UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia
India | New Zealand | South Africa
Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published 2016
Copyright © Marc Morris, 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover design by Pentagram
ISBN: 978-0-141-97785-0
Map
Genealogical Table
Picture Credits
WILLIAM I
1. Introduction
2. The Bastard
3. The Pledge
4. Bad Neighbours
5. Earl Harold
6. The Road to Hastings
7. Resistance
8. Enemies Foreign and Domestic
9. Domesday
10. Conclusion
Illustrations
Notes
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
To John Gillingham
The monks of Westminster had started the year by burying a king, and now they were ending it by enthroning a new one.
The dead king, Edward the Confessor, had been the monks’ dearest friend. During his long reign he had transformed the site of their abbey, a small island in the Thames to the west of London, into a seat of royal power, establishing a palace there for himself and rebuilding the ancient monastery, or minster, on a grand scale. The new church was a magnificent affair, the largest in Britain, and built in a strikingly novel ‘Romanesque’ style. It had been only recently consecrated, and was still not quite finished, at the time of the old king’s death on 5 January 1066. The following day the monks had reverentially laid him to rest in front of its high altar.
Now, almost twelve months later, they were preparing for the coronation of William, Duke of Normandy – though Englishmen sometimes referred to him by a different name. William was Edward’s second cousin and, according to some, his nominated successor. But the duke’s claim to the throne had been bitterly contested. The Confessor had been replaced in the first instance by his brother-in-law, Harold Godwineson, the most powerful earl in England and a candidate with strong popular backing. The result had been the most famous succession dispute in English history. After months of anxious waiting and preparation, William had invaded that autumn and fought Harold at the Battle of Hastings, killing his rival and many thousands of others. A few weeks later the surviving English in London had submitted and begged him to take the crown.
And so, on Christmas Day 1066, the Duke of Normandy entered the pristine abbey church at Westminster for his coronation ceremony. He was nearly forty years old, and this was the climactic moment of his life – the sacred ritual that would transform him from a duke into a king, and herald the beginning of what he hoped would be a long, glorious and peaceful reign. His English subjects, too, were hopeful that William’s rule would bring peace and security, for in recent months they had experienced little besides death and destruction. Before the crown was placed on his head, the new king swore to govern his kingdom according to the best customs of his predecessors.
But no sooner had this promise been made than the prospect of a better future was shattered. At some point during the proceedings, the audience was asked whether they would accept William as their new ruler, and responded with a shout of acclamation. This was customary behaviour for an English coronation, but the Norman soldiers who had been left outside to guard the church, hearing a clamour of foreign voices from within, assumed that treachery was afoot, and began setting fire to the surrounding buildings – such at least is the excuse for their behaviour tendered by the Norman chronicler who first recounted the tale. When those inside realized that the rest of Westminster was ablaze, they rushed from the abbey in all directions, some to fight the flames, others to indulge in opportunistic looting. Only the clergy who were performing the service remained inside, and completed the ceremony in terror. William himself, we are told, was left trembling from head to foot. At the very moment God had been called upon to bless his rule, all around were scenes of chaos and destruction.1
To chroniclers who wrote with the benefit of hindsight, this was an omen of the catastrophes to come. William’s reign did indeed prove to be long, but it was far from peaceful. While he wore the crown, England experienced greater and more seismic change than at any point before or since. The years immediately after his coronation were ones of almost constant violence, filled with English rebellion, Norman repression and even Viking invasion. Huge areas of the country were laid waste with fire and sword, especially the North, which was harried into submission without mercy during the winter of 1069–70. The old ruling elite of England were swept away in their thousands and replaced by continental newcomers, who spoke a different language and had very different views about the way society should be ordered. Hundreds of castles were constructed all over the kingdom to enforce Norman rule, and every major abbey and cathedral was ripped down and rebuilt. The tenurial map of England was torn up and radically redrawn, giving greater power than ever before to the king. At the end of his career, when William attempted to assess the scale of this transformation by launching a great survey, his subjects compared it to the Last Judgement of God.
Thanks to the Domesday Book, we know more about eleventh-century England than any other medieval society anywhere in the world. Accurate information about William himself, by contrast, is comparatively scarce. Domesday apart, the administrative sources for his reign are lacking, and royal letters and charters survive only where they have been kept in cathedral archives or copied into monastic cartularies. The deficit of such documents means that recovering even basic facts about William’s career is difficult. Most of the time we cannot say where he was or who he was with from one month to the next, and in some cases whole years of his life, even after his accession as King of England, are effectively blank. Such letters and charters as do survive, moreover, are formal affairs, not windows into William’s personality. The kind of private correspondence that sometimes illuminates the inner thoughts of later English monarchs simply does not exist.
This means that the only way we can approach William’s character and actions is through the words of those who described them at the time – monks or clerics who wrote chronicles and histories of the period. Some of these accounts can be extremely detailed, offering credible information about William’s activities and plausible interpretations of his motives. And yet, at the same time, their testimony has to be used with caution. Some chroniclers, such as the king’s chaplain, William of Poitiers, were writing what we would regard as propaganda, and were concerned at all times with presenting him in the best possible light. All chroniclers, being churchmen, tended to interpret events as the workings of God’s will, and in many cases wrote their histories for the moral edification of their readers rather than to preserve a strictly accurate record of the past. The anonymous English monk who wrote William’s obituary in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – one of our most valuable sources – explained that he had set down both the good and evil things about the king ‘so that people may cherish the good and utterly eschew the evil, and follow the path that leads to the kingdom of heaven’. Another outstandingly important chronicler, Orderic Vitalis, was fond of putting words into the mouths of the individuals he was writing about. ‘O my friends,’ says William on his deathbed, ‘I am weighed down with the burden of my sins, and tremble, for I must soon face the terrible judgement of God.’ The dying king then goes on to deliver a seven-page last speech, in which he reviews his whole career but gets many of the details wrong, including his own age. ‘I treated the native inhabitants of the kingdom with unreasonable severity, cruelly oppressed high and low, unjustly disinherited many and caused the death of thousands by starvation and war.’ It is important to remember that Orderic was born in England, and that these are his words, not William’s.2
A final frustration is that we have almost no clues about what William looked like. The images of his face that appear on English coins are highly stylized representations, not attempts at portraiture, and the well-known depictions of him on the Bayeux Tapestry tell us little beyond the fact that he apparently sported the same close-cropped hairstyle as every other eleventh-century Norman knight. His tomb in Caen, typically for its time, was not topped with an effigy, only an inscribed stone slab. When it was opened in 1522 on the orders of the pope, observers reported that William’s skeleton was large and long-limbed, but their conclusions are difficult to verify because the tomb was destroyed forty years later when the abbey was desecrated by French Protestants. All that was salvaged from the wreckage was a single thigh bone, which has since been reburied and exhumed several times. Archaeologists and anthropologists who examined it in 1987 estimated that the king’s overall height was about 173 cm (5 feet 8 inches). Assuming the bone really did belong to William, therefore, his height was only a little above the average for a medieval adult male (about 170 cm), and he was only 4 cm taller than his great-great-grandson, King John, whom contemporaries regarded as short. According to the chronicler William of Malmesbury, writing in the 1120s, William was immensely stout and strong, able to draw a bow that others could not bend while spurring his horse to a gallop, and so ferocious that his roared oaths would terrify those around him.3
How was it, then, that this extraordinary man, who changed England more than any other, came to be crowned on Christmas Day 1066?