Foundation Read online

  The main task of the king was indeed to lead his people into battle. By the aggrandizement of land and wealth he rendered the country more powerful and more worthy of God’s grace. All the land was his. He owned all highways and bridges, all monasteries and churches, all towns and rivers, all markets and fairs. That is why from the earliest times England was controlled by a minute and complex system of taxation. The coin itself was minted in the king’s name. The voice of the king was the voice of law; it could be said that he held the laws of the land in his breast. This was also the claim of Richard II, many centuries after his Saxon ancestors.

  William the Conqueror did not need to create the role of a powerful and centralizing king, therefore; he simply had to take up the part acquired by him. He adopted his crown three times a year at a ceremony known as the festal crown-wearing; we may imagine a tableau in which the king, in silent possession of his majesty, receives the homage of his great lords. There had been such crown-wearings in the eighth century but the practice may lie further back. These three days of the year – Christmas, Easter and Pentecost – were also the days when the pagan kings of the north used to perform a ritual sacrifice for the sake of the people. So kingship had very ancient roots. It has been said that William borrowed from the customs of the Frankish or Roman or Byzantine civilizations; yet it may be that his true ancestors are to be found in those who ordered the building of Stonehenge.

  The Angevin kings, the line of Henry II, Richard I and John I, chose instinctively to espouse and even to exaggerate the sense of divine kingship. They were all wilful and ruthless sovereigns who systematically exploited the resources of the country to bolster their own sense of significance. Richard was the first king to use the plural ‘we’ in the composition of royal charters. John was the first to call himself the king of the land rather than the king of the people. The premise of absolute power was of course challenged by the barons in the course of John’s reign, but it did not disappear with his death. It lay beneath the confused inheritance and dynastic struggles of the later generations; royal power was still a question of what was possible rather than what was just or right. In the thirteenth century the principle of primogeniture or the hereditary right of the eldest son was first advanced. The power of the Crown was secure in the reigns of Henry IV, Henry V and Edward IV. Richard II was the monarch most inclined to emphasize the divine rights of kingship.

  There was no progress towards a more liberal or benevolent concept of monarchy working in partnership with the great magnates of the land. As soon as the conditions were right, at the beginning of what has become known as the Tudor period, the king reasserts all of his authority and power with as much forcefulness as any Norman monarch.

  The belief that the king’s touch could cure the skin disease of scrofula emerged at some point in the twelfth century, although Edward the Confessor was accredited with miraculous powers at an earlier date. It is possible that Henry II was the first king to make a ritual out of healing those afflicted by the disease, and one of his courtiers wrote that the ‘royal unction’ was manifest ‘by the diminution of groin disease and the cure of scrofula’. The tradition continued until at least 1712, when Queen Anne touched the three-year-old Samuel Johnson for the latter disease. Johnson remained a staunch royalist for the rest of his life.

  7

  The coming of the conquerors

  By the end of the tenth century England was a rich and prosperous country. So the men of Denmark still came in search of treasure and of slaves; they fought against naturalized Danes as well as Englishmen. Sporadic raiding took place in the 980s, and in the course of one attack London was put to the torch. It was one of the many great fires of London. In 991 a Danish army overwhelmed a native force in Essex, giving rise to a great English poem of lament entitled ‘The Battle of Maldon’:

  Our thoughts must be the braver, our hearts the steadier,

  Our courage the greater, as our strength grows less.

  It is a poem containing all the stoicism and valour of the tenth-century warrior. He rode to the battlefield and then dismounted in order to fight on foot; he killed, rather than captured, the enemy. The English monarch Ethelred II was obliged to sue for peace after the signal defeat at Maldon. The Vikings wanted money, and Ethelred agreed to buy them off with £22,000 of silver and gold. The negotiations were helped by the fact that the English king could understand Old Norse. The taxation system of the nascent state was put into operation to provide what has become known as Danegeld or ‘the Danish tax’.

  This had been precisely the method used by Alfred when faced with victorious foes, but Ethelred was not so fortunate or perhaps as sagacious as his ancestor. He was given the nickname ‘unready’ or more precisely ‘ill-advised’, and it may be that his real fault lay in taking bad counsel. The leaders of the realm, the earls who controlled the shires, were divided among themselves on the best way of confronting the Danish threat. In legal and administrative affairs he was better served, however, and his reign is notable for its law-codes and charters. His was also a court of poetry and music as well as of war. We might call him Ethelred the Unlucky, with the proviso that kings are obliged to make their own luck.

  The king of Denmark was in that fortunate position. When he laid siege to London in 994, Ethelred again poured money into his purse. This was getting to be a habit. And the Danes now knew that England was as craven as it was wealthy. That is why all their attacks were now aimed against it. The raids continued over succeeding years, until the time came when a Danish king gained the throne. Ethelred materially affected the history of England in another sense, when in 1002 he married the daughter of the count of Normandy. It was a way of securing the protection of the south-east coast but, by that union, the fate of the English became inseparable from the fate of the Normans.

  In the early years of the eleventh century a storm of blood fell across England. The chroniclers write of nothing except the savagery and violence of the Viking raiders, of monasteries ransacked and towns put to the torch. In the same year as his marriage Ethelred ordered a general massacre of the Danes in England in retaliation for the attacks; it was said at the time of the slaughter that ‘every parish can kill its own fleas’. Ten years later the archbishop of Canterbury was murdered by a Danish force, and became one of the first martyrs of the English Church.

  In 1013 the king of Denmark, Swein Forkbeard, deemed that England was on the point of chaos and collapse. The various shires were in disarray, with their leaders unable to agree on a coherent strategy. Ethelred himself seemed to waver between paying and killing the enemy. One English bishop, Wulfstan, who called himself ‘Lupus’ or the Wolf, delivered a sermon to the nation in which he declared that ‘soldiers, famine, flames, and effusion of blood, abound on every side. Theft and murder, pestilence, disease, calumny, hatred, and rapine, dreadfully afflict us.’ It was the punishment of God on a sinful people. The nobles had squandered their strength in luxury.

  So Swein Forkbeard sailed with his son, Canute, in a great fleet. They came in splendour, their ships ornamented with gold and silver, their shields brightly burnished; when the sun shone on them, the eyes of the spectators were dazzled. Admiration, and dread, were mingled. All the people of the Danelaw submitted to him, and Ethelred fled to the protection of the walls of London before taking refuge in Normandy. He came back to England, on the death of Swein, but the young Canute proved too much for him and his sons. On their prone bodies Canute climbed to the throne in 1016. With the death of Ethelred and of the son who succeeded him, Edmund Ironside, the long lineage of the early English kings came to an end. The descendants of Alfred, the sons of Woden, had ruled the country for 145 years. Not one of them was ever proclaimed to be a tyrant.

  The first acts of King Canute were bloody indeed. He slaughtered the leading nobles of England, together with their children, so that his own sons could retain their dominion. When he took hostages, he often mutilated them before releasing them. He was as cunning as he was cruel; po
wer often uses piety for its own deep purposes and, after his conversion to Christianity, he gave unstintingly to churches. When he entered the great monasteries, according to a chronicler, his eyes were fixed on the ground and he overflowed with ‘a true river of tears’. The tears were not idle ones. He needed the English Church as a way of maintaining his spiritual authority as a legitimate king. He also strengthened an already strong position by marrying Ethelred’s widow, Emma from Normandy. But he had acquired a country that had suffered almost continual warfare and raiding for more than thirty years, and the universal call was for peace at any price. The price was vast. Canute exacted more than £82,000 from the shires of England in order to pay off his army.

  Then he began to set his kingdom in order. He divided the country into four military districts, and scattered his chosen men – his housecarls – over the shires in place of the English thegns. The English were once more a subject race. Canute was now a great emperor in his own right. He claimed to be the overlord of Scotland, of Ireland and of Wales. One of the Scottish nobles who paid homage to him was Maelbeath, better known to posterity as Macbeth. Canute was also lord of Denmark and of Norway, thus forming a Scandinavian empire of which England was a part. He married his daughter to the German emperor, whose coronation he had attended in Rome. He was known as Canute the Great, but he knew where his greatness ended. The setting for the story of the king failing to command the waves was the bank of the tidal Thames at Westminster, where his palace was situated. He died in the winter of 1035, and it is believed that his bones still lie buried somewhere within Winchester Cathedral.

  The reigns of Canute’s two sons, Harold Harefoot and Harthacanute, were short and inglorious, reinforcing the perception that the sons of a powerful father are often weak and insecure. Harthacanute was half a Canute. He and his brother serve only as a prelude to the longer rule of Edward, known as ‘the Confessor’. The new sovereign was the son of Ethelred and Emma; he was therefore part English and part Norman. He was related to King Egbert of Wessex, grandfather of Alfred, but he was also a Viking; the Normans had once been Viking settlers.

  In any case his real sympathies lay with the duchy of Normandy, in which he had lived for twenty-eight years. He arrived in London with a Norman escort, thus marking the true beginning of the Norman invasion. Within a few years of his coronation on Easter Day 1043, three Norman clerics were given English bishoprics, and Edward also planted a number of foreign magnates on English soil; they followed their native tradition and built castles rather than halls. The new king granted the Sussex ports to Feécamp Abbey, situated on the coast of Normandy, and gave the merchants of Rouen their own London port at Dowgate. The first act of the eleventh-century drama had begun. The invasion of 1066 was the end of a long process.

  The earls of England, however, the powerful magnates who controlled the shires, were instinctively hostile to the Norman interlopers. Among their number were Godwin, earl of Wessex, and Leofric, earl of Mercia; Godwin was married to a Danish noblewoman, while Leofric had been connected by marriage to the wife of Canute. The Danes and the English were close to becoming one people. It is a pertinent fact that the Danes fought alongside the English at the battle of Hastings.

  The two earls have long passed from memory but, curiously enough, the wife of Leofric survives in legend. Lady Godgifu is better known as Lady Godiva; her ride through the marketplace of Coventry, naked but with her long hair covering her honour, has become one of the most famous of English stories. She essayed the journey on condition that her husband alleviated the taxes of the citizens. It was also said that she commanded all windows to be closed and covered, so that she would be heard but not seen; one person disobeyed the rule, and he became known ever afterwards as ‘peeping Tom’. So another phrase has entered the vocabulary. There is no truth in the legend, of course, except for the fact that Godiva was indeed ‘lady of Coventry’ in the eleventh century. Almost a thousand years later, the ‘black eagle’ of Leofric is still part of the city’s coat of arms.

  If the earls of England were hostile to the Normans in their midst, they were also averse to war and disorder. When Godwin of Wessex led an insurgency against Edward, the other magnates joined forces with the king and obliged Godwin to flee to Bruges. The leaders of the nation feared open civil war, and they also feared another Viking invasion. That is why they would not fight one another. This bond of shared loyalty helped to stabilize the realm, and to ensure Edward’s survival. When Godwin died his son, Harold, took the earldom of Wessex; he would become one of England’s most short-lived kings.

  As a monarch Edward the Confessor made singularly little impression on the English chroniclers. He also made hardly any impression at all upon the course of English life. Of his character and nature, very little is known. The fact that he survived at all in such a ruthless and violent society suggests that he possessed shrewdness as well as resilience. He was called ‘the Confessor’ because he was deemed to have borne witness to the efficacy of the Christian faith, but in life he was not a particularly pious king. In one eulogistic poem he is described as ‘claene and milde’: he was ‘claene’ because he was not licentious, and he had no child; he was ‘milde’ because he was merciful. But he was not devout. His grants to the abbeys and monasteries were no more than what was expected. He showed no particular talent for diplomacy or administration. He had no grand plan; he worked by hazard and necessity, responding to each crisis in a measured manner. He had no principles other than those of self-interest and survival. Chance, and fortune, were his mentors. In this he was not unlike any other English king. It is perhaps the most important lesson of the nation’s history.

  With his death the life of England passes to a new stage. In the period from the eighth to the eleventh centuries, the identity of the nation was formed. Edward the Confessor had been rex Anglorum, ‘king of the English’, and his people were the anglica gens; he controlled Anglorum exercitus, ‘the army of the English’, and anglicanum regnum, ‘the kingdom of the English’. In this period, too, the fundamental components of the English state – the shire, the hundred and the tithing – were complete. England was unique and distinctive in its possession of a strong state. English law was propounded and drawn up in elaborate codes, with laws on property and inheritance that remained fundamentally unaltered for many hundreds of years. The art and literature of the period, including Beowulf (tentatively dated to the eighth century) and the Lindisfarne Gospels (early eighth century), have become part of the English heritage. Most importantly, the customs of the land were maintained and its traditions were preserved. The essential continuities of the English nation were passed on.

  To whom did Edward leave his crown? The question has never been satisfactorily resolved. It is reported that on his deathbed he pronounced Harold, son of Godwin, as his successor. Harold was not in fact the rightful heir; that honour was held by the king’s great-nephew, Edgar Atheling, who was only fourteen years old. In turn William, duke of Normandy, claimed that Edward had offered him the crown and that Harold had sworn on the relics of the saints to submit to William. Since history is written by the victor, that account became generally accepted. It is likely to be completely untrue.

  In any case Harold believed himself to have the greater claim, even though he was not part of any royal dynasty. He was the senior earl in the country, earl of East Anglia and earl of Wessex, possessed of vast estates and a great fortune. He was brother-in-law to the dead monarch and in Edward’s lifetime he was deemed to be a sub-regulus or ‘under-king’. The chroniclers report that he was of a free and open nature, and his own acts prove that he was skilful and brave in matters of war. With his brother, Tostig, he subdued Wales in 1063. So on 6 January 1066, the day of Edward’s burial, Harold was crowned as king of the English; it was the first coronation in the newly consecrated Westminster Abbey. Yet this happy precedent did not necessarily augur well. His reign, lasting nine months and nine days, was one of the shortest in English history.

&nbs
p; Two threats were raised against his kingdom. One came from the Scandinavian kings of northern Europe, eager to restore Canute’s empire, and the other now came from Normandy, where Duke William seems to have felt himself slighted or humiliated by the choice of Harold as king. It is alleged that, on hearing the news, he was much agitated. He could not sit still. He raged. He was driven by greed and desire for power.

  William was a child of violence and of adversity. In his earlier years he was known as William the Bastard, being the illegitimate child of his father’s relationship with the daughter of a tanner. He himself said that ‘I was schooled in war since childhood’, when he succeeded to the duchy at the age of seven or eight. He came to power in a region that was noted for private feud and vendetta with ensuing public disorder. But by force of character he subdued his enemies. He won his first victory on the battlefield at the age of nineteen, and reduced the neighbouring regions of Maine and Brittany to feudal dependency. He was a man of formidable power and ruthlessness, greedy for lands and for money. But he had one great gift; he had the power of command and was able to bend men to his will. If they refused to be persuaded, he broke them.

  That is why he was able to recreate the Norman state in his own image. It was still essentially a Norse state, fashioned from the early tenth century when Norwegian invaders forced their way into the territory and were allowed to settle there. The Normans were indeed the North men. They were part of a warrior aristocracy, their culture and society far less sophisticated than those of England. But they were learned in the new arts of war, which the English armies had not yet mastered. Duke William took the disparate regions of his duchy and, through a potent mixture of bellicosity and cunning, forged them into a centralized state under his leadership. He is a pre-eminent example of the ‘strong man’, the maker of the state, who emerges in all periods of the world’s history. He was 5 feet and 10 inches in height (1.7 metres), corpulent by middle age, with a harsh and rough voice. He had enormous strength and physical stamina. It was said that he could bend on horseback the bow that other men could not even bend on foot.