.
.Norman Conquest 1066
The Norman conquest of
1066 ended Anglo-Saxon rule of England and installed a new king. The stage was
set for the invasion when King Edward the Confessor died on January 5, 1066. He
did not have any children so he had no heirs to take his place on the English
throne.
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Invasion
of England
The conquest was the final act of a complicated
drama that had begun years earlier, in the reign of Edward the Confessor, last
king of the Anglo-Saxon royal line. Edward, who had almost certainly designated
William as his successor in 1051, was involved in a childless marriage and used
his lack of an heir as a diplomatic tool, promising the throne to different
parties throughout his reign, including Harold Godwineson, later Harold II, the
powerful earl of Wessex. The exiled Tostig, who was Harold’s brother, and
Harald III Hardraade, king of Norway, also had designs on the throne and
threatened invasion. Amid this welter of conflicting claims, Edward from his
deathbed named Harold his successor on January 5, 1066, and Harold was crowned
king the following day. However, Harold’s position was compromised, according
to the Bayeux Tapestry and other Norman sources, because in 1064 he had sworn
an oath, in William’s presence, to defend William’s right to the throne.
From almost the beginning of his reign, Harold faced
challenges to his authority. Tostig began raiding the southern and eastern
coasts of England in May, eventually joining forces with Harald III. Harold was
able to keep his militia on guard throughout the summer but dismissed it early
in September, when he ran out of supplies and his peasant soldiers needed to
return to their fields for the harvest. This left the south without defenses,
exposing it to invasion by William. Before William arrived, however, Harald III
and Tostig invaded in the north; Harold hastened to Yorkshire, where at
Stamford Bridge (September 25) he won a smashing victory in which both Harald
III and Tostig perished.
Meanwhile, on the Continent, William had secured
support for his invasion from both the Norman aristocracy and the papacy. By
August 1066 he had assembled a force of 4,000–7,000 knights and foot soldiers,
but unfavourable winds detained his transports for eight weeks. Finally, on
September 27, while Harold was occupied in the north, the winds changed, and
William crossed the Channel immediately. Landing in Pevensey on September 28,
he moved directly to Hastings. Harold, hurrying southward with about 7,000 men,
approached Hastings on October 13. Surprised by William at dawn on October 14,
Harold drew up his army on a ridge 10 miles (16 km) to the northwest.
Harold’s wall of highly trained infantry held firm
in the face of William’s mounted assault; failing to breach the English lines
and panicked by the rumour of William’s death, the Norman cavalry fled in
disorder. But William, removing his helmet to show he was alive, rallied his
troops, who turned and killed many English soldiers. As the battle continued,
the English were gradually worn down; late in the afternoon, Harold was killed
(by an arrow in the eye, according to the Bayeux Tapestry), and by nightfall
the remaining English had scattered and fled. William then made a sweeping
advance to isolate London, and at Berkhamstead the major English leaders
submitted to him. He was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day, 1066.
Sporadic indigenous revolts continued until 1071; the most serious, in
Northumbria (1069–70), was suppressed by William himself, who then devastated
vast tracts of the north. The subjection of the country was completed by the
rapid building of a great number of castles.
Consequences
of the Conquest
The extent and desirability of the changes brought
about by the conquest have long been disputed by historians. Certainly, in
political terms, William’s victory destroyed England’s links with Scandinavia,
bringing the country instead into close contact with the Continent, especially
France. Inside England the most radical change was the introduction of land
tenure and military service. While tenure of land in return for services had
existed in England before the conquest, William revolutionized the upper ranks
of English society by dividing the country among about 180 Norman
tenants-in-chief and innumerable mesne (intermediate) tenants, all holding
their fiefs by knight service. The result, the almost total replacement of the
English aristocracy with a Norman one, was paralleled by similar changes of
personnel among the upper clergy and administrative officers.
Anglo-Saxon England had developed a highly organized
central and local government and an effective judicial system (see Anglo-Saxon
law). All these were retained and utilized by William, whose coronation oath
showed his intention of continuing in the English royal tradition. The old
administrative divisions were not superseded by the new fiefs, nor did feudal
justice normally usurp the customary jurisdiction of shire and hundred courts.
In them and in the king’s court, the common law of England continued to be
administered. Innovations included the new but restricted body of “forest law”
and the introduction in criminal cases of the Norman trial by combat alongside
the old Saxon ordeals. Increasing use was made of the inquest procedure—the
sworn testimony of neighbours, both for administrative purposes and in judicial
cases. A major change was William’s removal of ecclesiastical cases from the
secular courts, which allowed the subsequent introduction into England of the
then rapidly growing canon law.
William also transformed the structure and character
of the church in England. He replaced all the Anglo-Saxon bishops, except
Wulfstan of Dorchester, with Norman bishops. Most notably, he secured the
deposition of Stigand, the archbishop of Canterbury—who held his see
irregularly and had probably been excommunicated by Pope Leo IX—and appointed
in his place Lanfranc of Bec, a respected scholar and one of William’s close
advisers. Seeking to impose a more orderly structure on the English episcopacy,
the king supported Lanfranc’s claims for the primacy of Canterbury in the
English church. William also presided over a number of church councils, which
were held far more frequently than under his predecessors, and introduced
legislation against simony (the selling of clerical offices) and clerical
marriage. A supporter of monastic reform while duke of Normandy, William
introduced the latest reforming trends to England by replacing Anglo-Saxon
abbots with Norman ones and by importing numerous monks. Although he founded
only a small number of monasteries, including Battle Abbey (in honour of his
victory at Hastings), William’s other measures contributed to the quickening of
monastic life in England.
Probably the most regrettable effect of the conquest
was the total eclipse of the English vernacular as the language of literature,
law, and administration. Superseded in official documents and other records by
Latin and then increasingly in all areas by Anglo-Norman, written English
hardly reappeared until the 13th century.
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