The Conqueror

William

Born c1028, Normandy  |  Died 9 September 1087, Mantes, French Vexin
Survived to become duke of Normandy. Conquered England. Fought to keep both. Succeeded. Can genuinely claim to have changed the course of history.

On Christmas Day 1066, Duke William of Normandy was crowned King of the English. As shouts of acclamation rang out beyond the doors, William sat on Edward the Confessor’s throne in the late king’s abbey that had been consecrated only a year earlier. Everything was new.

He should have died years ago. Even before 1066, William had already done the impossible.

William was born into the Norman court, most likely in late 1028, to Duke Robert I and his mistress, Herleva. Herleva was the daughter of Fulbert of Falaise, thought to have been a tanner. Not the poorest, perhaps, but not a family who could on their own push for recognition of their offspring. William the Bastard1, for that is what he was, could well have been pushed to one side, lost beyond the formalities of genealogy.

Had Duke Robert married and produced legitimate heirs, that is. Nothing came of discussions of a marriage to a daughter of England and Denmark’s King Cnut, and so the young William was drafted into the breach, witnessing his father’s charters as heir apparent. Previous dukes had been illegitimate, so this was not an insurmountable hurdle. It is hard to imagine a grandson of Cnut himself being overlooked for the grandson of a tanner, however. Duke Robert was still young, though, and this was no doubt a nice problem to have on another day.

Sometimes, tomorrow never comes. In 1034, Duke Robert left on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Normandy was more stable than it had been when he came to power in 1027 following the death2 of his rival and brother Richard III, but many of Robert’s nobles felt it was not out of the woods yet. This proved only too true when Robert died at Nicea on the pilgrim trail in 1035.

William was declared duke, but at seven or eight was the responsibility of a string of uncles and other nobles for whom control of the duke was a big step towards control of the duchy. Any semblance of stability fell away once the first of these, William’s great-uncle Robert, Archbishop of Rouen, died in 1037 and the duchy fell into a decade of anarchy. One of William’s guardians was killed in William’s chambers while he slept. Orderic Vitalis, writing William’s deathbed speech in the early years of the next century, has him tell the story of another time when

I was secretly taken from the chamber of my palace by my uncle, Walter, through fear of my own relations, and conducted to the dwellings and retreats of the poor…

Orderic Vitalis (early C11th)

This may be a bit of poetic license: William’s own moment in the tradition of Alfred’s cakes and Robert the Bruce’s spider. But even at that distance the idea had to have been plausible to be effective. To survive, William had been forced as low as he could go. As Orderic has William continue, ”My nearest friends, my own kindred, formed conspiracies against me.”

It is easy to imagine the kind of effect this perpetual uncertainty throughout William’s formative years had on him. It was not just danger from hostile armies or foreign potentates - although there were these as well - but the daily threat from those around you. Who might not be who they seem? Who has a price? And who will still be here in the morning? There is only so much of that sort of thing you can get used to.

And yet William survived. For all their infighting, the Norman aristocracy continued to recognise the role of the duke. The Church stayed loyal. From a distance, the French king also supported William, and it was to France that the duke escaped prior to his triumphal return in 1047 alongside King Henry of France at the battle of Val es Dunes, which established William clearly as duke.

Even then, fighting continued throughout the 1050s. Only by the start of the 1060s was William starting to look truly secure. Whether he felt that way, we can only guess.

And then William set about repeating history. While his father had headed east to Jerusalem, in 1066 William set his face north-west to England.

England was very much a known quantity to the Norman dukes. Emma of Normandy, Duke Robert’s aunt, had been married to two English kings, Aethelred and then Cnut. Robert himself had sheltered Emma’s two sons by Aethelred, Edward and Alfred. William and his guardians had continued Robert’s policy, at least with all of the security they could offer. It had paid off, as in 1042 the heirs of Cnut died out and Edward was able to return to peacefully assume the English crown.3

William claimed that Edward offered the succession to him. In the 1030’s that would have been a nice gesture, but offering something you have no immediate chance of getting to someone who may well not be alive to receive it could ring hollow. This promise may have been reaffirmed during the upheavals of the exile of the Godwine family from England in 1051-2, at which point one version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle even suggests a visit to England by William himself. Edward, by this time, had proved quite free with these promises and would not stop there. The appearance of Harold Godwineson himself in Normandy in 1064, for whatever reason, was a step further. The Bayeux Tapestry shows the two working closely together on campaign; Harold rescues some of William’s men and William knights Harold. It is only at the end that the relationship sours.

William clearly thought he had both the right and the chance to take the English throne, but there were enough Norman barons who counselled against it. England, after all, had near-unanimously thrown in its lot with Harold and Normandy was far from stable. William would not have lost any face declaring it to be too risky. Not the right time.

Yet he did the opposite. He pulled together a fleet at Dives and bought in mercenaries. He used his Church connections to get the Pope’s backing. His barons were made to swear homage to William’s eldest son, Robert Curthose, in case the worst should happen. The worst looked likely.

Harold had been effectively running England for years, even if he only now ruled it. He was an effective military campaigner with vast resources. Even if William somehow triumphed on the battlefield, he would still have to negotiate an established nobility who in recent history had dug in for years against the Danish onslaught. William would need everything and more to go right. But then the stars aligned.

If William had been lucky to make it this far. Consider this: As he waited to embark for England, the most famous warrior in Christendom arrived to push his own claim to England and defeats Harold’s northern earls at Fulford, taking off the table what would be Harold’s reinforcements in the event of an attack from the south. Harold then races his army north to defeat Hardrada at Stamford Bridge. Brilliance, but exhausting and further diminishing Harold’s fighting strength. Then the wind changes for William.

Even then, William relies on good scouting to spot Harold’s surprise attack. The Norman army fights all day with success but no breakthrough until the English suddenly lose their king in the late afternoon. Finally, the English rearguard nearly holds on. All that attrition, though, leaves the English nobility with the scale of losses it would not see again until World War I. The kingdom is left open for William and his Norman barons to move in.

Still there is more to do. William’s army has to survive an outbreak of dysentry outside Canterbury, before they can secure London. And the north still waits to be brought firmly under royal control.

Probably the only combination that could open the door for William to take and hold England, and he got it. His luck was in, but you also have to take the chances you’re given.

William was not making all his own luck. The weather, Harold Hardrada and so much else was outside his control. And yet William made sure he was in the right place to benefit. From a lifetime of danger and risk, his view of this kind of all-or-nothing moonshot may well have made sense. One bold move to put himself so far above his challengers that the future would be different. England’s money and a royal crown. Surely worth it, if you know that you could lose what you have at any time anyway.

He was also strong enough to carry it through. He did his homework, bringing the pope onside to provide legitimacy. The home front could be kept in line, with the assistance of the Church and William’s wife, Matilda.4 He was a skilled and brave leader on the battlefield, and feared off of it.

Around London, in the English north, in Brittany, Maine and France and more towns were attacked and burned by William and his forces. Opposition was crushed ruthlessly and collateral damage to farms, towns and livestock was a crucial part of this. He brought famine to the north, but it took a generation or more to recover the damage. There would be no more rebellion there for many years.

As terrifying as this would be if you were on the receiving end of it, William did not rule by fear alone. He gave no quarter, true, but he was not capricious. Disputes were settled at trials. The results of the rush for English lands were codified by the administration which William wisely kept intact. The Church spoke highly of him:

The king of the English, although in some matters he does not comport himself as devoutly as we might hope, nevertheless in that he has neither destroyed nor sold the churches of God…; and that he has compelled the priests on oath to put away their wives and the laity to forward the tithes they were withholding from us, in all these respects he has shown himself more worthy of approbation and honour than other kings.

Letter from Pope Gregory VII to Hugh, Bishop of Die (c1081)

Of all commentators, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle shared the sentiment. ”Amongst other things, the good security he made in this country is not to be forgotten - so that any man could travel over his whole kingdom without injury with his bosom full of gold.”

William would have understood only too well the advice that it is better for a prince to be feared than loved. He went all in, but he knew what it was to be king.

When rations were running short before the fleet could sail from Dives, William doubled the allowance. As rumours of his death spread across the Hastings battlefield, William tore off his helmet and rode in front of his men to stop the retreat. The north rose up; he crushed it down. Swein Estrithson threatened invasion to take up his claim to the throne, William taxed a fortune out of England to build an army that made the risk for Swein or anyone else just too great. All the way through - all in. He won the way that you can only win when you bet the pot. Just one loss and, well, you lose big that way too.

How big was his impact?

Apparently as a result of one day’s fighting, England received a new royal dynasty, a new aristocracy, a virtually new church, a new art, a new architecture and a new language. By 1086, when Domesday Book was compiled, fewer than half a dozen of the 180 great landlords or tenants-in-chief were English. By 1090 only one of the sixteen English bishoprics was held by an Englishman, and six of the sees had been moved from their historic centres to large towns.

R.H.C. Davis, The Norman Conquest (1991)

It was nothing short of an earthquake. William, through skill, bravado and no little bit of luck, restarted the clock on English history. Nobody has done it since.

For all William is monolithic, the mask slipped just once. On Edward’s throne in Westminster Abbey, that Christmas in 1066, William heard cries go up from outside. Nobody had told the Normans of the English tradition of acclamation for the new king. William’s soldiers reacted predictably. They set fire to nearby houses and moved to clear the crowd. As the commotion echoed through the new Abbey, William visibly trembled in what should have been his moment of triumph. You wonder if all his commitment, his bravery and his gambler’s instinct came not from the absence of fear or having normalised it, but its very presence. If you know how tenuous it is, if you worry you could lose it all anyhow, then what’s there to stop you?

William, for his part, never did get to stop. He died of injuries from when his horse stood on a hot ember as he and his men burnt the town of Mantes on campaign in 1087. William’s creation outlasted him, though. England and Normandy were only to be separated briefly on occasions until 1204. England now faced the Continent, not the North Sea. And William’s succession went as directed: Normandy to Robert Curthose, fulfilling a promise of 1066, England to William Rufus. His third surviving son, Henry, would rule both too.5

Bibliography

• Davies, R.H.C. (1991) From Alfred the Great to King Stephen. London, A & C Black
• Douglas, D.C. (1964) William the Conqueror. London, Eyre & Spottiswode
• Bayeux Tapestry (late C11th)
• Orderic Vitalis (early C12th) Historia Ecclesiastica. Oxford, Oxford University Press
• It is also worth a visit to William and Matilda's late C11th foundations in Caen: Abbaye aux Hommes and Abbaye aux Dames