Everything You Wanted To Know About The Normans

Everything You Wanted To Know About The Normans | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"‘The tapestry is an artistic source that borrows heavily from other artistic sources. We're as convinced as we can be that it was made in Canterbury, because at least a dozen of the scenes are borrowed from illustrated manuscripts that were held in either Christchurch or St. Augustine's Canterbury. So the tapestry designer would say to somebody, oh, I need a. I need a meal scene. You know, the the Normans are having dinner here, go and find me a picture of some chaps having a meal. And someone will come back and say, oh, here's a picture of the Last Supper. And they say, well, brilliant. We can use that as a model for the scene.

And that's what, you can see that happening in lots of scenes. With the death of Harold we seem to see that going on because the scenes surrounding it look very similar to a story in the apocrypha of the Bible, of the king, of the death of King Zedekiah… basically he's a king, he's a king who rebels against his overlord. And his punishment is to have his eyes put out, he's blinded. So if, as it seems likely, the tapestry artist was using an example of, an illustrated example of the death of King Zedekiah, then it may just be that Harold getting his eye put out was being borrowed from this artistic source.

The real stumbling block for the the arrow in the eye story is that no other contemporary source mentions an arrow in the eye. Late sources do. So off the top of my head, Henry of Huntington talks about him getting an arrow in the eye or an arrow in the face. Sometimes they're not even specific. They say an arrow in the face, an arrow in the brain. Arrow in the eye becomes the sort of standard description but there aren't contemporary sources that tell us how he died. William of Poitiers, who has a very detailed account of the battle, just says the report Harold is dead flew around the battle. It doesn't go into any detail.

The source that William of Poitiers is using, a source I mentioned earlier, the Carmen, the song of the Battle of Hastings, which we think now is made before the spring of 1068. So it's the most contemporary source of all, talks about Harold getting killed by a Norman Death Squad. Half a dozen or so men led by William go up to him and sort of single him out and hack him down. Now, you know, again, it's like, you're you're comparing you're, you're weighing a tapestry, an embroidery against a poem. You know, there's a lot of artistic license there…

William of Poitiers, who is William the Conqueror’s own chaplain, doesn't repeat that story. So this is an argument from silence but we know that Poitiers had a copy of the Carmen in front of him, because he parrots the bits of it he likes and other bits of it that he doesn't like he directly challenges. He says some people will tell you this, but this wasn't true. When he gets to the death of Harold, rather than refuting it, he just skips over it. So you could see that as a sort of a silent endorsement if you like, of the fact that the the Carmen’s story was accurate, but William of Poitiers didn't want to go into any of those details, because it made William look less chivalrous'...

The principal source for [Harold’s] career and the careers of his younger brother Tostig and the career of their father, Earl Godwin is a source called the life of King Edward. Which is, as its title suggests, ostensibly about Edward the Confessor. But it's, it's originally, it wasn't originally conceived as of as a life of Edward. Its author openly admits midway through in 1066, that the nature of the work has changed because of the outcome of the Battle of Hastings. He says, what am I to do now, you know, that this, this, this, this, this sort of song of praise has become a tragedy. So I shall tell you about King Edward and the many miracles that were sort of, you know, worked as a result of his influence. But the life of King Edwards is now called started off as a song of praise to the Godwin family. So it goes on for pages about how wonderful Godwin was. While he was like a father to the nation and his sons are these luminous heroes. So Harold is is is is is a sort of a superman, a demigod in that story. You know he's sort of chivalrous, merciful. He was tall, handsome, you know nice to children and animals. He really has no flaws.

So yes he was, the Godwinsons are rising and rising throughout the 1050s. And he's clearly a man, an experienced man who people, certainly his own faction which was, which was huge and dominant wanted to be king. And I daresay with all that sort of popular support that he cultivated, you know, he could have gone on to have a long and successful reign, but we just don't know. I mean, you know, it's, it's, I'm always wary of these figures through history that you know, they have, that their stock is so high based on a tract that their family commissioned.

You know, it's like the the other one I always have in for it in 30 seconds is William Marshall. And you know everyone says William Marshall the greatest Knight of the Middle Ages. Yeah, that's a line borrowed from a book commissioned by his sons. I can go and get a mug day from my son's that they gave me that says World's Greatest Dad on it. But I have to accept the fact that might not be objectively true…

In percentage terms… per capita, it's utterly devastating for the ruling class [and worse than the common folk] because the ruling class gets removed entirely. This, the data for this is Domesday book. So whilst in Domesday book you can see the population drop, for example, in Yorkshire of you know, hundreds of thousands as a result of the famine induced by the harrying, when you look at the ruling class, the people who are the king’s tenants in chief or their own tenants, the king’s sub tenants, you can see that, you know, there's maybe 500 to 1000 tenants in chief depending on who you ask. That's in 1066. In 1086, when Domesday book is compiled, out of those 500 or 1000, only 13 names are English.

So in terms of the top layer of the aristocracy, the English have been reduced to a kind of a tiny fraction, you know less than 1% of the land holders. And then that's even true if you look down at the King’s sub tenants, you know, there's seven or 8000 names. Only 10% of that number are still English by 1086. Obviously, a lot of them die at the Battle of Hastings. A lot of them die in the subsequent rebellions and battles in the five years that follow. Some of them we know go abroad, some go to Scandinavia. I, there's been some good recent research based on later Scandinavian myths. And I think contemporary Byzantine sources pointing out that some of them relocated to Byzantium. And I think in a lot of cases, they are just suppressed. So they they have to accept the fact that they are no longer top ranking aristocrats and they are suppressed into a sort of a gentry class...

The thing that William is famous for, that sort of stains his reputation even by the early 12th century, the person who really gives it to him with both barrels is Orderic Vitalis, is the harrying of the North. Because Orderic says more than 100,000 people died as a result of the harrying, and that seems to be confirmed by Domesday book. You can see for Yorkshire alone a drop in population of that magnitude. So he has that hanging over him… Orderic says well, you know, no earthly court can judge him but God will sort him out on this score, you know, so there's that. There's that. Sort of if you like, genocidal aspect to William’s policies. The thing that always bugs me though, is whenever William is shown, depicted in both documentaries and in dramas, more in documentaries in this country is that he's sort of seen as some sort of sadistic maniac who goes around sort of doing politics by chopping off people's arms, legs, you know, putting their eyes out, torturing, basically.

And the implication of this is that this is somehow novel, and that no clean limbed Englishman like say, Harold Godwinson would resort to such terrible, you know, foreign continental tactics. And in that case, the opt, in it's almost that the the opposite is true, because while you have two or three instances where William is described as having mutilated his enemies, so there's an incident in Allenson [sp?] before his, before, well before 1066 in the early 1050s. There's a case with the, after the Siege of Ely in 1070, where he, he maims the rebels he can get his hands on.

This is kind of entirely par for the course in the 11th century, particularly in England. In England for the last 200 years by this point has had Vikings running around and they certainly sort of, you know, don't pat you on the head afterwards and say, don't do it again, you know, they will chop your head off or kill you in all kinds of grisly ways. One of the things that’s curious about politics in England after Williams accession is that it's very hard to find examples of aristocrats who are deliberately put to death. There’s Earl Waltheof who rebelled against William or at least conspired against William in 1075. He has his head chopped off in the spring of 1076 at Winchester, then, and he's an Earl, he's Earl of Northumbria. The next Early to be executed in England after Waltheof’s death is the Earl of Atholl, a Scottish nobleman who was executed by Edward the First in 1306...

It's arguable that William and the Normans introduced a, a new idea to English politics, which was, you ought to be chivalrous. You'd be as unsparing and savage as you liked in your warfare. But, with, from their point of view, from their point of view, the people who count - the people at the top of the tree, you don't lob people's heads off and execute them. You capture them, you put them away in castles and if they promised to be very, very, very good, you ransom them and give them some of their lands back. That’s chivalry in a nutshell, and you can see William doing that... They didn't stab you to death when you're having dinner, which was the old English way of doing it. And they consider themselves more chivalrous. They looked upon the English way of doing things as barbarous...

Why was the conquest so important when 50, just 50 years earlier, Canute and the Danes have conquered England? I think the thing that makes the conquest so fascinating, so worthy of study is that England is changed by the conquest, I think more than any other event in its history. So it's a sort of a seismic shift in the way England is, is governed and comparing with the Danish conquest of 50 years earlier, I mean, yes, the Danish conquest, for example, is very bloody. Canute starts his reign with lots of executions, but by the time of Canute’s death, most of the Danes he's installed as Earls have disappeared. They've been redeployed to Scandinavia or they've died and they have been replaced by new Englishman. Prime example being Earl Godwin of Wessex. So the Danish conquest shakes up the aristocracy, but it doesn't really change the way land is held. It doesn't change the language that is spoken. It doesn't have any really noticeable impact on architecture, or religion.

Whereas if you look at what the Normans do, in 1066, you know, every church, every major church, every cathedral, every major abbey is ripped down and rebuilt. We've already talked about chivalry, we see a sudden drop in the number of slaves leading to the abolition of slavery. So I think by sort of every measurable, in every measure that's possible the Norman Conquest sees this this huge and sweeping change"