had been few castles, and these only stockades of wood on the top of earthen mounds; whereas in France every baron had a castle. On the Welsh and Scottish borders William was obliged to allow, and even to encourage his followers to build castles, but elsewhere he forbade it. But he built a great many royal castles and filled them with faithful paid soldiers. Again, in Normandy there had been barons as rich in lands and money as the Duke himself; but Willam kept enormous tracts of English land in his own hands, and so made the Crown ten times richer than any baron. Taxes.In Normandy the Duke had no real system of taxes; in England the King could and did levy a regular tax of so many shillings on each estate. Ethelred had begun this in order to get money to bribe the Danes; the later kings had continued it.
Domesday Book, 1085.Many estates were, however, free from this tax, and no doubt it was always difficult to collect. So, in 1085, William sent officers to every village and county in England to find out who must pay the tax and how much each must pay. These officers called together a sort of ‘Jury’ of the villagers, who declared the value of the estate. The results were collected and written down in ‘Domesday Book’, which you may see in the Record Office. An extract from it will run somewhat like this:—‘County of Cambridge: In Blackacre are ten hides [the hide is an old measure of land, say 120 acres]. Thurstan holds it. In King Edwards time Wulfstan held it. It was worth £2 6s. 8d. Now it is worth £4 13s. 4d. It never paid tax. There is land for eight ploughs. There are two freeholders and ten serfs. The priest holds half a hide. There is a mill, value 10s. There is wood for 100 pigs, and pasture for 20 cows.’
Old English money.Are you astonished at the small value of land? You must remember that you could then buy with £1 what might now cost you £40. For there was little silver and less gold in Europe before the discovery of America. Few gold coins were made in England before the reign of Edward III.
The population of England in 1085.From Domesday Book we can make a rough guess at the population of England in the eleventh century, say about 2,000,000, whereas now it is over 40,000,000. The book does not mention the number of people in the towns, but in many towns it does mention the number of houses. Probably no town, except London, had then as many as ten thousand people. Of many places the book says that they were ‘waste’, that is, had been burned, either by accidental fires (which must constantly have been occurring when all buildings were of wood) or by Danes or Normans in the process of conquest. Customs and laws.It also tells something of the ‘customs’ which prevailed in different counties and towns. We are getting near an age when we shall be able to call such customs ‘Laws’. The Norman Kings tried to use old English customs and to improve them. But theft and murder were still reckoned more as offences against the family of the person wronged than as crimes against the State. You could still atone for such offences by a fine. It was not till late in the twelfth century that you would infallibly be hanged if you were caught; and the certainty of punishment is what really prevents crime.
Free landowners and unfree tenants.Now, you can see that the result of an inquiry like Domesday was that the kings knew a great deal about their country and about their people. They would know, for instance, what great baron or earl was really dangerous; on what part of England what taxes could be levied, and so on. No doubt the new Norman landowners were often hard to their Saxon tenants. But it would not pay them to be too hard. They wanted rents and labour, and a starving man cannot pay rent or work in the fields. Life in the in the country.The land was the only source of riches, and therefore every gentleman had to be first and foremost a farmer, and his tenants under him had to be farmers or farm labourers too. Domesday mentions, under strange names, a great number of different classes of farming tenants; but, within the next century, we find that all these are melted away into two, the free and the un-free, the freeholders and the ‘villeins’ or ‘serfs’. The former are men whose land averages perhaps forty acres. They pay some small rent in money or in produce to the squire or ‘lord of the manor’, they follow the sheriff to battle when he bids them. The villein perhaps farms nearly as much land as the freeholder. But he is not free; he is bound to pay a rent in labour, say two or even three days a week on the squire’s land, many extra days at harvest time, and perhaps to pay so many eggs or pigs or hens every year; nor may he sell his land or go away without his squire’s leave. In fact he is very much at the mercy of the squire until the latter half of the twelfth century, when the King’s Law begins to protect him against the squire, to hang him if he commits crimes, and to enroll him as a soldier. But it will not pay the squire to oppress him too much if he is to get good work out of him. These clever Normans, all but a few of the greatest barons, soon made common cause with their tenants, soon became English at heart. Over them, too, the good land threw its dear familiar spell, and made them love it beyond all things.
Norman and Saxon.
Views of a Norman baron about his property in 1100.‘My son,’ said the Norman Baron, ‘I am dying, and you will be heir
To all the broad acres in England that William gave me for my share
When we conquered the Saxon at Hastings, and a nice little handful it is.
But before you go over to rule it I want you to understand this:—
‘The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite,
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right;
When he stands like an ox in the furrow with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, “This isn’t fair dealing,” my son, leave the Saxon alone.
‘You can horsewhip your Gascony archers, or torture your Picardy spears,
But don’t try that game on the Saxon; you’ll have the whole brood round your ears.
From the richest old Thane in the county to the poorest chained serf in the fields,
They'll be at you and on you like hornets, and, if you are wise, you will yield!
‘But first you must master their language, their dialect, proverbs and songs,
Don't trust any clerk to interpret when they come with the tale of their wrongs.
Let them know that you know what theyre saying; let them feel that you know what to say;
Yes, even when you want to go hunting, hear them out if it takes you all day.
‘They'll drink every hour of the daylight and poach every hour of the dark,
It’s the sport not the rabbits they’re after (we’ve plenty of game in the park).
Don't hang them or cut off their fingers. That's wasteful as well as unkind,
For a hard-bitten, South-country poacher makes the best man-at-arms you can find.
‘Appear with your wife and the children at their weddings and funerals and feasts;
Be polite but not friendly to Bishops; be good to all poor parish priests;
Say “we”, “us” and “ours” when you’re talking instead of “you fellows” and “I”.
Don't ride over seeds; keep your temper; and never you tell ’em a lie!”
Life in the towns.The towns were no doubt horrid places. The fortification of one or more ‘boroughs’ in each county had been begun by the son and grandsons of King Alfred in their wars against the Danes. Besides a wooden castle on a mound of earth, there would probably be some sort of wooden paling round the towns; and in the twelfth century palings would be replaced by stone walls. London, York, Chester probably kept their old Roman walls of stone and occasionally repaired them. As for cleanliness and what we now call ‘sanitation’, there was none. All refuse was thrown into the streets, which only rain-storms washed, and where pigs, dogs and kites scavenged freely. Each trade or craft had its own street, and a walk down ‘Butchers Row’ would probably be unpleasing to modern noses. But there was strong patriotism in the towns, and great rivalry between them. A townsman from Abingdon was a suspected ‘foreigner’ to the citizens of Oxford. In Sussex to-day the old folk in some villages speak of a hop-picker from another village as a ‘foreigner’.
The food of the people.Both in town and country the food, even of the poorest, was fairly plentiful. Salt meat, mainly pork, and in Lent salt fish, was the rule, and was washed down by huge floods of strong beer. There were no workhouses and no provision for the poor except charity, but charity (called ‘almsgiving’) was universal, and beggars swarmed everywhere. If no one else would feed them, the monks always would, and I fear they made little difference between those who were really in need and those who preferred begging to working. Washing was almost unknown. Even in the King’s household, while there were hundreds of servants in the cooking departments, there were only four persons in the laundry. Horrible diseases like leprosy were common, and occasionally pestilence swept away whole villages and streets of people.
The Norman Church.Life then was undoubtedly shorter, and its conditions harder, than to-day; but I think it was often merrier. Holidays were much more frequent; for the all-powerful Church forbade work on the very numerous saints’ days. Religion influenced every act of life from the cradle to the grave. All the village feasts and fairs centred round the village church and were blessed by some saint. The Norman bishops at once woke up the sleepy Saxon priests and abbots, taught them to use better music, more splendid and more frequent services, cleaner ways of life. Stone churches replaced the wooden ones, and those mighty Norman cathedrals, so much of which remains to-day, began to grow up. The zeal for monkery continued right into the thirteenth century, although a pious Norman gentleman seldom went into a monastery himself till his fighting days were over. In the Church a career was open to the poorest village lad who was clever and industrious, he might rise to be abbot, bishop, councillor of kings, or even Pope. All schools were in the hands of churchmen, and Latin was the universal language of the Church throughout Western Europe.
In King William's ‘Great Council’, which took the place The King’s Great Council.of the Saxon ‘Wise men’, and which became the direct father of our House of Lords, there would sit perhaps 150 great lay barons, nineteen bishops, and some thirty abbots; but the churchmen would be the most learned, the most cunning and the most regular attendants. Though this Great Council met only for a few days in each year, the King would need secretaries and lawyers and officials of one kind or another to be continually about his person; and most of these would be churchmen, whom he would reward with bishoprics and abbeys and livings. So far as there was what we now call a ‘Ministry’ or a ‘Privy Council’, it consisted mainly of churchmen.
Quarrels of the King with the Church.So powerful indeed was the Church that quarrels between it and the strong kings were of frequent occurrence during the next century or two. The churchmen were too apt to look to the Pope as their real head instead of the King. The popes always tried to keep the Church independent of the King. They wanted the clergy to pay no taxes for their lands, to have separate courts of justice, to be governed by other laws than those of the laymen, and yet to be wholly defended by the kings and laymen. Now no good king approved of these demands, which were indeed monstrous if you consider that the clergy owned between one-quarter and one-third of the land of England, and were getting more and more, from gifts by pious laymen, every day. William I had to allow the Church to have separate courts of justice, but he had no actual quarrel with the Pope, mainly because his archbishop, Lanfranc, was a very wise man. William I and Henry I each had sharp quarrels with Archbishop Anselm, while as for poor Stephen, he was at the mercy of the great bishops.
Task of the Norman kings.I don’t think you want to know at what date this or that baron rebelled against Willlam or Henry, or at what date William or Henry sent an army against the King of France or the Welsh; I would rather that you would understand how these Kings were pursuing, on the whole, two main tasks. First they were trying to make England and Wales one compact kingdom, and secondly they were obliged, because they were Dukes of Normandy, to quarrel with the Kings of France. It was they, then, who founded our 800-year-long hostility to the gallant Frenchmen, which is now, happily, at an end.
Beginnings of the Conquest of Wales,The first of these tasks was mainly left to the great Norman barons, the Earls of Chester, Shrewsbury and Gloucester, who built castles on the Welsh border and sent continual expeditions far into Wales. William II once marched himself to the foot of Snowdon, and gave the Welsh thieves a very severe lesson against stealing English cattle and murdering English settlers. Henry I started a regular colony of Englishmen in Pembrokeshire. Welsh ‘princes’ continued to exist till the end of the thirteenth century, but only once troubled England seriously after Henry I’s time.
and of Cumberland;In the north-west, William II completely conquered Westmoreland, Lancashire and Cumberland, made them English ground for ever, and rebuilt the old Roman fortress of Carlisle. attitude of the Norman King to Scotland.On the Scottish border William I built a great fortress at Newcastle-on-Tyne; but this did not stop King Malcolm's raids, for many Saxons, who had lost their lands in 1066, had fled to Scotland, and helped in these raids. But William II and Henry I managed their Scottish neighbours so cleverly, that from 1095 to 1138 there were no more Scottish raids at all. During these years of peace many Norman barons got into the south of Scotland, were welcomed and were endowed with lands by King David I.
Quarrels with the King of France, 1066–1154.As regards the French business, there was very little real peace between the Duke of Normandy and the French King. And as the former was now King of England also, he generally got the best of it. Until the middle of the twelfth century, the King of France was very poor and could get very few people to fight for him, whereas Henry I once shipped a lot of sturdy English soldiers across the Channel, and won a great victory at Tenchebray, 1106, over Norman rebels who were being encouraged by the French King. As a rule, however, our Kings fought their battles in France with foreign soldiers hired in Flanders. The English Kings even had some sort of a fleet, for the ‘Cinque Ports’ (Dover, Sandwich, Hythe, Romney and Hastings) were obliged to furnish them a certain number of ships every year. The causes of these quarrels with France are not interesting to us. They were usually about some frontier castle which the French King had grabbed or wanted to grab from the Duke, or the Duke from the King. At one of these quarrels William the Conqueror met his death in 1087. A terrible king and a terrible man he had been; but he had kept peace, and the fiercest baron had trembled before him. His one pleasure was hunting, and he was so greedy of it, that he began to make a series of cruel laws against poachers which later kings kept up till 1217. It was death to kill a stag in the royal forests.
His eldest son, Robert, was a weak, good-natured fellow, who had once rebelled against his father, and was the darling of the turbulent barons. So William had The sons of William I.left Normandy to Robert and England to his second son, William, who was called ‘Rufus’ from his red hair. William II, called ‘Rufus’, 1087–1100.Rufus was a violent ruffian, grasping and cruel, and mocked at everything holy; but he was strong and clever too, a mighty warrior and leader of men. He had at once to meet a fearful rebellion got up by Robert, but the English freeholders turned out in crowds to help him, and he smashed the rebels and battered down their castles as he battered down everything that came in his path. Soon he managed to grab Normandy also from poor Robert, who was always deep in debt and trouble of every sort.
The first Crusade, 1096.In 1096 Robert had gone to the East, and many of the turbulent French and Norman barons with him. They had gone in order to fulfil one of the noblest yet vainest dreams of those times, to rescue the Holy Land from the infidel Saracens or ‘Turks’, who had recently taken Jerusalem. The Saracens bullied pilgrims who went thither to venerate the places of Christ's earthly ministry and passion. These expeditions from the West were called ‘Crusades’, and pious adventurers went with them from all parts of Europe. A man who died upon a crusade thought that he was fairly sure of going straight to Heaven. This first Crusade was successful, and a Christian kingdom was set up in Jerusalem which lasted there for eighty-eight years, and in some parts of Palestine for nearly two hundred years. Europe learned much from the Crusades, and many luxuries, arts and crafts were brought back to it from the East. But the name got much abused, and at last the popes called every private quarrel of their own a crusade, promising their blessing to all who paid money to it, and scolding all who refused.
A prudent yet wicked English king like Rufus stayed at home in spite of the Pope's scoldings, and grabbed as much as he could of the property of his neighbours who went upon the crusade.
Henry I, 1100–1135.When Robert came back he found that he had lost another chance. Rufus had been shot in the year 1100, while hunting in the New Forest, and his youngest brother Henry had seized the crown of England. Of course Robert rebelled, and the great barons, both of England and Normandy, with him. But, equally of course, Henry and his faithful Englishmen made short work of every rebellion. English chroniclers called Henry I the ‘Lion of Justice’, and it was not a bad name for him. Though cruel and selfish, he was a much more respectable character than Rufus, and he kept order splendidly. He was a man of learning, which till then had been unusual in royal families. ‘An unlearned king,’ he used to say, ‘is a crowned ass.’ Only one of his successors, before the eighteenth century, was wholly unlearned, and that was Edward Il, who came to a bad end. Henry endeared himself to his Englishmen by marrying the last princess of the old Saxon race, Edith, daughter of Queen Margaret of Scotland, who was the great-great-granddaughter of Ethelred the Unready. Among Henry's courtiers and servants we often find the names of Englishmen as well as Normans, though all the highest places in the Church were still held by Normans or by men of mixed race. Well able to fight, and quite ready to do so when it was necessary, Henry, like other clever Kings, avoided all unnecessary wars, and got on well with the Scottish and sometimes even with the French kings.
But his only son was drowned in the wreck of the Stephen and Matilda, 1135–54.‘White Ship’ in crossing the Channel; and when Henry died, in 1135, his heir was his only daughter, Matilda, whose second husband was Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou in France. Now no woman had ever reigned in England, and so, when Count Stephen of Blois, son of William I’s daughter Adela, appeared in London and claimed the crown, he was welcomed as king, although he and most of the barons had already promised to uphold the claim of Matilda. Stephen was known to be a kind-hearted fellow who would not rule too strictly; he was, in fact, just like his uncle Robert.
Civil War, 1138-52.Alas for England! Matilda, naturally enough, claimed her ‘rights’, and civil war began almost at once. Nothing could have suited the barons better. They changed sides continually, and fought now for Stephen and now for Matilda, as long as there was any one left to fight. The barons are let loose.‘For nineteen winters,’ says the old English chronicler, who was still writing in his monastery at Peterborough, ‘this went on.’ Castles sprang up everywhere, ‘full of devils,’ who tortured men for their riches, made war for sport, burnt towns and corn-crops, coined their own money and compelled the poor to take it in payment. At the end of the reign it was said there were over three hundred unlicensed castles in England. Poor Stephen did his best; he flew hither and thither besieging these castles, but seldom had patience to take one. He and Matilda (who was just as bad, and a horrid female into the bargain) could only think of bribing the great barons to fight for them by heaping lands, riches and offices on them; and, between the pair of them, the treasures of the crown of England were soon spent. The King of Scots, David I, who was Matilda's cousin, rushed in at the very beginning with a great army of wild men, and, ‘Battle of the Standard.’though the Yorkshiremen gave him a sound thrashing at the ‘Battle of the Standard’ near Northallerton, 1138, he stuck to Cumberland, and Stephen soon tried to bribe him by giving him Northumberland also. So, as the old chronicler says, ‘it seemed to Englishmen as if God slept and all His saints.’ The Church alone remained a refuge for the oppressed, and, naturally enough, the Church came out at the end of it all, not only much richer, but with much more power over the hearts of men.
Peace made at Wallingford, 1152.At last in 1152 young Henry, the son of Matilda and Geoffrey, made peace at Wallingford with Stephen, who was now an old and worn-out man. Henry was to govern England as chief minister, while Stephen lived, and then to succeed to the crown. And in two years Stephen died and Henry Il became King of England.