From William the Conqueror to Bill the Bean Counter: the journey of a killer king
'Truly in his time men had much oppression and many injuries'
By DAVID MYTON
If there is a statue that causes offence to me it has to be that of William The Conqueror in Falaise, France. Now, I would never inflict any physical damage to William’s likeness knowing that I can leave his demise to the immutable law of Ozymandias – that time, and erosion, will take care of it. [See Shelley’s poem below]
William defeated the army of reigning Saxon king Harold Godwineson at the Battle of Hastings on October 14 1066, believing that he, not the now-slain Harold, was the legitimate heir to the throne of the recently-deceased King Edward the Confessor.
William asserted that Harold was a usurper and an oath-breaker, spinning out a spurious story (illustrated in the Bayeux Tapestry) that years before the battle Harold had sworn on holy relics his allegiance to William.
Whatever, all that mattered now was the Harold was dead and so William was crowned King of England at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066.
For the Saxon population that was bad enough – but much worse happened a few years later. And that was when William unleashed a genocidal attack on large tracts of northern England, laying waste to the land, slaughtering livestock, burning pasture, and murdering or otherwise condemning many thousands to die slowly and painfully of starvation - including children. “Truly, in his time men had much oppression and many injuries,” says the Anglo Saxon Chronicles.
This devastating attack on Yorkshire and nearby counties is known as The Harrying of the North, and it was a story I knew well for the outrage was ingrained in the folk-memory of my North Yorkshire home when I was growing up back in the 1950s-60s.
The impact of William’s invasion was felt not just in Yorkshire, but also in England as a whole. David Howarth notes in his book 1066: The Year of the Conquest, that all the people saw was a cruel foreign tyranny.
“It is reckoned that in the next 20 years [after 1066] 200,000 Normans and Frenchmen settled in the country, while at least 300,000 English people – one in five of the native population - were killed in William’s ravages or starved by the seizure of their farm stock and their land”. [p198]
The 11th century monks who wrote the relevant part of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles had this to say of William:
He had castles made and oppressed poor men;
The king was very hard
And took of his underlings many marks of gold,
And many more hundreds of pounds of silver,
That he took by weight, unjustly,
From his people for little need
Into avarice he was fallen
And greediness he loved overall …
The rich complained, the poor lamented;
But he was so hard he set their hate at naught. …
Welaway! That any man should grow so proud,
To think himself lifted up over all men ...
The historian Marc Morris cites chronicler and Benedictine monk Orderic Vitalis:
“In his anger [William] commanded that all crops and herds, chattels and food of every kind should be brought together and burned to ashes with consuming fire, so that the whole region north of the Humber might be stripped of all means of sustenance … As a consequence, so serious a scarcity was felt in England, and so terrible a famine fell upon the humble and defenceless people, that more than 100,000 Christian folk of both sexes, young and old alike, perished of hunger.”[ii]
William and his army had won The Battle of Hastings, no question. King Harold and his brothers Leofwine and Gyrth were slain in the conflict – famously depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry (note for pedants: it’s actually an embroidery).
Harold’s army at Hastings was no push-over – it included a mass of amateur fyrd militia but was leavened by the special forces of the day, fearsome axe-wielding professional warriors known as Housecarls.
It’s irresistible, though, to imagine what might have happened had Harold’s wayward brother Tostig not invaded the north of England in September 1066 with a host of Vikings led by the ruthless and exceedingly tall Harald Hardrada.
King Harold had to leave his southern defence posts and march north with his army to deal with this unforeseen menace – a journey getting on for 200km and described as “one of the signal feats of military history”. [iii]
Harold and his army defeated the Tostig/Hardrada Viking host at the Battle of Stamford Bridge just a few miles from York.
Then Harold heard the news that William had landed at Pevensey on the south coast – so he and his army turned around and repeated the marathon march to do battle with the man who wanted his throne.
A few years ago at the brilliant Jorvik Viking Centre in York, I had the opportunity to get kitted out in 11th century battle style – including a helmet, shield and a sword.
It was heavy, and there’s absolutely no way I could have walked from London to York, fought a battle, then walked back quick time to fight again at Hastings. Those guys were fit and strong. And brave.
After his victory, William was crowned king in the new Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. Thus began a new era for England, and the end of the old one.
Pre-conquest England had been plagued by invasions and incursions by Vikings from Scandinavia for many years. War was nothing new.
It was no genteel pastoral arcadia. But it was theirs.
Life was simple and usually short. The people raised their animals, worked the land, they knew its ways, and that good times invariably would be followed by hard.
Authors Robert Lacey & Danny Danziger in The Year 1000: What Life Was Like At The Turn Of The First Millennium, cite lines from an old English poem from the era, entitled The Fortunes Of Men – which they explain is a meditation on fate or on old English wyrd, which means “what will be”:
Often and again, through God’s grace
Man and Woman usher a child
Into the world and clothe him in gay colours
They cherish him, teach him as the seasons turn
Until his young bones strengthen,
His limbs lengthen
Hunger will devour one, storm dismast another
One will be spear-slain, one hacked down in battle …
One will drop, wingless, from the high tree …
One will swing from the tall gallows …
The sword’s edge will shear the life of one
At the mead bench, some angry sot
Soaked with wine. His words were too hasty…
One will settle beside his harp
At his lord’s feet, be handed treasures …
One will tame that arrogant wild bird
The hawk on the fist, until the falcon
Becomes Gentle
The primitive church was a comfort and help … “people believed as fervently in the power of saints bones as many today believe that wheat bran or jogging or psychoanalysis can increase the sum of human happiness”.
And the Saxons also wrote some great epics, including Beowulf, and a large amount of poetry – much of which inspired JRR Tolkien in the creation of The Lord of the Rings. Although the Saxons didn’t ride horses into battle, I’m pretty sure Tolkien’s Rohirim were based on the Saxons.
And in law, surprisingly, the Saxon codes “were concerned to shield women against the hazards of life in a rough, male-dominated society. If the epic poetry of the time embodied the aggressive male ethos of the warrior band, the law codes stood for the opposing rights of the physically frailer sex”.[v]
William The Conqueror meets Antonio Gramsci
Long before Antonio Gramsci became a Marxist, William The Conqueror knew all about cultural hegemony. Maybe he even invented it. He’s conquered the land, brought the subjugated people under his thrall, heard tongues talking in French – and now it was time to count and perhaps appropriate everything that everyone owned.
He was going to dominate the culture.
At heart, Normans “were administrators and lawyers ”[vi] who appear to have been “uniformly rapacious in pursuit of profit”.[vii] And so William bequeathed us the Domesday Book.
He sent his men “over all England into each shire to count and collate what everyone owned”.[viii] Around 1000 individuals held their land directly from the king … a mere 13 who were English.
“Domesday therefore reveals cataclysmic change to the composition of England’s ruling class, with Normans replacing native lords in almost every village and hamlet … Whereas in 1066 there had been several thousand middling English thegns, by 1086 half the land in England was held by just 200 Norman barons”.[ix]
William knew what he owned, its value, and its potential to generate future profit and exploitation … “there was not a hide of land in England that he knew not what he had from it and what its worth was …”[x]
The Norman aristocracy was in charge and over time they would see to it that England became more efficient, methodical and ruthless in pursuit of its goals both national and international.
It’s tempting to speculate if the nation would have launched into exploration, colonization, industrialization, and imperialism had the Saxons remained in charge.
All of this happened over a thousand years ago. But just because something happened deep in the past doesn’t mean it is irrelevant or without the power to move people today.
The writer C S Lewis spoke of the danger of “chronological snobbery” – that what is old and distant can be discounted.
The English historian EP Thompson put it this way when writing about the upheavals experienced by men and women during the industrial revolution in The Making of the English Working Class - “Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.”
I think that’s right.
William died in 1087. The Anglo Saxon Chronicles left this epitaph:
“Truly in his time men had much oppression and many injuries.”[xi]
As for William’s statues, I’ll let the poet Shelley have the final say.
Ozymandias
By Percy Bysshe Shelley
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said - “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
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References
[i] The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles: The authentic voices of England, from the time of Julius Caesar to the coronation of Henry II, p220 – Translated and collated by Anne Savage. Guild Publishing London, 1983
[ii] Marc Morris, The Norman Conquest, Hutchinson London, p229
[iii] David Howarth, 1066 The Year of the Conquest, Book Club Associates/William Collins Sons, 1977, p135
[iv] Winston S Churchill, A History of the English-speaking peoples, Cassell, London 1998, p74
[v] Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger, The Year 1000. What Life Was Like At The Turn Of The First Millennium, Abacus, 1999, p171
[vi] Churchill, p73
[vii] Morris p314
[viii] The Anglo Saxon Chronicles, p213
[ix] Morris, p320
[x] The Anglo Saxon Chronicles, p220
[xi] Ibid, p220
Great post David.