What happened in the aftermath of the Battle of Hastings? What horrors did William the Conqueror have to inflict upon his Anglo Saxon subjects in order to consolidate his new realm? And, what role did castles, the Harrowing of the North, and the Doomsday Book play in the creation of a new England? Join Tom and Dominic as they discuss William the Conquerer's new reign in the wake of the Battle of Hastings, and the true nature of the Norman Conquest. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What was the immediate aftermath of the Battle of Hastings?
We'll be doing a bonus on the way that 1066 and the Norman conquest was interpreted. So there will be more about that if you're a member of the Restless History Club. But for now, we're going to try and answer some of those questions that I just put. But a reminder, first of all, of where we ended the previous episode. So it is 1654 on the 14th of October.
saint calixtus's day 1066 and the sun has just set and the sun dominic has also set on the fortunes of the godwins and of england oh terrible the slopes and the summit of senlac hill are piled with the bodies of the dead and the dying and the mud reeks of blood and emptied bowels. Cries fill the darkening twilight and already you've got to imagine pillagers creeping up
through the dark, starting to strip corpses of their mail shirts, their weapons, their clothes, anything that might be of any value. And the killing is not yet over, even though darkness is now over Sussex, because the English have turned and fled. But this, of course, is when the Norman cavalry comes into its own because they can pursue the fugitives and hunt them down.
Mm hmm.
You'll be glad to hear, Dominic, they don't have it all their own way because it does seem, despite the garbled nature of the various accounts, there seems confusion as to exactly what happens. But it's clear that a body of English warriors, either fugitives or perhaps new arrivals, make a stand perhaps on some ancient earthworks. It's not entirely clear.
And they inflict a number of casualties on the Normans. And there is one report that Useless of Boulogne William's mate, who, according to the earliest account we have, was actually responsible for the death of Harold, that he received a blow between his shoulders that led to blood gushing out from his nose and mouth in a great fountain.
That's good news. That's great news. I'm very pleased to hear that.
And there are later accounts that report an entire ditch ending up filled with Norman casualties and that it was called the Malfos. So the evil ditch, a great ditch that had been covered with brambles. So the killing does go on through the night.
But when dawn comes on the 15th of October, what it reveals is a spectacle of carnage that is so terrible that even the Normans are kind of stunned by it. A bit like the English after Agincourt. And we should remind ourselves that the English will go on to win a victory over the French in due course.
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Chapter 2: How was King Harold's death and body handled after Hastings?
So who knows? I think of Keith Richards because he seems to be very much an Anglo-Saxon man, not a Norman. Yes.
I think Mick Jagger, more of a Norman. Agreed. Very interested in money.
Yeah, exactly. Cold-eyed. Cold-eyed. But Keith Richards, very much a man who would have sported an excellent moustache in the 11th century.
There are Norman accounts that the English, on the night before Hastings, spend it... Getting wasted. Brilliant. There you go. That's quite Rolling Stones. Anyway, however, all these stories, we don't really know which of them is true. There's inevitably an also report that Harold survived the battle and became a hermit, which is traditional in such cases. But whatever the truth, he is gone.
And the big question that everyone presumably is asking at this point is, does this mean the war is over?
Right, because... It could continue, right? I mean, William Early has the tiniest, tiniest bit of England, a little foothold, and there's a lot of England, and England has a very sophisticated state, and it's got a lot of people, and it's got a martial tradition. So why does... This is an interesting question. Why does the Norman Conquest basically... Why is this game over?
Well, we laugh perhaps at the way that Victorians insist on great men, the fate of great men affecting the course of nations. I think in this case, he's not far wrong. I think the war absolutely could have still been prosecuted and won. Had there been anyone left in England competent to continue the resistance to William and by implication be accepted as king?
So you need someone who's competent and can rule as a legitimate king. But the problem is, is there isn't really anyone. So Geirth and Leofine are dead. Edwin and Morca, if they were at the battle, nobody mentions it. They certainly haven't hung around.
Whether they're coming from Hastings or whether they're coming from the Midlands, they go to London and they rescue their sister, Harold's widow, and take her away up to Chester. There is Edgar Atherling, who is Edward the Confessor's great nephew. You know, he has the blood of the West Saxon kings in his veins.
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Chapter 3: Why did the Norman Conquest succeed despite ongoing English resistance?
And William had been a teenager when stamping down resistance in Normandy.
So a lot of listeners to this would be like, well, who's this bloke? I've never heard of this bloke. I mean, don't try and pretend he's a big player in this story because I've never heard of him. And again, it's a dog that doesn't bark. I mean, Edgar Affling is in London, which is the great prize, which is the capital.
And actually, when William marches on London from Canterbury and says surrender, London does not surrender. So why does this story not go anywhere? Why doesn't Edgar Affling hold out, raise an army, And then the next 10 years be a great civil war between Edgar Atheling and William. So he's one of those kind of ambivalent kings.
I suppose he's kind of the Anglo-Saxon Lady Jane Grey. You're never quite sure whether to include him in the list of English kings or not. I mean, I think the answer is that clearly he lacks the charisma and the resources to meet William in the field, which is why when William marches on London, he stays immured within the walls.
William occupies Southwark, so the southern stretches of the Thames, south of London Bridge. does not try and force London Bridge and enter London, but he makes sure to put Southwark to the torch so that everyone in London who are around Edgar can witness the fact that this new king is powerless to resist William's advance. And he then carries on heading westwards into the heartlands of Wessex.
And he adopts this policy that we've already quoted, but I'll quote it again. William of Poitiers describing the Norman way of war. striking fear by laying waste to the crops, fields and domains, capturing all the towns that lay in his path, putting garrisons in them, in short, to assault a given region relentlessly and engulf it in a great multitude of troubles.
And this is now the fate that is visited on Wessex, which is the heartland of England, of course. It's the kingdom that had been ruled by Alfred and by... Athelstan, and it was the great stronghold of the Godwins. Harold had been Earl of Wessex.
And so William is making, he is rubbing the noses of the English in the fact that the heartbeat of the English kingdom is now his to do with as he pleases. And so he ravages the whole way westwards as far as Wallingford in Oxfordshire. And as the name of Wallingford suggests, it's a fortified fort across the Thames. Alfred had built walls around it. It was one of his kind of fortified burrs.
But the local thane surrenders it to William. He's just one glimpse of William at the head of his army and he's, hey, please come in. I'm not hanging around here. And so William occupies Wallingford and it is there that he receives a key submission. And this is Stigand, the Archbishop of Canterbury.
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Chapter 4: Who were the key English figures after Hastings and why did they fail to resist?
And when you're up against someone as able as that and with as formidable a war machine behind him, I mean, as I say, you've really, really got to... To be a serious person. And I think it's clear that Edwin and Morka both probably look in the mirror and think, I don't really think I've got what it takes.
So here's the thing. Edward Augustus Freeman was quite right. Individuals do matter in history. And this is an example where the lack of such an individual really matters for England. But anyway, I took you off the narrative.
No, because I think you home in, from the English point of view, the great tragedy of the situation. They could have fought if someone had been there to command the resources that England still undoubtedly has. But because they don't, because William has a strategy, a campaigning plan that is tried and tested, and the English don't know what's hit them.
They have never come up across armoured horsemen with the capacity to build castles. And this, of course, was what Harold had been so worried about. It's what had led him to make the ultimately disastrous decision to go and fight the Normans in front of Hastings. But Harold had understood what the English were facing. I don't think anyone else had.
And so I think the impact of reports coming into London of towns and farms on fire. I mean, it's a kind of war of the world situation. Terrifying invaders coming burning all around. These are more formidable, more terrifying even than Harold Hardrada's army. So you can see why they would submit.
And of course, with the submission of London and of Edgar Atheling, we come to the climax of 1066, of this most fateful of years. William has achieved what he set out to achieve. He has secured the heart of the kingdom and before winter sets in very badly. And by the time it is Christmas, so Christmas was the day that Charlemagne, of course, had been crowned.
William is ready to be crowned himself. So he enters London a few days before Christmas. There is a massive military presence. No one in London can have any doubt that they are living in a city under occupation. And immediately and inevitably, William orders the construction of a castle on the southeast corner of the city walls by the Thames.
And this castle is the castle that today we know as the Tower of London. Right. But of course, it's not only London itself behind its Roman walls that has fallen into his hands. So too has the great palace complex built by Edward the Confessor to the west of London. And it's not just a palace, it's a minster or an abbey. So Westminster.
And it is in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day that William is crowned. Almost a year since Harold had presumably been crowned there. And everything seems utterly changed. So outside the Abbey, as William is being crowned, you have ranks of mailed French-speaking foreigners standing guard over the coronation of a King of England.
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Chapter 5: How did William the Conqueror consolidate power in England after the battle?
Because it's that history, it's those traditions that give him his status as a consecrated king. If he dumps on them, then that status means nothing. For William himself, clearly a very difficult balance to strike. And I don't think that we can...
really finish an account of 1066 this remarkable year without looking at how in the years that followed 1066 William did try to strike a balance between his role as conqueror and as anointed king brilliant let's do that after the break Tom so come back after the break to find out how William strikes the balance and ends up ruling his kingdom
Hi there, I'm Al Murray, co-host of WW2Pod, We Have Ways of Making You Talk, the world's premier Second World War history podcast from Goalhanger.
And I'm James Holland, and together we tell the greatest stories from the war. Our latest series focuses on the 80th anniversary of victory in Europe and the often untold closing stages of World War II.
And we've got so much to talk about in this series, from the daring Allied crossings of the River Rhine to the last hours in the bombed-out streets of Berlin. It is amazing how little this has been talked about before in popular media.
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After Pentecost, the king travelled about so as to come to Salisbury at Lammas. And there his counsellors came to him and all the people occupying land who were of any account over all England, whosoever's vassals they might be. And they all submitted to him and swore oaths of allegiance to him that they would be faithful to him against all other men.
That was the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was still going after the Norman conquest, and it's describing an event on the 1st of August, 1086. So we have moved on, we've jumped forward in time two decades since that tragic year when William of Normandy became king of the English people. So 20 years on, this is a good point for us to stop the narrative and to say,
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Chapter 6: What was significant about William's coronation and its symbolism?
He appears in Shakespeare's play, had died and had left a son who hadn't succeeded him because of course Tostig has. But William had looked after Wolfeoff, had kind of talent spotted him, had thought that he could employ him as the Earl of Northumbria. So in 1072 had appointed him in that role. But three years later, he's implicated in a plot against William, perhaps a little bit unfairly.
It seems that he confessed that he had been approached. He hadn't actually participated in it, but William is having none of it. So Wolfeoff had been arrested, tried, convicted and beheaded. So all the great earls have been eliminated in one way or the other.
And in fact, of the 1000 richest landowners in England, so these are all the people who are coming towards Salisbury in 1086, only 13 are English. So the thanes, this body of the elites, have effectively been destroyed as a social order. And there is barely a corner of England where Norman lords have not replaced the native landowners. And there are some amazing figures to illustrate this.
So 200 Normans hold half the land in England and 10 Normans hold a quarter of it.
So 10 Normans hold a quarter of England. I mean, that looks like a colonial takeover. There's no other way of putting it. I mean, we would describe this as the epitome of colonialism. And a foreign elite have moved in, displaced the original people who own the land, and taken it all for themselves, right?
And so where have the English landowners gone? Well, lots of them have fled to Constantinople, where they have enrolled in the Vrangians, as Harold Hardrada had done.
So that stuff about the Varangians, English Varangians in Constantinople, that's one of the big themes of The Last English King, the brilliant novel about this by Julian Rathbone, which is full of anachronisms and stuff, but is absolutely brilliant on the sense of this is a seismic shock, isn't he?
Yeah. So the Normans in that are kind of Nazis. He's casting it as the equivalent of the Nazi occupation of Poland. And I mean, the stories of the English lords who flee to Constantinople, I mean, are really very dramatic in themselves. The Byzantines often find themselves fighting the Normans and the poor old English keep losing.
There's one terrible battle where they all get trapped in a barn and get burnt to death. And some of them end up in Crimea, where they found a city called New York. So it's the first New York to be founded. Yeah, I love that fact. That's a very good fact. So it is effectively a complete decapitation of the native aristocracy. And was this always William's plan?
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Chapter 7: Did William’s coronation represent continuity or rupture in English history?
So we've mentioned the Norman landowners, but by far the largest landowner is William himself. So huge, huge direct control over vast arrays of estates and fortifications. And Salisbury is one of them. Windsor is another. The Tower of London, another. Still royal fortresses to this day. But William, of course, is not the only castle builder. Pretty much every Norman landowner is building them.
And of course they're doing this because they're a tiny minority surrounded by exceedingly hostile natives. And the fact that they are able to protect themselves in these fortifications, I mean, that sets them apart from, say, the Viking warlords who had done this before and who very rapidly... had kind of merged into the mass of the English who surround them.
This is not the case with these Norman landowners. They are very obviously physically separate from the people they're ruling because they're surrounded by these ramparts. And this is recognised by the English themselves straight away. So the entry for 1066 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
It recorded how Norman warlords built castles far and wide throughout this country and distressed the wretched folk and always after that it grew much worse. May the end be good when God wills.
But here's a thing. So visitors to a major English town and what was what would have been a major medieval town, if they go today, there are actually two structures that will often dominate the town. So one will be the castle or the ruins of the castle, but the other is often obviously the cathedral or a big church. And that's the other side of this, isn't it?
So it's partly military power, but there's also, as you've described so often, a kind of spiritual power. So there's a religious dimension to this conquest as well. There is.
And so again, if you're coming up to Old Sarum, you're coming up to Salisbury, you'd see the castle. but you would also see a half-completed cathedral, which is massive. Workmen have been toiling away for pretty much a decade. And as you say, it's part of a huge programme of church building in England that is completely unprecedented in the scale of its ambition. And
Most of the medieval cathedrals that still dominate English cathedral towns to this day were almost all of them either founded or actually constructed in the main in the immediate wake of the conquest or a generation or so after it. And of the Anglo-Saxon minsters, I mean, barely a brick of those was left standing.
And the Norman cathedrals that were built on the site of the Anglo-Saxon cathedrals, they don't just obliterate the memory of the Anglo-Saxon church, but they establish an imprint on the country that was designed to last.
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Chapter 8: How did William balance his role as conqueror and anointed king?
And these records, after this great meeting at Salisbury, will be copied out by a single scribe and come to be known in due course as Doomsday Book. And it's likely that that name is being applied to it very, very early on.
And it is called Doomsday Book because the presumption is that what has been recorded is unalterable, like the judgments that will be delivered at the end of days, the day of judgment.
And what the Doomsday Book stands for is the recognition that there's an entirely new order, right? That there's been a massive transfer of property and power from one social group to another, from the English aristocracy to the Norman aristocracy. And the point is that, like the cathedrals and the castles, this is going to last forever. There's no turning back now.
That was 20 years ago, and it's set in stone, literally, in the case of the castles and the cathedrals. Absolutely. And everybody accepts that, do you think, by this point? I mean, there may be a few people who, in their cups late at night, look back to the old days, but by and large, everyone accepts the world has changed.
Yes, maybe. Although one of the things that has precipitated William's desire to compile this great legal record is the fact that for about a year, William's hold on England has actually seemed quite precarious. And the reason for that is one that you touched on in your account of Harold Hardrada, where you said, is he the last of the Vikings?
Well, actually, no, he's not, because there are still Scandinavian kings who aspire to conquer England. And this is very evident in the circumstances that give birth to the Doomsday Book. So what prompted it is the prospect of an invasion by the Danish king Canute.
So this is the Canute, the nephew of the famous Canute, who'd been the great adversary of Harold Hardrada and is still very much on the scene and is threatening to launch a full-born amphibious invasion of William's kingdom. And so William, very like Athelred, wants to know how much money he's got and where he can obtain it from.
And he does this in the full consciousness that Scandinavian warlords are still on the scene. So in 1069, Sweyn, the Danish king, had sailed up the Humber and William had paid the Danes off, just as Athelred might have done. And obviously, William is not Athelred.
But again and again throughout his reign, he is doing as Athelred had sought to do, which is essentially to exploit to the full the incredible wealth and administrative know-how of his kingdom. And so in that sense, the Doomsday Book...
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