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How William the Conqueror brutally secured rule of England
Marc Morris discusses the long and bloody conquest of England that followed William's victory at the Battle of Hastings
William of Normandy’s victory at the battle of Hastings in October 1066 was far from the end of the Norman Conquest of England. It took many years, and putting down no small amount of rebellion, for William to fully establish control. In the final episode of our new series on 1066, Marc Morris discusses the long story of the Norman Conquest with David Musgrove. Watch now, or listen to the ad-free podcast below: View Green Video on the source website Want to hear more? Browse more episodes in our podcast series on 1066
1066 is the most famous year in English history, was marked by not just one, but three major battles, and saw three different men ruling as king of England. Marc Morris charts the events of 1066 and the fates of the key contenders in the fight for England's throne
The year 1066 is the most famous year in English history, and was marked by not just one, but three major battles, and saw three different men ruling as king of England. In the third episode of our series on 1066, Marc Morris, in conversation with David Musgrove, outlines how the tumultuous year played out and charts the fates of the key contenders in the fight for England's throne. Watch now, or listen to the ad-free podcast below: View Green Video on the source website Want to hear more? Browse more episodes in our podcast series on 1066
The VIKING king of England: the story of King Cnut and the Danish conquest of 1016
Marc Morris explores the long roots of the Norman Conquest of 1066
The roots of the Norman Conquest of 1066 can be traced all the way back to 1016 – when England was hit by an earlier foreign invasion. This time, the assault came from Denmark and the forces of Cnut. In the first episode of our new series on 1066, Marc Morris talks to David Musgrove about how the events of the early 11th century set the scene for the Norman invasion half a century later. Watch now, or listen to the ad-free podcast below: View Green Video on the source website Want to hear more? Browse more episodes in our podcast series on 1066
Five things to look out for when visiting a castle
Marc Morris highlights five features of Britain’s castles that show their development throughout the Middle Ages, from essential engineering to eye-catching decorations
Visiting one of the many castles across the British countryside offers spectacular sights and evokes centuries of history. Even if damaged, they stand as monuments of medieval architecture and engineering; as memorials to battles fought long ago; and as a markers in the advances made by rulers and their subjects. But what are some of the specific details or features that are worth knowing? Historian Marc Morris gives five highlights that will enhance any trip to Britain’s castles… Mottes If you see a great artificial mound of earth – a motte – the castle almost certainly dates from the late-11th or early 12th century, which is when castles were introduced to England on a huge scale. Mottes vary in size. They can be quite modest or they can be huge – the one at Tonbridge Castle in Kent, for example, would have taken months to build. And that's something to reflect upon if you see a motte: although it looks like – and essentially is – a large mound of earth, you can't put that up overnight. Just in terms of moving the earth, it's going to take thousands of man hours. You also can't make a motte out of one type of material. If it were all mud, it would just slip away. You have to build it with layers. You have to put a layer of clay, a layer of stone, a layer of sand, a layer of mud. So mottes are really consolidated, artificial hills. They would have to be, in order to bear the weight of the stone buildings that are later built on top. Read more | How to build a medieval castle: 9 top tips Wells Another thing you might look out for is the castle’s main well, because that's going to be essential. In the day-to-day living in a castle, it saves you having to go down to the river as your source of water. But in a siege, it becomes critical, because you can be hungry and last out a couple of weeks, but you can't be thirsty. It is one of the terrible things as a medieval historian, you do have to look into things like ‘how quickly does it take to starve to death’? I've looked at these questions, and you can go without food for two or three weeks, but you can't go without water for more than two or three days. Maybe you might last a week and then that’ll be it. So you need a well, basically. The first thing you do when you see a well is chuck a coin down to see how deep it is. And sometimes it's a disappointing half a second and just goes splosh, but sometimes they can be jolly deep. If you go to Dover Castle, which I think is the deepest in Britain, and you toss a coin down there, it's a good seven to eight seconds before you hear it go splosh. It's incredibly deep. The thing to think about there is just what an incredible feat of engineering that is. It gives the lie to the idea that the Middle Ages was somehow crude in terms of their engineering skills. Watch now | Five British castles with romantic histories Twin-towered gatehouses The entrances to early castles – those of the 11th and 12th centuries – are to a large extent, unimpressive. I'm not talking about the entrances to the towers, but the outer walls. Getting in through those is sometimes, literally, just a hole in the wall. Other times it's a tower with a gateway through it. From around about the year 1200, you start seeing two towers pushed together. That's your twin-towered gatehouse, and the entrance is between the two towers. By this stage they've got all the elaborate tricks that you associate with castle defences. You'll have arrow loops all around, facing forwards and crossing the entrance so you've got a field of fire against potential intruders. As you go through the twin-towered gatehouse, if you look up or look to the side, you will see grooves in the walls for portcullises to be lowered and slots in the ceiling for them to disappear into. You'll almost certainly, again if look up, see holes as you go through the entrance passage, which are so-called ‘murder holes’, from which you would traditionally chuck boiling oil, but pretty much anything you like that's nasty: quick lime or boiling water for instance. We're certainly beyond 1200 if you see a twin-towered gatehouse. It’s a good marker of the later Middle Ages. Read more | Who was the original king of the castle (and who was the dirty rascal)? Putlog holes Putlog holes are literally holes in which you put logs. They are holes in the masonry where the original scaffolding was. This sounds like a builder not finishing the job properly, but because these buildings were whitewashed and plastered on the outside or painted over, rather than taking the scaffolding down and then filling the hole with a block, they often just sawed off the log and left it in situ. Often these putlog holes are at a horizontal level, so they are just a line of holes for a platform. In some cases – such as in Edward I’s castles in north-west Wales – the putlog holes on the towers spiral around, as if there had been a helter-skelter effect. This is one of the things that indicates that Edward I’s castles in this area were built by continental Savoyard masons, rather than English ones. Read more | Reassessing Edward I: battle-hungry aggressor or dutiful conqueror? Machicolations Machicolations are where the wall head, the fighting platform, is built out from the wall so that you could theoretically throw things down on people's heads. I think one of the reasons that people like machicolations going into the 14th and 15th centuries is because they look pretty. The way you make your castle look like it's permanently wearing a crown is to machicolate the towers. The earliest examples are from the 1280s on the castles Edward I built in north-west Wales, but by the time they catch on, it’s well into the 14th and into the 15th century. So if you see machicolations around the top of your towers, you know you are dealing with a late medieval castle. Read next | 9 of Britain’s best castles Dr Marc Morris was speaking to Charlotte Hodgman on the HistoryExtra podcast, answering listener queries on history of British castles as part of our Everything You Wanted to Know podcast series. Hear more from this conversation in the full audio episode or explore more of our bitesize history videos.
British castles: everything you wanted to know
Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
Marc Morris answers listener questions on the history of British castles – from the motte and bailey structures of William the Conqueror to the great stone fortresses of Edward I
What was the interior design like in medieval castles? Why were so many of these fortresses built in Wales? And what was it like to live in one? In our latest ‘Everything you wanted to know’ episode, Marc Morris answers listener questions on the history of British castles. Speaking to Charlotte Hodgman, he touches on building techniques, the architectural influence of the crusades, and England’s first fortresses.
Your guide to King John, the monarch who issued Magna Carta
From killing his nephew to losing his empire to cruelly starving his enemies to death, King John was much more than the fictitious villain of the Robin hood legend. Marc Morris highlights how the king who issued Magna Carta came to be so despised…
King John is generally remembered as the villain from the tales of Robin Hood, and the man who was forced to issue Magna Carta. But was he really as bad as legend would have us believe? And what was it about his reign that provoked his subjects to demand such sweeping political reform? King John: key dates & facts Born: Around Christmas 1166, or possibly 1167 Died: 18/19 October 1216 Reigned: King of England for 17 years, from 27 May 1199 until his death Coronation: 27 May 1199, Westminster Abbey Parents: Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine Spouses: Isabella of Gloucester and Isabella of Angoulême Children: Five legitimate children, including Henry III, King of England, Richard of Cornwall and Joan, Queen of Scotland, plus several illegitimate children Succeeded by: Henry III How John became ‘John Lackland’ John was born around Christmas 1166, or possibly 1167. The uncertainty exists because he was the youngest of the eight known children of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and consequently not regarded as all that important. His father was the most powerful ruler in Europe – King of England, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou (all by inheritance), and Duke of Aquitaine thanks to his marriage to Eleanor. Henry’s intention was that this vast empire would be divided after his death, and he designated each of his three older sons as heirs to its different provinces. There was initially no such provision for John, which led to his contemporary nickname ‘Lackland’. A few years later, when Henry added Ireland to his domains, John was groomed to succeed him there. When the teenaged John finally visited Ireland in 1185, however, he acquitted himself badly, alienating both the native Irish and recent Anglo-Norman settlers. King John in Ireland: the making of a medieval monster "It was in Ireland that King John revealed himself as a monster," writes Nicholas Vincent, as he charts the course of the medieval king's descent into evil... Rebellion against Richard the Lionheart John’s reputation could have recovered from his youthful misadventures in Ireland; it was his behaviour in the decade that followed that did lasting damage. By the time Henry II died in 1189, two of his sons had predeceased him, enabling the eldest survivor, Richard, to inherit their father’s empire in its entirety. Richard I almost immediately departed on crusade – earning the nickname ‘Lionheart’ – and during his absence, John stirred up discontent in England and conspired with the king of France, Philip Augustus, to attack Richard’s lands on the continent. Read more | Your top questions about the crusades – answered When John heard the news that his brother had been taken prisoner on his return journey and was being held hostage, he threw caution to the wind and came out in open rebellion, telling people that Richard was dead. To attack the lands of an absent crusader was regarded as despicable, and chroniclers at the time were scathing. They condemned John as a “light-minded youth” and branded his alliance with Philip Augustus “a pact from Hell”. In opposing his own brother, said one writer, John had broken “the laws of nature” and thus became “nature’s enemy”. Richard was eventually ransomed and returned in 1194 to crush his brother’s rebellion. In the years that followed, John recovered some of his lands, but his reputation remained permanently tarnished. Read more about Richard the Lionheart Does Richard I deserve his reputation as a martial genius? Richard the Lionheart: king of war How did Richard the Lionheart die? King John’s accession In the spring of 1199, Richard was struck in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt as he besieged the castle at Châlus and died from gangrene a few days later. His sudden and unexpected demise triggered a succession crisis, for he had fathered no legitimate children. John was one possible candidate to replace him, but he had a rival in the shape of his nephew, Arthur – the son of his older brother, Geoffrey, who had died in 1186. The barons of England and Normandy favoured John, but those in Brittany and Anjou preferred the 12-year-old Arthur, who also received the backing of Philip Augustus. After a military standoff that lasted several months, the French king agreed to abandon Arthur and acknowledged John’s right to the entire inheritance, although he demanded the recognition of his superior lordship for the continental lands, and payment of 20,000 marks (£13,333). King John’s marriages Immediately after making peace with Philip Augustus, John set out to get married for a second time. His first marriage, celebrated at the start of Richard’s reign (and probably at his brother’s insistence) had been to a woman named Isabella of Gloucester, and had not been a success: she was not crowned with him in May 1199 and their marriage had been annulled by the end of the year. In the summer of 1200, reportedly at the suggestion of Philip Augustus, John married another Isabella, the daughter and only heir of the count of Angoulême. The acquisition of her lands promised to strengthen John’s position in Aquitaine, so from that point of view this new match made good sense. Politically, however, it was a disaster, because Isabella was already betrothed to a powerful lord named Hugh de Lusignan. The reason their wedding had not been celebrated was probably because Isabella was younger than 12, the minimum age the church would permit. John was apparently not bothered by this prohibition and pinched Hugh’s bride-to-be from under his nose. Read more | Eleanor of Aquitaine: the worst royal mother-in-law? How King John lost the Angevin empire The consequences of John’s marriage to Isabella were catastrophic. Hugh de Lusignan and his supporters in Aquitaine rebelled against him and then, after John attempted to strike back, appealed for justice to the French king. Philip Augustus, delighted for an opportunity to demonstrate the overlordship that his rival had recently admitted, demanded John attend his court in Paris to receive judgement. John refused and the two kings went to war, with Philip again advancing Arthur as John’s replacement. John scored an early victory in this renewed struggle in August 1202 by capturing Arthur and many of his supporters at Mirebeau, but he was unable to convert it into a peaceful settlement. The fighting continued and, in desperation, the king tried to solve the problem by making his nephew disappear. Soon after his 16th birthday, at Easter 1203, Arthur vanished from his captivity in Rouen Castle, almost certainly murdered on his uncle’s orders, as contemporaries claimed. His death only made matters worse. A few weeks later, Philip Augustus launched a massive invasion of John’s territories. Anjou fell immediately and Normandy surrendered the following summer, along with the northern part of Aquitaine. Apart from a couple of castles that held out until 1205, the entire northern half of John’s continental empire was lost. The emergence of ‘bad King John’ John’s treatment of Arthur quickly became notorious because it disregarded a long-established taboo on political killing. In the 12th and 13th centuries, nobles sought to capture their enemies during conflicts, imprisoning them afterwards or releasing them in return for ransom. John, by contrast, repeatedly violated this rule. In February 1203, shortly before Arthur’s death, the king had ordered more than 20 of the nobles captured at Mirebeau to be taken to Corfe Castle in Dorset, where they starved to death. Later in his reign, other prisoners suffered the same fate – most notably Matilda de Briouze, who died of starvation in a royal dungeon along with her son, William. Such incidents explain why multiple chroniclers described the king as cruel. “He was a very bad man”, wrote the Anonymous of Béthune, “more cruel than all others”. Contemporaries also condemned John for his lack of mettle. When he made peace with Philip Augustus on disadvantageous terms in 1200, some people took to calling him ‘Soft-sword’. In 1203, he abandoned Normandy without a fight, and this tendency to run away from danger was a repeated feature throughout his career. “No man may trust him”, sang the southern troubadour, Bertran de Born, “for his heart is soft and cowardly”. The other main charge levelled against John was lechery – specifically, that he preyed on the wives and daughters of his barons. While this is more difficult to prove, personal animosities against the king may explain why certain men, who lacked other obvious motives, fought against him with such implacable fury in the later part of his reign. Was King John a bad king? Graham E Seel | Why ‘Bad King John’ was actually good Marc Morris | Was King John really that bad? Yes! King John’s financial extortions The fundamental complaint against John was financial. Having lost his ancestral lands in France, the king laboured furiously to fund a campaign of reconquest. To this end, he taxed previously exempt groups, such as the Cistercians, and demanded massive sums from his nobles in return for having their inheritances. He sold justice on an industrial scale, imposing punitive fines for trivial offences, and extracted more money than ever before from his Jewish subjects, imprisoning and torturing them until they paid up. When the pope, following a row about the appointment of the Archbishop of Canterbury, placed all of England under interdict, John retaliated by seizing all of the Church’s land. This gave an immense boost to his income, albeit at the spiritual cost of excommunication. As a result of all these expedients, the king’s annual income rocketed from around £25,000 at the start of his reign to a peak of £145,000 in 1211. King John’s defeat in France With his war-chests sufficiently full, John launched his continental campaign in early 1214. The king’s own army advanced into French territory from the south, while his allies in the Low Countries – purchased at great expense – invaded from the north. The plan was to compel Philip Augustus to divide his forces. To that extent, it was successful, as the French king dispatched his son, Louis, to confront John’s army. But as this force approached, John hastily retreated and left the struggle to be decided by his northern allies. In July, Philip clashed with this army at Bouvines, near Lille, and won a great victory. At a stroke, John’s dreams of reconquest were dashed. In October he sailed back to England, his funds exhausted, accompanied by the spectre of defeat. John’s financial extortions had generated widespread opposition, and on his return he was confronted with demands for reform. The king dodged and delayed throughout the winter, but in the spring of 1215 his opponents lost patience and rose in arms against him. When they seized London in May, John was forced to negotiate. Read more | King John and the French invasion of England King John and Magna Carta In June, the two sides met at Runnymede, near Windsor, where they thrashed out an agreement. Magna Carta, as it soon became known, was a lengthy and wide-ranging promise by John that he and his heirs would rule better in future. Many of its provisions were uncontroversial enough to be included in later reissues, but its original enforcement clause, which effectively allowed the barons to make war on the king if he infringed the charter, was intolerable. John probably had no intention of honouring Magna Carta in any case, and secretly asked the pope to annul it. By September 1215, the king and his barons were once again at war. The first round of this final war went to John. In the autumn, he pummelled the rebel garrison at Rochester Castle into submission and throughout the winter he burned the estates of his enemies across the country. Read more about Magna Carta What if Magna Carta hadn’t been written? What did Magna Carta mean to the English in 1215? Is 15 June 1215 the true date of Magna Carta? Two historians debate How did King John die? In the spring of 1216, an army of Frenchmen landed in Kent led by Philip’s son, Louis, whom the rebels had invited to take John’s crown. As with their previous encounter, John responded by running away, leaving Louis and his army to occupy London and the south-east of England. The situation was resolved when John died from dysentery at Newark Castle on the night of 18/19 October 1216. According to the chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall, many people had “dreadful and fantastical visions” of the king that night, the implication being that John had been dragged off to suffer the torments of hell. John was succeeded by his nine-year-old son, Henry III, whose regents – notably William Marshal – defeated Louis’s supporters in battle in battle and persuaded them to depart by paying off the French prince. They also wooed English rebels back into the fold by reissuing Magna Carta, stripped of its more controversial clauses. In this way, the great charter became John’s lasting legacy – a document that ensured his oppressions would not be repeated by future rulers, and which continues to symbolise the rights of the subject against the power of a tyrant. Read next | Was King John murdered?
Anglo-Saxon conversion: the coming of the cross (at the point of a sword)
Although the Anglo-Saxons’ adoption of Christianity has often been labelled as peaceful, in reality many were swayed by the threat of aggression. Marc Morris investigates the violence that greased the wheels of conversion
Listen to this article: The story of how the Anglo-Saxons came to be converted to Christianity begins in Rome, at some point towards the end of the sixth century. A monk named Gregory (who in 590 became Pope Gregory I) was walking through the market when he noticed some unusual-looking boys being sold as slaves. Struck by their beauty, he asked where they were from and was told they were Angles, prompting a famous pun. “Good”, he reportedly replied. “They have the face of angels, and such men should be the fellow heirs of angels in heaven.” Such at least was the tale told by the Venerable Bede, writing around 150 years after these events, who indicated he didn’t set very much store in its credibility. But, like all good legends, it was grounded in reality. Six years into his pontificate, Gregory dispatched a mission to convert the Anglo-Saxons, headed by a monk named Augustine. Arriving in 597, Augustine was greeted by the king of Kent, Æthelberht, who was extremely hospitable. The king soon converted, along with his people, and in the decades that followed, the rulers and peoples of the various other kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England followed suit. By 686, well within a century of Augustine’s arrival, all the former pagan polities had become Christian. As you might expect, the process of bringing heathens to the light of heaven is presented to us in our earliest sources as essentially a benign and beneficial one. The heroes of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People are holy men, such as St Augustine or the Northumbrian St Cuthbert, and the good kings like Æthelberht who listened attentively and facilitated Christianity’s spread. Æthelberht, said Bede, “compelled no one to accept Christianity”, and this point was seized upon by later historians as clear evidence that the whole conversion process was voluntary. “We nowhere read of any of those persecutions at the point of sword,” said the Victorian scholar Edward Freeman, “which disgraced the proselytising zeal of the Frankish and Scandinavian apostles of the faith.” But this was nonsense. The Anglo-Saxons had been pagan since time immemorial, long before they had started settling in eastern Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. The fact that four of the days of the week in modern English are named after their heathen gods (Tiw, Woden, Thunor and Frig) indicates that their ancient ancestral beliefs were deeply embedded and therefore cannot have been lightly eradicated. Freeman’s faith in English exceptionalism apparently blinded him to the occasions where our sources point to exactly the kind of violence he insisted had only happened in other countries, not in dear old England. Listen | Historian Marc Morris tackles some of the most common misconceptions about the Anglo-Saxon era Chased off by pagans St Augustine’s mission soon spread from Kent to the neighbouring kingdoms of Essex and East Anglia. And it also reached the far north when King Æthelberht’s daughter, Æthelburh, was married to King Eadwine of Northumbria, bringing with her a priest, Paulinus, who became the first bishop of York. But the Roman mission ran into difficulties when the first generation of convert kings died. The bishops of London and Rochester were chased from their dioceses by new pagan rulers, and both the queen of Northumbria and the bishop of York were forced to flee when King Eadwine was killed in battle. In the north, however, Christianity was swiftly re-established by missionaries who hailed from a different direction. Ireland had embraced the new faith in the fifth and sixth centuries, and the new king of Northumbria, Oswald, having grown up in Irish exile, had been converted by Irish monks on the island of Iona. Soon after his accession, Oswald established some of these monks on the island of Lindisfarne, close to his royal seat at Bamburgh. In the generation that followed, missionaries from Lindisfarne not only re-evangelised Northumbria, but they also resumed the conversion of Essex and eventually won over the rulers of the powerful midland kingdom of Mercia. The two churches, Roman and Irish, were quite different in style. While contemplative Irish monks liked to base themselves on off-shore islands, their Roman counterparts preferred their seats to be in ancient cities, abandoned since the days of the Roman empire. Ascetic Irish missionaries walked from place to place, whereas Romans ostentatiously rode horses. There were also differences on points of doctrine. Disagreement on how to calculate the date of Easter led to a stormy debate at Whitby in 664, during which the Northumbrian king Oswiu (the brother of Oswald) switched sides, forcing the monks of Lindisfarne to align themselves with Rome. Seducing kings But when it came to converting people, the methods of the two churches were essentially the same. The first and most important target for any missionary effort was the king. Here, perhaps, the Roman church had the edge, bringing with them the papacy’s association with ancient imperial power and bearing precious gifts. In an effort to induce King Eadwine of Northumbria to convert, the pope sent him a gold-embroidered robe, along with a silver mirror and a gilded ivory comb for his queen. However, Christians of either camp could offer other inducements to aspirational pagan rulers: the power of literacy, enabling them to record laws and grants of land, and the promise of military success against their rivals. (We hear of more than one king taking what amounted to a spiritual test drive, agreeing to convert if God granted them victory over their enemies.) Most of all, the new religion offered the irresistible guarantee of everlasting life in paradise – an idea that must have had great appeal in a world where the death of rulers by plague, assassination or dismemberment in battle was a frequent occurrence. Christianity was equally attractive to other members of the elite. Royal and aristocratic women, for example, embraced the new faith because it offered them an opportunity for self-determination, as the heads of monastic communities. Whitby, the monastery where the famous synod of 664 took place, had been founded a few years earlier by Hild, a great niece of King Eadwine of Northumbria, known to posterity as St Hilda. In her capacity as abbess of Whitby, she ruled over both its male and female residents, earning the respect of a whole generation of holy men and women. All who knew her, says Bede, “used to call her ‘Mother’ because of her outstanding devotion and grace”. More stick than carrot But what of the non-elite folk? How were they induced to convert? The monasteries founded by kings and aristocrats were not closed-up affairs, and some of their residents took it upon themselves to tour the countryside, preaching and baptising. But many weeks, and maybe months, would elapse between these periodic visits, during which ordinary people had no spiritual guidance. They might erect a wooden cross at which to congregate to hear itinerant preachers, and in time it might be replaced with something more impressive, like the carved stone crosses that survive from the seventh and eighth centuries. But a system of parishes, with a priest resident in every settlement, lay hundreds of years in the future. The gulf between the experience of the elite and that of the common folk is well illustrated by a story told by Bede. He describes how some Northumbrian monks were using rafts to move wood along the river Tyne, when a storm blew up and swept them out to sea. Their fellow monks wept, Bede tells us, but the peasants who were watching stood and jeered. Let the monks drown, the crowd declared, “for they have robbed people of their old ways of worship, and how the new worship is to be conducted, nobody knows.” This incident suggests that, when it came to the conversion of ordinary people, there was probably rather more stick than carrot. King Eorcenberht of Kent, who ruled from 640 to 664, was praised by Bede for being the first Anglo-Saxon king to order the destruction of pagan shrines across his whole kingdom and for forcing people to fast during Lent. A generation later, Archbishop Theodore of Canterbury, newly arrived from Rome but originally from Cilicia (now Turkey), banned all manner of heathen customs: people burning grain to purify a house in which a corpse was resting, or mothers who placed their daughters in ovens to cure them of a fever. Such proscriptions, and the persistence of pagan worship in spite of them, invite us to consider the nature of the earliest conversions. In a letter from 598, Gregory I boasted that Augustine had baptised more than 10,000 people in Kent on the first Christmas after his arrival. Similarly, Bede relates that Paulinus, the first bishop of York, spent five weeks at the royal estate of Yeavering in Northumbria, baptising every day from dawn till dusk. In both cases, Bede claims these mass conversions occurred because people flocked to embrace the true faith. But did they really flock, or were they herded? Having assured us that it was said Æthelberht of Kent compelled no one to accept Christianity, Bede adds that the king “nevertheless showed greater affection for believers, since they were his fellow citizens in the kingdom of heaven”. With warrior kings like Æthelberht, it was always wise to remain on their affectionate side. The belief that the rapid conversion of vast numbers of people can only have been achieved through royal compulsion is borne out by the biography of St Wilfrid, who was at various times bishop of Northumbria and the de facto bishop of Mercia and Sussex. During his time in Sussex, boasts his biographer, Wilfrid baptised thousands of pagans in a single day, “some freely, and some at the king’s command”. Other episodes in Wilfrid’s career demonstrate that both he content to see Christianity spread through more overt forms of violence. For instance, on the occasion of the dedication of his splendid new church at Ripon, the bishop delivered a speech before King Ecgberht of Northumbria and all his courtiers, in which he listed all the lands that had been donated by the king and his predecessors. Ecgberht had won these lands as a result of his recent war of conquest against the British rulers to his west, and Wilfrid had been given the estates deserted by the British clergy, “fleeing from our own hostile sword”. As this implies, the British were not pagans but Christians, but they refused to celebrate Easter on the correct date, so war against them was felt to be justified. “Indeed,” affirmed Wilfrid’s biographer, “God would be pleased with the good kings for the gift of so much land to our bishop.” Merciless slaughter When it came to the conversion of the Isle of Wight, however, even Wilfrid’s biographer sought to minimise the bishop’s involvement, so shocking was the violence that unfolded. During Wilfrid’s time in Sussex, the kingdom was invaded by a pagan warlord called Cædwalla, who killed the sitting South Saxon king and then went on to depose the king of Wessex. By the mid-680s he was poised to conquer the Isle of Wight, which at the time was an independent kingdom. Cædwalla, says Bede, “endeavoured to wipe out all the natives with merciless slaughter, and to replace them with inhabitants from his own kingdom”. This genocidal scheme, carried out by a heathen king, was nevertheless supported by Wilfrid, for the inhabitants of Wight had not yet been converted, and the bishop saw conquest as a way of bringing them to the light. In return for lending his spiritual support, Wilfrid was given a quarter of the island as reward – a massive endowment of land that meant Christianity was established on the strongest of footings. The king of Wight, Arwald, seems to have perished during the fighting, but his two younger brothers managed to escape to the mainland, where they hoped to remain hidden. Soon, though, they were betrayed and handed over to Cædwalla, who ordered their execution. The only consolation Bede was able to draw was that both boys were permitted to receive baptism before they were killed, “and so made sure of their entry into the eternal kingdom”. As Bede noted, the Isle of Wight was the last of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to convert. By the late 680s, according to his reckoning, Britain had no more heathen rulers. Half a century later, when Bede was writing his famous Ecclesiastical History, Christianity had advanced a great deal further, and he was able to conclude by listing all the many bishops who were ministering to the various kingdoms and celebrate the continued increase in the number of monks and nuns. It was thanks to the assiduousness of these individuals that thousands of others must have eventually been brought to a fuller understanding of the new faith. Men and women such as Augustine, Cuthbert and Hild, through their tireless efforts and exemplary devotion, had gently and patiently won hearts and minds in a way that led future generations to remember them as saints. Scholars like Bede, or Hadrian, the abbot of Canter-bury who came from north Africa, ensured the history of the conversion was not forgotten and that the learned languages of Latin and Greek were taught as widely as possible. But we deceive ourselves, as Edward Freeman did, if we pretend that the rapid advance of Christianity among the Anglo-Saxons, particularly in its early days, was accomplished only by these peaceful methods and did not involve “persecutions at the point of [the] sword”. For many, their initial conversion was brought about through compulsion, violence and bloodshed. This article was first published in the June 2021 edition of BBC History Magazine
Historian Marc Morris tackles some of the most common misconceptions about the Anglo-Saxon era
What do we get wrong about the Anglo-Saxon era? Marc Morris, author of The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, busts some of the most common misconceptions about the period, from the early fifth century through to the Norman Conquest. Marc Morris is the author of The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England (Hutchinson, 2021) Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones Buy now on Bookshop.org
Alternate history: what if William the Conqueror had lost at Hastings?
There would be no Domesday Book or Bayeux Tapestry, but what else? Jonny Wilkes talks to historian Marc Morris about an England in which 1066 was not one of its most famous years
Each month BBC History Revealed asks a historical expert for their take on what might have happened if a key moment in the past had turned out differently. This time, Jonny Wilkes talks to Marc Morris about what England might have been like had Harold Godwinson triumped over William of Normandy at the battle of Hastings… So much hinged on the battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066. Victory for William, duke of Normandy, ushered in the Norman Conquest and huge political, administrative, cultural, religious and social changes. It established a new royal dynasty and aristocracy. It signalled the end of the Viking Age. It restructured both government and church. It saw England bind itself more closely to Europe. It led to the Bayeux Tapestry and Domesday Book, and made 1066 the most famous date in English history. All of that may never have happened, though, had Harold Godwinson, crowned in January 1066, bested William. Instead, Harold would have been the king who fought off two invasions in his first year. Harold had crushed the King of Norway, Harald Hardrada, at the battle of Stamford Bridge, in September 1066. “Had he gone on to defeat the Norman invasion, too, his reputation as a great warrior would have been truly legendary,” says Marc Morris, historian and author of The Norman Conquest and William I: England’s Conqueror. “He would be remembered as one of the greatest of English warrior kings, up there with Æthelstan and Henry V.” There were three pivotal moments that could have swung things for Harold. The first was that while, in May, he had been ready for William, stationing his army and fleet along the south coast, the invasion was delayed until late September. Had William sailed when intended, Harold would have been waiting, according to Morris. “The ease with which William landed at Pevensey and established his base camp at Hastings would have been denied to him. With an English fleet to oppose them, his ships might not have even made it to shore.” At the same time, Harold was contending with Harald Hardrada, along with his own brother Tostig Godwinson, in the north. The king of Norway first defeated the English led by Earls Edwin and Morcar at the battle of Fulford on 20 September, before Harold himself met his forces at Stamford Bridge. This is the second moment, for if the northern earls had emerged victorious at Fulford, Harold would have halted his advance and headed back south to prepare for the Norman invasion. This would have given him more time and many more experienced fighters. The final moment, of course, was Hastings itself, which could well have gone Harold’s way. His shield wall held the higher ground on Senlac Hill and withstood the Norman infantry, cavalry and archers for the whole day. William’s men even began to flee when they thought he had been killed, causing him to take off his helmet, show his face and rally his attack. “The fact that the battle went on from around 9am to sunset indicates that the two sides were quite evenly matched,” says Morris. “The thing is, Harold didn’t really need a decisive victory, or necessarily even to kill William. Had darkness descended with no outright winner, William would have been in a difficult position with nowhere to retreat except his camp. All Harold had to do was not die, keep William penned in, and wait for him to get into logistical difficulties,” claims Morris. “Had he been more cautious, Harold might easily have lived out the day and continued to wear his crown for many years to come.” In context: why did the battle of Hastings happen? When Edward the Confessor died without a child in early 1066, the most powerful noble in the country, Harold Godwinson, was crowned, having said the dying king of England had granted him the throne on his deathbed. But William, duke of Normandy and distant relative of Edward’s, declared that he had been made the heir in 1051, and started planning an invasion to assert his claim. William landed his Norman force in September and made camp near Hastings, just as Harold was quashing another invasion by Harald Hardrada, king of Norway, and was forced to race south. On 14 October, William defeated Harold at the battle of Hastings and the Norman Conquest began. It would bring about monumental changes: replacing the aristocracy with Normans and the language with French; restructuring land ownership, the church and feudalism; introducing Romanesque architecture, chivalry and castles; and advancing England as an international power. By ending two invasions from Norway and Normandy within a matter of weeks, Harold would have been “virtually unassailable”, says Morris. “God would have been demonstrably on his side.” He wouldn’t have had to secure his throne: he was already crowned, as Harold II, and had dealt with opposition in England the previous year. He would also have been in a strong position dynastically as he had two sons by his first marriage nearing adulthood, and his new queen was pregnant. There would be good reason to believe his line would carry on after him. As for William, his death would have caused a “great deal of turbulence” regarding the duchy of Normandy, says Morris. “His eldest son, Robert, was no more than 15 – possibly old enough to take personal charge without a regency, but lacking experience to govern.” William had struggled for decades to consolidate his rule and any future duke would have faced the same aggression, potentially damaging Normandy’s influence in the long term. “Here’s the rub: I don’t think England would be greatly different today had Hastings gone the other way,” says Morris. “If you look at what the Conquest changed in the short to medium term – the introduction of castles, Romanesque architecture, chivalry and the abolition of slavery, which was still widely practised in England – all those changes would have happened eventually. The Conquest simply meant they happened very quickly and aggressively.” That is not to say there wouldn’t have been any lasting impact. There would be no Bayeux Tapestry, no Domesday Book and no sudden shift in English history. Would that mean the names of the kings that came before 1066 would be better known today? Perhaps. “The major change was language,” concludes Morris. “The wholesale replacement of an English ruling elite with a new aristocracy drawn from northern France meant that for the next 200 years or so, French was the language of power.” “French loanwords entered the English language, and it evolved in ways that would otherwise not have been the case. The variety, complexity and illogicality of modern English is a direct and lasting result of the Norman victory at Hastings.” More alternate history What if... Alexander the Great hadn't died so young? What if... Boudica had defeated the Romans? What if... the Spanish Armada had landed in England? This content first appeared in the April 2021 issue of BBC History Revealed
Marc Morris explores how Duke William's defeat of Harold II at the battle of Hastings led to a seismic shift in English society, starting from the very top...
Even 950 years after the battle of Hastings, 1066 remains the most famous date in English history. It invariably marks the start or end of books about the Middle Ages, and even serves as a shorthand for English history as a whole, as in the parody book 1066 and All That. But why does this date enjoy such unrivalled celebrity? Hastings was certainly a decisive battle, and is imprinted firmly in our collective consciousness from an early age thanks to the miraculous survival of the Bayeux tapestry. Yet those who part with their money in exchange for a commemorative mug, tie or tea towel showing Norman knights charging into English soldiers, or Harold being struck in the eye with an arrow, may still be left wondering what all the fuss is about. It is, after all, just one medieval battle among many. The answer is simply that Hastings, and the Norman conquest that followed, affected England more than any other event – more so than the Reformation, more even than the Civil War of the 17th century. To quote the historian George Garnett, 1066 ushered in “change of a magnitude and at a speed unparalleled in English history”. The fundamental reason for this was the devastation of England’s old ruling class. Prior to 1066, the country had been governed by earls, ealdormen and thegns whose roots, in most cases, stretched back into the distant past. The short-lived Danish conquest of 1015 had shaken up this aristocracy and brought new families to the fore, but they remained overwhelmingly English in their ancestry and attitudes. Initially William had planned to keep these people in place. Though some had fallen at Hastings – notably Harold’s brothers and supporters – there were still many Anglo-Saxon faces at the new king’s court during the early years of his reign, as attestations to his charters testify. But those early years were also marked by constant English rebellion matched by violent Norman repression. Notoriously, after a large rebellion in 1069, William laid waste to the whole of northern England, causing widespread famine and a death toll in excess of 100,000: the so-called ‘Harrying of the North’. Terrible as this was, it was only a small fraction of the country’s population of around 2 million. The damage to the aristocracy was, by contrast, much more comprehensive. By the time the data for Domesday Book was compiled in 1086, the elite had been almost completely wiped out: of the 500 or so top individuals listed in the survey as tenants of the king, only 13 had English names, and of 7,000 or so subtenants, no more than 10 per cent were natives. The aristocracy of Anglo-Saxon England had been almost completely swept away – killed in battle, driven into exile or forced to exist in suppressed circumstances. In their place was a new ruling class drawn from the continent. “England,” lamented the chronicler William of Malmesbury in the early 12th century, “has become the dwelling place of foreigners and the playground of lords of alien blood. No Englishman today is an earl, a bishop or an abbot; new faces everywhere enjoy England’s riches and gnaw at her vitals.” The replacement of one ruling class with another had profound consequences for the country. English and Normans were quite different peoples who not only spoke different languages but also had quite different ideas about the way society should be governed. To begin with an obvious, practical example, they had different modes and methods of warfare. As the battle of Hastings demonstrated, the English elite still preferred to fight on foot, drawing their armies up to form their famous ‘shield-wall’, whereas the Norman aristocracy preferred to ride into battle after the fashion of their Frankish neighbours. More important than such cavalry tactics was the introduction of castles. These newfangled fortifications had been sprouting up across western Europe since the turn of the second millennium but, apart from a handful built during the reign of Edward the Confessor, had not been seen in England. All that changed with the coming of the Normans. “They built castles far and wide throughout the land,” wept the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1066, “oppressing the unhappy people.” At a conservative estimate, some 500 had been established in England and Wales before 1100, most of them planted in the years immediately after the invasion as the first generation of settlers dug themselves in. Think of almost any famous medieval English fortress – Windsor or Winchester, Newcastle or Norwich, Rochester, Lincoln or York – and the chances are it originated during the reign of William the Conqueror. Though most of these sites were built to a motte-and-bailey design with wooden walls and buildings, some incorporated great stone towers. Those built by the Conqueror at London and Colchester, and by his greatest followers at places such as Richmond and Chepstow, were on a scale never before seen in Britain. Not even the Romans, whose imperial style the king and his courtiers strove to imitate, had built towers of such height in Britain. The scale of the architectural revolution was even more apparent in the rebuilding of churches. In 1066 England had only one Romanesque church: Edward the Confessor’s abbey at Westminster. Thereafter England’s new continental prelates competed with each other in a frenzy of grandiose reconstruction, ripping down and replacing what they considered to be outmoded places of worship. By the time of William’s death in 1087, work was well advanced on nine of England’s 15 cathedrals, and by the time of the death of his son, Henry I, in 1135, all 15 had been completely rebuilt. As with the castle towers, the scale was unprecedented – the new cathedral at Winchester, begun in 1079, was larger than any other church north of the Alps – and the speed was astonishing. This was the single greatest revolution in the history of English ecclesiastical architecture. Striking as these changes were, arguably the most profound and lasting consequences of the Conquest arose because the Normans had new attitudes towards human life itself. You will still often read that they introduced feudalism to England – a statement that most medievalists today would regard as meaningless, because the term was invented in the 19th century, and no two historians can agree on the definition. The Normans do seem to have introduced a more precisely defined form of military service, and they certainly introduced to many parts of England a more onerous form of lordship. Domesday Book shows in many counties a huge drop in the number of people classed as free. In Bedfordshire, for example, there were 700 freemen in 1066, but by 1086 their number had fallen to just 90. A famous Domesday entry for Marsh Gibbon in Buckinghamshire notes that its English farmer, Æthelric, used to hold his land freely, but now holds it “in heaviness and misery”. Yet, even as they were making life more miserable for those who had once been free, the Normans were dramatically improving the fortunes of those who had not. Before 1066, England had been a slave-owning and slave-trading society. To modern minds the distinction between a pre-Conquest slave and a post-Conquest serf may seem negligible, but to those who experienced both conditions there was a world of difference: to be a slave was far worse than being a servile peasant. Slaves were essentially human chattels, with no more status than the beasts that stood in the field. They could be sold individually, separated from their families, punished by beating, and even killed by their masters if deemed to have transgressed: male slaves were stoned, females burned. And their numbers were far from negligible. Estimates vary, but at least 10 per cent of the population of England were slaves in 1066, with some scholars suggesting the figure may have been as high as 30 per cent. In contemporary Normandy, by contrast, slavery was a thing of the past. The Normans, as the descendants of Vikings, had once been slave-traders par excellence; the Norman capital, Rouen, had once had a thriving international slave market. But references to this market dry up in the early 11th century, as does evidence for slavery in the duchy as whole. By the time William became duke in 1035, some Normans – particularly churchmen – were actively condemning it. Accordingly, slavery declined sharply in England after the Conquest. Domesday Book shows , for example, a 25 per cent drop in slave numbers in Essex between 1066 and 1086. The chroniclers also tell us that William banned the slave trade, acting at the insistence of his long-term moral tutor, Lanfranc of Bec, who was made archbishop of Canterbury after the Conquest. The ban was clearly effective because in the following decades slavery died out. The last church council to condemn “that shameful trade by which in England people used to be sold like animals” took place in 1102, and by the early 12th century the practice of keeping and trading slaves seems to have disappeared altogether. “In this respect,” wrote the monastic author Lawrence of Durham in the 1130s, “the English found foreigners treated them better than they had treated themselves.” This better treatment was also apparent in another respect, which can be summarised in a single word: chivalry. In the 11th century, chivalry had nothing to do with later perversions such as laying cloaks in puddles for ladies, or inviting the enemy to take the first shot. It meant, essentially, not killing your enemies once they had been defeated. The Conqueror may have been savage in his warfare but once his political opponents had surrendered he either imprisoned them or sent them into exile. Occasionally he even let them go free in return for a promise of future fidelity. This was all foreign to England, where the norm till 1066 had been to deal with political rivals by killing them. Æthelred the Unready (c968–1016) had succeeded to the English throne after the murder of his half-brother, Edward the Martyr, and later eliminated several of his enemies in similar fashion. His successor King Cnut began his reign in 1016 with a bloody purge of the English aristocracy. Even during the reign of the saintly Edward the Confessor it was possible to get away with murder, as the Northumbrian nobles who came to spend Christmas 1064 at court discovered when they were bumped off on the queen’s orders. All this changed after 1066. “No man dared slay another,” said the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, “no matter what evil he might have done him.” During the Conqueror’s reign, only one high-ranking Englishman, Earl Waltheof of Northumbria, was executed, and he was said to have been judged according to “the laws of the English”. Waltheof, beheaded outside Winchester in 1076, was the last earl to be executed in England till 1306. From 1066, executions of noblemen were exceedingly rare, and chivalry became a taboo that you broke at your peril, as the murderous King John later discovered. The Norman conquest, in other words, ushered in almost two and half centuries of chivalrous restraint. The sudden replacement of one ruling elite with another meant that these new attitudes towards slavery and political killing were adopted rapidly in England. Beyond England’s borders, however, no such revolution had taken place, with profound consequences for the history of the British Isles. By the 1120s, English chroniclers such as William of Malmesbury were looking at their Welsh, Scottish and Irish neighbours with a fresh and critical eye, noting with distaste that they continued to slaughter and enslave each other. Such people were considered barbarians – the first time this distinction had been drawn in British politics. New attitudes imported by the Normans created for the English a sense of moral superiority over the Celtic peoples, which would help to justify and underpin their own aggressive colonial enterprises against those peoples in the centuries that followed. None of this is intended as a defence of the Norman conquest. The price of such change was immeasurable pain for many English people. One effect much lamented at the time was the loss of artistic treasures. Anglo-Saxon craftsmen were famous for their skill in working precious metals, yet almost all the artefacts they created were either carried off as booty or melted down to pay mercenaries. And while we may admire the post-1066 Romanesque churches, those destroyed to make way for the new ones had in many cases stood for centuries. “We wretches are destroying the work of the saints,” wept Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester in 1084, as he watched the roof being ripped from his old cathedral, “thinking in our insolent pride we are improving them.” Though the effect of the Conquest on the English language is nowadays seen as a positive, with Old English enriched by thousands of French loan words, few English people at the time can have viewed it in such benign terms. For at least two centuries before 1066, since the days of King Alfred, English had been used not only for writing religious texts but also for drawing up government documents. Shortly after the Conquest, however, the royal chancery switched to Latin, and in time so did the scriptoria of monastic houses, severing a vital link between the clergy and the laity. “Now that teaching is forsaken, and the folk are lost,” wrote an anonymous English author in the mid-12th century, “now there is another people that teaches our folk.” Lastly, the Norman takeover entailed an enormous loss of life: the thousands who fell at Hastings were only the beginning. Some English observers, looking back several generations later, could see the positive changes brought by the Normans, but for those who lived through the experience, the Conquest felt like their world coming to an end. “Things went always from bad to worse,” sighed the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 1066. “When God wills may the end be good.” This article was first published in the November 2016 issue of BBC History Magazine