No More Learning

King Henry was not unwilling to repay the service which he had himself
received in like circumstances from William's father sixteen years before,
and so William was enabled before long to take the field against the rebels
at the head of a mixed force of Normans and Frenchmen with King
Henry at his side. The rival forces met at Val-des-Dunes, a few miles east
of Caen, and the day ended in a complete victory for the Bastard, who
soon followed it up by taking Brionne and driving Guy of Burgundy out
of Normandy.
The victory of Val-des-Dunes marks William's accession to power, and
CH. XV.


## p. 494 (#540) ############################################

494
William and his kinsmen. His marriage
a year later he still further enhanced his fame by leading a large band of
Norman knights into Anjou to assist King Henry in an attack on Geoffrey
Martel. On this expedition he shewed such daring in the field and such
skill as a military leader that Geoffrey Martel himself declared that there
could nowhere be found so good a knight as the Duke of Normandy.
Having made such a successful début, William was not the man to
let the grass grow under his feet, but quickly set to work to make it
clear to all who were in any way inclined to thwart him that he “recked
nought of them and that if they would live or would keep their lands or
would be maintained in their rights they must will all that he willed. ” If
not, whether kinsman or vassal, bishop or monk, rich or poor, he would
sweep them from his path, sparing no man. The first to feel the
weight of his wrath were his kinsmen, William Count of Mortain, Wil-
liam Busac of Eu, and William Count of Arques. In turn they all chal-
lenged the duke's authority, and for their temerity were deprived of
their estates and driven into exile, the first to Apulia, the second to
Boulogne, and the third to the court of the French King. Shortly
afterwards William also fell foul of Archbishop Malger. The quarrel
arose primarily because William resented the attitude which the leaders
of the Church had taken up in the matter of his marriage. As early as
1048, William made overtures to the Count of Flanders, Baldwin V, for
the hand of his daughter Matilda. The Count approved of the match,
but on some obscure grounds the clergy objected to it, and bringing the
matter before Pope Leo IX at the Council of Rheims in 1049, obtained
a decree forbidding William and Matilda to marry. As soon, however,
as William heard in 1053 that Pope Leo had been beaten and taken
prisoner at Civitate, he set the Church's ban at defiance, and boldly
married Matilda in the minster at Eu. Malger, who was smarting over
the outlawry of his brother the Count of Arques, thereupon excommu-
nicated William, with the result that two years later he was himself
deposed by a council summoned by William, on the charge that he
was too worldly a prelate, while his see was bestowed on Maurilius, a
monk of Fécamp. It was in the middle of this period of family strife
in 1051 that William visited England and came back believing, as he
afterwards declared, that he had received some sort of promise from his
kinsman King Edward that he would be nominated by him as his suc-
cessor. At the moment, of course, this promise could make no practical
difference to William's position. It was otherwise, however, with his
marriage to Matilda; for the alliance with Flanders upset the balance of
power in northern France and led Henry I to abandon the traditional
friendship of the Capetian house towards the lords of Rouen and to take
up the cause of William's dispossessed kinsmen. This new policy led to
two invasions of Normandy by French forces, but on both occasions
Henry's arms met with crushing defeats, in 1054 at Mortemer, not far
from Aumâle, and in 1058 at Varaville, near the mouth of the Dives.


## p. 495 (#541) ############################################

The acquisition of the county of Maine
495
These victories greatly increased William's confidence in himself, and
turned his thoughts towards enlarging his dominions at the expense of
his southern neighbours. Already in 1049 he had made a beginning by
seizing the hill-town of Domfront and the surrounding district of the Pas-
sais in the north-west corner of the county of Maine and annexing them
to Normandy; but in 1051 Geoffrey Martel had made further expansion in
this direction difficult by driving Herbert, the young Count of Maine, out
of his patrimony, and annexing his territories to Anjou. After the victory
of Mortemer William advanced beyond Domfront another twelve miles
into Maine and built a castle at Ambrières in defiance of Geoffrey.
This was a serious menace to Geoffrey of Mayenne, the leading baron of
western Maine, who appealed to Geoffrey Martel for assistance; but
their united efforts to demolish the fortress only led to the capture of
Geoffrey of Mayenne, who, a little later, was forced to do homage to
William for his lands in order to regain his freedom. In eastern Maine,
however, where lay the see and castle of Le Mans and the chief
demesnes of the count, Geoffrey Martel's position remained unaffected,
and the most William could do was to prepare for the future by be-
trothing his infant son Robert to Count Herbert's infant sister Margaret,
with the understanding that Herbert's right to Maine, if he died child-
less, should pass to the heir of Normandy as Margaret's destined husband.
In 1060 both Henry of France and Geoffrey of Anjou died, and the way
became open for Count Herbert to recover his patrimony. But in 1062
Herbert also died, whereupon William at once advanced down the valley
of the Sarthe and occupied Le Mans in Margaret's name, in opposition
to the wishes of the inhabitants, who rose in favour of Herbert's aunt
Biota, the wife of Walter, Count of Mantes. A year later the little
Margaret died before any marriage had taken place between her and
Robert. The only excuse for holding Le Mans therefore vanished; but
William none the less determined to retain his prize and shortly after-
wards himself assumed the title of Count of Maine. In normal times
this step would have provoked strong opposition both from the King of
France and the Count of Anjou; but Philip I, the new King of France,
was at the time a minor, and in the guardianship of William's father-in-
law, the Count of Flanders, while the Angevin inheritance was in dispute
between Geoffrey Martel's two nephews. William accordingly in 1064
had a free hand. His overlordship nevertheless was not really acceptable
to either the clergy or the barons of Maine, who, if they must submit
to a stranger, much preferred an Angevin master. In the long run,
therefore, the acquisition of the overlordship over Maine, partly by force
and partly by chicanery, brought William little real strength, though it
undoubtedly increased his reputation for luck and cunning. Meantime
on his eastern border William had also profited by the victory of
Mortemer to compel the Count of Ponthieu to do him homage; and
thus it came about that Harold was handed over to William and
CH. XV.


## p. 496 (#542) ############################################

496
The Norman Church under William
became his unwilling guest when he was wrecked in the count's
territory.
By 1065, then, William was a far more commanding French feudatory
than he had been in 1047. Within his duchy also he had taken steps
which greatly consolidated his authority. For example, he had fixed the
quotas of military service for his barons and rigidly enforced the rule
that no castle should be built without his leave; he had made his half-
brothers, Robert and Odo, the sons of Arlette by a marriage with
Herluin of Conteville, respectively Count of Mortain and Bishop of
Bayeux, and had bestowed on each of them very extensive fiefs. He
had also, in 1059, obtained a dispensation for his marriage from Pope
Nicholas II on the condition that he and his wife should each build and
endow a monastery. This reconciliation with the Church had been
negotiated in Rome by the Italian Prior of Bec, Lanfranc of Pavia, who,
in spite of his original opposition to William's marriage, had become his
closest friend and adviser. And this was very important, for Lanfranc
was not only the finest teacher of his day and renowned for his suc-
cessful disputations with the heretic Berengar, but was also a most subtle
lawyer and a statesman of genius. Born about 1008, he was some twenty
years older than William; but, once they had made friends, the differ-
ence of age and training was no bar to the completest sympathy arising
between them, and so a relationship arose which was of the utmost value
to William, as it put at his service one of the keenest and most practical
intellects in Europe. At the same time, it must not be thought that either
William's reconciliation with the Papacy or his friendship for Lanfranc
had made him in any way abandon the claims of his ancestors to be supreme
over the Norman clergy. On the contrary, in 1065 there was hardly
any continental Church so much under the control of the secular power
as that of Normandy. Not only did the duke nominate all the Norman
bishops and invest them with their privileges, but he was regularly
present at the meetings of Church councils and no ecclesiastical decrees
were issued without his sanction. His influence over the clergy, however,
seems to have been almost wholly a good one. For just as he himself
in his private life was an earnest and religious man and an exemplary
husband, so in his public capacity, as protector of the Church, he took
the greatest pains to foster discipline and piety among the parish priests,
and saw to it that the prelates whom he selected were men of learning
and character who would do their best to promote reforms and rebuke
evil-doers. He also took an active part in broadening the range of
monastic influence. In obedience to the Pope's decree, he set himself
about building two monasteries at Caen, one for men and the other for
women, and he did his best further to improve discipline and learning
in the older ducal abbeys. His example too was an incentive to several
of his greater vassals, with the result that some six or seven baronial
minsters were founded between 1050 and 1065. The chief of these were


## p. 497 (#543) ############################################

William prepares to invade England, 1066
497
St Évroul and Cormeilles in the diocese of Lisieux, St Martin at Séez,
and Troarn near Val-des-Dunes in the Bessin, the last two, it should be
noted, both being founded by Roger of Montgomery. Normandy could
therefore boast in 1065 of twenty-one monasteries for men, eight of
which were in the patronage of the duke and thirteen in the patronage
of the leading barons. There was, however, still no monastic foundation
in the diocese of Coutances.
The foregoing sketch of the development of Normandy and of Wil-
liam's career down to 1066 has been given in order to shew clearly the
nature of the risks deliberately accepted by Harold when he seized the
English crown. However contident he might be that he could deal with
the Earls of Mercia and Northumbria—and he at once tried to conciliate
them by marrying their sister Ealdgyth—Harold knew that his most
dangerous rival was William and that it would be very difficult to come
to terms with him. Nor did William long leave any one in doubt as to
his intentions. As soon as he heard of Harold's coronation, he sent
messengers to England, reminding him of his oath and demanding his
allegiance. At the same time he proclaimed to all the world that Harold
was a usurper, and sent envoys to Pope Alexander II denouncing Harold
as a perjurer and asking for a blessing on his proposed invasion of
England. To this appeal the Pope gave a favourable ear; for the Eng-
lish Church in the eyes of the Curia was much in need of reform, and
might well be brought by such an expedition more under papal authority.
Alexander, therefore, by the advice of Archdeacon Hildebrand, sent
William a consecrated banner as a token of his approbation, and thus
gave the duke's piratical adventure almost the character of a holy
war. Pending the result of their negotiations, William summoned a
council of his barons to meet at Lillebonne, and asked them to support
his enterprise. It was only with difficulty that they were persuaded to
help him. Feudal law gave the duke no right to call for their services
out of France, and to most of them it seemed doubtful whether a suf-
ficiently strong force could be got together for so great an undertaking,
or, even if got together, whether it would be possible to build and man
sufficient transports to carry it across the Channel. The first objection
was met by asking for volunteers from outside Normandy and promising
them a share in the plunder of England. And as for the second objec-
tion, William would not listen to it for a moment, but ordered transports
to be built in all parts of the duchy and stores of arms and provisions
to be made ready by harvest time. In these deliberations the most
active advocate of the duke's project was his seneschal William Fitz
Osbern, who perhaps knew something of southern England at first hand,
as his brother Osbern Fitz Osbern already held an ecclesiastical post in
Sussex, being Dean of Bosham, together with an estate in Cornwall".
The appeal for volunteers soon brought adventurous spirits from all
Domesday 1, 17 a. Boseham; 121 b. Stratone.
1
C. MED. H. VOL. V. CH. XV.
32


## p. 498 (#544) ############################################

498
The strength of the Norman army
quarters to William's standard. The largest number are said to have
come from Brittany, led by Brian and Alan of Penthièvre; but the
number of Flemings was almost as great. There were also strong con-
tingents from Artois and Picardy, while Eustace of Boulogne, who had
a long-standing feud with the house of Godwin, offered his services in
person. On the other hand very little help came from Maine or Anjou,
and only a handful of knights from more distant parts, such as Cham-
pagne, Poitou, or Apulia. One would fain know the total number of
William's host, but as usual the figures given by the chroniclers are
merely rhetorical. Several considerations, however, strictly limit the pos-
sible numbers. In the first place, we can be sure that the Norman con-
tingents outnumbered the auxiliaries from other parts. But, as we have
already seen, it is very unlikely that Normandy at this time could put more
than 1200 knights into the field. Again, the Bayeux poet Wace, who
describes the expedition in great detail in Roman de Rou, a metrical
chronicle written about 1172, states that his father had told him that
the number of transports of all kinds was not quite seven hundred; and,
as the Bayeux tapestry testifies, the largest of these were only open barges,
with one square sail, not capable of holding more than a dozen horses,
while the majority were still smaller and less capacious? . It seems then
that the most plausible number we can assume for William's army is
somewhere round about 5000 men. Somewhere about 2000 of these were
probably fully-equipped knights with trained horses, of whom about 1200
hailed from Normandy and about 800 from other districts, while the
remaining 3000 men would be made up by contingents of footmen and
archers and the crews who manned the ships. In that age, however, even
5000 men were an almost fabulously large force to collect and keep
embodied for any length of time, nor were there any precedents for
attempting to transport a large body of cavalry across the sea. No viking
leaders had ever done that. Their fleets had only carried warriors, and
their first operation after landing had always been to seize horses from
the invaded territory. William's knights, on the contrary, must have
their own trained horses; and so William had to provide for bringing
over at least 2500 horses in addition to his men, and this too in small
open boats which were unable to beat to windward; nor could he reckon
on any docking accommodation, either for embarking or disembarking
them. The mere crossing of the Channel, then, would be a remarkable
and very novel feat; and if the weather turned stormy or the tide were
missed, a very hazardous one. Nothing indeed brings out the duke's
prestige so plainly as the fact that he was able to persuade his followers
to take so tremendous a risk. By harvest time, as arranged, his prepara-
tions were fairly complete, and the contingents from western Normandy
1 The reasonableness of Wace's figure is strikingly illustrated by William of
Malmesbury's statement that in 1142 the Earl of Gloucester used 52 ships to trans-
port some 360 knights from Cherbourg to Wareham.


## p. 499 (#545) ############################################

Harold defeats Harold Hardrada
499
and Brittany lay ready with their transports at the mouth of the Dives'.
There they remained windbound for four weeks, and it was only in the
middle of September that they were able to move eastwards to Saint-Valery
in the estuary of the Somme and join the contingents from eastern Nor-
mandy and Picardy. At Saint-Valery the invaders were about 60 miles as
the crow flies from the Sussex coast, instead of about 105 miles as they
would have been had they started from the Dives; but still there was no
sign of a fair wind for England, and whispers began to spread that
William's luck had deserted him.
Meantime, events were taking place in England which greatly
improved William's chances. All through the summer Harold had kept
both men and ships in readiness on the south coast for William's coming.
But when September came the men insisted on going to their homes to
see after the harvest. Scarcely, however, had they disbanded, when
Harold received the unwelcome tidings that his exiled brother Tostig in
alliance with Harold Hardrada, the great warrior-King of Norway, had
entered the Humber with a large fleet and was threatening York. Harold
at once got together his house-carls and such other men as he could lay
hands on, and started to cover the 200 miles between London and York
by forced marches to succour the Yorkshiremen. Before he reached
Tadcaster, news arrived that the Earls Edwin and Morkere had been de-
feated at Fulford outside York, that the city had submitted, and that
the invaders had moved off eastwards to plunder Harold's own manor
of Catton by Stamford Bridge on the Derwent? Harold accordingly
marched past York and fell on the invaders by surprise. A long and
desperate fight ensued, in which both Harold Hardrada and Tostig were
killed, while only a remnant of their men survived to regain their ships
and betake themselves home. This splendid victory was gained on
Monday, 25 September, and at any other time would have made Harold's
position secure. Almost at the same time William at Saint-Valery, in total
ignorance of what Harold was doing, was organising processions of relics
to intercede for more favourable weather. In most years equinoctial gales
might have been expected, but suddenly fate smiled upon him. The
weather became fine, the wind veered round to the right quarter, and on
Thursday, 28 September, he was able to embark all his men and horses.
By nightfall all was ready, but he still had to wait for the tide. The
actual start was not made till near midnight, William leading the way
with a lantern at his mast-head in the Mora, a fast-sailing craft which
had been specially fitted out for him by his wife. The probable intention
was to land near Winchelsea in the great manor of Brede (Rameslie),
which for over 40 years had been in the possession of the monks of
i William of Poitiers states that the whole armament was first assembled at the
Dives. It would, however, have been senseless to bring the eastern contingents so
far west, only to lengthen the crossing.
Domesday 1, 305a. Cattune.
2
CH, XV.
32--2


## p. 500 (#546) ############################################

500
Battle of Hastings, 1066
Fécamp by the gift of Knut and Emma'. The wind and tide, however,
carried the Aotilla farther to the west, and in the morning William
found himself off the small haven of Pevensey, with no obstacle to bar
his entrance. Pevensey itself at this time was a small borough of 52
burgesses ? ; but they could only look on helplessly while William's trans-
ports were one by one beached and unloaded. Once safe ashore, no time
was lost in moving eastwards to the larger borough of Hastings, where
orders were immediately given for the building of a castle.
On the news of William's landing being brought to York, Harold at
once rode south to London to collect fresh forces, leaving Edwin and
Morkere to follow. Many of his best house-carls had fallen at Stamford
Bridge, but a very powerful force of thegns could soon have been mustered
from the shires south of the Welland and Avon if only Harold would
have played a waiting game. He was, however, in no mood to remain on
the defensive. He had just won a magnificent victory, and it seemed to
him a cowardly plan merely to stand by and let the invaders overrun his
native Sussex without hindrance. He therefore, after a few days' halt,
set out again, having with him only such levies as had hastily come in
from the districts nearest London. Passing through the Weald, he led
his forces towards Crowhurst and Whatlington, two villages lying north-
west of Hastings', which had formed part of his personal estates before
he became Earl of Wessex, and on 13 October, the eve of St Calixtus,
he encamped on an open ridge of down which lay midway between his
two properties some six miles from the sea. Early next day William,
eager to attack, marshalled his army near the high ground of Telham,
two miles away, and then advanced in three divisions having the Breton
contingents, say 1000 men, on the left, the Flemings and Frenchmen,
say 1000 men, on the right, and the Normans, say 2400 men, in the
centre. A slight valley intervened between the two armies, and across it
William could see Harold's forces posted in close formation several ranks
deep along the crest of the ridge, having a front of perhaps 500 yards.
The English in accordance with their national custom were all on foot,
the house-carls and thegns being armed with two-handed axes and kite-
shaped shields. Some of Harold's men, however, were just peasants, armed
only with javelins and stone-tipped clubs. The whole body probably out-
numbered the invaders, but Harold knew that he was at a great disad-
vantage in having very few archers, and no mounted troops to match
William's 2000 horsemen. He consequently gave his men orders to stand
strictly on the defensive, and on no account to leave their position, which
was one of advantage, as the enemy would have to attack up a fairly
Domesday 1, 17 a. Rameslie. Cf. also Haskins, EHR, Vol. xxxi (1918),
p. 342.
2 Domesday 1, 20b. Pevensel.
3 Domesday 1, 18 b. Crohest, Watlingetone.


## p. 501 (#547) ############################################

Death of Harold. The Normans advance on London 501
steep slope, whether in front or on the flanks! . William's men, undeterred
by that, came on steadily, the front ranks in each division being made up
of archers and cross-bowmen, followed by lines of heavily-armed footmen
(loricati), while the knights brought up the rear. For some hours all
attempts to storm the hill were in vain, and at one moment William had
great difficulty in preventing the Bretons from retreating in a panic. At
last, however, by the stratagem of a feigned flight on the right, a number
of the English were induced to rush down the hill in pursuit, whereupon
the Norman knights wheeled their horses round, and easily cut them to
pieces. This gave the opening which William was looking for. Renewing
the attack, slowly but surely the Norman knights pressed back the
depleted English shield-wall, until at last Harold was mortally wounded
by an arrow in his eye. For a space some leading thegns still held out
round the king's dragon standard ; but one by one they too were hewn
down, so that by nightfall the English army was reduced to a mere
leaderless rabble which scattered and fled into the woods. The disaster
to Harold's cause was complete. The deaths of his brothers, Earls Gyrth
and Leofwin, together with the slaughter of so many leading men, made it
impossible for the supporters of the house of Godwin in eastern Wessex
to make another stand. Duke William, on the other hand, was too
cautious to press on quickly; and it was not till five days after his
victory that he set out from Hastings to get possession of Canterbury,
moving by Romney and Dover. Meantime, in London, the leaders of the
English Church, headed by Stigand, acting in co-operation with the chief
landowners of the Midlands and the Eastern counties under the guidance
of Aesgar the Staller, the leading magnate in Essex, declared for setting
Edgar the Aetheling on the throne. In this decision Edwin and Morkere
outwardly acquiesced; but secretly the two earls were intriguing to
prevent the crowning of the young prince—he was hardly yet seventeen,
it would seem m-and they soon retired to their estates without summoning
their men to fight for him. Once more it was clearly shewn that the
English race had as yet developed no true national feeling. Perhaps
what the earls hoped for was a partition of the kingdom between
themselves and William, the duke contenting himself with Wessex.
While still at Canterbury, the news was brought to William that Queen
Edith and the men of Winchester were prepared to recognise him. This
made it safer for him to advance on London ; but before actually attack-
ing the city, he thought it more politic to secure as strong a foothold
as possible south of the Thames. He therefore marched past Southwark
and Kingston and up the Thames valley, harrying a wide belt of country,
until he came to the borough of Wallingford, at that time the chief
place in Berkshire. Crossing the Thames at this point, he doubled back
eastwards to Berkhampstead in Hertfordshire, so as to threaten London
1 Freeman's view, that the English line was protected by a palisade, has been
strenuously contested by Mr Round, and seems quite untenable.
CH. XV.


## p. 502 (#548) ############################################

502
London submits. William crowned
from the north-west and cut it off from possible succour from the Mid-
lands. As Edwin and Morkere still remained inactive, the magnates
in London decided that armed resistance was hopeless. They accordingly
went to meet William, and made their submission, the king-elect, Edgar
the Aetheling, being one of the party. The Norman forces thereupon
advanced unopposed to London; and on Christmas Day 1066 William,
like Harold only a year before, was hallowed King of the English in
Edward's new church at Westminster by Ealdred the Archbishop of
York, Stigand of Canterbury's services being refused, on the ground
that he had received his pallium from an anti-Pope.
When once William had been crowned with the traditional rites, his
attitude towards those who had submitted to him necessarily changed
from that of an invader bent on promoting terror and havoc to that of a
lawful sovereign anxious to stand well in the eyes of his new subjects and
eager to give them as good peace as he had already given to Normandy.
Nevertheless, William was faced with a dilemma; for he could not safely
allow his new dominions to remain without a Norman garrison, or risk
offending the soldiery to whom he owed his triumph by disappointing
them of their promised rewards. To feel secure he had to allot extensive
estates to his chief followers, which they, in their turn, could deal out
to their retainers, and also build castles up and down the land for their
protection. As he surveyed his position, however, after the coronation,
William might well think that he had gained sufficient territory to reward
his men lavishly. The area acknowledging his authority was already
much larger than Normandy, and it included a considerable proportion of
the most fertile and best populated parts of the country. It comprised,
moreover, the estates of nearly all those who had actually fought against
him, including a large proportion of the estates of the house of Godwin;
and all these he could legitimately regard as confiscated for treason and
available for distribution. The areas, too, which had not as yet actively
opposed him, such as West Wessex, North Mercia, and Northumbria,
might well submit voluntarily if given more time. He therefore decided
to adopt a waiting policy, and to direct his immediate efforts to organising
the south-eastern half of the country, giving out at the same time that
the English laws and customs would be maintained, and that even those
who had helped to set up Edgar the Aetheling might make their peace
by paying suitable fines and providing hostages. In Essex and East
Anglia there was really little doubt that leniency would be the best policy,
as William knew that several of the leading landowners, such as the
Bishop of London, the Abbot of Bury St Edmunds, Ralf the Staller, and
Robert son of Wimarc, were definitely on his side, being men of French
extraction who had been installed and promoted by King Edward. The
policy of waiting, however, quickly bore fruit in the Midlands as well,
and before long many of the leading Mercians, headed by Edwin and
Morkere, betook themselves to William's court at Barking and did him


## p. 503 (#549) ############################################

Siege of Exeter. Revolt of Edwin and Morkere
503
homage. The two earls, in fact, as they had not fought against William,
were well received and confirmed in all their possessions on the condition
that they remained in his company. Meanwhile castle-building and the
assignment of confiscated lands to Normans were pressed on steadily, and
by March William felt himself sufficiently secure to risk a visit to
Normandy, for the double purpose of making a triumphal progress
through the duchy and of impressing his continental neighbours. To
grace his triumph he took with him Edgar the Aetheling, Archbishop
Stigand, Earl Edwin, Earl Morkere, Earl Waltheof, and many other
leading Englishmen, and also a great quantity of gold and silver and
plate and jewels, seized from the conquered districts, for distribution as
a thank-offering among the churches of Normandy. In England he left
the direction of affairs in the hands of his half-brother, Odo, Bishop of
Bayeux, and of his seneschal William Fitz Osbern, the former having his
head-quarters in Kent and Essex, and the latter apparently in Hampshire
and the Isle of Wight, together with the custody of more distant strong-
holds in Gloucestershire and Herefordshire. For eight months these two
governed as joint-regents; and if they did not foster, at any rate they did
little to repress, the rapacity and licence of the rank and file of the
intending settlers. No serious risings of the English, however, occurred,
the only disturbance of note being an unsuccessful attempt made by
Eustace of Boulogne, helped by the men of Kent, to oust Odo of Bayeux
from Dover, a stronghold which the count claimed ought to have been
entrusted to him and not to the bishop.
In December 1067 William returned from Normandy, and soon
realised that the remoter shires were not going to submit to his authority
without compulsion.
To begin with, Harold's mother, Gytha, was still
holding out in western Wessex; and though the men of Somerset had
apparently by this time deserted her cause, it required a march by
William in person to Exeter, and an eighteen days' siege of the borough,
before the men of Devon and Cornwall would come to terms with him.
Then, soon after Whitsuntide 1068, came the news that Edwin and
Morkere, disgusted at the slights put upon them, had broken into revolt,
that Edgar the Aetheling with his sisters had set out for the north, and
that Gospatric, who had been recognised by William as Earl of Bernicia,
was inclined to set Edgar up as king. William, thus challenged, at once
marched his forces into Yorkshire. The rapidity of his movements and
the prompt building of castles at Warwick, Nottingham, and York,
quickly cowed Edwin and Morkere into renewing their allegiance; but
Edgar and Gospatric took refuge at the court of Malcolm Canmore, the
King of Scots (1054-1092), who received them honourably. William
himself did not go beyond York, but turned south again, and spent the
autumn in erecting castles at Lincoln, Huntingdon, and Cambridge.
Being determined, however, to get a footing in the north, he offered the
earldom of Bernicia to one of his Flemish followers, Robert of Commines,
CH. XV.


## p. 504 (#550) ############################################

504
The harrying of the north. Revolt of Hereward
1
1
1
and sent him early in 1069 with a force of 500 horsemen to Durham.
This move ended in disaster, for the Northumbrians at once rose and
massacred Commines and his men; whereupon Edgar, helped by Earl
Waltheof, reappeared in Yorkshire and laid siege to William's forces in
York. Once more William hastened to York and
gave
orders for a second
castle to be built there. But even so the Yorkshiremen were only tem-
porarily quelled, and soon took heart again on hearing that Svein Estrith-
son of Denmark was at last fitting out an army to enforce his claim to
the English crown as Knut's heir. The Danish expedition set out in
August 1068, and after ineffective attacks on Kent and East Anglia,
joined forces with Edgar the Aetheling in the Humber. The fall of York
followed towards the end of September, Waltheof taking a prominent
part in the attack. For a moment the situation looked serious; for a
revolt was also in progress in Shropshire and Staffordshire led by a thegn
named Eadric the Wild, while only a month or two earlier some of
Harold's illegitimate sons, sailing from Dublin, had effected a landing
near Barnstaple in Devon. There was, however, no real co-operation
between William's enemies, and the crisis soon passed away. Leaving the
Bishop of Coutances and Brian of Penthièvre to deal with the danger in
the south, William himself marched upon Stafford, scattering the rebels
before him, and then into Yorkshire, at the same time sending detachments
into Lindsey under the Counts of Mortain and Eu. South of the Humber
these leaders were successful in capturing several parties of Danes, but
William himself was held up at the river Aire by foods for over three
weeks. His mere proximity, however, demoralised the Danes; and when
at last he renewed his advance, he found that the main body had evacuated
York and retreated to their ships. The way was thus cleared for William
to punish the Yorkshiremen. Thrice they had defied him, and he was
determined that it should never occur again. He therefore gave
orders
that the country from the Humber to the Tyne should be systematically
devastated. For several weeks the cruel work went on, the villages one
after the other being burnt, while the inhabitants and cattle were either
killed or driven away. As a result, the whole of the diocese of York,
stretching from the North Sea to the Irish Channel, became so depopulated
that even twenty years later the greater part of it still remained an
uncultivated waste. Nothing in William's career has so blackened his
reputation as this barbarous action; but it led quickly to Gospatric and
Waltheof's submission, and at any rate freed the Normans from all further
danger. In 1070 Cheshire and Shropshire were both overcome without
any serious fighting, and by March William was back at Salisbury and
able to disband his forces. After that, only one more rising of the English
is reported. This was led by Hereward, a petty Lincolnshire landowner,
and was no more than a forlorn hope, provoked by the arrival of the
Danish fleet in the fenlands surrounding Ely. The Danes indeed effected
little beyond the sack of Peterborough, but Hereward held out in the


## p. 505 (#551) ############################################

The Conqueror re-allots the soil of England
505
Isle of Ely for over a year. The fall of his stronghold marks the completion
of the Conquest. By the close of 1071, William was in full possession of
every English shire; Earl Edwin was dead, Earl Morkere a prisoner, and
Edgar the Aetheling was once more a fugitive in Scotland.
Having followed in outline the five years' struggle by which William
gradually obtained full mastery over his kingdom, it is time to turn to
the measures which he took for its reorganisation and government. At
the outset, as we have seen, it was by no means his intention to make
many sweeping changes. He claimed to be Edward's lawful heir, and
from the first he gave out that it was his will that “all men should have
and hold Edward's law. ” Such surviving writs and charters as date from
the years 1067 and 1068 shew that at first he acted partly through
Englishmen, while to some extent he even seems to have employed the
English local levies in his military operations. The prolonged resistance,
however, which he encountered in so many districts, inevitably led the
Conqueror to change this policy, and gave him an excuse for treating all
the greater English laymen as suspected, if not active, rebels and for
confiscating their estates. He thus by degrees seized nearly all the best
land, with the exception of the broad estates owned by the Church and
the monasteries, and was able to reward his leading fighting-men not
merely handsomely, but with fiefs often ten or even twenty times as
valuable as the lands they possessed across the Channel. And even so
he by no means exhausted the land at his disposal, but was able to retain
for himself far more and far better distributed crown-lands than had
been enjoyed by any English king before him. He was able further to
set aside a sufficient amount of land to provide wages or maintenance
for some hundreds of minor officials and domestic retainers, such as
chaplains,clerks, physicians, chamberlains, cooks, barbers, bailiffs, foresters,
falconers, huntsmen, and so forth, whom he employed about his person
or on his wide-spread estates, or whose past services had entitled them to
either pensions or charity.
The process by which the conquered land was parcelled out into fiefs
for William's fighting-men can unfortunately only be surmised; for no
documents have survived, if any ever existed, recording his grants or the
terms on which they were made. The outcome of the process on the other
hand is very completely set before us, as the resulting fiefs, or “baronies”
to use the technical French term which now came into use, are all described
in minute detail in the book of Winchester," the unique land-register,
soon nicknamed “Domesdei," which the Conqueror ordered to be drawn
up in 1086. This wonderful survey, which we know as Domesday Book,
covers the whole kingdom with the exception of the four northern counties
and a few towns, London and Winchester being unfortunately among the
omissions. Internal evidence shews that the survey was made by sending
several bands of commissioners on circuit through the shires, who convened
CH. XV.


## p. 506 (#552) ############################################

506
The evidence of Domesday Book
the shire-moots and got the information they required from local juries,
containing both Normans and Englishmen, drawn from each hundred.
The resulting returns, which are set out in Domesday Book county by
county and fief by fief, are clearly answers to a definite schedule of questions
which were put to the juries, and which were designed to elicit how many
distinct properties, or “manors” as the Normans termed them, there were
in each hundred, by whom they had formerly been held in King Edward's
day, and to whom they had been allotted, how far they were sufficiently
stocked with peasantry and plough-oxen, and what was estimated to be
their annual value to their possessors, both before the Conquest and at
the date when the survey was made.
Particulars were also called for, which enable us to ascertain the
categories into which the peasantry were divided, the distribution of wood,
meadow, and pasture, and the amount of taxation to which each manor
was liable in the event of the king levying a Danegeld. Unfortunately
the clerks who compiled the record in its final shape at Winchester, and
re-arranged the returns by fiefs instead of as originally by hundreds and
villages, were not directed to summarise the information collected about
each fief; and so the survey contains no totals either of area or value for
the different fiefs by which they can be conveniently compared and
contrasted one with another. With patience, however, such totals can be
approximately worked out, and sufficiently accurate statistics compiled
to shew relatively how much of England William reserved for himself
and his personal dependants, how much he left in the hands of the prelates
and monastic houses, and how much he assigned to the various lay
baronies which he created to reward the soldiery by whose help he had
effected the Conquest. In making such calculations, however, it is not so
much the acreage or extent of any given fief which it is important to find
out as its total annual value. Any wide-spread estate, of course, gave
importance to its possessor from a political point of view; but in the
eleventh century, just as to-day, acreage was only of subsidiary importance,
and the effective power of most of the landed magnates at bottom depended,
not on the area but on the fertility and populousness of their manors
and on the revenue which could be obtained from them either in money or
in kind. It is in fact as often as not misleading to count up the number
of the manors on different fiefs, as some commentators on Domesday Book
have done, and contrast, for example, the seven hundred and ninety-three
manors allotted to the Count of Mortain with the four hundred and
thirty-nine manors allotted to the Bishop of Bayeux, or both with, say,
the hundred and sixty-two manors allotted to William Peverel. For
“manors” or holdings were of every conceivable extent and variety, just
as estates are to-day, and might vary from petty farms worth only a few
shillings a year, in the currency of those times, to lordly complexes of land
stretching over dozens of villages and worth not infrequently as much as
£100 a year or more. Even neighbouring manors of similar acreage


## p. 507 (#553) ############################################

The rental of England in 1086
507
might vary enormously in value in proportion as they were well or badly
stocked with husbandmen and cattle; while in some parts of England
whole districts remained throughout William's reign so badly devastated
that to own them was far more of a liability than an advantage, in view
of the large expenditure required for reinstatement.
To take a leading example, Hugh, the Vicomte of Avranches, was
allotted almost the whole of Cheshire with the title of Earl, a wide
territory which in later centuries gave considerable importance to his
successors; but in Hugh's day (1071-1101) the revenue which could be
derived from all the manors in Cheshire put together was estimated to be
little more than £200 a year. In Middlesex on the other hand the single
manor of Isleworth was estimated to be worth £72 a year in 1086 and
the manors of Fulham and Harrow £40 and £56 a year respectively;
nor were manors such as these by any means the most valuable which
then existed in fertile and populous parts of England. It seems clear
then that the Vicomte of Avranches did not derive his undoubted
importance and power in England so much from his Cheshire estates, in
spite of their extent, as from other far better stocked manors which
William allotted to him in Lincolnshire (£272), Suffolk (£115), Oxford-
shire (£70), and elsewhere, which were together worth over £700 a year,
and without which he and his retainers could hardly have supported
the expense of defending the marches of Cheshire against the tribesmen
of North Wales.
Let us take then the estimated annual value put upon the various
manors and estates by the Domesday juries in 1086 as the most illuminating
basis of calculation open to us. If this is done, it will be found, after
a reasonable allowance has been made for ambiguous entries and entries
where the value has been inadvertently omitted by the scribes who wrote
out the final revision, that the total revenue in the money of the period
of the rural properties dealt with in the survey, but exclusive of the
revenue arising from the towns, may be thought of in round figures as
about £73,000 a year.
To this total the ten shires of Wessex south of the Thames con-
tributed about £32,000, the three East Anglian shires about £12,950,
the eight West Mercian shires about £11,000, the seven shires of the
Southern Danelaw lying between the Thames and the Welland about
L9400, the northern Danelaw between the Welland and the Humber
about £6450, and finally the devastated lands of Yorkshire and Lanca-
shire about £1200. If it were possible to ascertain the corresponding
values at the date when the estates first came into the hands of their new
owners, the figures would in each case be much smaller; but though there
are some returns in Domesday which give the values when the lands were
received,” these are far too fragmentary to furnish the data necessary for
calculating such general totals. To make up totals from averages is all
that could be done for the earlier date, which would be unsatisfactory;
CH. XV.


## p. 508 (#554) ############################################

508
The rental analysed. The Crown-lands
and, after all, the values for 1086 are perhaps more to our purpose, as they
indicate better the potentialities of income to which the new landowners
could look forward in 1070, however much for the moment the country-
side had been impoverished by the fighting in the previous four years.
Reckoning then that the income from land which the Conqueror had
at his disposal, exclusive of the rents and other profits of the boroughs,
was potentially about L73,000 a year, Domesday Book, when further
analysed, shews that the distribution of this sum resulting from the king's
grants for the five main purposes for which he had to provide was roughly
as follows: (a) £17,650 a year for the support of the Crown and royal
house, including in that category himself, his queen, his two half-brothers,
and King Edward's widow; (6) £1800 a year for the remuneration of his
minor officials and personal servants, later known as the King's Serjeants;
(c) £19,200 a year for the support of the Church and monastic bodies;
(d) £4000 a year for the maintenance of some dozen pre-Conquest land-
owners and their men, such as Ralf the Staller, Robert son of Wimarc,
Alured of Marlborough, Colswegen of Lincoln, and Thurkil of Arden, who
for one reason or another had retained his favour; and (e) £30,350 a year
for the provision of some 170 baronies, some great and some small, for the
leading captains, Norman, French, Breton, and Flemish, and their retainers,
who had risked their lives and fortunes in the great adventure of
conquering England.
The figures just given, though of course they only claim to be approxi-
mately accurate, are of great interest, revealing as they do that William
retained nearly a quarter of the income of the kingdom from land for
the use of the royal house, and that he assigned little more than two-fifths
of the total for rewarding the chiefs of the great families who had fought
for him, and their military and other followers. Even if the two fiefs,
worth together about 25050 a year, which William assigned to his half-
brothers, the Bishop of Bayeux and the Count of Mortain, be reckoned
to the share of the baronage rather than to the share of the Crown, the
income allotted for baronial fiefs must still be thought of as considerably
less than half the total income of the estates in the kingdom. With these
two fiefs deducted, the share of the Crown may be thought of as about
£12,600 a year; but as some £1600 a year of this was assigned to Queen
Edith and her retainers for her life, William and Matilda's potential
income from their manors before 1076 was roughly £11,000 a year. Even
this smaller figure is about twice the amount of the Crown's revenue in
King Edward's day as estimated by the Domesday juries. The estates, too,
retained by the Conqueror for the Crown were more evenly distributed
over the kingdom than Edward's estates had been, so that the power of
the Crown in many districts was much increased. In the last years of his
reign Edward had possessed no manors in Middlesex, Hertfordshire,
Essex, Lincolnshire, Rutland, Cheshire, or Cornwall, and comparatively
few in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Yorkshire. As arranged by William, the


## p. 509 (#555) ############################################

The ecclesiastical
fiefs
509
Crown had a substantial share everywhere except in Sussex and in the
three counties along the Welsh border, in which districts he parted with
all the old Crown manors and erected marcher fiefs of a special kind,
apparently for military reasons. The ultimate increase in the revenue of
the Crown from land was not, however, solely due to a retention of a larger
number of manors for the royal use, but arose partly from raising the
rents at which the manors were let to farm to the sheriffs and other reeves,
who took charge of them as speculative ventures and recouped themselves
in their turn by raising the dues and increasing the services exacted from
the cultivating peasantry. To what extent these augmented rents were
justifiable or oppressive we cannot tell; but Domesday often records a
thirty, and sometimes a fifty, per cent. rise above the estimated values of
King Edward's day, and in not a few instances the remark is added that
the cultivators could not bear these increased burdens.
Turning from the Crown to the Church, let us next analyse the revenue
of about £19,200 a year set aside for the support of the various classes of
the clergy. This substantial sum is made up of four items as follows:
(a) £8000 a year assigned for the maintenance of the secular clergy, that
is to say of the fifteen bishopries and of the houses of secular canons, some
thirty in number, but exclusive of the endowments of the parochial clergy;
(6)£9200 a year appropriated to some forty monasteries for men; (c) £1200
a year appropriated to some ten nunneries; and (d) £800 a year appro-
priated, by the gift of either Edward or William, to Norman and other
foreign monasteries.
In one sense of course very little of this revenue can be said to have
been assigned to the Church by William, for the greater proportion of
the manors which produced it had long been devoted to religious purposes.
The Conqueror, however, as a matter of policy acted on the principle that
not even the oldest grants to the Church were valid until he had re-con-
firmed them. As a result, the Church suffered not a few losses; but she
was at the same time recouped by many new grants of great value, and
on the whole gained considerably. In particular, the poorly-endowed sees
of the Danelaw acquired a great increase of temporalities. In some cases,
however, such new acquisitions seem to have been purchased. The see of
Canterbury, as might be expected, enjoyed the wealthiest fief, with a
revenue of about £1750 a year, the see of Winchester coming second with
a revenue of over £1000 a year. In general, however, the greater monas-
teries controlled more valuable fiefs than the lesser bishops. The seven
richest houses, that is to say, Glastonbury (£840), Ely(£790), St Edmund's
Bury (£655), the old Minster at Winchester (£640), Christchurch at
Canterbury (£635), St Augustine's (L635), and Westminster (£600), were
assigned between them a revenue of nearly £4800 a year, whereas the ten
poorer bishoprics had less than £3000 a year between them. The see of
Selsey for example had even in 1086 only a revenue of £138 a year, and
the see of Chester even less. It is true the secular clergy had other sources
CH. XV.


## p. 510 (#556) ############################################

510
The English survivors. The lay fiefs
of revenue besides their manorial incomes; but none the less it remains one
of the most outstanding features of the society of the day that the monks
and nuns, who can hardly have numbered all told a thousand individuals,
should have had control of so large a share of the rental of England.
Having provided for himself, his half-brothers, his personal servants,
and the Church, William still had an income of over L34,000 a year from
land at his disposal. Some £4000 of this, as already noted, was either
restored to or bestowed on favoured Englishmen and their retainers; but
these doles were on too small a scale to affect the general character of the
Conquest settlement, and so they need not detain us. It is, however, in-
teresting to observe that Archbishop Stigand occupies an important place
in this category; for he appears in Domesday as holding a personal barony
worth some £800 a year in addition to his immense Church preferments,
and so as a landowner he ranks with the wealthiest of the barons. Let us
pass on then and consider the general body of the military fiefs, the
“baronies” or “honours” as the Normans termed them, which were created
to reward the invading armies, and which form one of the corner-stones of
the English social system for some three centuries. It is here that the
Domesday evidence is particularly welcome, the evidence of the historical
writers being for the most part vague, and limited to too few fiefs to give a
true picture. Domesday on the other hand enables us to analyse and
compare all the fiefs, and shews that there were at least one hundred and
seventy baronies, without counting as such the petty fiefs held directly of
the Crown with incomes of less than £10 a year,
which were also numerous
but only of subsidiary importance.
As with the “manors,” the first thing to note about the “baronies”
is that they were of many different types and varied not only in size and
value, but in compactness and to some extent in the conditions of tenure
under which they held. What a contrast one barony might be to another
can best be seen from the fact that the list of baronies comprises fiefs of
all grades, starting from quite modest estates producing incomes of only
£15 a year or less and gradually advancing in stateliness up to two
princely fiefs with revenues of about £1750 a year each. Another cha-
racteristic is that there were no well-marked groups in the list corre-
sponding to definite grades of rank; nor is there any indication that the
Conqueror distributed his rewards in accordance with any pre-arranged
scheme. A clear idea of the nature of his distribution, however, can only
be gained by attempting some classification; and so it will be well to
divide the baronies arbitrarily into the five following groups: Class A,
containing baronies valued at over £750 a year each; Class B, contain-
ing baronies having revenues between £650 and £400 a year; Class C,
containing baronies having revenues between £400 and £200 a year;
Class D, containing baronies with revenues between L200 and £100 a
year; and Class E, containing baronies valued at less than £100 a year.


## p. 511 (#557) ############################################

Classification and tenure of the fiefs
511
Working on these lines, Domesday enables us to say that in Class A
there were eight baronies, having an aggregate of about £9000 a year; in
Class B ten baronies, with revenues aggregating about £5000 a year; in
Class C twenty-four, with revenues aggregating about £7000 a year;
in Class D thirty-six; and in Class E between ninety and one hundred.
The two wealthiest baronies were those assigned to William Fitz Osbern
and Roger of Montgomery; and next in order came the fiefs allotted
respectively to William of Warenne, Hugh of Avranches, Eustace of
Boulogne, Richard of Clare, Geoffrey Bishop of Coutances, and Geoffrey
de Mandeville. In Class B the richest fief was that assigned to Robert
Malet, and several other famous names figure in it, such as Ferrers,
Bigod, Giffard, Braiose, Crispin, and Taillebois; but it is not till Class C
is reached that we come to the equally famous names of Peverel, Lacy,
Montfort, Toeni, Mortimer, and Vere, and only at the very bottom of
Class C that we find Beaumont and Beauchamp. It remains to be said
that if we insert the English survivors into these classes, Ralf the Staller
and Stigand take rank in Class A, Earl Waltheof in Class B, and Robert
son of Wimarc in Class C. Similarly as regards the bishoprics. The sees
of Canterbury and Winchester, both be it noted held by Stigand, are the
only sees which rank in wealth with the first class of baronies. The
sees of London (£615), Dorchester (£600), Salisbury (£600), Worcester
(£480), and Thetford (L420) rank with the second class; the sees of Exeter
(£360), Wells (£325), York (£370), Hereford (£280), Rochester (L220),
and Durham (L205) with the third, Chichester (£138) with the fourth,
and Chester (£85) with the fifth. York and Durham, however, are not
fully accounted for in Domesday, and so possibly these sees should be
reckoned as baronies of the second class.
The spoils of victory being thus parcelled out, we must next inquire
under what conditions of tenure the baronies were held. On this point
the Domesday survey is unfortunately silent, no questions as to tenure
being put to the hundred juries, and so we have to fall back on infer-
ences drawn from the conditions of tenure found in force in England a
generation or two later, supplemented by the few vague hints which can
be gleaned here and there from monastic chronicles. There can, however,
be hardly any doubt that William from the outset insisted that the
baronies should be held on the same conditions of tenure as the baronies
in Normandy, nor can the barons themselves have desired to hold by any
tenure other than the one they were accustomed to and understood. This
means that the English methods of land-tenure were not adopted, and
that the barons obtained their fiefs on the four conditions of (a) doing
homage to the king and swearing fealty, (6) providing definite quotas
of fully-equipped knights, if summoned, to serve in the king's army for
40 days in the year at their own cost, (c) attending the king's court
when summoned to give advice and assist the king in deciding causes,
and (d) aiding the king with money on the happening of certain events.
CH. XV.


## p. 512 (#558) ############################################

512
The quotas of military service
If these obligations were not sufficiently performed, it was recognised that
the baronies were liable to be forfeited. As to the rules of succession, it was
recognised that no baron had any power to dispose of his barony or any
part of it by will. If a baron died leaving no heirs, the barony escheated,
that is, fell back to the Crown. If there were male heirs it descended to
them, subject to the payment of a relief to the Crown; but already there
was a tendency for the king to claim that fiefs were indivisible and to insist
on enforcing a rule of primogeniture. If there were only female heirs, the
fief was partitioned amongst them provided the king did not interfere. If
the heirs were minors, the king had the right of guardianship, and in
the case of female heirs the right of bestowing them in marriage. A
further question, about which there has been a good deal of discussion,
is how were the quotas of knights to be provided fixed for each barony.
There has been a tendency to suppose that the number of knights de-
manded must have borne some fixed relation either to the size or to the
value of the barony. All the evidence, however, tends to prove that in
this matter there was much caprice and no uniformity, and it seems
probable that the king was able to fix the amount of military service
arbitrarily when the baronies were created, and perhaps solely in accord-
ance with his personal estimation of the merits of the various barons. As a
result the quotas which he imposed, the servitium debitum as it was called,
were for most baronies a round number of knights-5, 10, 15, 20, 40,
60, and so on, the feudal armies being organised on a basis of consta-
bularies of ten knights. Quotas of forty or more knights were imposed
on most of the baronies having revenues of over £200 a year; quotas
of between twenty and forty knights on most of the baronies having
revenues of between L200 and £100 a year. It appears, however, that
several of the poorer baronies had to find comparatively large quotas,
and on the whole the burden of knights' service was lightest for the
richer baronies. It is certainly curious that William was satisfied with
such small quotas, for the system is only designed to produce a force of
some 4200 knights. He made up his mounted force, however, to 5000
knights by imposing tenure by knights' service on all the bishoprics and
on a number of the richer abbeys, and he evidently regarded these selected
ecclesiastical fiefs in many respects as baronies. One more matter re-
quires elucidation. It is commonly supposed that there was a castle at
the head of each barony, but at any rate in William's day this was not
the case. It is true that William himself ordered many castles to be
built, but these were on his own estates; it is also true that many
castles
were erected by William Fitz Osbern, Roger of Montgomery, and Hugh
of Avranches, the three barons with special powers put in charge of the
Welsh marches; but elsewhere William insisted that no castles should be
built without his licence. A small number of barons only were accorded
this special mark of favour, and those who obtained it were not always
the barons with the largest fiefs. Most of the barons, it would seem, far


## p. 513 (#559) ############################################

The under-tenants and the peasantry
513
from having castles of their own, were saddled on the contrary with the
obligation of finding garrisons for the royal castles, a service that came
to be known as “castle-guard. ”
Having set out the baronies and defined their military liabilities and
conditions of tenure, William to all appearances left each baron full
discretion to deal with his barony as he liked. The various manors com-
posing it were handed over as going concerns with the peasantry living
upon them, and each baron selected for himself which manors he would
keep as demesnes for himself and which he would sub-enfeof. The king
did not even insist that enough knights should be enfeoffed to perform
the servitium debitum of the barony. If the barons preferred it, they
had full liberty to farm out their lands to non-military tenants, who
held not by knights' service but by the tenure known as “socage,” that
is to say, by the payment of rents in kind or in money, together with
some light agricultural services. It thus came about that, though the
baronies in their entirety were held by knights' service, only a portion
of the lands which they comprised were actually held by military tenants.
It must not be supposed, either, that when subtenancies were created
the barons only gave them to their kinsmen or retainers from overseas.
The returns in Domesday shew clearly that on all baronies many men
were granted subtenancies who were of English descent, and some of
these undoubtedly held their lands by knights' service subject to the
same conditions as their Norman neighbours. As to the peasant classes,
it was not to the interest of either the barons or their subvassals to
expropriate them to any extent. The invaders were few and could not
provide a peasantry from their own ranks. Their interest lay in having
as numerous a population as possible on their estates, in order that they
might obtain increased dues and increased labour services from them,
and in time bring more land into cultivation. At the same time the
new landlords could see no use in preserving the numerous distinctions
which had differentiated the “geneat” from the “gebur” or the “soc-
manni” from the “liberi homines. ” They found it much more convenient
to regard the peasantry as all equally bound to the soil and all liable to
similar dues. In particular they were hostile to the system of com-
mendation under which some of the cultivating classes had been free to
select and change their lords. As a result commendation was entirely
swept away, and the men in every manor, whatsoever their social status,
became bound to their lords by an hereditary tie. This meant a con-
siderable social revolution, especially in the eastern half of England.
To a great extent the freer classes were merged into the less free, ab-
sorbed into manors, and compelled to do unfree services. Every lord of
a manor was allowed under the new system to maintain a court for his
tenantry and could compel them to bring their civil disputes before it,
provided tenants of other lords were not involved. The net outcome no
doubt was increased exploitation of the peasantry, but at the same time
C. MED. H. VOL. V. CH. XV.
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514
William's anti-feudal measures
the advent of the new landowners also meant greater activity in farming.
When once the turmoil of the Conquest and reallotment of the land was
over, the new lords set to work with a will at reinstatement, and they
not only, in a few years, restocked the greater proportion of the wasted
manors, but are soon found encouraging the assartation of woodlands,
the drainage of the fens, the building of mills and churches, and the
planting of new urban centres. There were of course black sheep among
them, stupid and avaricious men, of whom little good is reported; but
such men were hardly typical and, at any rate as long as William lived,
they had to keep in the background and curb their passions.
The allotment of the land was perhaps the most complicated and
critical task that William had to undertake. At any rate it was the
most revolutionary of his measures; for it established in England the
cardinal feudal doctrines that all land is held of the king, that all occu-
piers of land except the king must be tenants either of the king himself
or of some lord who holds of the king, that the tie between the lord and
his tenants is hereditary, and that the extent of each man's holding and
the nature of his tenure determine in the main his civil and political
rights. William in fact, whether consciously or not, brought about a
reconstruction of society on a new legal basis, and so in a sense turned
England into a feudal state. But though this is so, William also took
very good care that he himself should not become a feudal king after
the pattern of the king in France or the Emperor in Germany. In
Normandy he had established his ascendency over the baronage and had
shewn how feudalism could be combined with personal government. In
England he worked out exactly the same result on a larger scale. Rich
and magnificent as were some of the new baronies, never allowed
any
of their holders to become petty kings in their own fiefs, to make
private war on their neighbours, or to acquire a jurisdiction over their
tenants which would entirely exclude his own. To this end he main-
tained intact the courts of the shire and hundreds, and to some extent
the Anglo-Saxon system of police. To this end he created only six or
seven earldoms, with strictly curtailed spheres and privileges, and in the
rest of England retained all the fiscal rights that had attached to the
office in his own hands. To this end he insisted on the rule that all
tenants by knights' service owed that service to the king alone and not
to the barons from whom they held their knights' fees. To this end he
maintained side by side with the new feudal cavalry-force the right to
call out the old national infantry levy. Taxation was not feudalised. The
obligation on all freeholders to pay "gelds” was maintained as well as
the obligation to serve in the “fyrd"; and for both purposes William
quickly realised that he must put on record the details of the ancient
hidage scheme from which alone each man's liability could be ascertained.
Lastly, he never allowed his advisory council to take a definitely feudal
shape. As supreme feudal lord he constantly held courts for his imme-
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The King's Court. Reform of the Church
515
diate tenants; but, the kingdom being large and the tenants widely
dispersed, he soon established the practice of summoning only a portion
of the tenants to any particular court. As a result the court of barons, the
“Curia Regis," as it was called, easily became a very elastic body, very like
the old “Witenagemot” in composition, in which the king could take the
advice of whom he would, but still need never hamper himself by summon-
ing too many of those who were likely to oppose his wishes. So completely
indeed was this principle established, that mere gatherings of the king's
household officers, the steward, the butler, the chamberlain, or the con-
stable, reinforced by one or two prelates and perhaps one or two barons
of moderate estate, came to be regarded before William died as a suffi-
cient meeting of the “Curia Regis” for all but the most important sorts
of business, and the way became cleared for future kings to utilise their
feudal court as the chief organ of government, out of which in due
time the various departments of state for special purposes were each in
turn developed. There were, however, no developments of this nature
in William's day. Confident in his own powers and determined to be
master in everything, his numerous “writs” shew that he settled nearly
every detail himself, and made little use of any subordinates other than
the staff of royal chaplains who prepared the writs under the super-
vision of his chancellor, and the local sheriffs to whom the writs were
addressed, who presided in the shire-courts, had charge of the col-
lection of the revenue, and farmed the royal manors. So confident indeed
was he, that he frequently employed barons of the third grade as sheriffs;
but it is clear that he dismissed them at will, and we never find them
in league against him or attempting independent action. Looked at
broadly, the outcome of the Conqueror's policy was the establishment of
a monarchy of such an absolute type that it could ignore all provincial
differences of law and custom; and so William's measures tended to bring
about a real unity in the kingdom such as had never been known under
the Saxon kings.
One set of deliberate reforms has still to be mentioned. Before the
Conquest the English Church organisation was very defective. Synods
for promulgating ecclesiastical laws had ceased to be held, nor were
there any special ecclesiastical tribunals or any definite system of arch-
deaconries. The special jurisdiction of the bishops was exercised in the
shire and hundred moots, with the result that the enforcement of moral
discipline was at the mercy of doomsmen who were ignorant of Canon Law
and very possibly themselves offenders. Even the powers of the primate
over his suffragans were far from clear; and the two archbishops, instead
of working together, were in dispute as to their spheres of jurisdiction. In
addition to these defects, there was little zeal shewn anywhere for either
discipline or learning.