One of the great "what if" questions of English history relates to the Norman Conquest of 1066. The outcome of Harold's engagement with William hung by little more than a Bayeux tapestry thread and could have gone either way. In the end William was the lucky one and with Harold dead the English lacked the leadership to withstand William's eventual triumph. Would English history have turned out differently. I suspect it would and this is apparent in the microcosm of the Wolverton Manor.
At the time of the conquest it was in the hands of three thegns Godwin, Tori and Alvric. After the conquest the whole manor was under the control of one man. And this was repeated across the country. It is estimated that in the last days of Anglo Saxon England there were about 4000 thegns. William replaced all these with fewer than 200 lords of his own.
Anglo Saxon England was in many ways a more equal society. I don't want to use the word democratic because it does not apply in any modern sense but people then did have more of a voice in community affairs. The council, witan, was a feature at all levels of society, and, as can be seen in this Wolverton example, the presence of three thegns within the manor meant that no one of them could become too powerful. The Norman centralization of power was the significant revolution of 1066 and has had its long term impact to this day. The Normans largely married amongst themselves and held themselves a class apart from the natives they had subjugated. In my view this is the origin of our English obsession with upper and lower classes - not a feature of Anglo Saxon society.
I'm not convinced by revisionist histories with their rosy view of Dark Age Britain as a wonderful fairyland, full of sturdy, creative, free-spirited folk, free of the Roman yoke and not yet crushed by the Normans. It was a land in the grip of a centuries-long recession:
Indeed, the common Roman man in Britain had a higher standard of living than the Anglo-Saxon Kings did two centuries later. The Fall of Rome destroyed the Mediterranean economy of scale. Specialists disappeared – everyone returned to a “do-it-yourself” economy autarky. Without comparative advantage, production drastically declined, impoverishing everyone.
There's written evidence that the Anglo-Saxons knew just far society had fallen since Romano-British days. Check out the Anglo-Saxon poem, The Ruin. Allowing for the vagueness of memory in a society with patchy literacy and crude historical records, it's a powerful indication that they knew something important had been lost. The decline was not all about the loss of magnificent buildings, though - it probably hit the poorest hardest:
The story told by the archeological evidence in all these areas is basically the same: from a sophisticated, widespread industrialised economy that could offer high-quality goods to even the lower strata of society, Europe descended into a fragmented, moneyless economy at a level of sophistication and production well below that of pre-Roman times, and that the ones to suffer this decline most were the 'common people'.The transition to rule by Saxon warlords probably involved as much violence as the coming of the Norman overlords six centuries later:
Much further work is needed to clarify the picture, but what we may have here, particularly in the shape of the ditches and the buckles, is genuine hard evidence of the catastrophic fragmentation of Roman Britain - the Bosnian option. We may be looking at a process, in which a mixture of old rivalries and new ones carved up British society, destroying trade and communication between separate entities, weakening British society and opening the way for a take over by a new Germanic elite.
The fact that the Anglo-Saxon language adopted very few of the Celtic words used by the conquered Britons suggests that the Anglo-Saxon Conquest was in some ways more crushing than the later Norman one.
There's also written evidence of that violence in Anglo-Saxon literature. The best-known surviving poems from the period, Beowulf and The Battle of Maldon, belong to a tradition of heroic epics, in praise of warlords. Sometimes warlords are venerated for being winners, powerful enough to protect their people in battle, as in opening lines of Beowulf:
LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings
of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,
we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!
Sometimes, like Byrhtnoth in The Battle of Maldon, warlike leaders are seen as heroes for going down fighting. But whatever the outcome, it seems clear that the authors see battle as a Good Thing. Even in poems that aren't ostensibly about fighting, the assumptions of a warlike society come through. When the author of The Ruin contemplates the decaying buildings of Roman Britain, what does he imagine?
...The ruin has fallen to the ground
broken into mounds, where at one time many a warrior,
joyous and ornamented with gold-bright splendour,
proud and flushed with wine shone in war-trappings;
looked at treasure, at silver, at precious stones,
at wealth, at prosperity, at jewellery,
at this bright castle of a broad kingdom.
The Dream of the Rood is all about Jesus on the cross, but this is no turn-the-other-cheek gentle Jesus meek and mild. He mounts the cross like a hero preparing for battle:
The young hero stripped himself--he, God Almighty--
strong and stout-minded. He mounted high gallows
The description of Christ's burial sounds more like the funeral of a warrior-king, fallen in battle:
They laid there the limb-weary one, stood at his body's head;
beheld they there heaven's Lord, and he himself rested there,
worn from that great strife. Then they worked him an earth-house,
men in the slayer's sight carved it from bright stone,
set in it the Wielder of Victories. Then they sang him a sorrow-song,
sad in the eventide, when they would go again
with grief from that great Lord. He rested there, with small company.
But we there lamenting a good while
stood in our places after the warrior's cry
So, things seemingly weren't that great under the Anglo-Saxons - it was a feudal, factional society, defined by loyalty to strongmen with weapons and bands of loyal followers. In that sense, the land was bit like Afghanistan now, although Anglo-Saxon women probably didn't have such a hideous time as their modern Afghan sisters.
Were the Normans any better? In a lot of ways, probably not. Norman knights were mainly illiterate barbarians, too. Medieval chivalric romances were as much in awe of powerful warriors as the heroic poems of the Dark Ages. Literacy was still rare and mostly monopolised by the Latin-speaking church.
The brutish nature of the new order was highlighted thirty years after the Battle of Hastings, when the first wave of zealous Norman knights joined the warrior elites of Latin Christendom, clanking eastwards on crusade, fuelled by a toxic mixture of greed, religious fanaticism and a belief in their own martial prowess. Once they reached the Middle East, the barbarians from Western Europe must have seemed like boorish, brawling ignoramuses to the sophisticated Byzantine Greeks and like mere savages to their Seljuk adversaries, then at the heart of what was an immensely more advanced and civilized Islamic world.
The Anglo-Norman Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester provides a good illustration of the ruthlessness of the Norman ruling class in action. De Montfort was captain-general of the French forces at the start of the Albigensian Crusades against Cathar "heretics" in the South of France. He was present during the notorious siege and massacre at Bezier:
The Crusaders laid siege to Bezier on July 22nd, 1209. The city was pillaged and burned. When the Papal Legate, Arnaud, was asked how they were to tell the Roman Catholics from the Cathars, he told the Crusaders "Kill them all. God will recognize his own!" They did. Nearly 20,000 men, women and children. Bezier was reduced to ashes. Bezier had a long history before the Cathars (there was a Roman colony on this site) and a long history after the Cathars. A lot of it brutal and hard (history has so much brutality and hardship!) but nothing that matches the part it played in the Albigensian Crusade.
After Bezier, de Montfort continued to play an enthusiastic role in the imposition of order and orthodoxy:
He became notorious and feared for his extreme cruelty, massacring whole towns, and for his "treachery, harshness, and bad faith." In 1210 he burned 140 Cathars in the village of Minerve who refused to give up their faith. In another widely reported incident, prior to the sack of the village of Lastours, he brought prisoners from the nearby village of Bram and had their eyes gouged out and their ears, noses and lips cut off. One prisoner, left with a single good eye, led them into the village as a warning.
It seems to me that the major difference between the Normans and their Anglo-Saxon predecessors was how efficiently the Normans centralized power. William the Conqueror was swift in consolidating his victory, replacing the ruling class and decisively crushing resistance in Mercia and Northumbria. After the Harrying of the North, the local leaders were replaced by loyal Normans and regional autonomy was greatly reduced. With the warrior aristocracy providing the brawn and the literate clerk-administrators of the church providing the brains, a smaller group of people could rule greater areas and numbers of subjects. The Norman castles dominating the landscape were a direct symbol of Norman power, the Domesday Book was a symbol of the administrative underpinnings of that power. It wasn't quite a centralized modern state, but the combination of armed temporal power with the "civil service" of the church formed an entity closer to the sort of state we'd recognise than the more loosely organised and devolved power of the Anglo-Saxon world.
Power, as Lord Acton observed, tends to corrupt; absolute power even more so. In so far as the Normans were more powerful than the Anglo-Saxons, they had greater opportunities to be oppressive and unjust to more people. Because they were efficient centralizers, a smaller elite was able to impose its will on a larger number of people - society was probably more unequal and the tiny clique of rulers now, literally, spoke a different language from the people they ruled (the first royal proclamation issued in English came nearly two centuries after the Norman Conquest, while the nobility didn't start to educate their children in English until about 1300).
But maybe there were some advantages to the centralization of power. There were still conflicts and bloody battles in England, Wales and the Scottish borders after the Norman Conquest - perhaps, though, the centralization of power made life for the ordinary person a little safer than it had been under the weaker, more devolved Anglo-Saxon rulers. Certainly, the country wasn't subject to large-scale, successful foreign attacks and occupation such as the Vikings had mounted in pre-conquest days. Also, under centralized power, perhaps some of the economies of scale, the specialization and the prosperity of Roman Britain began to return. Some population figures suggest an increase in general prosperity after the new order had become firmly established - in 1200, the population of England was estimated at around 2.8 million people, by 1300, it had risen to 5 million (close to one estimate of the population of Roman Britain a millennium before). This expansion was to halt in the Fourteenth Century, but it's safe to put this down to poor harvests and famine at the beginning of the century, followed by the devastating impact of the Black Death, which was to kill 20-50% of the population after it arrived in the country in 1348.
My take on all of this is that Norman rule was a very mixed blessing. In some ways it reminds me of the later enclosure of common land by rich landowners.
The enclosure movement caused great suffering, including forced eviction, the destruction of whole villages, the creation of a disadvantaged landless class, poverty and widespread inequality. This suffering is justified, in the view of some, by being the lesser of two evils. The Tragedy of the Commons theory proposes that, had land been kept in common, everyone would have suffered. For example, it is in the interest every individual herder sharing a parcel of common land to graze as many of cattle on that shared land as possible. Each herder would receive all the benefits from each additional cow, whilst sharing any damage caused to the land by overgrazing with all the other herders. Eventually the carrying capacity of the land will be exceeded by an expanding population all seeking to maximise their personal return from the common land. Ergo, if a few people seize the land and farm it sustainably, liberty may be curtailed and inequality increased, but it's better than the alternative of an expanding population depleting a finite resource which eventually collapses leaving everybody hungry.
Likewise, it may be that the centralization of power under the Norman yoke, although unjust and oppressive, gave the nation enough security and economies of scale to grow and prosper. History not being an experimental science, we can't re-run the experiment and be sure what would have happened if Harold had defeated the invaders at Senlac Hill. Maybe, England would have been a less powerful, more divided nation, prey to internal violence and open to foreign attack, but also a more equal society with less of a gulf between ruler and ruled. For good or ill, we're still a relatively unequal nation and for all the talk of democracy and meritocracy, we still retain something like a ruling class. Tug those forelocks to your new overlords, peasants!
Thanks to Tom Freeman for the gratuitous poster of Dave the Conqueror and chums at the end of this post.
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