William the Conqueror and the Rule of the Normans

by F. M. Stenton

Geoffrey, bishop of Coutances is one of the more frequent visitors at William’s English courts, and we may suspect that this method was not infrequently used in England when the intricacy of a matter in dispute surpassed the legal competence of the court as a whole. It forms, in fact, the first stage in that segregation of a legal nucleus within the indifferentiated Curia which created the executive organ of the days of the two great Henrys. The early part of this process takes place almost wholly in the dark so far as England is concerned, and we must seriously doubt whether it had led to any very definite results when the Conqueror died; for it is to Henry I., rather than to his father, that we should assign the formation of an organised body of royal administrators. In this, as in other institutional matters, the Conqueror’s reign was a time of tentative expedients and simple solutions; it is essentially a period of origins.

The king’s court is a very mobile body. The king is always travelling from place to place, and where he is at any moment there is his court held also. It is possible to construct an itinerary of our kings from Henry II. onward, but this cannot be done in the case of William, for it is exceptional for his charters to contain any dating clause. William is indeed to be seen issuing writs in very different parts of his kingdom: at Winchester, the ancient capital of Wessex, and York, the ancient capital of Northumbria; at hunting seats such as Brill and Woodstock; at Downton in Wiltshire, Droitwich, and Burton-on-Trent; but the list of places which we know to have been visited by William and his court in time of peace is very small compared with the materials which we possess for an itinerary of Henry I., or even of William Rufus. To this deficiency of information is largely to be attributed the fact that, compared with Henry I., William is rarely[^[302]] to be found in the northern parts of his kingdom; it is probable that fuller knowledge of the details of his progresses would reveal a number of unrecorded visits to the shires beyond Watling Street.

WILLIAM’S WRIT TO COVENTRY

A natural means of transition from the king’s court to the local divisions of the country, the shires and hundreds, is afforded by the recognised means of communication between the two, those writs of which mention has already been made. In form a writ is simply a letter addressed to the persons who are responsible for the fulfilment of its directions, and it is usually witnessed, as we have seen, by a greater or less number of the persons present with the king at the time of its issue. Such a letter might be written either in Latin or in Old English, the former of course being more usual under the Norman kings, and it was usually authenticated with the king’s great seal. This simple device seems to have been the legal means by which the great transfer of land which followed the Conquest was brought about; the king would send down one of these writs to the sheriff of a county directing him to put a certain baron in possession of certain specified lands, and the sheriff would need no further warrant. We may give the following as an example of a writ in its Latin form:

“William king of the English salutes Baldwin sheriff of Devonshire and all his barons and servants in that shire.

Know ye that I have granted to my monks of Battle [de Bello] the church of St. Olaf in Exeter with the lands of Shireford and with all other lands and possessions belonging to the said church. Wherefore, I will and command that they hold it freely and in peace and quit from every duty of earthly service and from all pleas and claims and [attendance at] shire and hundred courts and from every geld and ‘scot’ and aid and gift and danegeld and army service, with sake and soke and infangenethef; [quit moreover from] all works on castles and bridges, as befits my demesne alms. Witnessed by Thomas, Archbishop of York, and William, the son of Osbert at Winchester.”[^[303]]

Any comment on the privileges conveyed by the document would be outside our present purpose, which is merely to illustrate the way in which King William sent his instructions into the different parts of his kingdom. But the formula of address deserves notice because it suggests that the writ was really directed to the shire court where the sheriff and the “barons and king’s servants” of the shire periodically met. There it would be read in the presence of the assembled men of the county, and the sheriff would forthwith proceed to carry its directions into effect. The sheriff in the king’s eyes is clearly the executive officer of the shire and his importance is not to be measured by the modern associations aroused by his title. The Latin word which we translate as “sheriff” is vicecomes and this word also represents the French vicomte, a fact which should by no means be ignored, for the sheriffs of the half-century succeeding the Conquest resemble their French contemporaries much more closely than either their English successors of the twelfth century or the shire reeves of the Anglo-Saxon period. For one thing, they are in a sense true vicecomites: the sheriff was the chief officer in each county in which there was no earl, and the earldoms created by William were few, and with the exception of Kent were situated in remote parts of the land. Then also it is certain that some at least of the more important sheriffdoms were hereditary in much the same sense as that in which the great earldoms before the Conquest were hereditary—the cases of Devon, Wiltshire and Essex are examples—to which we must add that the early Norman sheriffs are often very great men. Baldwin the sheriff of Devon was the son of William’s own guardian, Count Gilbert of Brionne, and two of his sons followed him in the office. Edward the sheriff of Wiltshire was the ancestor of the medieval earls of Salisbury. Urse de Abetot, alternately despoiler and tenant of the church of Worcester was the chief lay landowner in Worcestershire, Hugh Fitz Baldric, sheriff of Yorkshire, was among the greater tenants in chief in that county. In local, as in general constitutional history, it is most important not to read the ideas of Henry II.’s time into the institutions which prevailed under the Conqueror. Had William in 1070 tried to carry out a general deposition of his sheriffs, such as Henry II. actually achieved in 1170, the attempt, we may be sure, would have led to a revolt, and the mass of the baronage would have sided with the official members of their class. But indeed, so long as the Normans were still intruders in a conquered country, it was only politic on William’s part to govern through men of strong territorial position, men who had the power to enforce the king’s commands in their own localities. In the choice of his local administrators, as in certain other aspects of his policy, William was preparing difficulties for his successors, but his justification lay in the essential needs of his own time. The great transfer of land from Englishmen to Normans, to take one instance, could never have been accomplished if the local government of the country had been in weak hands.

In the period immediately following the Conquest, the four years between 1066 and 1070, which in so many respects are distinct from the rest of William’s reign, perhaps the majority of the sheriffdoms continued to be held by Englishmen. Within this period writs are addressed to Edmund, sheriff of Herefordshire, Sawold of Oxfordshire, Swegen of Essex, and Tofig of Somerset, and even after 1070 such Englishmen as Ethelwine, sheriff of Staffordshire,[^[304]] continue the series. In fact, the development of the provincial administration in this respect seems to have followed a very similar course to that which we have noted in the case of the king’s court; there is a period in which men of both races are mingled in the government of the shires, as well as in attendance on the king’s person. But by the end of the reign the change in both respects had become almost complete, and the introduction of Norman sheriffs began early; for before 1069 Urse de Abetot had already entered upon his aggressive[aggressive] course as sheriff of Worcestershire, and it is very probable that even by the time of William’s coronation the Norman Geoffrey had succeeded Ansgar the Staller in his sheriffdom of London and Middlesex.[^[305]]

From the sheriffs we may pass naturally to their superiors in rank, the earls. Taught by experience, William regarded the vast, half-independent earldoms of the later Anglo-Saxon period with profound mistrust, and as the occasion presented itself he allowed them to lapse. All the earldoms held by members of the house of Godwine became extinct with the battle of Hastings, but the great provincial governments of Mercia and Northumbria probably lasted until the final revolt of Earls Edwin and Morcar in the spring of 1069. After their suppression there remained three minor earldoms of Anglo-Saxon origin, East Anglia, Northampton, and Bernicia, the holders of which, as we have seen, were mainly responsible for the rebellion of 1075. Upon William’s triumph in the latter year the East Anglian earldom was suppressed, that of Northampton ceases to exist for the remainder of the Conqueror’s reign, and we have already noticed the reasons which led to the continuance of the earldom of Bernicia. Similar motives led to the creation of the four earldoms which alone can be proved to have come into being before 1087, and which deserve to be considered in detail here. They are: