447 – The End of the Conquest

Welcome to the British History Podcast.

My name is Jamie and this is episode 447,

The End of the Conquest.

This show is ad-free due to member support, and as a way of thanking members for keeping the show independent, I offer members-only content, including extra episodes and rough transcripts.

And you can get instant access to all the members' extras by signing up for membership at thebritishhistorypodcast.com at about the price of a latte per month.

And thank you very much to Steve, Seth, and Daphne for signing up already.

If the last few episodes have seemed a little confusing, then you're hearing them right.

Europe at the end of the 11th century was a rapidly changing world, and it is all going to have a profound impact on the history of Britain.

I want you to have a really good understanding of what's going on here.

And to do that, I've been forced to go back and forth between simultaneous storylines.

The idea is to keep you rooted in what is happening right here and now, watching events unfold the way the people living through them would have.

But I'm also mindful that this is hard to follow sometimes, which is why I try and give you refreshers on who the hell I'm talking about every once in a while.

But that being said, sometimes I just drop a thread because I really want to finish a story and I can't just confuse you with all these endless side plots.

And this episode is beginning with one of those dropped threads.

So, with all the craziness of 1085, which included Scandinavian invasion fleets, Norman nobles being assassinated by children, and a failed proposal from Robert Curthose to a woman who may have killed her previous husband, well, amidst all of that, Pope Gregory VII

died in May of that same year.

And as he lay dying, he decided to lift all the excommunications that he'd imposed in his time under the big hat.

Now, Gregory was a controversial pope who was known for rising to a fight and throwing ecclesiastical punches.

So that list of excommunications was kind of long.

And now, they were all lifted.

Except for a couple.

There were two people that, as far as dying Gregory was concerned, concerned, could burn in hell.

Emperor Henry and Anti-Pope Clement III, or as Gregory would have called him, Wibbert.

They were not getting their excommunications lifted, which meant that in the end, Gregory died as he lived, condemning Henry.

And actually, for about a year after this, Anti-Pope Clement III was the only pope in Europe.

But by mid-1086, Gregory's faction had selected a successor, who chose the papal name Victor III, which means that in 1086, which is where we're at right now in the story, there were once again two popes.

Though Victor was about 60 years old, and he wasn't long for this world, so it won't be long before Clement would once again be the only pope, at least for a little bit.

So at this point, Rome is looking a little more like a chessboard than it is a church.

Meanwhile, over in England, William was still waiting for the Danish-Flemish invasion.

And waiting to be invaded sucks.

So William was trying to keep himself and his kingdom as busy as possible.

Now the doomsday book took up a big chunk of this extra energy.

Many officials were being sent all over the kingdom to collect the numbers.

And while that went on, William was handling courtly matters.

And the highlight of this was probably when his youngest son, Henry, was knighted.

Because that's nice.

I mean, being William's youngest, this was probably the best that Henry could hope for.

I mean, this kid had no chance to inherit anything significant.

But at least he would be a knight.

But overall, England was kind of just stuck in a waiting game.

And then it got worse.

Do you remember how I mentioned last episode that there appears to have been a shift in the weather patterns?

Well, the impacts of that were really starting to pile up.

Weather in England had sucked lately, like way worse than usual.

And this was an agrarian society, so bad weather wasn't just something that ruined everyone's holiday plans.

When the weather went sideways, crops failed.

So harvests weren't coming in, and the kingdom was settling into widespread famine.

And when we think about famine, we tend to think about starvation, and that's entirely correct.

But the problems don't stop there.

People start to get panicky when they're not eating enough.

So even if your family was surviving the famine, things at home were probably more stressful and chaotic than normal, just from the reduced calories.

And this would have been the case also for your whole village or town.

Everyone would have been just kind of edgy at best.

Furthermore, the damage of famine can last long after the food comes back.

Malnutrition, especially in early childhood, can create a whole host of health issues that will follow a person for the rest of their life.

And one of the worst parts of famine is that if you're not eating enough, your immune system goes straight to hell.

So you're not only hungry, you're also more susceptible to infection and disease.

So even if you and your family are able to stretch your food out and you could avoid starving to death, you still might find yourself overcome by a common illness.

And sure enough, the scribes start recording England getting absolutely rocked by harvest problems, bad weather, and outbreaks of plague.

Now, to be clear, the nobles almost certainly weren't the ones risking starvation here.

They would have continued to eat whatever food the peasants gave them as rent for the land that they were working.

And the very highest nobility wouldn't have felt a change in diet at all.

In fact,

William was getting notoriously plump at this point in his life.

So, really, the only serious risks that the upper nobility were facing when it came to famine would have been disease, since famine makes an epidemic more likely, and of course, the added risk of civil unrest.

So, while William wasn't going hungry, he still was in a dangerous position, and it was one that would have made the Danish invasion even harder to fight off.

So the English court was feeling tense.

Meanwhile, over in Denmark, King Canute IV still wanted to invade England.

We're told by a monk from St.

Augustine's in Canterbury, who at this point was living in exile in Denmark, that the English were begging King Cnut to free them from William's tyranny.

And while that very well might be true, Cnut's interest in this campaign wasn't altruistic.

He wanted a fancy new kingdom.

And so a mixed fleet of Danish and Flemish vessels were gathering at Limfjord, getting ready to deliver that kingdom to him.

Now this fleet was big.

It was intimidating.

And it was stuffed full of conscripts who had been pulled off their farms to take part in Canute's English invasion.

The problem was that a lot of folks weren't really in the mood to be taking orders from King Knut.

And you can see why.

Recently, he'd been instituting significant changes in the kingdom, including coinage reforms, which, you'll recall, usually involved invalidating the previous coinage and then demanding that everyone trade them in for the new official coins.

And the exchange rate for these kinds of swaps were almost always catastrophic, and we have no reason to think it was any different here.

And since everyone used currency, that meant that folks on all levels of society were suddenly feeling the pinch.

And that was on top of Knut's failed invasion from the previous year, where he had held conscripts in his fleet far longer than he should have, and despite requests that the conscripts return for the harvest, they were ordered to stay in harbor, waiting for an invasion that never came.

And Knut hadn't just ignored their concerns.

He had exiled his own brother for even daring to bring it up.

Then, when Knut finally let the farmers go, it was too late, and the harvests had already failed.

This obviously led to famine, and when King Knut was faced with his very obvious failure here, he responded, not by accepting blame, but by accusing some noblewomen of witchcraft and then fining their husbands.

So, Knut wasn't exactly Mr.

Popular at the moment.

And yet, mere months after all of that, Canute was once again mustering a bunch of farmers, assembling a fleet, and was having them just...

sit in the harbor again, just like last time.

A huge fleet, just bobbing up and down in the water, invading nothing.

Again.

Now Danish families were already tightening their belts due to the last harvest season debacle.

And now Knut was fixing to have them do it all over again without even giving them a year or two to recover from the first time.

So imagine your average Danish guy who's conscripted into this thing.

He's already trying to come to terms with the fact that he very well might die in a foreign land for his king's ambitions.

And now, he's facing the very real possibility that his friends and family back home might starve to death in the meantime, all thanks to this same king's incompetence.

And even if they're lucky and they survive, they might get accused of witchcraft or something.

Now, this isn't going to work.

And so...

Surprising no one, except for Knut, a peasant revolt kicked up in the town where the king was staying.

Now, Knut and his boys fled, obviously, but the peasants were mad as hell and probably also realized that the only way they had a chance to survive this revolt was to win and kill the king.

So they chased Knut as he fled from place to place.

And eventually, he was forced to board himself inside a church at Oden's.

And this was just a church.

It wasn't some chapel inside a castle or something.

It was just a normal church.

So of course, the peasants quickly broke in and Knut and his followers were killed in July of 1086.

The throne then passed to his brother, Olaf, the same guy who Knut had exiled the previous year for pointing out that barley didn't harvest itself.

Now, Olaf was actually still in Flanders and exiled when the news came down.

But in the ultimate I told you so moment, he became the next king of Denmark.

And that must have felt vindicating.

But at the same time, he inherited a kingdom in crisis.

I mean, Olaf was hardly the consensus candidate.

One of his own half-brothers, Eric, openly opposed him and had even been involved in his earlier banishment.

And when Olaf returned as king, Eric fled, which meant he was still out there.

And Olaf's headaches didn't end there.

Honestly, the peasants were probably a much bigger concern than his extended family members.

These peasants wanted things to improve, and they had just demonstrated their willingness to commit regicide if they didn't see some progress.

Unfortunately, there was only so much Olaf could do.

Much of what was rotten with Denmark was out of his hands.

Knut certainly had made matters worse with his policies, but the root of everything from the ships being stuck in port to the failed harvests came down to climate.

And kings don't control the climate.

And so, despite the regime change, the weather was still terrible.

And the harvests were still failing.

And that put King Olaf and his supporters in a tight spot.

But they had a solution.

They determined that actually, this time it wasn't the king's fault that the weather was bad.

No, this time the weather had a completely different cause.

This was all divine retribution.

You see, Big J was really mad that the peasants had killed the previous king.

So if they were upset about the bad harvests and the famine, well those peasants should take a good hard look in the mirror.

Meanwhile, Olaf and his people would be working really hard to fix this problem that the peasants had gotten them into with their regicide, and they would see see about making his older brother into a saint in order to get in good with God.

But I hope you peasants had learned your lesson here with all this regicide stuff.

If anything, Jesus is letting you off lightly here, so you better not test his patience by trying that nonsense again.

And so, this means that by late summer, as Olaf was busy trying to establish his brother as Saint Cnut the Holy, over in England, William was learning that Canute wasn't launching anything because Canute was dead and the Danish fleet had been disbanded and the Danes were currently embroiled in an economic and spiritual crisis.

William had lucked out again.

Well, at least as far as the Danish problem went.

William still had plenty of problems on the continent.

Hubert was capturing and ransoming large numbers of his nobles, and when he wasn't capturing knights, he was killing them.

Recently, he'd slaughtered a group of Norman knights, including Robert de Vieux Pont and Robert de Ussi, who, with a name like that, I'm guessing was popular back at camp.

So morale at Camp de Bougie was flagging hard.

Rather than isolating and defeating Hubert, they were watching soldiers from Aquitaine, Burgundy, Maine, and elsewhere just march in and support Hubert's war.

And even worse, these guys were getting rich as hell off of all these ransoms.

This whole war was exactly the kind of thing that chivalric knights loved.

All these knights were getting their fill of violence, glory, and stolen wealth.

You know, provided, of course, that they were knights on Hubert's side, which the bougie camp wasn't.

So for them, this sucked.

And when the ransom demands came in, you could be damn sure that it was the family of the captured knights and not the king who would end up paying for it.

So even though Hubert and his men were having a great time, Rufus and his men thought this really needed to stop and soon.

So they reached out to Hubert to see if he might somehow come to an agreement with the king to bring an end to this conflict.

And I'm sure that they also pointed out that this actually would be in Hubert's interest,

since now that Denmark and Flanders were no longer a threat, the king very well might return from England, along with his big ass army.

Back in England, William was wasting no time.

Canute had died in early July, and word travels pretty quick, so by mid to late July he probably would have been aware that the threat of invasion had evaporated.

And with some newly found free time,

William focused his attention attention on the real source of his anxiety.

His own nobles.

Those guys were shady as hell.

And he really hadn't been sure what they or any of the other English, for that matter, would have done if this invasion had actually happened.

When push comes to shove, William trusted the English about as far as he could throw a ham, and he trusted the Anglo-Norman aristocracy only a little farther.

And these days, he was much more suited to eating ham than throwing it.

Things have been stressful, after all.

Now, thankfully, there was the doomsday book, because by this point, the gathering of the census data was completed.

And while it was a census, what they were doing was also propaganda.

The way the material for the doomsday book was gathered and the way that it was eventually constructed established the Battle of Hastings as year zero for England.

By conducting a survey of property in the moment immediately before Hastings, or as they called it, in King Edward's day, and then comparing it with the status of property in 1086,

there's an explicit and an implicit statement that everything that's happened prior to Hastings is ancient history.

That those days of primordial England had been overthrown.

And now, in that second entry, we can see the real owners of England.

And that's what really mattered, both on a political level and also on a taxation level.

It's the sort of ruthless subtext that we've come to expect from William.

And if you're wondering why primordial England was under King Edward's day and not under King Harold's day, well, erasing Harold's reign has been William's life mission for literally decades by this point.

In fact, Harold is only referred to as a king once, and it seems like it was done by accident in an entry for Hampshire.

Everywhere else, the last English king is erased, and Harold is referred to as just an earl.

So William was, in a very real way, establishing himself as the point where real England begins.

and erasing the existence of anything he deemed out of keeping with that myth.

You know, unless that prior information suited his purpose, as was the case with that trial at Penneden Heath.

But for the most part, the thrust of the census established William as the dawn of England.

And this wasn't something that would have been experienced only by a handful of officers.

The compilation of this census was a massive affair touching every community.

And I can't help but remember my Catholic school days and the Bible passage Luke 2.1.

Quote, in those days, Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world and everyone went to their town to register end quote.

They're telling us about a census, but they're also telling us about Augustus and his power.

And that's pretty much what was happening here.

And it's been suggested that more than 60,000 people were brought into the Shire Courts and the lesser courts to testify about the state of property in the kingdom.

And perhaps as many as 40,000 people provided additional local knowledge.

So this was an enormous operation and something that pretty much all of England would have been forced to reckon with in one way or another.

By having these officers in your community gathering this information and having the landowning class summoned to give testimony in court, the king was making the not-so-subtle statement that the conquest was over, that his regime was permanent, and that they were all subject to it, down to the individual owner of a hide.

It also codifies the legality of the widespread seizure of the lands by the new Norman landlords, because they weren't ashamed of what happened, nor were they trying to hide it.

They were writing it down, in fact, and many times they even included how the new Norman landlords got their hands on that property.

It was a bold, symbolic statement.

And what they did with this data was equally expansive.

Looking at the various records discussing the compilation of the Doomsday Book, you get all kinds of descriptions of its purpose.

And that suggests that the original intent of it was multifaceted.

And Orderic even mentions that it provided the king with an account of England's military strength, which actually I'm sure it would have, since by knowing the full extent of ownership within the kingdom, William would have been able to gauge the rough number of conscripts that he could draw from any given community.

So the census and the process of collecting its data enabled William to know who had what and what they owed him, both in taxes and in duties.

It also meant that he now had a list of the most powerful and wealthy land magnates within England, specifically Specifically, by name.

Now, granted, when we look at the Doomsday Book, we see that wealth of all kinds had shrunk from the pre-conquest era.

As we've spoken about in previous episodes, William's campaigns and the harrying of the north had turned entire communities into untaxable wastelands, or wasa as they're referred to in the doomsday book.

We're also able to see the bounds of the kingdom, and it turns out England had literally shrunk under William's command.

For example, we don't see any lands north of the Ribble or the Tees that are included in that census.

But even though this list of magnates was less than it would have been had he not been such a ruthless tyrant, it was still a list.

And William decided to put it to use.

He summoned all the quote land-owning men of any account, end quote, to a gathering at Salisbury, which was modern-day Old Sarum.

This was to take place on August 1st of 1086.

And keep in mind, these were land-owning men who had only recently seen the king's officers come to their communities and demand their testimony.

So the king and his goons knew where they lived.

They also knew who they were and what they owed specifically.

So this was basically like getting a summons from the eye of Sauron.

So naturally, they came as ordered.

Malmsbury and Henry of Huntington report that modern-day Old Sarum saw a massive assembly of landowners.

The Chronicle echoes this, telling us that all the chief men in England had come to attend.

And in all likelihood, this gathering numbered well into the hundreds.

Quoting historian David Bates here, quote, it took place at a site that owed its existence to the new regime, and which was only in the early stages of development, with the new cathedral started there in 1075 within a huge Iron Age hill fort.

⁇

It's hard to miss the propagandic element to that site, right?

It's saying that the old ways are done, that Normandy has dragged you lot into the modern era, and that now there is no England without Normandy.

And the reason all these magnates have been brought there had an equally strong propagandic element, and it was a reason echoed by the doomsday book.

The powerful were brought there to swear to William that they would be loyal and faithful to him against all others, and that they would, in the words of the chronicle, become his vassals.

And reading that, you might think that this meeting was just a boring formality, a mere recitation of the status quo.

I mean, these guys were the king's subjects, after all, so they were already bound by fealty.

And actually, William had spent the last 20 years arguing that they were already his vassals.

His view was that they were his vassals before he had even landed in England.

But, like the doomsday book, this oath was more than it appears.

It was a codification of power.

It was a statement that said that the Norman regime wasn't temporary or a blip.

The conquest was done.

William had won, and they were bound by oath to be loyal to him.

Welcome to the new age.

This was also a bit of clever political theater.

This setting and this oath all hearkened back to the old English ways of kings ruling by consent, when nobles would be gathered and kings would seek their oaths.

And that would have been flattering.

And the world is full of people who are desperate to be close to power.

So there were likely more than a few men in that room who were really happy to be there.

But while it did have some elements that felt like the Old English approach to kingship, the event was Norman at its core.

William wasn't asking for their consent.

He was telling them to bind themselves by oath to him.

That's very different.

And the records tell us us that the landsmen did exactly as they were told.

And if anyone at this meeting thought this was a sign that William was turning over a new leaf, and that he would be now focused much more upon governance and justice?

Well, those hopes were quickly dashed.

The chronicle reports that once the oaths were obtained, William collected

a very large sum from his people, wherever he could make any demand, whether with justice or otherwise.

End quote.

William had the census, he had an army, he had a bunch of fat cats assembled at Old Sarum, and, well, Daddy needs a new pair of shoes.

Once William got his hands on as much cash as he could, he then headed to the Isle of Wight and loaded it all on his ship before leaving England.

He was headed back home to Normandy.

And as soon as William's attentions were turned elsewhere, Edgar the Atheling, the proper heir to the throne of England, put his plan into motion.

For years, he had kept close to William's court due to an agreement struck early in the conquest.

He had sworn that he would not raise rebellion nor seek the throne, and in exchange, William had agreed to keep him in honor.

But William hadn't been keeping up his end of the bargain.

Even though he was flush with cash from all his various taxes and gelds, he had not been treating Edgar with the appropriate level of honor.

It's not clear how bad it was, but as far as Edgar was concerned, he wasn't getting the cash and prizes he was owed.

And I'm guessing it also hadn't escaped Edgar's notice that there was widespread discontent among the English people.

And if they were even reaching out to the king of Denmark for an invasion, well, these were people who were desperate for a regime change.

How every action taken by William reinforced this sense of disloyalty.

The king was practically radiating anxiety about it.

And while Edgar had sworn an oath to William, it was William who had broken it.

which meant that Edgar was no longer bound.

Hands free, he set to work.

And he moved to Italy.

He was sick of all of this rain.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, you can reach me at thebritish history podcast at gmail.com.

And if you'd like to sign up for membership, you can do so at thebritishhistorypodcast.com.

Thanks for listening.