Norman Conquest of England

“ And, if all other arguments should fail, he could offer lands and honours in England to all who would come and help him to conquer England. William in short could show himself all things to all men, from a pious missionary to a mere robber. But mark that all this care to put himself right in men’s eyes shows that we have got out of the days of mere violence. When the English entered Britain, when the Danes entered England, when the Northmen settled in what was to be Normandy, they did not think of putting forth so many good reasons for what they did as Duke William put forth now. ”

“ The duchy had suffered more from the private wars which prevailed everywhere, and which the duke made no effort to check, than from the invasion of William. England in general had had peace, under the strong hand of the king, but so heavy had been the burden of the taxation which the war in Normandy had entailed that agriculture declined, we are told, and famine and pestilence followed. In the west the Welsh had risen against the Norman lords, and had invaded and laid waste parts of the English border counties. ”

“ Thus the land was filled with castles, and warfare took mainly the form of attacking and besieging them. After the Norman Conquest we hear for a long time much more of sieges, and much less of battles in the open field, while in the Danish wars we heard much more of battles than of sieges. The Normans also brought their own way of fighting into England, and made great changes in English armies. Before the Conquest we had no horsemen and very few archers ”

“ The arrival, however, of the impetuous Norman race, securing as it did a close connection with the Continent, quickened the intellect of the people, raised their intelligence, was of inestimable benefit to the English, and played a most important part in raising England among the nations. Moreover, it has helped to produce the race that has peopled Northern America, Australia, and the south of Africa, holds possession of India, and stands forth as the greatest civilizer in the world. The Conquest of England by the Normans was achieved without even a shadow of right or justice. ”

“ THE ICINGLAS FOR a century after the Norman Conquest, continental visitors, in journeying through England as it then was, were surprised, ever and anon, after passing the strong fortresses—heavy, massive, and frowning—with which the Norman conquerors had crowned every height, to come upon lonely two-storied houses, quite unfortified, standing in parks of ancient oaks, amidst which swine fed and kine grazed. These were the dwellings of such of the Anglo-Saxons of rank as had escaped the Norman sword or the exile which to many of them was worse than death ”

“ But it was not till the beginning of the tenth century that the Normans settled in that part of the mainland of Gaul which from them took the name of Normandy. The English had thus been living for six hundred years in their land, when the Normans had been living only about a hundred and fifty years in theirs. The English therefore in the eleventh century were more thoroughly at home in England than the Normans were in Normandy. Among the English the adventurous spirit of new settlers had spent itself in the long wars with the Welsh which established the English dominion in Britain. ”

“ The defeat of Robert and the crushing of the most powerful nobles had taught the barons a lesson which did not need to be repeated, and England was not easily accessible to the foreign enemies of the king. In Normandy the case was different, and despite Henry's constant successes and his merciless severity, no victory had been final so long as any claimant lived who could be put forward to dispute his possession. ”

“ Even at the Conquest its power and wealth secured it a full recognition of all its ancient privileges from the Conqueror. In one way indeed it profited by the revolution which laid England at the feet of the stranger. One immediate result of William's success was an immigration into England from the Continent. A peaceful invasion of the Norman traders followed quick on the invasion of the Norman soldiery. Every Norman noble as he quartered himself upon English lands, every Norman abbot as he entered his English cloister, gathered French artists, French shopkeepers, French domestics about him. ”

“ England united against Norman invasion. There was again an united nation, a nation perhaps more united than it had been five-and-thirty years before, ready to withstand the new, the last attempt, at a Norman conquest of England. If a few earls and great lords played a game of yet more active treason than had been played by Eadwine and Morkere, they were not able, as Eadwine and Morkere had been able, to keep back any part of the force of England from joining the national standard. ”

“ William’s heavy-armed foot pressed on along the whole line, the native Normans having to face King Harold’s chosen troops in the centre. The attack was vain; they were beaten back, and they could not break down the palisade. Then the horsemen themselves, the Duke at their head, pressed on up the hill-side. But all was in vain; the English kept their strong ground; the Normans had to fall back; the Bretons on the left actually turned and fled. Then the worse-armed and less disciplined English troops could not withstand the temptation to come down from the hill and chase them. ”

“ Their want of fidelity to the prince, or to any trust reposed in them, appears strongly in the history of their later period; and their want of humanity in all their history. Even the Norman historians, notwithstanding the low state of the arts in their own country, speak of them as barbarians, when they mention the invasion made upon them by the Duke of Normandy [m] . The Conquest put the people in a situation of receiving slowly, from abroad, the rudiments of science and cultivation, and of correcting their rough and licentious manners. ”

“ The great object of the Normans was to cut their way to the standard, where King Harold still fought. Many men were killed in the attempt; the resistance of the English grew slacker; yet, when evening was coming on, they still fought on with their King at their head, and a new device of the Duke’s was needed to bring the battle to an end. ”

“ But open war did not begin at once. William contented himself for some months with sending over troops to occupy castles in the north-eastern portion of Normandy, which were opened to him by barons who were favourable to his cause or whose support was purchased. The alarm of Robert was soon excited by these defections, and he appealed to his suzerain, King Philip I of France, for aid. If the policy of ruling in Normandy was natural for the English king, that of keeping kingdom and duchy in different hands was an equally natural policy for the French king. ”

“ It is not by one battle that England is to be conquered, and even if we lose the first we may gain the second. We can stand the loss better than the Normans, for doubtless William has brought all his strength with him, and if beaten must make his way back to his ships, while Harold would in a short time find himself at the head of a larger army than that with which he may first meet them. Was the slaughter as great as they say at Stamford Bridge? ”

“ Some of these changes were made merely for the time, while there was still a distinction between English and French. This last is the word commonly used to take in both the Normans and all the other French-speaking people whom William had brought with him. Frenchmen who had settled in King Edward’s time were to reckon as Englishmen. Normans and Englishmen were to live in peace, but as the Normans were often killed privily, a special law was made for their protection. If the murderer was not to be found, the hundred was to pay. And for some purposes each nation was to keep its own law. ”

“ Both invasions were met by Henry at the head of his troops, but no fighting occurred on either occasion. On the second invasion, Louis was ill of a fever in Paris, and negotiations for peace were begun, the Church interesting itself to this end. Geoffrey and Henry certainly had no wish for war. The king's friend, who had been captured, was handed over to him; the Norman Vexin was surrendered to France; and in return Louis recognized Henry as Duke of Normandy and accepted his homage. Henry at once ordered an assembly of the Norman barons, on September 14, to consider the invasion of England ”

“ The fear of foreign invasion died away; the Danish attacks in 1075 and 1085 were utterly futile. Englishmen, while they hated William as the destroyer of their independence, could not forget ‘the good peace that he made in this land; so that a man of any account might fare over his kingdom unhurt with his bosom full of gold.’ To keep the peace in a land was no slight thing in those days of feudal anarchy; and if the Norman Conquest was very far from being an unmixed benefit, it at least brought about a better sense of unity than had hitherto prevailed in England. ”

“ Foreign trade too increased; England had a very old trade with Germany and Flanders; this in no way ceased, while a great trade with Normandy and other parts of Gaul grew up. And, besides the fighting men and others who followed the kings, not a few merchants and other peaceful men from other lands settled in England. In every way, in short, Britain ceased to be a world of its own; England, and Scotland too, became part of the general world of Western Europe. ”

“ Normandy and England alike became parts of a vast dominion, the ruler of which was in no way either Norman or English except by female descent. Yet, as he was English by female descent, men150 tried to see in him a representative of the old kings. In this state of things all the natives of England, of whatever race, began to draw closer together, and still more so under Henry’s sons, when a fashion set in of favouring men who were altogether strangers, neither English nor Norman. This reign was the time of the famous Archbishop Thomas, son of Gilbert Becket. ”

“ If the Duke of the Normans was to be transformed into the King of the English, it could be done only with the loyal support of his Norman followers; nor is it at all likely that, in a state so thoroughly feudal as Normandy, the suzerain would have ventured to assume so great an increase of rank and probable power without the express consent of his vassals, in disregard of what was certainly the usual feudal practice. The decision of the council was favourable, and William accepted the crown. ”

“ The Conquest of the West.—The taking of Exeter was followed, at once or before long, by the conquest of all western England. Dorset, Devonshire, Somerset, Cornwall, and most likely Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, were now added to William’s dominions. But Eadric still held out in his corner of Herefordshire. William was now master of all Wessex and East-Anglia and of part of Mercia. His conquest of the western lands was clearly followed by many confiscations and grants of land; above all the King’s brother Count Robert got nearly all Cornwall, and large estates in other shires. ”

“ To the surprise of the Normans who landed in battle array no armed man was to be seen. Parties of mounted men at once examined the country for miles round, but without finding signs of the defending army they expected to meet. On the following morning a small force was left in the Roman fortifications near Pevensey to guard the ships, hauled up on the beach, from attack, and the duke with his army marched away along the Roman road to Hastings, where William established his headquarters and resolved to await the approach of the army of England. ”

“ Some of the bishops appear to have opposed the choice of any king. No dominating personality arose to compel agreement and to give direction and power to the popular impulse. England was conquered, not by the superior force and genius of the Norman, but by the failure of her own men in a great crisis of her history. ”

“ And, now that they were fully settled in their own land, the Normans began, quite in the spirit of their forefathers, though in another garb, to go all over the world to seek for fighting wherever fighting was to be had. Often religious zeal was mingled with love of fighting. ”

“ He was of too stormy a disposition himself to settle down to a quiet life on his Norman lands. Duke Robert had attacked one of his castles, while Henry was making war upon him in England, but, as was usual in his case, totally failed; but it was easy to take vengeance upon the duke, and he was the first to suffer for the misfortunes of the lord of Bellême. All that part of Normandy within reach of Robert was laid waste; churches and monasteries even, in which men had taken refuge, were burned with the fugitives. Almost all Normandy joined in planning resistance. ”

“ When we turn from the destructive to the constructive side of the Middle Ages we find that the village idiot is the inspiration of cities and civic systems. We find his seal upon the sacred foundations of Westminster Abbey. We find the Norman victors in the hour of victory bowing before his very ghost. In the Tapestry of Bayeux, woven by Norman hands to justify the Norman cause and glorify the Norman triumph, nothing is claimed for the Conqueror beyond his conquest and the plain personal tale that excuses it, and the story abruptly ends with the breaking of the Saxon line at Battle. ”