The Norman Conquest by Frank Stenton

 

The partition of England among a foreign aristocracy organized for war was the chief immediate result of the Norman Conquest. After all allowance for the sporadic survival of English landowners and the creation of new holdings for the household servants of great men, the fact remains that an overwhelming majority of the manors described in the Domesday Book were held by some form of military tenure. The provision of knights for the king in adequate numbers was the first charge upon the baronage of the Norman settlement. The arrangement devised for this purpose gave to the upper ranges of Anglo-Norman society a stability and cohesion unknown in the pre-Conquest state. They substituted for the fluctuating relationships which had connected the Lords and their men in Old English times a system which held the higher social classes permanently together in a definite responsibility for military assistance to the king. There was no place in Norman England for the man of position who claimed the right to ‘go with his land to whatever lord he would.’

It was the outstanding merit of this aristocracy that it set itself to use the institutions which it found in England. The chief administrative divisions of the country – shires, hundreds, and wapentakes* – were accepted as a matter of course by its new lords. They for their part applied Old English methods to the management of their estates, and they were remarkably tolerant of the varied and often inconvenient types of manorial structures which has come down from King Edward’s time. The institutions which they found it necessary to create were few in number and specialized in purpose. The honorial court,  which was the chief of them, came into being for the the settlement of the internal business of a great fief. The castlery, which never became of first importance in English life, was a tract of country organized by a series of planned enfeoffments for the maintenance of a particular fortress. Neither of these innovations interfered at any essential point with the accustomed course of local government. The framework of the Old English state survived the Conquest.

The innovation which touched the common man most nearly was the formidable body of rues and penalties which the Norman king imposed on the inhabitants of the districts reserved for their hunting. The French origin of the Anglo-Norman forest law has now bee placed beyond dispute, and the Conqueror’s severity towards those who broke the peace of his deer is recorded by one who had known him. That he enlarged the border’s of King Edward’s forests is certain, and there is no need to doubt the early tradition that the New Forest was converted into a royal preserve by his orders, to the destruction of many peasants who were struggling for existence in that unfriendly land.** Nevertheless even within the forest sphere there was no absolute break with the past. The idea of a royal forest, jealously preserved, had been familiar to Englishmen for forty years at least before the Conquest. Cnut had laid a heavy fine on anyone who hunted in a district which he had set apart for his own pleasure. Forest wardens had been maintained by Edward the Confessor. It is more important that the new forest legislation, which was intended for the protection of the king’s deer, never interrupted the operation of the common law. The forest courts brought the peasant within their jurisdiction under a new surveillance in the interests of the king’s sport, but left him in all other matters to the familiar justice of shire and hundred.

In these ancient institutions the Anglo-Saxon tradition was never broken. The virtue of the Old English State has lain in the local courts. Their strength had been due to the association of thegns*** and peasants in the work of justice, administration, and finance, under the direction of officers responsible to the king. The memory of this association  survived all the changes of the Conqueror’s reign. To all appearance, his barons and their men accepted as a consequence of their position the share in local business which had fallen to their English predecessors. As early as 1086 the feoffees of Norman lords can be seen on the hundredal juries which swore to the information collected for the Domesday Survey. Their successors carried the aristocratic element in local government down to the heart of the middle ages, and beyond. There is a genuine continuity of the function between the thegns of the shire to whom the Confessor addressed his writs and the knights of the shire whose co-operation made possible the Angevin experiment in centralization.

In some, and perhaps in many, cases there was also continuity of descent. The number of thirteen-century landed families which can be traced backwards to an ancestor bearing an English or Danish name is by no means inconsiderable. It includes some families of baronial rank, such a Berkeley, Cromwell, Neville, Lumley, Greystoke, Audley, Fitzwilliam of Hinderskelf and Fitzwilliam of Sprotborough, and many others of less prominence which were influential in their own districts. Isolated families of position with such an ancestry can be found in most pats of England, but they were especially numerous in the far north. Where they were indistinguishable from the English aristocracy of southern Scotland, in Yorkshire and Lancashire, and in the northern midlands,. A few families of this type are known to have been descended from English landowners of 1086, and a small minority of these families are carried back by Domesday Book to the time of King Edward. But there are many which cannot be traced beyond the first half of the twelfth century, and of which the origin must be left an open question. Their distribution suggested that some at least of them were founded by Englishmen who had been planted by the king or by some Norman lord on lands devastated in the wars of the Conquest. It may be hoped that more descents of this kind will be worked out in the future, for every established case helps to reduce the abruptness of the transition from the English to the Norman order.

In the law and practice of the local courts few changes of the first importance had been made by the end of the Conqueror’s reign. The most far-reaching was the withdrawal of the ecclesiastical pleas from the jurisdiction of the hundred. Of the king’s other innovations the chief was the institution of a device for the protection of Frenchmen who ha come to England since 1066. It was ordered that if any of them were killed, and his lord failed to arrest his slayer within five days, the lord must pay 46 marks to the king, the hundred in which the murder took place being responsible for any portion of this sum which the lord was unable to produce. The regulation probably belongs to an early part of the Conqueror’s reign, when most Frenchmen in England were attached to the households of knights or baron, and it gives no more than a point of departure for the mass of custom which rapidly developed round the murder fine and presentment of Englishry. For the orderly settlements of disputes between Frenchmen and Englishmen the Conqueror provided that if a Frenchman accused an Englishman of perjury, or of one of the commoner sorts of violent crime, the Englishman might choose for his defense either the native ordeal of iron or the foreign method of the judicial; combat. Here the  advantage was clearly with the English defendant. For the rest, there is little in the remains of William’s legislation which might not have been prescribed by an Anglo-Saxon king; and the only enactment which reads like a deliberate modification of English practice is an order that offenses formerly punished by death should in the future be punished by mutilation. In most of its details the laws observed by Englishmen in 1087 was the law of King Edward, and, for that matter, the law of Cnut and Aethelred II.

But in spite of these and many other points of continuity, the fact remained that sooner or later every aspect of English life was changed by the Norman Conquest. The conclusions which different historians have reached about its significance have naturally varied with their personal interests and with the kind of approach which each of them has chosen. By some, impressed with the Old English achievement in arts and letters, the Conquest has been lamented as the destruction of a civilization. Others have regarded it as a clearance of the ground for a cosmopolitan culture of which  Anglo-Saxon England gave no promise. Some have stressed the survival of English institutions and ideas; others, the novelty of the social order to which the Norman settlement gave rise. There will never be unanimity on the degree to which, in the historian’s balance, the efficiency of the Norman government should outweigh the havoc done by the Conqueror’s armies. On all the problems connected with the Conquest opinion is constantly changing as the attention of students shifts from one type of evidence to another, as fresh materials come to light, and a old theories are tested by a new grouping of familiar facts.

For all this, it can at least be said that to the ordinary Englishman who had lived from the accession of King Edward to the death of king William, the Conquest must have seemed an unqualified disaster. It is probable that, as a class, the peasants had suffered less than those above them. Many individuals must have lost life or livelihoods at the hands of Norman raiders, and many estates may have been harshly exploited in the interests of Norman lords anxious for ready money; but the structure of rural society  was not seriously affected by the Norman settlement. To the thegnly class the Conquest brought not only the  material consequences of an unsuccessful war, but also the loss of privilege and social consideration. The thegn of 1066 who made his peace with the Conqueror lived thence-forward in a strange and unfriendly environment. The political system of his youth had been destroyed, he had become the subject of a foreign king, and must have felt at every turn the dominance of a foreign aristocrat which regarded him and his kind, at best,, with tolerant indifference. It was as the depressed survivor of a beaten race that he handed on the Old English tradition of local government to the men who has overthrown the Old English state.

To such a man there can have been little satisfaction in the strength of the Anglo-Norman monarchy or the scale of its executive achievement. But it is hard to believe that he can have been wholly unconscious of the new spirit which had entered into the direction of English affairs at the Conquest. The gallantry of individuals in the crisis of 1066  - of Edwin and Morcar at Fulford, of Harold at Stamforbridge and Hastings- tends to conceal the troubled insecurity of the preceding years. Throughout the reign of King Edward England has been a threatened state, relying for existence on a military system which recent events had shown to be insufficient for its needs. The initiative had always been with its enemies, it had never found an effectual ally, and before King Edward’s death it had ceased to count as a factor in European politics. The Normans who entered into the English inheritance were a harsh and violet race. They were the closest of all western peoples to the barbarian strain in the continental order. They had produced little in art and learning, and nothing in literature, that could be set beside the work of Englishmen. But politically, they were the masters of the world.

 

* a subdivision of some English shires corresponding to a hundred. Middle English, from Old English wǣpentæc, from Old Norse vāpnatak act of grasping weapons, from vāpn weapon + tak act of grasping, from taka to take; probably from the brandishing of weapons as an expression of approval when the chief of the wapentake entered upon his office. Hundred, unit of English local government and taxation, intermediate between village and shire, which survived into the 19th century. Originally, the term probably referred to a group of 100 hides (units of land required to support one peasant family), headed by a hundred-man or hundred eolder.

**New Forest, Hampshire Wiltshire. Twelfth-century chroniclers alleged that William had created the forest by evicting the inhabitants of 36 parishes, reducing a flourishing district to a wasteland; this account is thought dubious by most historians, as the poor soil in much of the area is believed to have been incapable of supporting large-scale agriculture, and significant areas appear to have always been uninhabited. There were perhaps 20 small hamlets and isolated farmsteads in William’s time.

*** a thegn or thane was an aristocrat who owned substantial land in one or more counties. Thanes ranked at the third level in lay society, below the king and ealdormen.