Chapter 7: The Norman Conquest

The Norman knights of William, Duke of Normandy, killed Harold and defeated the English forces in the historic Battle of Hastings. On Christmas Day, William, who became known as William the Conqueror, was crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey, London.

Battle Abbey - the spot where Harold fell

William faced serious resistance in his early years as king. The people of northern England, helped by a Danish force, revolted in 1069. William crushed the rising mercilessly. But stories were later written about Hereward the Wake, a heroic Saxon rebel, who resisted the Normans in the Isle of Ely, Cambridgeshire. It took William five years to put down the revolts in his new kingdom. He seized the land of all Saxons who fought against him and distributed it among his Norman followers, except for vast tracts that he kept for himself as crown lands. On his own estates and on those of favoured barons he ordered strong fortified castles built.

Immediately prior to the conquest Alric held the five hide estate at Holt (Holte). Little Witley (Witlege) was held by Arnwin, a priest, who paid the mother church the normal dues plus one sester (about 32 ounces) of honey. As woodlands are home to wild bees that produce honey, the only form of sweetener known in Europe at that time, it is likely that Ockeridge Wood was the original source.

Following the conquest William appointed one of his knights, Urso de Abitot, as Sheriff of Worcester. Urso (the Bear) was born in St Jean, near Havre in France and made his home in Salwarpe, near Droitwich. In 1075 he helped to crush the revolt of Earl Roger of Hereford. His rewards for this, combined with his lack of scruples when it came to expropriating church lands, meant that by 1086, when the survey for the Domesday book was completed, he had possession of nearly 200 hides; one sixth of Worcestershire. This even included land that he had taken from Evesham Church which had previously been granted to the Bishop of Bayeux. Holt and Little Witley were amongst Urso's acquisitions. Urso took the latter manor from Walter Ponther who had acquired it sometime in the preceding twenty years. Urso’s influence is still visible today in Worcestershire place names such as Redmarley D'Abitot and Croome D'abitot.

William I established a strong central government in England, but he was a Norman king who saw England purely as an extension of his French domains. He exercised strict and systematic control over his conquests.

In return for their grant of land, called a fief, William's barons had to perform certain services. They had military obligations to serve as knights (army commanders). To replace the Anglo-Saxon Witan, William formed an advisory council, the Curia Regis, to help him govern. The King appointed Norman earls, barons, noblemen, bishops and abbots to the council and to other high positions. Unlike the Witan, the council did not have the power to choose the king.

All land was divided into manors. Most manors contained a village. A baron or lord was the King's tenant-in-chief and had several manors. The lord kept some land as his demesne, for his personal use. He let other land go to freeholders, who could leave his manor if they wished. Native Anglo-Saxon farmers who were reduced to the class of serfs, or villeins, as the Normans called them farmed the rest. Villeins could not leave the manor on which they were born and had to give the lord part of their produce. They also had to work on the demesne. This system of land tenure was the basis of feudalism, which held sway all over Europe in the Middle Ages.

The lord passed on part of his military obligations to his tenants, who held manors from him. The tenants of each manor performed specific regular services for their lord. This type of land tenure and manorial and military organisation is known as feudal tenure. Feudalism had been practiced in Anglo-Saxon times, but under the Normans, it became more organised.

The cultivated land of each manor was in three large fields. Each field was divided into long, narrow strips. The lord kept several strips for himself, and allotted a number of strips to each villein. Each person's strips were distributed in various parts of the fields. By this arrangement, no one had all good or all bad land. Crops were grown in a regular, three-year rotation to prevent soil exhaustion. In the first year, one field grew wheat or rye, another grew oats or barley, and the third was left fallow (uncultivated). In the second year and in the third, the crops were rotated. As a result, each field grew two crops in the three years.

Some land around the manor, but outside the three fields, was common land for keeping cattle, poultry, and sheep. People gathered fuel from the woodland and grew hay on the meadowland. Farmers slaughtered most of the cattle each autumn because they could not feed them in winter. They preserved meat by salting it.

During the period of Norman rule, the Church was an important influence in the life of the people. Every village had its church, and every city had a cathedral (a bishop's church). Monks and nuns lived in monasteries and convents. Foreign monks and bishops, brought in by the Normans, made the monasteries centers of learning. Anyone who wanted to study went into the church as a matter of course. The king's secretaries, judges, and most of his civil servants were churchmen, because only churchmen had the necessary education.

The Church was wealthy. Kings granted many estates and manors to it. Pious people left money or land to it in their wills. The Normans built many stone churches, including St. Bartholomew-the-Great in London. Norman churches and castles had thick walls, huge columns, and round-headed arches.

An early type of Norman castle was a motte and bailey. This type of castle consisted of an artificial mound (the motte) surmounted by a wooden tower and enclosed by a moat and stockade (the bailey). Later, the Normans built great stone towers called keeps. The Normans built nearly a hundred castles during William's reign, including the Tower of London.

Shortly before his death in 1087, William conducted a survey to discover how much land, as conqueror, he now owned in England, how the rest was divided, and how the land was peopled. The record of William's survey became known as the Domesday Book and was the first official record of the property holders living in England and the amount of land they held. Domesday is a corruption of Doomsday (the day of the final judgment); the work was so named because its judgments in terms of levies and assessments were irrevocable. The information was collected in 1086; 20 years after William and his followers conquered England. He used the information from the survey to set taxes and to further divide large estates among his followers.

For the survey the kingdom was divided into districts. Each district supplied census takers called legati, who visited each county and conducted a public inquiry. The set of questions that these officers asked of the town and county representatives constituted the Inquisitio Eliensis; the answers supplied the information from which the Domesday Book was compiled. The census and the land survey covered most of the territory William controlled. No survey was held in either London or Winchester, and information about regions in northern England is incomplete. Domesday Book is viewed as the greatest public record of medieval Europe.

There was no single source of justice in post Conquest England. The king's council was the Supreme Court, and in the last resort, the king was the fount of justice. Normally only great lords were tried by him. Their fellow freemen in regional or local courts, called shire or hundred courts usually tried freemen. Norman landowners also held courts and judged their tenants. Church courts tried clergy for all crimes except treason. They also tried lay people for such offences as adultery and heresy.

Under Anglo-Saxon law, a person could be cleared by the oaths of a group of men who believed the person to be innocent. But a person who was a known criminal or who had been caught in the act might have to undergo trial by ordeal. For example, the person might have to plunge an arm into boiling water. If the burns did not fester within three days, the person was judged to be innocent. In the 1200's, trial by jury began replacing trial by ordeal.

Henry I extended royal control over criminal cases and appointed royal officials in shire courts. Henry II sent judges throughout the country to hold royal courts.

Although most Anglo-Saxons became serfs under the Normans, they kept their language and many of their customs. Through the years, the differences between the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans gradually decreased. For example, the Normans spoke French at first. But eventually, their language blended with that of the Anglo-Saxons. In time, the Normans and Anglo-Saxons became a united people.

A significant innovation under the Normans was the introduction of the royal forest. `Forest' was a legal term applied to land governed by forest laws designed for the protection of deer and where only the monarch could hunt. The creation of royal forest, particularly the New Forest, made a deep impression on contemporaries. John of Worcester alleged that William I had depopulated a fruitful and prosperous countryside and had destroyed houses and churches to make way for the deer. Popular rumour declared that the death of the Norman king, William Rufus, while hunting in the New Forest, was an act of divine retribution for the impious act of his father. But modern scholarship suggests that Norman kings tended to impose the forest laws mainly upon districts where clearing and cultivation had made relatively slow progress in areas of agriculturally unfavourable terrain.