The Story of England, page 15
Below the likes of Edwin and his wife the many gradations of class in society were well-established before 1066. Ten per cent were still slaves and 15 per cent free, but the large majority were bonded or semi-free, unable to move places or jobs without permission of their lord; these were thralls, villeins, boors and ceorls – words still with a pejorative meaning today. They were the majority of the people of England, their lot vividly conveyed by an interview written as a teaching aid by the schoolmaster and homilist Aelfric around the year 1000. ‘How would you describe your work?’ he asks the ploughman, an unfree labourer on his lord’s demesne. The response is the first piece of English literature in which the working class speaks:
‘Oh I work very hard, dear lord. I go out at daybreak driving the oxen to the field, and yoke them to the plough. For fear of my lord there is no winter so hard that I dare scive at home. But the oxen having been yoked up, and the share and coulter fastened to the plough, I must plough a full acre or more every day.’
‘Have you any companion?’
‘Yes, I have my lad driving the oxen with a goad, who is hoarse now because of the cold and all the shouting.’
‘What else do you do in a day’s work?’
‘I do more than that, sure. I have to fill the oxen’s bins with hay and water them, and carry their muck outside.’
‘My, my, it sounds like hard work then.’
‘It’s hard work all right, sir, because I am not free.’
The village in 1066
Kibworth is one of 13,000 villages and towns the Normans will record in their survey of England after the Conquest of 1066 – when for most English communities detailed records begin. For most of these a similar kind of story can be told, even though there are of course great differences in landscape, custom and language between, say, a Devon hill farm, a Durham mining village or one of the archaic English hamlets on the Welsh side of Offa’s dyke.
Norman data for 1066 show that the basic map of the village was already complete, the product of several centuries of growth and change. In the north was the old Anglo-Saxon lord’s enclosure, which will later become Kibworth Harcourt, a place of freemen and smallholders. A short distance to the south, beyond the church, where a little stream ran across the road, was the lower settlement, which will become Kibworth Beauchamp, a workers’ settlement of villeins and serfs perhaps with a communal oven, its water mill, its big barns and yards for the plough teams; then the hamlet of free farmers, smiths and metalworkers to the south at Smeeton. And finally, at the end of the ridge, the tiny Viking settlement at Westerby, little more than an outlying hamlet consisting of maybe only a couple of farmsteads.
Spread over these four settlements, the combined population of the parish of Kibworth on the eve of Conquest we can estimate at around three or four hundred people: a large place by eleventh-century standards when the county town itself had only a couple of thousand.
As is evident from the way the people are described, class divisions were already strongly marked in the communities – and between the communities. All the sokemen, or freemen, lived in Harcourt and Smeeton; but remarkably there were none at all in Beauchamp. It is hard not to think that the roots of such divisions must lie far back in time. Perhaps Beauchamp had begun in the Dark Ages as a vill of dependent peasants: unfree service labour certainly marks its story for centuries. A survey of 1315 astonishingly shows at that time there were forty-four families of serfs and villeins and only three freemen, so the eleventh-century pattern had not changed.
Originating no doubt at some point in the early Middle Ages in differing circumstances of lordship, the contrasting characters of the three hamlets will continue over the next 900 years, and are still remarked on today, when despite the transformations of industry, enclosure and migration, continuities with the old community and the old village families are still not yet quite broken.
The last days of Anglo-Saxon England
So there is the village story up to 1066. With a little speculation, a little help from archaeological finds, landscape, place names, test pits, and even metal detector finds, a tentative narrative can be essayed of what one might call the prehistory of the village. Inevitably (as with most English villages) the lack of early documentation necessitates guesswork, speculation and a little imagination. By 1066 the people of Kibworth had already known Celtic, Roman, Anglian and Viking lords – their tribal and regional identities and allegiances had transferred from lords of the Corieltauvi to Middle Angles and to Mercians; and then to ‘the king of all the English’. They had seen dramatic changes in the pattern and apparent direction of history. They had lived through famine, plague and climate change. They had endured wars, migrations and conquests. There is no evidence over this first thousand years that Kibworth ever ceased to exist, though in the worst times it may have contracted severely. And from the tenth century the villagers had seen their standard of living improve and the insecurity of life lessen under the protection of the king’s law – the thread of English history that continues from then till today.
In the late Saxon period the country grew wealthy. One important source of this wealth was wool, as it had been from Roman times. There were more sheep than people in Anglo-Saxon England, maybe four or five times as many, and fine English cloth was exported to the continent. But at the end of the tenth century the country’s wealth encouraged yet new waves of invaders, which led in the end after a long period of war to conquest by the Danes. From the 990s to 1016 England was criss-crossed by armies as the faltering government lost its nerve. For all its sophistication in administration the English state was still reliant on the energy and charisma of the king: on his ceaseless itineraries, on his military leadership, his ability to bully, cajole and punish where needed, but most of all, in such a diverse multi-ethnic society, to negotiate effectively.
The hapless king at this time was the butt of a pointed contemporary joke: he was Ethelred (‘noble council’) Unraed (‘no council’ – ‘useless’). Writing in London, a remarkably acute observer of the time expressed profound loyalty to the idea of the kingdom of the English, even though he judged the king in the end a failure. Ethelred’s government raised huge sums of silver coin as ‘Danegeld’ to buy the invaders off: tens of millions of silver pennies. This was a staggering measure of the kingdom’s wealth, but a huge burden on the free peasants of Kibworth and elsewhere, as each hundred was required to gather a levy on each village, which from a place like Kibworth might have amounted to its annual taxable value. The passage of armies devastated large tracts of the country and the government’s increasingly panicky attitude to Scandinavian settlers in southern England, people living widely after seventy years of free movement, led to them playing the race card against ‘the enemy within’. Had the massacres fomented in Oxford, among other places, occurred more widely they might have undone much of the previous generations’ work. But 1016, the year of the battles’ resolution, came as a kind of relief to a war-weary country. On a lavish royal manuscript the new king, the bearded flaxen-haired young Canute, is depicted giving a gold cross to the royal house of the New Minster, Winchester, his hand firmly on the hilt of his sword.
A Danish dynasty till 1042 brought back political stability, and opened England in general, and the Danelaw in particular, to the Scandinavian world. The line of Alfred was restored in 1042 in the person of the saintly Edward the Confessor, but great energies were needed to hold the kingdom together in the face of feuding magnates: a task that had worn out some of the great kings of the Alfredian dynasty before they reached fifty. Edward even abolished the national tax on military forces. A vivid image from a contemporary encomium portrays Edward’s wife Emma embroidering fancy diaphanous clothes for him for ceremonial occasions. This is a far cry from our image of Alfred dealing with a knotty legal case in plain man’s language ‘while washing his hands in the closet’; or the plain cloak, woollen leggings and tunic worn by Athelstan, who was praised for his willingness to ‘throw off the condescension of royalty and rank and mingle with the common man’. Beyond the Humber the Northumbrians still hankered after some kind of home rule; in the Midlands they still perhaps temperamentally preferred one of their own. But in 1055 a near civil war was averted, not by the king or his high-ups, but by the rank and file – men like the Kibworth thegns Aelfric and Edwin – on the grounds that ‘there were good Englishmen on both sides.’
The Norman Conquest
In the New Year of 1066 the old king died and a new man took the throne: Harold Godwinson, a member of a powerful landed family of eleventh-century nouveaux riches. From that point events unfolded with incredible suddenness. Duke William of Normandy announced his claim to the throne and assembled a fleet and army at the mouth of the Somme. The English king summoned a huge levy, ‘the biggest ever seen’, from the free peasants of England, supplied and paid by their communities, and for forty days waited on the south coast ready to repel the invaders. Through August contrary winds across the Channel kept William at bay, but meanwhile in the north Harald, King of Norway, landed his fleet in Yorkshire, exciting old separatist urges among the northerners. When the earls of Mercia and Northumbria were defeated outside York the English king gambled all on a lightning move north, riding his royal army up to Yorkshire, where he won a savage battle against the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge. But the gamble failed. Two days later, as Harold licked his wounds in York, the wind changed and William’s fleet was wafted over to Pevensey. Harold’s response, unwisely perhaps, was instantly to march back down to the south coast, where events came to a tragic denouement at Hastings on 14 October. There, the king, his brothers and ‘the flower of the English nation fell.’ Among them perhaps thegns of the Midlands including Aelfric, Meriet’s son, and Edwin Kibworth, who now disappear from history. Whether freemen from Main Street went with their lord with horse, helmet and spear and did not return, history does not record.
There were, as might be expected, many opinions about the disaster, and no doubt these arguments were aired in the village as all over England. Harold had acted precipitately; his support had dwindled, ‘at the end he only had his paid troops with few from the country.’ It was said that only half the English army ever assembled, and those present claimed only a third were even in battle order when the battle began, such had been the speed of Harold’s advance. More plausibly in some eyes, God had given the Frenchmen victory on account of ‘the nation’s sins’. So the nation chewed over the reasons for defeat, as they still do. At Berkhamstead, William received the surrender of the English nobles, including the overlord of Kibworth, Edwin, Earl of Mercia. On Christmas Eve, William was crowned at Westminster Abbey. As the result of one battle, the English world was about to change for ever.
That winter of 1066 the Viking and English farmers of Kibworth saw themselves as belonging to an English state ruled by a king of the English. For people old enough to look back on the war of 1013–16 when Sweyn of Denmark’s armies devastated their fields, traversing the country in the long disastrous unravelling of Ethelred’s government, it must scarcely have been possible to imagine anything worse. By now the community had been formed with its traditions and customs, its work practices and its class divisions, its rich and poor. The great fields existed with their strips, wongs and siks, ‘sunnyside’ and ‘shady side’, paced out by the field jury. Their assemblies met every month at the ‘spear tree’ to enact the common law. In their pockets one coinage of the realm, still as well-minted and as reliable a currency as it had been in the now golden days of Edgar a hundred years before, when, as old people said, ‘You could leave a gold arm ring on a bush and no one would pinch it.’ But now again, as with Cnut in 1016, the whole kingdom had fallen to an invader. And this time an invader with a different language and very different traditions of government.
In the story of England the next stage is set. What will happen to the community of the village and the community of the realm – this ‘rices anweald’, this ‘londes folc’ as they would have put it – over the next centuries? The England which had emerged out of the ancient slave order of Roman Britain is now about to pass into full European feudalism brutally imposed from above and outside. How will it change, and in what way will it remain the same? How will the feudal medieval order fare with its slaves, villeins, burs and churls? How will our modern world emerge out of theirs?
7. The Norman Yoke
Night fell with a chill damp air and a smoky mist near the Sussex coast on 14 October 1066. The dead and dying were strewn in heaps on the low ridge at the edge of the Downs. (Marked now by the ruins of Battle Abbey, the place was then known to the English only by a local landmark, ‘the old hoar apple tree’.) Among the ‘flower of the English’ were the thegns who had stuck by the king, perhaps Aelfric, son of Meriet, and Edwin of Kibworth among them. Picking their way through the blood-streaked mud, the dead horses and smashed war gear, a party of Normans with burning torches searched the broken bodies where the standards had stood, looking for the English king’s corpse – or what was left of it. At one stroke England had fallen.
In the immediate shock of defeat we all reach for old consolations to explain shattering events and that autumn the English were no different. ‘The Normans had possession of the battlefield,’ wrote the Anglo-Saxon chronicler with gritted teeth, as God had granted them victory because of ‘the nation’s sins’. It must have seemed as good an explanation as any of the scarcely credible chain of events in autumn 1066 which had led up to the battle of Hastings. Many other explanations have been offered by historians since that time as to how the richest nation state in Western Europe fell to a small army of Norman knights, mercenaries and adventurers who had chanced their arm on the greatest prize, hitching their star to the fortunes of William of Normandy.
The Conqueror’s coronation in Westminster Abbey at Christmas 1066 had been with the consent of the chief nobles. The allegiance of the people was another matter. Over the next three years he set about subduing England to his rule through warfare, a scorched-earth policy and ruthless repression. Siege causeways were pushed into the Fens, mobile towers and battering rams broke the walls of picturesque former Roman cities like Exeter; deliberate devastation of the countryside was the order of the day wherever there was opposition. But despite the completeness of the defeat at Hastings the scale of resistance was surprising, and it provoked fury: ‘In those early days,’ wrote one Norman later, ‘wherever they could the English laid secret ambushes for the hated race of the Normans, and, when opportunity offered, killed them secretly in the woods and in remote places. In revenge the Norman kings and their ministers, devising exquisite kinds of tortures, raged against the English.’
The Norman army spent the first few years marching, fighting and killing, its path marked by columns of smoke and savage reprisals against the English. The battle hardened Norman knights and mercenaries in the north deliberately engineered a humanitarian disaster, which left a desperate peasantry ‘eating grass and rats’ and even resorting to cannibalism and selling their own children into slavery. In the Midlands the Normans brought devastation to the rich farming lands around Kibworth. Leicester was besieged and stormed by William the Conqueror; the town was sacked and partly burned, and a large portion of the city destroyed. One hundred and twenty houses were levelled to build a castle by the Soar on the southern edge of the Anglo-Danish borough. After the destruction William handed over a huge part of the shire – some sixty estates formerly under the rule of the Earl of Mercia – to a man who had been with him at Hastings, Hugh Grandmesnil.
In his mid-thirties, a formidable horseman and fighter like his master, Hugh was hard-bitten, masterful and inured to war, displaying that mixture of cruelty and ostentatious piety that characterized a medieval nobleman. For his loyalty he received over a hundred English manors from William, the majority around Leicester, his centre of power, where he was now sheriff. As part of the clampdown Grandmesnil built castles in his main strongpoints and on key routes. On the route between Welland and Leicester castles were constructed at Hallaton, and it appears at Kibworth too. On the track which later became the A6, they cleared and levelled the Anglo-Saxon lord’s demesne, barns and ox sheds, demolishing a row of peasants’ cottages south of ‘the king’s highway through the village’. To save time and effort the Normans earmarked the Roman burial tumulus at the Munt as the core of their motte, the conical mound with its palisaded platform which formed the strongpoint and last refuge inside a Norman castle. They assembled the village reeves and press-ganged the villagers into the ditch-digging and construction work, organizing carts and oxen for shifting timber and bringing smiths to on-site foundries to manufacture nails. Norman sappers were adept at carrying prefabricated castles with them and knocking them together at speed, but here they probably had the time to commandeer a local labour unit who brought cut timbers by wagon and ox team from Gumley woods. The reeves would provide the tools from the manor store, as listed in their estate memoranda: ‘axes, adzes, awls, plane, saw, auger, mattock, crow-bar, spade, shovel’, to shape the tree trunks on site before they were positioned to make the palisades and platforms.
That at least is how it may be imagined. No certain proof has yet been found that the Munt was a Norman castle. It has played such a major part in the village story from the Romans to the Jarrow marchers, but it has had no scientific excavation and over the last two centuries has been too badly disturbed for magnetometry to reveal the shadow of any timber buildings under the soil. As we saw in the first chapter, the mound was dug two or three times in the nineteenth century and cut with massive trenches, so its size and shape can only be estimated now from the account of John Nichols in the late eighteenth century. Nonetheless Nichols gives us enough to indicate with a fair degree of certainty that at some point it was reshaped into a motte and bailey castle. He describes a motte about thirty-five metres wide and six high. It is now only four metres in height but in the Middle Ages it was probably twice that; the flat area on top is still about twenty-two metres across. The motte was surrounded by a ditch about eight metres wide and two deep: similar dimensions to known Norman mounds at Hallaton and Gilmorton, and identical to another castle belonging to Hugh Grandmesnil at Ingarsby. The remains of an entrance causeway six metres wide were once visible on the south-west; and Nichols says that on the south side of the motte a further ditch projected for about forty metres with a bank eight metres wide and still nearly a metre high. This was most likely part of the outer bailey.
