THE NORMAN CONQUEST OF ENGLAND

49

were grouped about the housecarles, a force made up chiefly of Scandinavian warriors that was organized by Cnut soon after his accession in England. The housecarles used the battle-ax as their principal weapon and fought on foot. The knight overcame the housecarle. When the fight was ended William had won a complete victory. The English had lost not only their army but their king: Harold and his brothers and the flower of the English host lay dead on the battlefield.

But

One

42. The Norman Conquest of England. Two months later William was chosen king by the English lords and was crowned on Christmas day in the new church of Westminster. actual control of England he did not have for some years. revolt appeared after the other, especially in the old Danish settlements; but they were local and sporadic. So long as the English did not unite in their resistance, William found it comparatively easy to put down these rebellions. The

Devastation

conquest was carried forward in ruthless fashion: of the Vale of York. 1069. when the men of Yorkshire refused to submit, William marched his army into the beautiful vale of York and

Hereward.

transformed it into a desert.1 For a distance of more than fifty miles between York and Durham, not a single village was spared. The last important revolt was that of Hereward, a Mercian of noble ancestry who led an uprising in the Fenlands, and whose exploits became a favorite theme in the ballad literature of medieval times. It was not until the surrender of Hereward in 1071 that William could look upon the work of conquest as completed.

43. Summary. The history of the Old English kingdom covers exactly two centuries: it begins with the accession of Alfred to the throne of Wessex in 871 and closes with the completion of the Norman conquest in 1071. Of these two centuries, the first was a period of greatness and growth in almost every field of English life; the second was an age of disaster and decline. During the tenth century the English kings. pushed their boundaries to the limits of Wales and Scotland and formed the whole into a single kingdom. The period was also one of notable achievements in literature, in education, and in church reform. But the new structure had a fatal weakness it was based too largely on conquest. The Danelaw 2 was the larger part of the kingdom; and it was inhabited by Angles who had no strong sense of loyalty to the kings of 1 Cheyney, No. 55.

2 Review sec. 29.

Wessex and by Danes who had resisted them to the utmost. Had the dynasty of Alfred been permitted to remain in peace on the new English throne for another century, it is likely that Saxons, Angles, and Danes would have been welded into a single nationality; but the viking invasions prevented this.

After southern England had been pillaged by the vikings for thirty years, the strength of Wessex was gone, and Sweyn Forkbeard found conquest a comparatively easy task. When the English people submitted to Cnut in 1016, they gave up their right to govern England; for Cnut placed foreigners in many of the higher offices, and after the Danes were gone, the Normans came in with Edward the Confessor. Cnut built up an empire, but he added nothing to the territories of England, and he lost Lothian to the Scots.1 Edward did nothing to consolidate his kingdom and the two great sections continued to drift apart. The campaign against William of Normandy should have called out all the forces of the kingdom, but the lords of the Danelaw sulked and failed to appear at Hastings; and the enemy conquered.

ALFRED.

REFERENCES

Oman, History of England, 37-44; Ransome, Advanced History of England, 53-60; Tout, Advanced History of Great Britain, 43-49; Plummer, Life and Times of Alfred; Tappan, In the Days of Alfred the Great.

THE DANISH CONQUEST: CNut. Oman, 52-56; Ransome, c. viii; Tout, 57-61; Larson, Canule the Great.

LATER ANGLO-SAXON INSTITUTIONS.

Andrews, History of England, c. iii;

Innes, History of England, 38-49; Cross, History of England, c. v.

THE COMING OF THE NORMANS. Fletcher, Introductory History of England,

I, i, 77-85; Oman, 62-71; Ransome, 81-93; Tout, 67-72.

ENGLISH LIFE BEFORE THE NORMAN CONQUEST. - Gardiner, Student's History of England, c. v; Tout, 73-80; Wrong, History of the British Nation, c. v.

1 Gardiner, 84.

CHAPTER III

ENGLAND UNDER NORMAN RULE

44. Policy of William. William of Normandy apparently did not regard himself as a conqueror: he professed to believe in his rights to the English crown as Edward's heir. It was,

Destruction of the English aristocracy.

therefore, his avowed pur

pose to govern England as an English king; to enforce English laws; and to maintain English institutions. The results of the conquest, however, do not show any clear traces of this policy: the coming of William and his Norman barons initiated certain marked changes in English government and society, some of which came to be permanent features of the English constitution and of English life.1

45. The Norman Aristocracy. Perhaps the most important of the earlier results was the destruction of the native Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. The English

nobles fell in great numbers on the field of Hastings where Earl Godwin's family perished, in the uprisings led by the family of Leofric two years later, and in various later revolts. During William's reign the 1 Tuell and Hatch, No. 8 (Freeman); Gardiner, 104-106.

52

THE NORMAN ARISTOCRACY

53

Danes made two expeditions to the English shores, the chief results of which were the ruin of several important native chiefs who had joined the Scandinavians in the hope of dislodging William. As a rule, the Conqueror was generous to his English opponents if they were of noble blood; usually he spared their lives, though in such cases he managed to render them harmless by transporting them to Normandy. Those whom he permitted to remain in England were deprived of their lands and wealth, and consequently lost all their power and influence. In these various ways the native Englishmen lost their natural leaders and organized opposition was made impossible.

The places of authority and power that had formerly been held by the English nobility King William gave to his Norman followers and barons. These aliens were often The Norman permitted to live in castles, which in theory be- castles. longed to the king but were held by the barons on his behalf. A castle was a combination of home, fortress, and camp. At first it was merely a fortified enclosure or a single square building called a keep, built with massive walls and several stories high; but in time a more elaborate form of castle-building arose. The later castle was an enclosure surrounded by a deep moat and a strong wall provided with towers. at regular intervals to facilitate defense. Along the wall on the inside were placed the necessary buildings: the lord's hall, the chapel, the kitchen, the barns, the stables, the barracks for the retainers, and various other buildings. In this little fortress the lord kept a number of warriors, often mercenaries and in the Norman period usually foreigners, a force that served as a garrison and an army of occupation for the neighborhood. With the country dotted

1 Innes, I, 45-48.

HAWKING

A favorite form of amuse

ment of the Norman nobility including the ladies. The hawks were trained to assist

in certain forms of hunting. From the Luttrell Psalter, ca. 1340.