1. NATURE OF THE Conqueror’s feudalism — 2. The officers of the royal household and their fees — 3. Royal residences and building of the Tower — 4. Character of the royal expenses, dress, manners, and education.
1. During the reigns of the four Norman kings, England was as it were violently caught up by the irresistible Norman torrent and swept out of its back-water into the main stream of continental civilisation. Saxon England had had a civilisation of its own, and brought a wealth of treasure and of ideas to its new governors so great as to secure for it the first place among its lord’s possessions. England was no mere appendage to Normandy, with London suffragan to Rouen; from the first it was clear that the kingdom would precede the duchy. To the newly-conquered kingdom the conquerors brought all they had to give, and the chief part of their wealth lay in their continental ideas, which put new life into Church and State. As he owed much to the papacy, which was now to enter upon a new era, characterised by novel and ambitious schemes, it was certain that William I. would bring the English church into line with his Norman church: he was prepared to distinguish things spiritual from things temporal, and let his own masterful wielding of the temporal sword measure the strength of the spiritual. In his time there would be no war on the frontier of the spiritual and temporal kingdoms. Further he brought with him men of all ranks of society and from many countries, imbued with the doctrines of continental feudalism. William and his ministers found English society already half feudalised, but without cohesion and almost anarchic, with tribal elements still only half absorbed, a society so wanting in symmetry and system as to have little to commend it to Norman ideas of government. But as in feudalism there was danger of conflict among the many temporal swords, here, too, William the Conqueror saw to it that the royal sword, while he wielded it, should be supreme. The feudalism which he brought with him placed him merely as “primus inter pares”: that was a position not good enough for him; he aimed at and secured a mastery.
The fabric of society as it was woven by him was of course to be woven of tenurial relations, for no western European could conceive of social relations of any other web, but in woof and warp he introduced a strand of governmental power which was not of tenure. With marvellous vigour king after king carried on his work. Only the reign of Stephen shows by contrast how great was the accomplishment of his predecessors and successors. It was then and then only that the spiritual sword and the baronial swords were uppermost.
What manner of men were these great rulers? Can they be approached at all in their daily lives and be seen otherwise than as governors? Little attention, comparatively speaking, has been paid to the social life of the Normans in England, and yet many difficulties in the understanding of larger themes are best removed by understanding the many characteristic phrases or expressions descriptive of daily life which give colour to the chronicles of the past. The Normans were capable of carrying out schemes of a particular nature, partly by reason of their peculiar domestic civilisation. The evidence descriptive of the life of the Norman kings in England is not abundant, for their palaces are almost wholly swept away; almost all the records of their expenses have vanished; their letters are few in number and formal in character; no chronicle describes their courts in detail. Furthermore, much of their life was spent across the Channel, and their interests were centred largely in the land they came from, so that some of the evidence we have is relevant rather to the Norman duchy than to the English realm. Nevertheless, the fragments of evidence that remain, the entries in Domesday Book, and the statements made touching Henry I.’s reforms in his court are not inadequate to give a detailed picture.
2. The increase in royal dignity which followed on the Norman Conquest was merely one symptom of the nature of the change that had come over England. The Norman court was better planned than the royal household of Anglo-Saxon times, so far as we know it. Both had grown out of the Germanic idea of the household, with its reeve, dish-thegn, cup-bearer, and staller, but in the Norman ducal household these officers had been reinforced by many others. Household departments were multiplied, and under each head of a department (whose office tended to become hereditary and one of dignity only), there were the numerous servants doing the domestic duties. The Norman “curia” was capable of Protean changes of character, adapting itself according to circumstance as an ambulatory household, a camp, a tribunal, a council of war, an administrative or political assembly. Inasmuch as the king’s household was the nursery in which were trained and reared the great officers of State, a peculiar interest attaches to offices that sound humble enough. The king’s household, and the separate households of the queen and the royal children have all left their mark on Domesday Book, for, in return for services past and future, stallers, marshals, chamberlains, cooks, bed-chamber-attendants, stewards, jesters, managers of the king’s transport, of his hunting and hawking expeditions, must all be given a landed provision, in the days when the king is rich in land and not in money.
But a precise description of the daily allowances of the palace servants comes from an Exchequer record of a somewhat later date. The record is believed to represent the reformed household of Henry I., and there is evidence that it was written soon after his death in 1135. Henry found it necessary to correct many abuses that had come in under Rufus’s management and he ordered that his Chancellor should receive five shillings a day, and bread, wine, and candles in fixed quantity. The stewards had a like “livery” or stipend, and so also the butler, master chamberlain, treasurer, and constables. The solid part of the board, which is not mentioned, was of course provided at the king’s table; these liveries, or “buttery commons” as we should call them, of bread, wine, and candles were for private consumption. All these officers being en pension appear as strictly household officers, though they were, from another point of view, officers of state. This same record shows that in the Chancellor’s office there was a master of the writing-room with a staff of clerks and scribes; it is the office of a man who was Secretary of State for all departments And in close association, for the Chancellor is an ecclesiastic,comes the chapel department, with its two sumpter-men employed in the transport of its furniture when the royal household moves. The supply of lights for the chapel was fixed with precision by the thrifty Norman king at two large candles on Wednesdays and Saturdays, with a torch nightly before the relics and thirty bunches of small candles. The chapel had further a provision of a gallon of wine for mass, and a measure on Absolution Day (Thursday before Good Friday) to wash the altar.
The steward or master-dispenser and his servants got a similar “livery” and a salary which varied according as they were living within the house of the king or without. In the steward’s department was a naperer to look after the linen, an usher and a bread-counter. The bearer of the alms-dish or “scuttle” fed in the house. In the larder department slaughterers were employed, receiving “customary” food. In the bakery two bakers fed in the house, and two travelling bakers were at wages. The number of loaves they were to make out of a given quantity of flour was fixed by the careful king, no doubt in order to put a stop to abuses. The making of the royal wafers was the duty of a “nebularius.”
The king’s kitchen and the great or “hall” kitchen were clearly distinguished, each with its separate staff. The cook of the “demesne” or king’s own kitchen fed in the house and had 1 1/2 d. a day for his man; ushers and vessel-keeper and sumpter-man or pack-carrier had the same. The “great” kitchen had a larger staff with numbers of spit-men. The kitchen spits played a large part in the medieval table-service as many contemporary illustrations remind us.
Owing to the disorder which reigned at William Rufus’s great feasts at Westminster Hall, even he, who was not a reformer like Henry I., appointed ushers of hall, and kitchen, and doorkeepers, in all three hundred of them, armed with rods to use upon occasion, for the protection of guests and cooks alike from the press of the rabble. Such is the story of Rufus’s contemporary Gaimar, who gives an amusing description of the scenes at royal feasts, of the greedy clutching at dishes as they passed from kitchen offices, with many a spill.
Each department had its own carters and sumpter-men, answerable for the transport when the king travelled, and perhaps also for the provision of supplies. The chamberlain’s department was answerable for the king’s bedroom service, and included the king’s bed-bearer and a water-man who travelled with the king and got an extra salary when his master put him to the trouble of preparing a bath, except on the three great Church festivals when the king was bound to bathe, and the water-man must bathe him without extra charge. “Concerning the washerwoman there is uncertainty,” says the writer of this curious record; that is, it is not clear whether she belongs to the household and has court-rations or not. The treasury is spoken of under the “camera,” for the idea that in the sleeping quarters treasure is safest is a very old one. It was the bedchamber staff that was to provide most of the officers of the Exchequer.
Coupled with the “camera” comes the Constable’s and next the Marshal’s department. The first seems to have already lost its association with the stable (comes stabuli), while the Marshal (marescalcus, horse-servant) retains his link with the stable and farriery department (compare Fr. maréchal). It seems probable that horseshoeing first became customary in England after the Norman Conquest.
Both Constable and Marshal were to be prominent in the Exchequer department, for their chief duty is the payment of the king’s knights and hunting-servants. By Henry I.’s “constitution” the wages of the Marshal’s servants when the king’s household moved from place to place were precisely determined, and the perquisites of the watchmen, the fuel-man, the tent-keeper, the four horn-blowers and twenty servants, whose duty was probably that of bodyguard. Then follow the servants who were responsible for the king’s sport, the fewterer or keeper of greyhounds, keepers of the hawks’ mews, the wild-cat hunters, the “berner” in charge of running hounds, the huntsman of the hart, the keeper of the “braches,” dogs of keen scent; these and the wolf-hunters all had their “liveries” for themselves and their horses and dogs and hounds. The archers carrying the king’s bow took 5d. a day.
Subsequent records of the organisation of the king’s household, of which there are several of various dates, show how the above scheme expanded, and go to prove that the Norman royal housekeeping, though an advance on the Saxon, was still rude. The list of liveries, for instance, becomes much longer in later times.
The household offices were at least nominally presided over by the highest of the king’s men, but undoubtedly they delegated to others the services which they did not care to do themselves. We must not credit the legend of the Colchester monks, that their earl became “dapifer” because William fitz-Osbern, the king’s trusted minister, served up an underdone crane before his master. But Gaimar’s story of the origin of the Earl of Chester’s golden wand may be truer. Four earls, he tells us, were to carry state swords before Rufus to the great feast at Westminster Hall. Earl Hugh, of Chester, was too proud to carry anything, for he said he was not a servant. Thereupon the king offered him a golden wand and made the bearing of it an office for him and his heirs.
It will be seen that this scheme for the royal household took its character largely from the fact that the court was ambulatory, as it remained when far more highly organised. The story of Henry I.’s reorganisation is borne out from several independent sources. Eadmer, as the biographer of Anselm, claims that the change was due to his beloved patron’s advice, and he gives a vivid account of the sufferings of the people when called upon to provide for the necessities of the ravaging horde of courtiers under the old system. Till the number of hangers-on was reduced, the villagers fled before the advent of the court, taking refuge in the woods. William of Malmesbury, writing as a contemporary, and Walter Map, writing under Henry II., both speak of Henry I.’s new system as marking progress in discipline and economy. In his time the royal travels were so regular that as the “camp” moved along its needs were supplied “as easily as at a fair.” The officials were sure of their wages, and the merchants who sold food to the court were sure of their pay.
This “Constitutio Domus Regis” of Henry I. has seemed worth analysing carefully, because it is the earliest account, and one full of vivid detail, which describes the royal housekeeping. It serves as a picture not only of the royal household, but, as will be shown later, of the household of the king’s great men.
3. The three first Norman kings spent the greater part of their time out of England, and when in England their travels were seldom broken by periods of repose. Punitive expeditions summoned the Conqueror over the length and breadth of his realm, and his successors were scarcely less active within a. more limited area. These travels were partly a means of supporting the court, partly for judicial purposes, partly to make known the king’s power. All the great forest districts were visited in turn for the pleasures of the chase, and in each the king had a fixed habitation. Thus the great Councils, such as those held at Rockingham, Clarendon, Woodstock, take their names from favourite hunting-seats, for all the kings knew how to combine business with pleasure.
William the Conqueror, after his not too peaceful coronation at Westminster, withdrew to the safety of a camp, and before London could be made a safe centre for operations, fortifications, which resulted in the building of the Tower, had to be begun. The first defences seem to have been temporary, but after the advantages of the site had been experienced, the Conqueror decided to build a great keep or tower, such as probably already stood at Rouen. This was the first keep to be built in England, and the architect was Gundulf, bishop of Rochester, 1077-1108, at one time a clerk of Rouen cathedral, and a monk of Bee, when Lanfranc was prior. Lanfranc brought him to England in 1070. That he was still presiding over the works of the White Tower when bishop, is known from an agreement made between him and a London burgess in whose house he was lodging, a record which his Rochester monks preserved.
The White Tower as it now stands is Gundulfs work, adapted to the needs of succeeding centuries. The wall of the keep (12 to 15 feet thick) is said to have taken six weeks to pierce with modern appliances. The walls, diminishing in thickness at each stage upwards, were built of rubble, rudely coursed, with very open joints, while the plinth, quoins, and pilasters, characteristic of the Norman rectangular keep, are believed to be of Kentish rag. The chief features to notice in the plans, both because they are characteristic and because they show the creator’s architectural power, are the intersecting wall, the three well-staircases, the mural staircase to the chapel, the mural gallery on the top-floor (the lord’s dwelling), which communicated with the three well-stairs and with the chapel; the dark cellars used as storehouses of food and arms; and the loops, wide enough to shoot from, but not wide enough to admit fire-brands thrown from without. The floors, now brick, were originally doubtless of timber.
The account of Ralph Flambard’s escape from the Tower in 1100 goes to prove that the inner arrangements were then in the main much as they have remained. This splendid building stands alone to mark the highest point attained in castle architecture in the Conqueror’s clay. Under Rufus in 1097, a great wall was built encircling the Tower; and later a palace was included within one of the castle wards, to which Stephen at one time withdrew.
But the Tower was not often the Norman king’s dwelling-place. At the time when Rufus was levying forced labour for his castle-work from the shires round London, according to the old English plan, he took the opportunity to raise for himself a new palace at Westminster, with a hall of proportions magnificent enough to be thought very grand by his contemporaries. His famous boast that this hall should be completely surpassed by the rooms which he meant to build round it, he never carried out, and later sovereigns even deemed it necessary to rebuild his great hall on a statelier scale.
The Saxon royal house at Winchester was left to the use of the mother of the Confessor and his widow, and a new one was built for William, on ground which encroached upon the New Minster, and from which twelve burgesses had first to be evicted. The New Minster was strong enough to obtain compensation; not so perhaps the burgesses. Besides this palace, to which a great hall, the essential part of a palace, was attached (as we learn from the account of the destruction of this palace in Stephen’s reign), a castle was also built where the treasure, together with the regalia, was kept. When the king wore his crown at the three great Church festivals, it was fetched from Winchester, and when the Empress Matilda entered Winchester in Stephen’s reign to seek to reclaim her own, her first business was to go to the castle for the crown, as her father had done on William Rufus’s death. Other favourite dwellings were Windsor, improved by Henry I., and styled New Windsor, and in the Isle of Wight, a favourite starting-point for Normandy, a hall was early made at Carisbrooke. Henry I.’s name is also closely associated with Beaumont Hall, Oxford, now totally destroyed.
4. William the Conqueror, whilst he was in England, was oftener in camp than under a roof. Rufus’s court was less purely military, and if we may trust a mass of hostile evidence, it was degraded by scenes of debauchery that created the profoundest impression upon his time. Henry I. restored decency to the court, although he could not boast a clean domestic record like his father. He had, however, the tastes of a collector, and the arts prospered under his patronage. That he collected jewels is known from a letter written by a prior of Worcester to Eadmer, Anselm’s biographer, in which he suggests that for money Henry might be persuaded to part with some pearls; he collected also plate, and had a menagerie of rare animals at Woodstock, his favourite place for privacy and retirement; to Woodstock foreign kings sent lions, leopards, lynxes, camels, porcupines, and an ostrich.
A minute account of his expenses, where these were deducted from the sheriff’s accounts, is entered on the single Exchequer record which comes from his reign (1130). It states the cost of conveying wine, wheat, and garments for the king and queen from hunting-lodge to hunting-lodge, of carrying cuttle-fish, cheeses, venison, of “transportations” to Normandy, of building done at, the king’s expense, whether of castles as at Arundel and Carlisle, or of lodges of timber and daubed lath. The building or repair of London Bridge (Rufus had begun it), of Rochester Bridge, to be ready against the king’s coming, is noted here, and in these, our earliest building accounts, the minute particulars into which the sheriff enters are often of great interest for the history of prices as also of architecture.
The liveries or payments in money, food or clothes, which were due from the king, are likewise deducted by the sheriffs on their accounts, and from this source many curious particulars may be collected.
As recipients of livery, the watch and the porter and the servants of St. Briavel’s castle in Gloucestershire are spoken of, and in London there were large deductions for the livery of the future King Stephen, of servants keeping the watch, and the porters of the Tower, of the wife of the naperer, of the engineer; payments to goldsmiths; and for fuel, herring, onions, oil and nuts to be taken to Woodstock; for wine, pepper, cummin, ginger, cloth, basins, shirts, bought for the king’s use. The sheriffs deduct, further, liveries for the men working in the royal vineyards, which appear always to have been brought more closely under the lord’s eye than the less highly cultivated part of his manors. There are also to be deducted the fees of the guardians of the parks, of the feeding of game-birds in the park, and at Windsor, especially, these charges are heavy. The costs of restocking the royal farms are rarely closely specified, though now and again there may be a special entry. The fee for a costly stallion to leap the king’s mares serves to show that some attention was paid to breeding from good stock. Upon the Pipe Roll, too, there are entered those charitable donations which the king’s “farmers” were authorised to make in his name; for instance, for the “vestiture” or clothing of nuns at Berkeley, for “corrodies” or grants of food and clothing, as well as less regularly paid alms to the poor and needy.
All these curious side-lights come from an isolated Exchequer roll of a single year, and may serve as specimens of the wealth of illustration which is offered by these records when under Henry II. the stream of them becomes almost continuous. For the Norman period alone do we have to be content with mere scraps, but they are scraps which show the nature of the Norman civilisation in quaint detail.
Although little can be known of the daily life of the Norman palace, the chroniclers have not failed to bring the personalities of kings, queens, and princes vividly before us. Nor is evidence on dress deficient. The seals of the Conqueror and his successors show the king in his military and in his civil dress. On the one side the king is seen mounted and clad in a shirt or hauberk of mail, with long breeches of mail, a helmet, a lance with three streamers, and a kiteshaped shield. Stephen wears the hauberk with continuous coif On the reverse, in robes of state, he is seated on a throne. The nature of the robes is described by Ordericus Vitalis; for the king sent his robes to Roger de Breteuil, and they consisted of a surcoat or chlamys, a silk tunic, and a mantle of ermine. Henry I. received from the bishop of Lincoln a cloak lined with sable worth £1oo of Norman money, according to Gerald of Wales, but the sum is perhaps fabulous. The use of fur-lined clothes was necessitated by the medieval custom of living exposed to the weather, and the sorts which are spoken of continually throughout medieval literature are spoken of also in Norman times; for instance, in Gaimar’s description of the clothes worn by noblemen at Rufus’s feast, and in the English Chronicle’s account of the furs which Margaret of Scotland gave to the Norman king.
The seal of Matilda, Henry I.’s daughter, shows a royal lady’s dress of the same period; or we may turn to the statue, believed to represent her mother, which flanks the great gate of Rochester cathedral. A similar figure, possibly by the same hand, is in the wall of the old Moot Hall, Colchester. This hall is said to be the work of Kudo Dapifer, a friend and ally of Gundulf at Rochester.
The tendency to effeminacy in men’s dress, which consorts so curiously ill with all we know of Norman energy, an energy which no debauches could quench, was frequently referred to by contemporaries, and in terms which seem to show that the complaint was one better founded and more generally felt to be true than is always the case when contemporaries decry the new fashions. The outward changes were held to be indicative of those far deeper-rooted evils which Rufus’s licentiousness (so men said) had made common in England. As a matter of fact, the new fashions had spread all over Western Europe, so at least says Ordericus Vitalis. He speaks of long curled and plaited locks, parted down the middle of the head, of trailing skirts which made all active exercise impossible, of shoes with pointed tocs as long as the tails of scorpions, filled with tow, of large wide sleeves which made the hands usless, of fillets in the hair that curling tongs had crimped; and equally hateful in the eyes of many were the long beards which contrasted with the close-shaven faces of the Conqueror’s day, beards that were allowed to grow, a bishop said, in order that the stubby chin might not prick the mouths of ladies in kissing.
Rufus was extravagant in dress, and William of Malmesbury has a story of his refusing a pair of hose at three shillings because they were not dear enough. Some confused reminiscence of this seems to lurk in Iago’s ballad: —
“King Stephen was a worthy peer,
His breeches cost him but a crown.”
The fashionable robes were worn loose and open, and the effeminates walked with mincing gait, encumbered by their flowing skirts. Many bishops are reported to have |preached upon these topics, and Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, among others; but the most famous incident was the scene after a sermon preached before Henry I., when he and all his courtiers submitted their heads to a bishop’s shears. Of Wulfstan, the saintly bishop of Worcester, it is recorded that he often used a knife, which he carried to clean his nails or to remove dirty spots from books, to crop those whom he could bring to submission. Even Rufus amused himself by setting a passing fashion of lock-clipping at court. When in Henry I.’s time long hair was again in vogue tlie cropping of Robert, count of Meulan and lord of Leicester, Henry I.’s principal confidant, was thought to augur well, for he was in the pink of fashion. Indeed, such was his power to sway fashionable circles that he succeeded in reducing the meals of the nobility to a single long repast, in imitation of the example of Alexander Comnenius. This was wholly contrary to English notions, which encouraged frequent heavy feeding and drinking. It is said that in Hardicnut’s time the meals were four a day, and some of the Norman settlers, whose digestions were differently planned from that of Robert of Leicester, elected to follow the English system. Their leader was Osbern, bishop of Exeter, brother of William fitzOsbern, William I.’s right-hand man. Some people were bold to say that the new Leicester fashion was due to stinginess, and William of Malmesbury was at pains to show that this accusation was unjustifiable. But if sparing in food, the Norman courtiers did not spare their potations, and Robert of Normandy is said to have been tricked of his duchy while drunk.
Although the treasures in plate accumulated by the Norman court as booty after the Conquest give an idea of luxurious furnishing, further indications are few and far between. The French charters mention the Conqueror’s “tapet” and Henry I.’s down quilt, but likewise the straw for the royal “thalamus.” Of the tapestry that adorned the room of William I.’s daughter, embroidered in gold, silver, and silk thread, a life-like account is preserved in a poem by a contemporary. The scenes represented her father’s conquests, and some of them must have been almost identical with those of the Bayeux tapestry. But there is sufficient evidence to show that this set of tapestry is not that described in the poem.
Of the amusements of the Norman royal household little trace has been handed down. The dicing and backgammon of Rufus’s court was considered one of the many manifestations of his inferiority. In his father’s busy reign there had been no room for amusement. In place of these “idle sports” Henry I. is said to have restored active exercises, and the leisure of the court was spent in hunting and practice for the arduous hand-to-hand encounters of serious warfare.
The queens of the Norman period were women of character, and the chroniclers have thought their works and ways worthy of some note. Of the merits of William I.’s queen the best evidence is her husband’s confidence and devotion. Vicegerent for him in Normandy, holder of his pleas in England, she was clearly a woman of good sense, tact, and experience. It was the learned Henry I. whose wives achieved some position as patrons of literature. His first wife, Matilda, English born, took great delight in minstrelsy, and encouraged the members of a fraternity which was regarded by the superior persons of that age as of worse than doubtful repute. “Happy he who could soothe the ears of the queen by some new song.” It was complained of her that her patronage was extended chiefly to foreigners (the poet Guy of Amiens was her almoner), but as it was the clerks of melodious voice, the scholars famed for verse and for singing, who, according to William of Malmesbury, were the recipients of her charity, we may believe rather that her discrimination in patronage was justified. The low character of the fraternity of minstrels was a familiar theme, and the good religious queen preferred perhaps the better educated of the singers of romantic lays. The queen’s letters, whether from her own pen or not, give a favourable idea of her intellect. Six are to Anselm, to whom she never failed to show every mark of friendship. Neither worldly business nor pleasure, it is recorded, could keep her from hurrying to meet him wherever he passed, that she might prepare convenient lodgings for him. Hildebert, bishop of Le Mans, was also one of her correspondents. Her charities, her hospitals, and maintenance of bridges have secured to her always a favourable memory.
Not only Matilda, but her Flemish-born successor, Adeliza, cultivated the romanticists. It was the poet Gaimar’s boast that he knew tales which Adeliza’s troubadour David did not know, “nor had he them in writing.” The “bestiary” of Philip de Thuan, perhaps one of her countrymen, is dedicated to her.
The indifference of William I. to the poets is recorded by one who wrote under the patronage of his daughter Adela. William was concerned rather to choose active men of affairs for the public offices of his new kingdom than to extend his patronage to learning. Neither his name, nor that of Rufus, is associated with any literary enterprise. But the men of affairs attached to the Norman churches, who came over to fill bishoprics and abbeys, were almost without exception men of learning and all were of his choosing. The school of historians that wrote of the Conqueror’s reign alone would testify to the fact that his circle was intellectual. Rufus’s education was purely military; but all the chroniclers agree in describing Henry as well educated, though the name Beauclerk was a late addition. What exactly this literary education amounted to is another question. Ordericus Vitalis styles him “litteratus rex” because he could read a letter in Latin. William of Malmesbury says he was not a good reader aloud, and his Latin was not of the best. A curious story has been adduced in proof that he understood English, but it will not bear that interpretation. A clerk reading out of a charter came to a list of customs in English, granting “sac and soc,” “toll and team,” “mundbryce,” and the like. He came to a standstill, but the king, who was well-learned, was able to explain it all. The story testifies rather to his legal than to his linguistic attainments. Of the Conqueror it is recorded that he tried to learn the English language, but found that he was too advanced in life to make much progress.
Henry I.’s education was in all likelihood that of a business man and a lawyer, and his age was a great one in administrative reform. Through his skill in selecting organisers who rose through his chancery, and came under his eye in his chapel, it is to his reign that are traced the development of the Exchequer, of the national councils and courts, and the beginning of judicial circuits. He attended to despatches even during mass, and it was to speed in getting through the service that his greatest servant, Roger, bishop of Salisbury, owed his early promotion. In Henry I.’s time illiteracy was considered by some a positive aid to ecclesiastical promotion by the king (who wanted no second Anselm), if we may trust the story of a king’s chaplain who deliberately misread the service in order to gain advancement. He read so grotesquely that Henry asked the reason. On hearing the truth, the chaplain received at once the reward of his humour and penetration, the priory of St. Frideswide’s, Oxford.
1. THE SUPPLANTING OF the English nobility — 2. Baronial households — 3. Evidences of literary taste among the barons — 4. Nature of their castle-building: armour — 5. Private war: ideas of honour — 6. The military orders — 7. Ladies.
1. It was part of the Conqueror’s scheme that as far as possible the whole frame-work of English government and English society should be maintained and made the basis on which the strengthening and systematising Norman genius for government should be set to work. The principle of retention was carried so far that in the distribution of lands to his followers William did not map out the country into compact military districts, suitable for military occupation, but gave as a rule to each Norman the holding of an English predecessor, a holding that had been casually and unsystematically pieced together, whose portions lay scattered far and wide and were held on many various conditions. Surrounded by his own relatives and by adventurers from all parts of Gaul, William was obliged to give to the greedy, but he gave in such a way as not to weaken himself.
The process of supplanting the English nobility and the English official class was carried out with great completeness, though the method of the change varied in different parts of the country. In Kent, the most civilised part, many non-feudal characteristics were allowed to stand, to trouble lawyers in aftertimes: on the marches of Wales and in the least civilised parts of the country the king accepted an unmitigated feudalism, with all its dangers, as the best guarantee, at the moment, of his own peace. He delegated to the lords of lands the sovereign powers he could not exercise himself The great feudalists, whom William endowed, shared with him the racial genius for government, which showed itself not in England only but likewise in Sicily, where at this very time “the best organised and most united” state in Europe was being built up by them. Their law and their architecture are the most eloquent witnesses to their character. Bold and stern, ruggedly simple, what they built was destined to endure.
2. Of their domesticity we can know less even than of the king’s. Not a single account of baronial expenses comes from this period or from the next. But the Normans did not create many different types of domestic life. The scheme of the king’s household was that of every baron. The “Laws of Edward the Confessor,” not always trustworthy, speak truth when they tell us that archbishops, bishops, earls, barons had in their households their knights and servants, namely dapifers, butlers, chamberlains, cooks, bakers. So great an earl as he of Chester is said by Henry of Huntingdon to have owned a third of the kingdom. Whether this be true or not, Ordericus Vitalis has a good deal to say of his style of living. Hugh of Avranches, earl of Chester, “the Wolf,” “the Fat,” gathered about him a vast household of clerks, knights, and young men: his court was a school of manners of a boisterous kind. A lover of riotous sport, he was before all a lover of minstrelsy, romance, and jest. He engaged the best narrators of historic feats, to spur on the young to rivalry. Gaimar bears out part of this story, and describes his house as open to all, a place where wine flowed like water. The earl’s friendship for Anselm proves that his character was many-sided. A careful collection of rather scrappy evidence might show that some of the Norman barons had their peaceful interests which give relief to that picture of their turbulence, violence, and cruelty which doubtless cannot be painted in colours too dark. Even Robert of Belleme, one of the worst specimens, made it his interest to improve the English breed of horses by introducing Spanish stallions, and Gerald of Whales a century later praises the result of his work.
3. Although there were but few, comparatively speaking, among the Norman laymen, who cared aught for cultivation of mind, the names of those who are associated with literature deserve the more to be remembered. Henry I.’s illegitimate son, Robert, Earl of Gloucester, has earned for himself, through William of Malmesbury’s dedications, a lasting fame. William tells in terms of unbounded praise of Robert’s devotion to literature, of his copious draughts from the fount of science. And his story is borne out by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s dedication of his History of the Kings of Britain, addressed likewise to Robert. Geoffrey’s history, according to his own account, was based on oral traditions, recited by heart “as though they were written,” and on a Latin rendering made by Walter, archdeacon of Oxford, from a Breton or Welsh chronicle. Gaimar, who used Geoffrey of Monmouth, says likewise that he used Walter’s work, and that it was rendered from the Welsh at Robert of Gloucester’s request. Neither Welsh nor Breton original, nor Walter of Oxford’s Latin, is extant, nor indeed seems to have been known to any of Geoffrey’s successors, so that doubt has been thrown on the whole story. But whether Geoffrey is to be credited with more or less imaginative power, or more or less respect for historic truth, we may believe that in Gloucester he found a patron; and from Gaimar’s account it is clear that in Lincolnshire also there was a group of nobles and ladies interested in romantic literature. Gaimar records his indebtedness to the patronage of Dame Custance wife of Ralph fitzGilbert, the founder of a Cistercian abbey, Kirkstead, in Lincolnshire. He used many books before he finished; indeed he never could have finished, he says, had it not been for her aid. For his use she sent to Helmsley for a book belonging to one Walter Espec (the Woodpecker). This work was the translation made from the Welsh at Robert of Gloucester’s request. Custance prized the volume so much that she paid a mark of silver, burnt and weighed, for a copy, and kept it always in her chamber. The book-lender Walter Espec is introduced to us in another capacity by the historian of the Battle of the Standard, who describes him as a man of gigantic stature, with raven-black hair and a voice like a trumpet. The fine speech which Ailred puts in his mouth may well be his, at least based on his own words; he bids the Normans remember that they have seen the King of France turn tail, that it is they who have subdued distant Apulia, Calabria, Sicily, and will their mailed knights be beaten by the bare-legged barbarous Scotch?
Another Lincolnshire patroness of literature was Adelaide de Condé of Horncastle, who employed in her household the trouvère Samson of Nanteuil. A baron who was himself a writer was the clever Breton, Earl Brian fitzCount, reared and knighted by Henry I., an Exchequer auditor and a supporter of the Empress Matilda against Stephen. He composed a treatise (now lost) in defence of her rights, so eloquent that a very learned man, Foliot, bishop of Hereford, writes that it kept him engrossed to the neglect of his duties.
But the best evidence that lay education was not wholly neglected is the number of barons who were famous lawyers, like Alberic de Ver, “causidicus,” chief justiciar and chamberlain to Stephen, one of whose judicial speeches remains on record. Such another, Henry I.’s councillor and judge, the earl of Leicester, though no great Latinist, could see through many a legal subtlety in lay and ecclesiastical controversy. For this man’s sons Henry I. provided an education, bringing them up “like his own children”; and when these youths were sent to dispute with the cardinals in logic, they beat them “in sophisms and lively argument,” so says William of Malmesbury.
Another of Henry I.’s bastard sons, Richard, was educated by Bloet, bishop of Lincoln, together with the historian Henry of Huntingdon. The Empress Matilda’s son, the future Henry II., was given the greatest continental teachers in the Latin classics, natural philosophy and versification, and while under his uncle, Robert of Gloucester, likewise, he had in England excellent teaching, together with that earl’s sons. One of these sons, Roger, became bishop of Worcester; another, William, had for his chaplain that same Geoffrey of Monmouth who was to be chief of a school of quasi-historical romance.
But there were few learned knights, such as the friend of Paul, abbot of St. Alban’s, who delighted to buy books for the church, few ladies like the Countess Goda, wife of Eustace of Boulogne and sister to the Confessor, who possessed a choice copy of the Gospels, worthy to be presented to such a library as that of Rochester cathedral.
4. What is more characteristic of the baronial spirit of the Norman era is their building of castles, whose ruins remain to show the dominance of force in everyday Norman life.
Modern scientific inquiry inclines to ascribe more and more of the earth-works, motae, to the Norman rather than to the Anglo-Saxon time. The castle towers, none of which were pre-Norman, fall into two well-defined groups, one solid and rectangular, floored and intended for habitation, the other hollow and generally round, a shell-keep, built as a defence added to an artificial mound. The rectangular keep, requiring solid foundations, is not found in conjunction with the artificial mota. The majority of the barons seem to have been content at first with an enclosed camp, planted in a defensible position, and protected only by an earthwork or palisade. Within, wooden cabins furnished shelter from the elements.
William I. had employed Gundulf to build him the Tower of London, and Gundulf, imitating his own tower built himself the square keep of West Mailing, where he lived as bishop of Rochester. To his influence the keep of Colchester, known to have been in existence in 1101, may very possibly be due. The De Veres followed suit with the square keep of Hedingham in Essex; at Norwich the keep was added to the castle 1120-1140. At Rochester, where Gundulf had built a wall in part-payment of a fine of £100 to Rufus, William de Corbeuil, archbishop of Canterbury, added a keep 1126-1139. Ordericus has described the horrors of a siege at Rochester before the keep was built; the accumulation of filth from men and horses; the heat; the flies, so numerous that men could not eat by day or night unless flappers were used. Such troubles were avoided by those who could shelter themselves in a floored keep, with fire-places and bed-chambers in the thickness of the walls, with privies likewise, arranged with shoots to keep the filth from the wall. By the end of the period there were such keeps in the west, Bristol and Gloucester (both destroyed), Bridgenorth, Ludlow, Chepstow; at Sherborne, Devizes, and Old Sarum, Roger of Salisbury’s castles were considered miracles of masonry; his Devizes was called “the glory of Western Europe.” At Sherborne his keep was octagonal. Of the castles of his nephew Alexander, bishop of Lincoln, Sleaford, Banbury, Newark, praised in similar terms, only a part of Newark remains. At Porchester the fine keep stands; near Winchester, Henry the bishop built Wolvesey, from the stones of the destroyed king’s palace. The keeps of Bamborough and Newcastle belong to the next period, but in the north, Norham received its solid keep from Ralph Flambard.
Where a shell-keep suited best the nature of the ground, the occupants need have recourse to its protection only during siege; in times of peace the garrison was housed in timber buildings in the several wards or separate enclosures which surrounded it. At Cardiff the shell-keep was further defended by a great enclosing wall, 40 feet high and 10 feet thick.
In the lower scale of castle-building came small “peles” for a captain and slender garrison, or a “baile,” such as that of York, which was built in eight days in William I’s. time. Lower still came the “domus defensabilis,” which was generally not strong enough to stand a serious siege. In Stephen’s time a lord, whose house was too weak to protect his people, moved with all his following into Exeter. The county-town in troubled districts, now and for a long time after, was a place of shelter for the people of the county. There is reason to think that the county-towns were carefully schemed by the Saxon kings to fulfil this object. At Shrewsbury a payment towards the repair of the borough walls was long levied on the county, and in the fifteenth century Hereford still acknowledged its responsibility for the protection of the county residents above the rank of cottier.
Numbers of castles which in the early Norman period were seignorial, were destined to become royal by the process of confiscation. That the policy of bridling the people by strongholds was one likely to turn to the weakening of the royal power was quickly perceived, as rebellion followed on rebellion, each with a castle as its centre. At Bridgenorth, for instance, Robert of Belleme had strongly protected a vast space capable of holding thousands of men. When in Stephen’s time the multitude of castles became a danger, threatening all alike, the necessity for control was realised, and the work of destroying those that were unlicensed by royal authority had to be taken in hand as the first duty of his successor. The possession of a castle, even though a castle in little more than name, implied feudal rights of a high kind; and Henry II., in determining what castles were adulterine,” took in hand a “quo warranto” enquiry of a searching kind. Unlike Edward I. he collected no great volume of evidence as to the warrants for castellar rights, but, backed by a national feeling that had been disciplined by civil war, Henry accomplished where Edward merely recorded.
Three principal dangers had to be encountered when the fortifications were put to the test of a siege. First there was the danger lest the water supply should give out. This happened at Exeter, and a terrible description of the horrors men endured remains to us. Wine had to be used to make bread, and to put out fire-brands. This last, the danger from fire, was a principal cause for the erection of stone buildings. Thirdly, for use against stone buildings, the Normans fully developed, at an early date, the possibilities of mining, and with the exercise of much engineering skill arranged cover for the miners. In victualling castles for prolonged sieges no great difficulty seems to have been encountered. Provisions were levied by compulsory sale, from the surrounding country, as part of the castellan’s right, and bread and salt flesh, wine, beer, and flour were deposited each in its proper place, as Laurence of Durham describes in his versified account of a castle’s organisation. Hall, kitchen, stables, barracks, and lodgings for soldiers, were arranged in orderly fashion, and every need was supplied by a levy of feudal service. It was due to these services that the word “castellum” carried to English ears a dread significance.