Laws of King William

*I will that all the men whom I have brought with me, or who have come after me, shall be protected by my peace and shall dwell in quiet. And if any one of they [sic] shall be slain, let the lord of his murderer seize him within five days; if he cannot, let him begin to pay me forty-six marks of silver so long as his substance avails. And when his substance is exhausted, let the whole hundred in which the murder took place pay what remains in common. And if the murderer were caught, and if he were an Englishman, then the Laws of William the Conqueror were quite clear as to what happened next.

*If a Frenchman shall charge an Englishman with perjury or murder or theft or homicide or 'ran', as the English call rapine, which cannot be denied, the Englishman may defend himself as he shall prefer, either by the ordeal of hot iron or by wager of battle. But if the Englishman be infirm let him find another who will take his place. If one of them shall be vanquished, he shall pay a fine of forty shillings to the King. If an Englishman shall charge a Norman and he be unwilling to prove his accusation either by ordeal or by wager of battle, I decree, nevertheless, that the Norman shall acquit himself by valid oath.

William ruled England for two decades. He was called William the Conqueror. He wanted to be known as King William. He wanted the English to accept him as Edward the Confessor's rightful heir. As King, he certainly adopted all the Old English powers. For example, he continued to impose taxes calculated to improve the state and not just his own coffers. But, further down the scale of nobility the Norman minority gradually overturned the power of the English.

C+A military caste was imposed from above. A revolution not only in warfare, but also in the upper reaches of society, had taken place. There were interminable controversies among the new masters of the country about the titles to their lands, and how diese fitted the customs and laws of Anglo-Saxon England. Finally in 1086 a vast sworn inquiry was made into the whole wealth of the King's feudal vassals, from whom he derived a large part of his own income. The inquest or description, as it was called, was carried through with a degree of minuteness and regularity unique in that age and unequalled for centuries later. The history of many an English village begins with an entry in Domesday Book.

A contemporary chronicler wrote that the book was to be called Domesday because 'It spared no man, but judged all men indifferently, as the Lord in that great day will do.’

The idea for Doomsday came to William at Christmas in 1085. A writer of the time recorded that:

*He sent his men all over England into every shire and caused them to ascertain how many hundred hides were in the shires, of what of land and of cattle the King himself owned in this country or what dues he ought to receive every year from the shires. Also he caused them to write down how much land belonged to his archbishops and his suffragan bishops and his abbots and his earls. What and how much in land and in cattle each man possessed, who was occupier of land in England, and how much money it was worth. So very narrowly did he cause the survey to be made that there was not a single hide or rood of land, nor even was there an ox or a cow or a pig left that was not set down in his writing. And afterwards all diese things were brought to him. This was a time of great crisis in the reign of William of Normandy. There was talk of invaders from Scandinavia. So behind Domesday was the need to raise money as well as to find out who had the financial, and therefore political and military, power in England.

C+ The Norman garrison in England was threatened from abroad by other claimants. The rulers of Scandinavia still yearned for the Island, once the west of their empire. They had supported the rising in the North in 1069, and again in 1085 they threatened to intervene with greater vigour and it was under the shadow of this menace that Domesday Book was compiled. In 1086, William called together at Salisbury 'all the land-holding men of any account throughout England, whosoever men they were’. The King had need of an assurance of loyalty from all his feudal tenants of substance, and this substantial body bound itself together by oath and fealty to his person. Domesday was to be William's last great achievement. The survey, the great reckoning, was born out of crisis at home and abroad. But William of Normandy's influence was more lasting in England than anywhere else. He changed the way the English lived, the laws that governed them and the course of their history. He did so ruthlessly.

And, there was one particular aspect which made his rule different from any that had gone before. It determined the development of feudalism and, in some sense, it applies to this day. William said that whatever loyalty a person had to his immediate lord, his protector, that that person's allegiance to the monarch must always be greater. His reign was the more remarkable considering the conflicts in his own family and in particular, in Normandy, where his Queen, Matilda, ruled in his absence.

C+Though England was a more valuable possession than Normandy, William and his sons were always more closely interested in their Continental lands. The French Kings, for their part, placed in the forefront of their policy the weakening of diese Dukes of Normandy, now grown so powerful, and whose frontiers were little more than twenty miles from Paris. Hence arose a struggle that was solved only when King John lost Normandy in 1203. Queen Matilda was a capable regent in Rouen, but plagued by the turbulence of her sons. The eldest, Robert, a Crusading knight, reckless and spendthrift, with his father's love of fighting and adventure but without his ruthless genius or solid practical aims, resented William's persistent hold on life and impatiently claimed his Norman inheritance. Many a time the father was called across the Channel to chastise rebellious towns and forestall the conspiracies of his son with the French Court. Robert, driven from his lather's lands, found refuge in King Philip's castle of Gerberoi. William marched implacably upon him. Beneath the walls, two men, visors down, met in single combat, father and son. Robert wounded his father in the hand and unhorsed him, and would indeed have killed him but for the timely rescue by an Englishman, one Tokig of Wallingford, who remounted the overthrown Conqueror. Both were sobered by this chance encounter, and for a time there was reconciliation. Robert also broke with his two brothers, William (who was to become known as William Rufus) and Henry, who one day would also be King. And, even when there was reconciliation it was never for long. All this meant that William spent more and more time away from England. It's difficult to track him down through contemporary documents, but it is known that for three years, between 1077 and 1080, William was not in England at all.

One writer of this time was William of Malmesbury.

*They [the Normans] live with economy in large houses; they envy their equals; they wish to vie with their superiors; and they plunder their subjects though they protect them from others. They weigh treason by its chance of success, and change their opinions for money. They are the most polite of peoples; they consider strangers to merit the courtesy they extend to each other. After their coming to England they revived the rule of religion.You might see churches rise in every village and, in towns and cities, monasteries built after a style unknown before. They are exceedingly particular in their dress, and delicate in their food, but not to excess. Normans, according to William of Malmesbury, are scheming, often brutal and at the same time civilized, whatever that might have meant at the time. In 1080, the Northumbrians killed the Bishop of Durham, a Norman and we're.' told by one of the chroniclers, another 100 died with him. And in that same year, the Earl of Moray was killed by an army of Scots. The Scottish Kings had never accepted the lines drawn between England and Scotland. The Conqueror's knights had chased and fought the old northern Saxons who refused to give in to his rule. Among them had been Edgar the Aethling, a great survivor who indeed was to outlive William. He was now related by marriage to Malcolm the Bighead, the Scottish King. Malcolm had become King when he beat Macbeth (the real Macbeth) in 1057. He too outlived, and out-harried, William who found life even more difficult after the death of his wife, Matilda.

C+ Matilda died, and with increasing years William became fiercer in mood. Stung to fury by the forays of the French, he crossed the frontier, spreading fire and ruin till he reached the gates of Mantes. His Normans surprised the town, and amid the horrors of the sack, fire broke out. As William rode through the streets his horse stumbled among the burning ashes and he was thrown against the pommel of the saddle. He was carried in agony to the priory of St Gervase at Rouen. There, high above the town, he lay, through the summer heat of 1087, fighting his grievous injury. When death drew near, his sons William and Henry came to him. William, whose one virtue had been filial fidelity, was named to succeed the Conqueror in England. The graceless Robert would rule in Normandy at last. For the youngest, Henry, there was nothing but 5000 pounds of silver, and the prophecy that he would one day reign over a united Anglo-Norman nation. This proved no empty blessing.

The tidying of the family affairs was nor such an easy matter as that makes it appear. At first the Conqueror refused to make his son, Robert, the Duke of Normandy. But the priests pressed the dying King to change his mind. One of the monks at the St Gervase Priory recorded William's words at the time. 'Since he has disdained to come here himself it is with your witness and the will of God that I shall act. With my testimony I declare that I forgive him all the sins he has commuted against me and I grant him the whole Duchy of Normandy. He has learned to take advantage of my leniency and now he has brought down his father's grey hairs in sorrow to the grave. ' William the Conqueror died on 9 September 1087.

So, the Conquest is done. For those who had lived under Edward the Confessor, then through the spring, summer and early autumn of 1066 under Harold and finally through the two decades of William, it had all been a terrible affair. Nothing but conflict, nothing but change. The last of the Saxon lords and landowners suffered more than the peasant class. All had to live beneath the rule of a foreign king. There could have been little consolation in the improved bureaucracy of the governing of the country. And England could only look forward to more conflict as the barons played a dangerous game with the division of the Anglo-Norman inheritance between the warring brothers' Robert in Normandy and the new King, William Rufus.(from “This Sceptred Isle” by Christopher Lee, L. 1990)