A history of England

by Charles Oman

Meanwhile William marched at mid-winter through the snow-covered heights of the Peakland, from York to Chester, to crush out the last smouldering fires of the insurrection on the North-Welsh border. Cheshire and Shropshire bowed before him, and there was then nothing left of the English hosts, save a few scattered bands of fugitives. Waltheof, the leader of the rebellion, submitted to the king, and, to the surprise of all men, was pardoned and restored to his earldom. The Danes returned to Denmark, bribed by William to depart (1070). But the last remnants of the English gathered themselves together in the Fenland under Hereward the Wake, a Lincolnshire man, the most active and undaunted warrior of his day, Hereward fortified himself in an entrenched camp on the Isle of Ely, in the heart of the Fens, and defied the king to reduce him. For more than a year he held his own, and beat off every attack, though William brought up thousands of men and built vast causeways across the marshes in order to approach Hereward's camp of refuge.

End of Eadwine and Morcar.—Hereward pardoned.

It was at this moment, when the Isle of Ely was the only spot in England that was not in William's hands, that the foolish and selfish earls Eadwine and Morcar thought proper to rebel and take arms against the Normans. They had long lost all influence, even among their own followers, and were crushed with ease. Eadwine fell in a skirmish; Morcar escaped almost alone to Hereward's camp. Soon afterwards that stronghold fell, betrayed to William by the monks of Ely (1071). Hereward escaped, but most of his followers were captured. The king blinded or mutilated many of them, and put Morcar in close prison for the rest of his life. But he offered pardon to Hereward, as he had to Waltheof, for he loved an open foe. The "Last of the English" accepted his terms, was given some estates in Warwickshire, and is found serving with William's army in France a year later.

The English never rose again; their spirit was crushed; ruined by their own disunion and by the selfishness of their leaders, they felt unable to cope any longer with the stern King William. Any trouble that he met in his later years was not due to native rebellions, but to the turbulence and disloyalty of his own Norman followers. Those of the English who could not bear the yoke patiently, fled to foreign lands, many to the court of Scotland, where Queen Margaret, the sister of the Etheling Eadgar, made them welcome; some even as far as Constantinople, to enlist in the "Varangian guard" of the Eastern emperor.

The monarchy feudalized.—Villeinage.

In the fifteen years that followed, William recast the whole fabric of the English society and constitution, changing the realm into a feudal monarchy of the continental type. Even before the Conquest the tendency of the day had been towards feudalism, as is shown by the excessive predominance of the great earls in the days of Aethelred the Ill-counselled and Edward the Confessor, and by the decreasing importance of the smaller freeholders. As early as Eadgar's time a law bade all men below the rank of thegn to "find themselves a lord, who should be responsible for them;" that is, to commend themselves to one of their greater neighbours by a tie of personal homage. But the old-English tie of vassalage, though it placed the small freeholders in personal dependence on the thegns, left them their land as their own, and allowed a man to transfer his allegiance from one lord to another. When, however, the English thegnhood had fallen on Senlac Hill, or had lost their manors for joining in the rebellion of 1069, the condition of their former dependents was much changed for the worse. The Norman knights, who replaced the thegns, knew only the continental form of feudal tenure, where the land, as well as the personal obedience of the vassal, was deemed to belong to the lord. So the English ceorls, who had been the owners of their own land, though they did homage to some thegn for their persons, were reduced to the lower condition of villeinage—that is, they were regarded as tilling the lord's land as tenants, and receiving it from him, in return for a rent in service or in money due to him. And instead of the land being considered to belong to the farmer, the farmer was now considered to belong to the land; that is, he was bound to remain on it and till it, unless his lord gave him permission to depart, being glebae ascriptus, bound to the soil, though he could not, on the other hand, be dispossessed of his farm, or sold away like a slave. The condition of the villein was at its very worst in William's reign, because the burden was newly imposed, and because the Norman masters, who had just taken possession of the English manors, were foreigners who did not comprehend a word of their tenants' speech, or understand their customs and habits. They felt nothing but contempt for the conquered race, whom they regarded as mere barbarians; and hard as was the letter of the feudal law, they made it worse by adding insult to mere oppression. They crushed their vassals by incessant tallages, or demands for money over and above the rent in money or service that was due, and allowed their Norman stewards and underlings to maltreat the peasantry as much as they chose. It should be remembered also that, evil though the plight of the villein might be, there were others even more unhappy than he, since there were many among the peasantry who were actually slaves, and could be bought and sold like cattle. These were the class who represented the original theows or slaves of the old English social system.

Predominance of the crown.

Feudalism, then, so far as it meant the complete subjection of the peasant, both in body and in land, to the lord of his manor, was perfected in England by the Norman conquest. But there was another aspect of the feudal system, as it existed on the continent, which England was fortunate enough to escape. The crowning misery of the other lands of Western Europe was that the king's power in them had grown so weak, that he could not protect his subjects against the earls and barons who were their immediate lords. In France, for example, the king could not exercise the simplest royal rights in the land of his greater vassals, such as the Duke of Normandy or the Count of Anjou. All regal functions, from the coining of money to the holding of courts of justice, had passed to the great vassals. Even when a count or duke rebelled and declared war against the king, his liegemen were considered bound to follow their master and take part in his treason. Now William was determined that this abuse should never take root in England. He was careful not to allow any of his subjects to grow too strong; in distributing the lands of England he invariably scattered the possessions of each of his followers, so that no one man had any great district entirely in his hands. He gave his favourites land in eight or ten different counties, but in each they only possessed a fraction of the whole. There were only three exceptions to this rule. He created "palatine earls" in Cheshire, Shropshire, and Durham, who had the whole shire in their hands, and were allowed to hold their own courts of justice and raise the taxation of the district, like the counts of the continent. These exceptional grants were made because they were frontier shires, and the earls were intended to be bulwarks against the king's enemies—Chester and Shropshire against the Welsh, and Durham against the Scots.

The sheriffs.

In the rest of England the king kept the local government entirely in his own hands, using the sheriffs (shire-reeves), who had existed since the early days of the kings of Wessex, as his deputies. It was the sheriff who raised the taxes, led the military levy of the shire to war, and presided in the law courts of the district. The sheriffs, whom the king nominated as men whom he could completely trust, were the chief check on the earls and barons. Their office was not hereditary; they were purely dependent on the king, and he displaced them at his pleasure. By their means, William kept the government of England entirely in his own hands, and never allowed his greater vassals to trench upon his royal rights.