The Normans and Their World Read online

  The Normans and their World

  Jack Lindsay

  Copyright © Jack Lindsay 1973

  The right of Jack Lindsay to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1973 by Hart-Davis, MacGibbon Ltd.

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  To Harry Chaplin

  *

  The light-spot shifts, with curious changes

  and glints of sense, and then estranges;

  a curtain slips and darkness falls.

  Stare deeper still, stare from your centre

  and suddenly you truly enter.

  A comprehensive lustre seems

  to pierce and flood the core of things—

  till shadows of bewildering wings

  disperse the scene with tottering walls

  into malicious chaos where

  the faces clot to iron masks

  with eye-slots of mercurial dreams.

  Then the slow light-shaft drills again,

  the surfaces are neatly explored,

  order fallaciously restored.

  *

  Thus, while at history we stare,

  it opens out and all is plain,

  then shuts and we are aliens there.

  How break the circle of confusion,

  delusion followed by exclusion,

  unless we somehow learn to share

  the struggles, the compulsive tasks,

  the reckless joy, the sure despair,

  the lonely vision that emerges,

  the unpredictable wild surges?

  We glimpse the body and spirit bare

  in an apocalypse of pain

  beyond which breaks the earth redeemed.

  *

  Still harder to communicate

  the entangled whole, in words repeat

  the onward movement, ring on ring

  of dancers who advance, retreat,

  advance again; freewill and fate

  dictate the pattern that appears

  obscurely from the hopes and fears,

  the unifying circling sweep...

  Something grows human at the core

  in the dense night of evil’s reign;

  from blind recurrence born again

  the wholly-free new forces leap;

  and so the light breaks through once more.

  Jack Lindsay

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Notes and Abbreviations

  Part One – The Normans and the English

  Chapter One – The Normans and the Viking Age

  Chapter Two – A Closer Look at the Vikings

  Chapter Three – Norman Dukes and English Kings

  Chapter Four – Edward, Harold, and William

  Chapter Five – The Normans in the South

  Chapter Six – The Norman System

  Chapter Seven – Anglo-Saxon England

  Part Two – The Norman Conquest

  Chapter Eight – The Conquest

  Chapter Nine – William Rufus to Henry II

  Chapter Ten – More on the Normans in the South

  Chapter Eleven – Tenures, Fiefs, and Military Organization

  Chapter Twelve – State and Church

  Chapter Thirteen – County, Town, Trade

  Chapter Fourteen – Portents and Prophecies

  Chapter Fifteen – Resistances and Reconciliations

  Chapter Sixteen – A Wider Perspective

  Appendix – Note on Norsemen and the Heavy Plough

  Bibliography

  Extract from Helen of Troy by Jack Lindsay

  Foreword

  This is a book about the Norman Conquest of England, but it seeks to cast its net far more widely than is usual in books on this theme. Firstly, it deals at some length with the Viking background of the Normans and with the general significance of the great Scandinavian expansion between the eighth and tenth centuries — the last large-scale movement of heathen peoples into the Christianized region of western Europe, with its roots in the Roman past. Secondly, it gives an account of the Norman irruption into south Italy, the conquest of Sicily, and the attempt to invade the Byzantine empire. These events had profound effects on the whole European situation in that they caused support to be given to the Papacy at the crucial moment of its self-assertion. Thirdly, while providing an account of Normandy, Anglo-Saxon England, and Norman England, it attempts to enlarge the focus by relating the events and developments to the whole pattern of medieval society, its structure and the deep conflicts which in the end led to its transformation. Fourthly, throughout the account, and particularly in chapters fourteen to fifteen, an attempt is made to get inside the minds of the men of the period, to find what held them together and gave them a sense of identity.

  So, though the book for the most part deals with the eleventh and twelfth centuries, it has been found necessary at moments to look backwards or forwards and to keep before the reader at all times a sense of what the society was moving out of, and what it was moving into. Both the Normans and the English of the eleventh century had very distinctive qualities. The merging of their contributions, after much stress and struggle, was what gave the English of later centuries their particular character and their important role in the full working out of the potentialities of the feudal world and in the creation of the new society that superseded it.

  Jack Lindsay

  Notes and Abbreviations

  The following abbreviations are used in the notes to the text:

  AN (Annales de Normandie)

  AS (Anglo-Saxon)

  Ant. (Antiquity)

  B (Barlow)

  Chron. or Chronicle (Anglo-Saxon Chronicle)

  DB (Domesday Book)

  D (Douglas)

  EcHR (Economic History Review)

  EHR (English History Review)

  F (Finberg); H (Hollister)

  H. of H. (Henry of Huntingdon)

  L (Lennard)

  Li (Liebermann)

  LL (L. Lancaster)

  LW (Lynn White)

  MA (Medieval Archaeology)

  N. (Norman)

  Ord. (Ordericus Vitalis)

  PP (Past and Present)

  RS (Rolls Series)

  Sp. (Speculum)

  S (Stenton, F.M.)

  TRHS (Transaction of the Royal Historical Society)

  W (Whitelock)

  W. of M. (William of Malmesbury)

  W. of P. (William of Poitiers).

  *

  Apart from the inevitable debt to the older scholars such as Stenton, Haskins, Poole, Cam, and so on, I should like to make special mention of Barlow, Loyn, Sayles, Hollister, Hallam, Harvey, Lennard, Finberg, Hilton, Lynn White, Douglas, and, for the last chapter, Kiernan.

  Part One – The Normans and the English

  Chapter One – The Normans and the Viking Age

  The Normans were Northmen or Norsemen. Their settlement in Normandy was part of the prolonged expansion by trade, piracy, raids, and colonization from Scandinavia (that ‘womb of nations’ as Jordanes called it) which went on in the early medieval period. This Viking movement was the last large-scale barbarian or pagan movement in the West, and it had important results in determining the shape and character that Europe was to take. A broad idea of the vast changes brought about by the Norsemen can be got by glancing at the Mediterranean world in 1000 AD and then in 1100. In 1000 that world was dominated by three powers: the Byzantine Christians carrying on the Roman Empire in parts of the east, and two Islamic caliphates: the Fatimite, centred on Cairo, whose control extended as far as Sicily;
and the Spanish, centred on Cordova whose control extended over what is now Algeria and Morocco, and reached south through Mauritania towards Senegal. By 1100 that situation was radically altered, with the Normans dominating south Italy and Sicily and crusaders advancing eastward. The Normans were not the only factors in this change, which drew northern Europe into the Mediterranean sphere with its ancient bases, its complex and rich cultures; but they had been the most important. We cannot imagine the swing occurring as and when it did without the Normans. Bloch took 1050 as the date marking the decisive social changes ‘transforming the face of Europe’; it follows that those changes cannot be conceived without the impact and expansion of the Normans.

  The links between Scandinavia and Britain were formed much earlier than the eighth century, when the raids began. For instance, the finds at Sutton Hoo have shown that the East Anglian royal house at around 650 was in touch with the Uppland region of Sweden.[1] Too often historians have approached British history largely from the Mediterranean angle, from that of the Romans or the Roman Church. But we need also to see the Dark Ages and the early medieval epoch in a Germanic perspective which includes Scandinavia. Otherwise we get a very one-sided picture and fail to grasp the entangled nature of the changes that went on. We must regard the Norman Conquest of England as the last great Viking expansion, linked with the developments going on in Italy and Sicily. By adopting the Frankish language and the feudal system, to which they gave their own stamp, the Norsemen of the eleventh century changed themselves radically, but we can still see them as Vikings making their own peculiar transformation of what they took over from the Franks, the men of Anjou and Maine, or others. Their irruption belongs generally to the same movement of peoples that produced the Danelaw in England and brought about Cnut’s Anglo-Danish empire, and yet it introduced something quite new into England and into the whole European situation.[2]

  The first raid of Norsemen, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, came late in the 780s, when they laid waste the Dorset coast; then in 793 Lindisfarne, the cradle of Northumbrian Christianity, was pillaged; next year came an attack on Jarrow. After some decades of quiet the raids were resumed on a larger scale. Norwegians, looting in Cornwall, were defeated by Egbert of Wessex at Hingston Down in 838; but such effective counteraction was unusual. In the 840s Norsemen sacked London and ravaged Lincolnshire and Northumbria. ‘Great slaughter at London...and at Rochester,’ says the Chronicle. Then in 851 there ‘came 350 ships to the mouth of the Thames, and the crews landed and took Canterbury and London by storm’. Soon afterwards King Aethelwulf of the West Saxons defeated them in Surrey. About this time they dominated the Lower Thames and in 851 ‘the heathens for the first time wintered in Thanet’. Four years later they wintered in Sheppey. Then a decade later ‘the heathen army sat down in Thanet and made peace with the men of Kent, and the men of Kent promised them money for the peace’. They were beginning to settle. For years bands roved in central and northern England under Ivar the Boneless, whom the Irish Annals call ‘Chief King of All the Northmen in Britain and Ireland’. Then came the wars with Alfred and his successors. From the late 860s the invaders had been settling in fair-sized groups. Healfdene took York and in 876 finally conquered the kingdom of Northumbria. Alfred’s treaty with Guthrum in 886 gave the invaders the right to settle in the north and in the Five Boroughs (Nottingham, Lincoln, Stamford, Derby, Leicester). In the early tenth century warriors from Dublin and Norway added the north-west to the areas of Norse influence; but by mid-century English control had been nominally re-established all over the country.

  From the early ninth century there were Norse settlements in Ireland, especially at seaports such as Dublin, until the decisive check at Clontarf in 1014. From 849 a new phase had developed. Instead of sailing round the north of Scotland, the invaders came round the south of England. These men, Danes, were called by the Irish the Black Heathen, as opposed to the White Heathen, the Norwegians. There was much settlement also in Wales, and a big attack in 915 that reached out to Archenfield on the borders of Herefordshire and Gloucestershire; a bishop was captured and had to be ransomed for £40. At last the Norsemen were driven off, but after 952 raids again became common. In 988 the two main monasteries of Glamorgan were ravaged, and in 997 came worse. Yet at the same time the Welsh kings were calling on Norse aid against rivals or the English; as late as 1088 Rhys ap Tedur used Norse and Irish mercenaries to regain his kingdom. The Norse settlements along the coast, of which Cardiff was one, had complete control of a thriving trade.[3]

  We may note in passing that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Irish Annals, and the Russian Chronicle under the name of Nestor, were the only histories in the vernacular in Europe before 1200. Annalistic compilations in the monasteries derived from the custom of entering short historical notices on the pages of Easter Tables. In Alfred’s time, perhaps at the instigation of the king or some noble of the south-west, a chronicle of events up to 891 was made, and copies were circulated to various centres of learning, where they were kept up to date with additions from bulletins of national events and items of local interest. Hence the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

  *

  The Scandinavians were the farthest north of the German-speaking peoples. They first made an impact on the Roman world in the late second century BC as the Teutones of northern Jutland and the Cimbri, their eastern neighbours. The Romans never reached Scandinavia; but in the early empire the Danish islands were a centre from which elements of Roman culture were carried northward. The Germanic tribes had been organized on a war basis when they began to encroach on the Roman world. Tacitus at the end of the first century AD wrote: ‘The Germans have no taste for peace; renown is more easily won among dangers; and you cannot maintain a large body of Companions except by violence and war.’ The war chief had not yet become the king. Tacitus mentions chiefs, duces, who owed their position to virtus, their qualities of war leadership. The rex and dux may have been related to different gods: the sacral ruler looking to Tiwaz (Tyr), sky god of order and law; the dux to Wodin (Odin, Othinn), god of the dead, lord of magic and spirit-possession, who became god of war. However that may be, rex and dux had merged by the time of the Germanic invasions of Britain.[4]

  Warfare was endemic over these centuries. When the Norsemen come on the scene, we are in the early medieval period, and our information derives from the chroniclers, normally monks, who regarded the Vikings with particular horror. No doubt, one reason for this emotion was the fact that England had been free for some time from external attacks; but the main reason was that the raiders were heathens with no respect for church property. The sanctions that had some effect on Christians were disregarded by the Vikings, who found that monasteries with great accumulations of wealth were often built near the coast, in remote places open to attack, as at Lindisfarne. The new invaders were also terrible in the way they struck suddenly, without warning, from the sea. The chroniclers spoke of them with the sort of sheer dismay, as at utter abominations, that they kept otherwise for Christian rulers who despoiled the church of land and property: Charles Martel of Francia, Aethelbald of Mercia, William Rufus of England.

  Already in Roman times the Northmen had looted temples. At Fycklinge in central Sweden a fine bronze vessel has been found, inlaid with silver and copper, and inscribed: ‘To Apollo, the Benefactor of the Temple, Grannus Ammillus Constans offered this gift.’ At Vang another bronze vessel was found, probably from a Gallic temple: ‘Aprus and Libertinus gave this Vessel to the Temple.’[5] In 793 Alcuin wrote from Charlemagne’s court:

  Never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold the church of St Cuthbert spattered with the blood of God’s priests, despoiled of all its ornaments. A place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples.

  The Annals of St Bertin (composed at the abbey near what is now St Omer in the Pas de Calais) tell how Danish pirates ra
ided Rouen: ‘carrying everywhere a fury of rapine, fire and sword, they gave up the city, the monks, and the rest of the people to carnage and captivity. Some of the monasteries and other places near the Seine they devastated; the rest they left filled with terror, having received much money.’ Abbo in his poem on the siege of Paris in 885-6 tells of the wild beasts going ‘by horse and foot through hills and fields, forests, open plains, and villages, killing babies, children, young men, old men, fathers, sons and mothers’. He declared: ‘They overthrow, they despoil, they destroy, they burn, they ravage, sinister cohort, fatal phalanx, cruel host.’[6] An Irishman of the twelfth century summoned up all his abusive rhetoric:

  In a word, although there were an hundred hardsteeled iron heads on one neck and an hundred sharp ready cool never-rusting brazen tongues in each head and an hundred garrulous loud unceasing voices from each tongue, they could not recount or narrate, enumerate or tell, what all the Gaedhil suffered in common, both men and women, laity and clergy, old and young, noble and ignoble, of hardships and of injuring and oppression, in every house, from those valiant wrathful purely-pagan people.[7]

  We have no accounts on the side of the Vikings for the earlier years; but we do have the runes from many of their graves. An early Swedish inscription at Rök in Östergotland gives us the Viking exultation over war loot and conjures up the heroic lays and legends that sustained the warriors:

  For Væmod stand these runes. And Varin wrote them, the father for his dead son. I tell the ancient tale which the two war-booties were, twelve times taken as war-booty, both together from man to man. This I tell second who nine generations ago...with the Reidgoths; and he died with them, because of his guilt.

  Theodoric the bold, king of sea-warriors, was the ruler over Reid-sea shores. Now sits he armed on his Gothic horse, shield-strapt, protector of Maerings.

  This I tell in the twelfth instance where the Horse of the Valkyrie sees food on the battlefield, where twenty kings lie. This I tell in the thirteenth instance, which twenty kings sat on Sjælland for four years, with four names, sons of four brothers: five called Valke, sons of Radulv, five Reidulvs, sons of Rugulv, five Haisls, sons of Harud, five Gunnunds, sons of Bjorn...I tell the tale which of the Ingvaldings was revenged through a wife’s sacrifice. I tell the ancient tale to what young warrior a kinsman is born. Vilin it is. He could kill a giant...I tell the ancient tale: Thor. Sibbi, guardian of the sanctuary, ninety years of age, begot a descendant.[8]