Millennium by Holland, Tom (any book recommendations txt) 📕

If the Normans, who knew that in truth it was their own sword arms which had won their bastard duke the crown, sometimes found this hard to take, then so did the English. William’s coronation oath, that he would uphold the laws and customs of his new subjects, had been sworn with all due solemnity—and sure enough, for the first few years of his reign, he did indeed attempt to include them as partners within his new regime. But the English earls could never quite forgo a taste for revolt — with the result that, soon enough, an infuriated William was brought to abandon the whole experiment. In its place, he instituted a far more primal and brutal policy. Just as his ancestors had cleansed what would become Normandy ofits Frankish aristocracy, so now did William set about the systematic elimination from England of its entire ruling class. The lands of the kingdom – its ‘folc and foldan’ — were henceforward to be in the charge of Normans, and no one else. This, however, as a feat of dispossession, owed less to the example of Rollo than to William’s well-honed mastery of the cutting edge. No longer was England to remain isolated from the revolution that had so transformed the princedoms of France. Pevensey and Hastings were destined to prove only the first of the castles raised by the conquerors. The proficiency of William fitz Osbern, in particular, was noted by the English as a grim and fearsome thing: ‘for he built castles far and wide throughout this country, and distressed the wretched folk, and always after that it grew much worse’. Which was putting it mildly: for the task of the Norman lords, set as they were amid a sullen and fractious people, was no different in kind to that of the most upstart castellan in France.

In England, however, it was not just scattered hamlets and villages that needed to be broken, but a whole kingdom. In the winter of 1069, when the inveterately rebellious Northumbrians sought to throw off their new king’s rule, William’s response was to harry the entire earldom. Methods of devastation familiar to the peasantry of France were unleashed across the north of England: granaries were burned, oxen slaughtered, ploughs destroyed. Rotting corpses were left to litter the road. The scattered survivors were reduced to selling themselves into slavery, or else, if reports are to be believed, to cannibalism. Even enthusiasts for William’s rule confessed themselves appalled. ‘On many occasions,’ wrote one of them, ‘I have been able to extol him according to his merits, but this — this I dare not praise.’

And yet, as William might legitimately have pointed out, the practice of ravaging was an ancient one in England. Edgar had done the same — and he was remembered as ‘the Peaceable’. Hard and ruthless ‘the Conqueror’ might be, but for all that, he was no Harold, given to breaking his promises lightly. The oath he had sworn at his coronation, to uphold the laws of England, was one that he would labour all his life to keep. In his determination to keep together his new realm, its unity, its public order and its peerless administration, William was indeed a king in the most formidable tradition of the Cerdicingas. Duke of Normandy too, and favourite of the reformers in the Lateran; he was a ruler of many parts. No statesman of his age was less the prisoner of the past — or more adept at turning it to his own ends. Tradition and innovation: both would continue to be exploited by William with a trail-blazing facility. That his reign was destined to prove one perpetual experiment, an attempt to weave a tapestry from a multiplicity of different strands, whether drawn from England, or Normandy, or Rome, would ultimately serve to render his achievements only the more lasting. He might have been the bastard descendant of pirates – but he would end up master of the most formidable instrument of royal power in the whole of Christendom. He had dared – and he had won.

True, doubts as to the price paid for this victory were never altogether dispelled. ‘For what has a man profited,’ as Abbot Hugh of Cluny wrote pointedly to William, ‘if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his own soul?’ Even Hildebrand himself, the very man who had pushed for the Conqueror to be granted a papal banner, appears to have felt a slight measure of queasiness at the sheer scale of the bloodletting that he had helped to sponsor. In 1070, only a few months after the harrying of Northumbria, a papal legate imposed a public penance on all who had fought at Hastings. Shortly afterwards, in a further show of expiation, the foundations of a new abbey began to be dug on the very site of the fateful battle. The altar, so William had decreed, was to stand precisely where Harold had fallen: a command that required the entire top of the hill to be levelled. Religiosity, arrogance, and a quite awe-inspiring monumentalism: the new monastery combined them all. If it was intended to express contrition, then so too was it designed to overawe. ‘Even a Greek or Saracen’, claimed one Norman, describing the Conqueror’s prodigious sponsorship of churches, ‘might find himself impressed.’ As well he might. The great buildings that William could afford to build, unprecedented engineering experiments raised in stone, were indeed on a scale to compare with anything to be found in Constantinople or Cordoba. So too was the state that he ruled. No matter that he had founded it, like Battle Abbey, upon a field of blood – its foundations were destined to last.

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH

Just Say No

It took a conqueror to seize a kingdom. Kings, however, if they were weak, and especially if they were children, might be captured with altogether greater ease. Even the very