under the lee of the Isle of Wight, waiting to intercept William’s
armament, while the fyrd of Wessex was ready to support him
if the enemy should succeed in making a landing. By September
the provisions were spent, and the ships were growing unseaworthy.
Very reluctantly the king bade them go round to
London to refit and revictual themselves. William meanwhile
had been unable to sail, because for many weeks the wind had
been unfavourable. If it had set from the south the fortune of
England would have been settled by a sea-fight. At this moment
came a sudden and incalculable diversion; Harold’s turbulent
brother Tostig, banished for his crimes in 1065, was seeking
revenge. He had persuaded Harold Hardrada, king of Norway,
almost the last of the great viking adventurers, to take him as
guide for a raid on England. They ran into the Humber with
a great fleet, beat the earls Edwin and Morcar in battle, and
captured York. Abandoning his watch on the south coast Harold
of England flew northward to meet the invaders; he surprised
them at Stamford Bridge, slew both the Norse king and the
rebel earl, and almost exterminated their army (Sept. 25? 1066).
But while he was absent from the Channel the wind turned, and
William of Normandy put to sea. The English fleet and the
English army were both absent, and the Normans came safely
to shore on the 28th of September. Harold had to turn hastily
southward to meet them. On the 13th of October his host was
arrayed on the hill of Senlac, 7 miles from the duke’s camp at
Hastings. The ranks of his thegnhood and house-carles had been
thinned by the slaughter of Stamford Bridge, and their place was
but indifferently supplied by the hasty levies of London, Wessex
and the Home Counties. Edwin and Morcar, who should have
been at his side with their Mercians and Northumbrians, were
still far away—probably from treachery, slackness and jealousy.
Next morning (October 14) William marched out from Hastings and attacked the English host, which stood at bay in a solid mass of spear and axemen behind a slight breastwork on the hillside. After six hours of desperate fighting the victory fell to the duke, who skilfully alternated the use of archers and cavalry against the unwieldy English phalanx. (See Hastings: Battle of.) The disaster was complete, Harold himself was slain, his two brothers had fallen with him, not even the wreck of an army escaped. There was no one to rally the English in the name of the house of Godwine. The witan met and hastily saluted the child Edgar Ætheling as king. But the earls Edwin and Morcar refused to fight for him, and when William appeared in front of the gates of London they were opened almost without resistance. He was elected king in the old English fashion by the surviving magnates, and crowned on Christmas Day 1066.
II. The Norman and Angevin Monarchy (1066–1199)
When William of Normandy was crowned at Westminster by Archbishop Aldred of York and acknowledged as king by the witan, it is certain that few Englishmen understood the full importance of the occasion. It is probable that most men recalled the election of Canute, and William the Conqueror. supposed that the accession of the one alien sovereign would have no more permanent effect on the realm than that of the other. The rule of the Danish king and his two short-lived sons had caused no break in the social or constitutional history of England. Canute had become an Englishman, had accepted all the old institutions of the nation, had dismissed his host of vikings, and had ruled like a native king and for the most part with native ministers. Within twenty years of his accession the disasters and calamities which had preceded his triumph had been forgotten, and the national life was running quietly in its old channels. But the accession of William the Bastard meant something very different. Canute had been an impressionable lad of eighteen or nineteen when he was crowned; he was ready and eager to learn and to forget. He had found himself confronted in England with a higher civilization and a more advanced social organization than those which he had known in his boyhood, and he accepted them with alacrity, feeling that he was thereby getting advantage. With William the Norman all was different: he was a man well on in middle age, too old to adapt himself easily to new surroundings, even if he had been willing to do so. He never even learnt the language of his English subjects, the first step to comprehending their needs and their views. Moreover, unlike his Danish predecessor, he looked down upon the English from the plane of a higher civilization; the Normans regarded the conquered nation as barbarous and boorish. The difference in customs and culture between the dwellers on the two sides of the Channel was sufficient to make this possible; though it is hard to discern any adequate justification for the Norman attitude. Probably the bar of language was the most prominent cause of estrangement. In five generations the viking settlers of Normandy had not only completely forgotten their old Scandinavian tongue, but had come to look upon those who spoke the kindred English idiom not only as aliens but as inferiors. For three centuries French remained the court speech, and the mark of civilization and gentility.
Despite all this the Conquest would not have had its actual
results if William, like Canute, had been able to dismiss his
conquering army, and to refrain from a general policy
of confiscation. But he had won his crown not as
duke of Normandy, but as the head of a band of cosmopolitan
Progress
of Norman Settlement.
adventurers, who had to be rewarded with land
in England. Some few received their pay in hard cash, and
went off to other wars; but the large majority, Breton and
Angevin, French and Fleming, no less than Norman, wanted
land. William could only provide it by a wholesale confiscation
of the estates of all the thegnhood who had followed the house
of Godwine. Almost his first act was to seize on these lands, and
to distribute them among his followers. In the regions of the
South, which had supplied the army that fell at Hastings, at
least four-fifths of the soil passed to new masters. The dispossessed
heirs of the old owners had either to sink to the condition
of peasants, or to throw themselves upon the world and
seek new homes. The friction and hatred thus caused were bitter
and long enduring. And this same system of confiscation was
gradually extended to the rest of England. At first the English
landowners who had not actually served in Harold’s host were
permitted to “buy back their lands,” by paying a heavy fine
to the new king and doing him homage. What would have
happened supposing that England had made no further stir, and
had not vexed William by rebellion, it is impossible to say.
But, as a matter of fact, during the first few years of his reign
one district after another took up arms and endeavoured to
cast out the stranger. As it became gradually evident that
William’s whole system of government was to be on new and
distasteful lines, the English of the Midlands, the North and the
West all went into rebellion. The risings were sporadic, ill-organized,
badly led, for each section of the realm fought for its
own hand. In some parts the insurrections were in favour of
the sons of Harold, in others Edgar Ætheling was acclaimed as
king: and while the unwise earls Edwin and Morcar fought for
their own hand, the Anglo-Danes of the East sent for Sweyn,
king of Denmark, who proved of small help, for he abode but
a short space in England, and went off after sacking the great
abbey of Peterborough and committing other outrages. The
rebels cut up several Norman garrisons, and gave King William
much trouble for some years, but they could never face him in
battle. Their last stronghold, the marsh-fortress of Ely, surrendered
in 1071, and not long after their most stubborn chief,
Hereward “the Wake,” the leader of the fenmen, laid down his
arms and became King William’s man (see Hereward).
The only result of the long series of insurrections was to provoke the king to a cruelty which he had not at first shown, and to give him an excuse for confiscating and dividing among his foreign knights and barons the immense majority of the estates of the English thegnhood. William could be pitiless when provoked; to punish the men of the North for persistent rebellion and the destruction of his garrison at York, he harried the whole countryside from the Aire to the Tees with such remorseless ferocity that it did not recover its ancient prosperity for centuries. The population was absolutely exterminated, and the
