A history of England

by Charles Oman

Doctrine of direct allegiance to the crown.

William also enunciated a most important doctrine, which clashed with the continental theory of feudalism. He insisted that every man's duty to the king outweighed that to his immediate feudal suzerain. If any lord opposed the king and bade his vassals follow him, the vassals would be committing high treason if they consented to do so. Their allegiance to the crown was more binding than that which they owed to their local baron or earl.

Although, then, the Norman conquest turned England into a feudal hierarchy, where the villein did homage to the knight, the knight to the earl, the earl to the king, yet the strength of the royal power gained rather than lost by the change. William was far more the master of his barons than was St. Edward of his great earls like Godwine or Siward. And this was not merely owing to the fact that William was a strong and Edward a weak man, but much more to the new political arrangements of the realm. William never allowed an earl to rule more than one shire, while Godwine or Leofric had ruled six or seven. William's sheriffs were a firm check on the local magnates, while Edward's had been no more than the king's local bailiffs. Moreover, there were many counties where William made no earl at all, and where his sheriff was therefore the sole representative of authority.

The Great Council.

The kingly power, too, was as much strengthened in the central as in the local government. The Saxon Witan had represented the nation as opposed to the king: it had an existence independent of him, and we have even seen it depose kings. The Norman "Great Council," on the other hand, which superseded the Witan, [8] was simply the assembly of the king's vassals called up by him to give him advice. Though the class of persons who were summoned to it was much the same as those who had appeared at the Witan—bishops, earls, and so forth—yet they now came, not as "the wise men of England," but as the king's personal vassals, his "tenants-in-chief." All who held land directly from the crown might appear if they chose, but as a matter of fact it was only the greater men who came; the knights and other small freeholders would not as a rule visit an assembly where their importance was small and their advice was not asked.

William and the Church.—Ecclesiastical Courts.

William's hand was felt almost as much by the Church as by the State. He began by clearing away, one after another, all the English bishops; Wulfstan of Worcester, a simple old man of very holy life, was ere long the sole survivor of the old hierarchy. Their places were filled by Normans and other foreigners, the primatial seat of Canterbury being placed in the hands of Lanfranc of Pavia, a learned Italian monk who had long been a royal chaplain, and had afterwards been made Abbot of Bec; he was always the best and most merciful of the king's counsellors. William and Lanfranc brought England into closer touch with the continental Church than had been known in earlier days. This was but natural when we remember that it was with the Pope's blessing and under his consecrated banner that the land had been conquered. The new Norman bishops continued Dunstan's old policy of favouring the monks at the expense of the secular clergy, and of establishing everywhere strict rules of clerical discipline. Their stern asceticism was not without its use, for the English clergy had of late grown somewhat lax in life, and unspiritual and worldly in their aims. It was with Lanfranc's aid that William took a step in the organization of the Church that was destined to be a sore trouble to his successors in later days. Hitherto offences against the law of the Church had been tried in the secular courts, and this was not felt to be a grievance by the clergy, because the bishops and abbots both sat in the Witan and attended the meetings of the local shire courts, where such offences—bigamy, for example, or perjury, or witchcraft, or heresy—were tried. But William and Lanfranc now gave the bishops separate Church courts of their own, and withdrew the inquiry into all ecclesiastical cases from the king's court. Though William did not grasp the fact, he was thus erecting an institution which might easily turn against the royal power, as the ecclesiastical judges in their new courts were not under the control of the crown, and had no reason to consult the king's interests. But in William's own time the Church-courts gave no trouble, for they had not yet learnt their power, and the bishops dreaded the king's arm too much to offend him. For William was no slave of the Church; when Pope Gregory VII. bade him do homage to the papacy for his English crown, because he had won England under the papal blessing, he sturdily refused. He announced also that he would outlaw any cleric who carried appeals or complaints to Rome without his permission, and he forbade the clergy to excommunicate any one of his knights for any ecclesiastical offence, unless the royal permission were first obtained.

Rebellion of Earls of Norfolk and Hereford.—Execution of Waltheof.

We have already mentioned the fact that in the last fifteen years of his reign William had little or no trouble with his English subjects. But his life was far from being an easy one; he had both foreign enemies to meet and a turbulent baronage to keep down. Many of the new earls and barons were not born subjects of William, but Flemings, French, or Bretons, who looked upon him as merely the chief partner in their common enterprise of the conquest of England; even among the Normans themselves many were turbulent and disloyal. Within ten years of the Conquest, the king had to take arms against a rebellion of some of his own followers. Ralf, Earl of Norfolk, and Roger, Earl of Hereford, took counsel against him, and tried to enlist in their plot Waltheof, the last surviving English Earl. "Let one of us be king, and the two others great dukes, and so rule all England," was their suggestion to him, when they had gathered all their friends together under the pretence of Earl Ralf's marriage feast. Waltheof refused to join the rebellion, but thought himself in honour bound not to disclose the conspiracy to the king. When the two earls took arms they soon found that William was too strong for them. Ralf fled over sea; Roger was taken and imprisoned for life. Of their followers, some were blinded and some banished. But the hardest measure was dealt out to Earl Waltheof, whose only crime had been his silence. William was anxious to get rid of the last great English territorial magnate; he tried Waltheof for treason before the Great Council, and, when he was condemned, had him at once executed at Winchester (1076). His earldoms of Northampton and Huntingdon were, however, allowed to pass to his daughter, who married a Norman, Simon of St. Liz.