William the Conqueror and the Rule of the Normans

by F. M. Stenton

The rapidity with which England had been conquered had demonstrated clearly enough the inefficiency of the Anglo-Saxon military system, and the changes introduced in this matter by King William were revolutionary, both in details and in principle. The military force at the disposal of Edward the Confessor had consisted of two parts: first, the fyrd or native militia, based on the primitive liability of every free man to serve for the defence of his county, and secondly a body of housecarles, professional men-at-arms, who served for pay and were therefore under better discipline and available for longer periods of service than the rustic soldiery of the shires. There is no good evidence to prove that the Anglo-Saxon thegn was burdened with any military obligation other than that which rested on him as a free man, but there are certain passages which suggest that, in the latter days of the old English state, the king in practice would only call out one man from each five hides of land, and that he would hold his more powerful subjects responsible for the due appearance of their dependants. If this were an attempt to create a small but efficient host out of the great body of the fyrd, it came too late to save the situation and, so far as our evidence goes, it was the professional housecarles who bore the brunt of the great battles of 1066. By derivation at least the housecarle must have been a man who dwelt in his lord’s house as a personal retainer; and, although we know that men of this class had received grants of land from the last native kings, there is no reason to believe that their holdings were conditional on their services, or indeed that they were other than personal marks of favour, quite unconnected with the military duty of the recipient.

The essential features of the Norman system were entirely different to this. Each tenant in chief of the crown, as the condition on which he held his lands, was required to maintain, equip, and hold ready for immediate service a definite number of knights, and the extent of his liability in this matter was not, save in the roughest sense, proportional to his territorial position, but was determined solely by the will of the king. Transactions of this kind most probably took place at the moment when each tenant in chief was put into possession of his fief, and their observance on the part of the grantee was guaranteed by the penalty of total forfeiture in the event of his appearance at the king’s muster with less than his full complement of knights. His military liability once ascertained, a tenant would commonly proceed to enfeof some of his knights on portions of his estate, keeping the remainder in attendance on his person. As time went on the number of landless knights continually became less and less, and by the end of the Conqueror’s reign, the greater part of every fief was divided into knight’s fees, whose holders were bound by the circumstances of their tenure to serve with their lord in the discharge of the military service which he owed the crown. No definite quantity of land, measured either by assessment or value, constituted the knight’s fee; but, judging from the evidence of a later period, it seems certain that each tenant in chief was burdened with the service of a round number of knights, twenty, thirty, or the like, and it is quite possible that these round figures were influenced by the Norman constabularia of ten knights, a military unit which we know to have prevailed across the Channel before the conquest of England.[^[319]]

But the work of subinfeudation once started, no limit in theory or practice was ever set to it in England, and in the earliest period of Norman rule we find knights, who held of a tenant-in-chief, subletting part of their land to other knights and the latter continuing the process at their own pleasure. In Leicestershire, for example, the vill of Lubbenham was held of the king by the archbishop of York, and had been let by him to a certain Walchelin, who had enfeoffed with it a man of his own called Robert, who had granted three carucates of land in the manor to an unnamed knight as his tenant. But this is an exceptional case, for it is unusual for Domesday to reveal more than two lords in ascending order between the peasant and the king. A process of the same kind had not been unknown in England in the time of King Edward; churches had been leasing land to their thegns; and thegns, whom a Norman lawyer would consider to hold of the king, had been capable of subletting their estates to their dependants. But the legal principles which underlay dependant land tenure had never been worked out in England, as they had been elaborated in Normandy before the Conquest, and in two important respects at least there was a marked difference between the old and the new system. On the one hand it is extremely doubtful whether Anglo-Saxon law had developed the idea that all land, not in the king’s immediate possession, was held directly or indirectly of the crown; and in the second place the old English system of land tenure was far slacker and less coherent than its Norman rival. Domesday Book contains frequent references to men who could leave one lord and seek another at will, and this want of stability in what was perhaps the most important division of private law meant a corresponding weakness in the whole of the Anglo-Saxon body politic. Here as elsewhere the Norman work made for cohesion, permanence, and theoretical consistency.

AUTOGRAPH SIGNATURES TO WINDSOR AGREEMENT

It was also an innovation upon accepted practice that the Conqueror extended to ecclesiastical estates the military responsibilities which he imposed upon lay fiefs. Long before the Confessor’s time, the churches had been subletting land to their thegns on condition that the latter should do the military service which the said churches owed to the king; but the duty in question merely represented the amount of fyrd service due from the lands of each religious house, and was in no sense the result of any bargain between the king and the latter. On the other hand, the number of knights maintained by an ecclesiastical tenant of King William depended in the last resort upon the terms which that tenant, whether bishop or monastery, had made with the new sovereign. The Conqueror could not venture to dispossess a native religious house as he could dispossess a native thegn or earl; but he could insist that such a body should make its contribution towards the new army which he was planting on the soil of England, and he could determine the minimum amount of the contribution in each case. So far as our evidence goes, the knight service demanded from a monastery was fixed in a much more arbitrary manner than that imposed on a lay tenant; a baron’s military liabilities would greatly correspond in the main, though very roughly, with the extent of his fief, but no principle of the kind can have been applied to the burden laid upon the church lands. The abbeys of Peterborough and Abingdon were bound to supply sixty and thirty knights respectively, but St. Albans escaped with a servitum debitum of six, and St. Benet of Hulme was only debited with three. It is more than probable that political conditions went far towards producing these violent discrepancies; a monastery, like Peterborough, which had displayed strong nationalist tendencies, might fairly enough be penalised by the imposition of a heavy burden of service towards the maintenance of the foreign rule. On the other hand, the process in question was regarded in a very different light by the Norman abbots who were gradually introduced in the course of the reign, and by the English monks placed under their government. To the former the creation of knights’ fees meant a golden opportunity of providing for their necessitous kinsmen beyond the Channel; to the latter the withdrawal of land from the immediate purposes of the church forboded an ultimate shrinkage in the daily supply of beef and beer. The local chronicler of Abingdon abbey tells us sorrowfully how Abbot Ethelhelm sent over into Normandy for his kinsmen, and invested them with the possessions of the monastery to such an extent that in one year he granted seventy manors to them, which were still lacking to the church a hundred years later.

Reference should perhaps be made here to the difficult question of the actual numbers of the territorial army which rose at King William’s bidding upon the conquered land. In a matter of this kind the statements of professed chroniclers must be wholly ignored; they represent mere guesswork, and show a total insensibility to the military and geographical possibilities of the case. Several attempts, based upon the safer evidence of records, have recently been made to estimate the total number of knights whom the king had the right to summon to his banners at any given moment, and it is probable that the results of such inquiries represent a sufficiently close approximation to the truth of the matter. On the whole, then, we may say that the total knight service of England was fixed at something near five thousand knights, of whom 784 have been assigned to religious tenants-in-chief, 3534 have been set down as the contribution of lay barons, the remainder representing the allowance properly to be made for the deficiencies in our sources of information.[^[320]] The question is important, not only for the influence which tenure by knight service exercised on the later English land-law, but also for its bearing upon the cognate problem of the numbers engaged in the battle of Hastings, which has already received discussion here.

From knight service we may pass naturally enough to the kindred duty of castle-guard. The castles which had arisen in England by the time of the Conqueror’s death belong to one or other of two great classes. On the one hand, there was the royal fortress, regarded as an element in the system of national defence, whether against foreign invasion or native revolt; to the second class belong the castles which were merely the private residence of their lord. In castles of the former class, which were mostly situated in boroughs and along the greater roadways, the governor was merely the king’s lieutenant; Henry de Beaumont and William Peverel were placed in command of the castles of Warwick and Nottingham respectively, in order that they might hold those towns on the king’s behalf. This being the case, it was only natural that garrison duty as well as service in the field should be demanded from the knights whom the barons of the neighbourhood were required to supply; the knights of the abbot of Abingdon were required to go on guard at Windsor Castle. Of the seventy castles which we may reasonably assume to have existed in 1087, twenty-four belong to this class, and twenty of the latter are situated in some borough or other, and this close connection of borough and royal castle is something more than a fortuitous circumstance. In Anglo-Saxon times, it is well ascertained that each normal borough had been the military centre of the district in which it lay, and had in fact been the natural base of operations in the work of local defence. The Normans brought with them new ideas on the subject of defensive strategy, but the geographical and economic conditions which gave to the boroughs their military importance in early times were not annulled by the Norman Conquest; and it would still have been desirable to safeguard the growing centres of trade from external attacks, even if it had not been expedient in Norman eyes to set a curb upon the national spirit among the dwellers in the English towns. No general rule can be laid down as to the custody of these royal castles; it was not infrequent for them to be held on the king’s behalf by the sheriff of the shire in which they might be situated, but the Conqueror would entrust his fortress to any noble of sufficient military skill and loyalty, and, as in the cases of Warwick and Nottingham, a tenure which was originally mere guardianship might pass in the course of time into direct possession.

The larger class of private castles is less important from the institutional standpoint. In Normandy the duke had the right to garrison the castles of his nobility with troops of his own, but the Conqueror does not seem to have extended this principle to England. It is very probable that he would insist on his own consent being given to any projected fortification on the part of his feudatories, but so long as his rule was threatened by English revolt, rather than by Norman disloyalty, he would not be greatly concerned to limit the castle-building tendencies of his followers. On the Welsh border, for example, where the creation of a strong line of castles was an essential part of the business of frontier defence, the work of fortification must largely have been left to the discretion of the earls of Shrewsbury and Chester, and to the enterprise of the first generation of marcher lords. East of a line drawn north and south through Gloucester, lie nearly half of the total number of castles which we can infer to have been built during the Conqueror’s reign, but only fourteen of them were in private hands.

Underneath all these violent changes in the higher departments of the military art, the old native institution of the fyrd lived on. Two years after Hastings, at the dangerous crisis occasioned by the revolt of Exeter, we find the Conqueror calling out the local militia, and at intervals during his reign the national force continues to be summoned, not only by the king but by his lieutenants, such as Geoffrey of Coutances at the time of the relief of Montacute. It is not necessary to assume that William had prescience of a day when an English levy might be a useful counterbalance to a feudal host in rebellion; he inherited the military as well as the financial and judiciary powers of his kinsman King Edward, and obedience would naturally be paid to his summons by everybody who did not wish to be treated as a rebel on the spot. It does not seem that the Conqueror materially altered the constitution or equipment of the fyrd; in fact he had no need to do this, for its organisation and armament, obsolete as they were in comparison with those of the feudal army, still enabled it to fight with revolted Englishmen or Scotch raiders on more or less of an equality. For the serious business of a campaign the Conqueror would rely on the small but efficient force of knights at his command, and it is to be noted that no barrier of racial prejudice prevented the absorption of Englishmen of sufficient standing into the knightly class. The number of Englishmen who are entered in Domesday Book, on a level with[with] the Norman tenants of a great baron, is considerable, and it is by no means improbable that, below the surface of our records, a process had been going on which had robbed the heterogeneous militia of King Edward’s day of its wealthier and more efficient elements. Many a thegn who would formerly have joined the muster of his shire with an equipment little, if at all, superior to that of the peasantry of his neighbourhood, will have received his land as the undertenant of some baron, and have learned to adopt the military methods of his Norman fellows. We cannot define with accuracy the stages by which this process did its work, but when the time came for Henry II. to reorganise the local militia, it was with a force of yeomen and burgesses that he had to deal.