the anglonorman state - ok

8/14/2019 The AngloNorman State - OK

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From Sir Frank Stenton, ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

EPILOGUE

THE ANGLO-NORMAN.STATE

BY theend of the Conquerors reign all directive power within theEnglish state had passed from native into alien hands. In 1087, with lessthan half a dozen exceptions, even lay lord whose possessions entitledhim to political influence was a foreigner. The English church was ruledby men of continental birth and training. No Englishman had beenappointed by the Conqueror to any English see and, when he died,Wulfstan of Worcester and Giso of Wells alone survived from theepiscopate of King Edwards day. Ramsey and Bath were the onlyabbeys of more than local importance which remained under theauthority of Englishmen. The leading members of the kings household

were all Frenchmen; a French clerk presided over his chancery, andFrench sheriffs controlled the administration of all but an insignificantnumber of shires. It would never be gathered from Domesday Book orfrom the witness-lists of King Williams later charters that he had begunhis reign in the hope of associating Frenchmen and Englishmen in hisgovernment on equal terms.There was more than one reason for the disappearance of the greatEnglish landowner. In the twenty years between the coronation of KingWilliam and the completion of the Domesday Survey a considerablenumber of English families must have become extinct in the course ofnature. Several of the Conquerors barons are known to have married

Englishwomen, who, presumably, were the heiresses of native houses.Other prominent families suffered forfeitures which compelled theiryounger sons to find new careers in foreign parts. Within twenty yearsfrom the battle of Hastings, Englishmen in large numbers were servingthe Eastern Emperor as guardians of his palace, or in operations againstthe Normans of south Italy and the Turks of Asia Minor. But it is alsoprobable that many families which escaped forfeiture and extinction fellinto insignificance because no place could be found for them in the neworder which was developing in England. It was essentialto the stability of the government that provision should be made inEngland for the endowment of a powerful military force. It would have

been impossible for the Conqueror to leave a large number of importantEnglishmen in possession of their estates without requiring them toenfeoff knights for his service. But it must have been clear to him thatan English thegn was ill fitted to be the lord of men whose conception ofwarfare was fundamentally different from his own, and Domesday Bookshows that the number of Englishmen to whom he allowed thisresponsibility was remarkably small. So far as can be seen, most of theprominent Englishmen who survived the wars of the Conquest were


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deprived of the .greater part of their estates, retaining no more thanwas sufficient to maintain them in modest prosperity. Their fate washard, but in the circumstances of the time it was inevitable. They werethe victims of a social revolution.A hundred years ago most writers would have been inclined to define

this revolution as the introduction of the feudal system into England. Itis still hard to find a better definition. Here and there in pre-ConquestEngland there are signs of an approach, towards a form of society whichcan loosely be described as feudal. Many scholars have used theremarkable leases granted by St. Oswald and other Old English bishopsas an indication of this tendency. If feudalism is regarded merely as aform of social order which recognized, the principle of tenure in returnfor service, there is no reason to quarrel with this opinion. St. Oswaldstenants were bound to him by fealty, and he would undoubtedly havemaintained that their tenure was conditional on the performance of theservices which he expected to receive from their holdings. But to regard

these leases as evidence of a social organization which, might haveproduced a tenurial system like that of medieval England is to gobeyond anything that the facts warrant. In any scheme of socialrelationships to which the word feudal can profitably be applied thetenants service was specialized and defined exactly. Its amount wasdetermined by a bargain between the tenant and his lord, in which thesize of the tenancy was a secondary consideration. Pre-Conquestleasehold tenure has none of these features. The stipulated services aremany and various, and their amount was decided, at least in part, bythe size of the tenants holding. It is perhaps more important that theseleases contain no demand for services of a military character. The

riding-service which some of them required was not the duty of goingon military expeditions, but service to a lord as his escort or messenger.It can safely be assumed that the king would expect the tenants of abishop, or of any other magnate, to serve in the levies of their shires,mounted and equipped in a way appropriate to their several degrees.But it is no less clear that their liability to military service was apersonal obligation, independent of any contract with the lord of whomthey held their lands. They were not in any sense the predecessors ofmedieval knights, and the men who were holding land on similarconditions in the Norman age could never be fitted into any acceptedcategory or feudal tenure.

In contrast to these various and indeterminate conditions the serviceswhich governed post-Conquest tenures were limited inrange anddefinite in amount. It is true that after the Conquest, as before, it waspossible for an individual to owe more than one form ot service for thesame piece of land. Of Ditton in Surrey, held by Wadard of Bishop Odo,Domesday Book says He who holds it of Wadard renders him 50shillings and the service of one knight. But such cases wereexceptional, and the services which they comprised were always


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defined with precision. It is of more significance that immediately afterthe Conquest military tenure of a kind which was not even fore-shadowed in the Confessors time becomes of universal and paramountimportance. It is now half a century since Round made what was thenthe daring claim that, in England, tenure by knight-service was a

Norman innovation. After a generation of research Rounds theory hasbeen confirmed at every point. What remains to be done is todemonstrate, by work on individual fees, che extent to which, tenures ofthis new model had been created by the Conquerors companions. Thatthe process was gradual is certain. But it is already clear that thesystem of military tenures revealed by the feodaries of the Angevin agehad been laid down in outline before the Domesday Inquest was token.The partition of England among a foreign aristocracy organized for warwas the chief immediate result of the Norman Conquest. After allallowance for the sporadic survival of English landowners and thecreation of new holdings for the household servants of great men, the

fact remains that an overwhelming majority of the manors described inDomesday Book were held by some form of military tenure. Theprovision of knights for the king in adequate numbers was the firstcharge upon the baronage of the Norman settlement. The arrangementsdevised for this purpose gave to the upper ranges of Anglo-Normansociety a stability and cohesion unknown in the pre-Conquest state.They substituted for the fluctuating relationships which had connectedlords and their men in Old English times a system which held the highersocial classes permanently together in a definite responsibility formilitary assistance to the king. There was no place in Norman Englandfor the man of position who claimed the right to go with his land to

whatever lord he would.It was the outstanding merit of this aristocracy chat it set itself co usethe institutions which it found in England. The chief administrativedivisions of the country -shires, hundreds, and wapentakes- wereaccepted as a matter or course by us new lords. They for their partapplied Old English methods to the management of their estates, andthey were remarkably tolerant of the varied and often inconvenienttypes of manorial structure which had come down from King Edwardstime. The institutions which they found it necessary to create were fewin number and specialized in purpose. The honorial court, which was thechief of them, came in to being for the settlement ot the internal

business of a great fief. The castlery, which never became of the firstimportance in English life, was a tract of country organized by a seriesof planned enfeoffments for the maintenance of a particular fortress.Neither of these innovations interfered at any essential point with theaccustomed course of local government. The framework of the OldEnglish scare survived the Conquest.The innovation which touched the common, man most nearly was theformidable body of rules and penalties which the Norman kings imposed


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on the inhabitants of the district reserved tor their hunting. The Frenchorigin of the Anglo-Norman forest law has now been placed beyonddispute, and the Conquerors severity towards those who broke thepeace of his deer is recorded by one who had known him. That heenlarged the borders of King Edwards forests is certain, and there is no

need to doubt the early tradition that the New toresc was converted intoa royal preserve by his orders, to the destruction of many peasants whowere struggling for existence in that unfriendly land. Nevertheless evenwithin the forest sphere there was no absolute break with the past. Theidea of a royal forest, jealously preserved, had been familiar toEnglishmen for forty years at least before the Conquest. Cnut had laid aheavy fine on anyone who hunted in a district which he had set apartfor his own pleasure. Forest wardens had been maintained by Edwardthe Confessor. It is more important that the new forest legislation, whichwas intended for the protection of the kings deer, never interrupted theoperation of the common law. The forest courts brought the peasant

within their jurisdiction under a new surveillance in the interests of thekings sport, but left him in all other matters to the familiar justice ofshire and hundred.In these ancient institutions the Anglo-Saxon tradition was neverbroken. The virtue of the Old English state had lain in the local courts.Their strength had been due to the association of thegns and peasantsin the work of justice, administration, and finance, under the direction ofofficers responsible to the king, The memory of this association survivedall the changes of the Conquerors reign. To all appearance, his baronsand their men accepted as a consequence of their position the share inlocal business which had fallen to their English predecessors. As early as

1086 the feoffees of Norman lords can be seen on the hundredal jurieswhich swore to the information collected for the Domesday Survey.Their successors carried the aristocratic element in local governmentdown to the heart of the middle ages, and beyond. There is a genuinecontinuity of function between the thegns of the shire to whom theConfessor addressed his writs and the knights of the shire whosecooperation made possible the Angevin experiment in centralization.In some, and perhaps in many, cases there was also continuity ofdescent. The number of thirteenth-century landed families which can betraced backwards to an ancestor bearing an English or a Danish name isby no means inconsiderable. It includes some families of baronial rank,

such as Berkeley, Cromwell, Neville, Lumley, Grcystoke. Auclley,Fitzwilliam of Hinderskelfe and Fitzwilliam of Sprotborough, and manyothers of less prominence which were influential in their own districts.Isolated families of position with such an ancestry can be found in mostparts of England, but they were especially numerous in the far north,where they were indistinguishable from the English aristocracy ofsouthern Scotland, in Yorkshire and Lancashire, and in the northernmidlands. A few families of this type are known to have been descended


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from English landowners of 1086, and a small minority of these familiesare carried back by Domesday Book to the time of King Edward. Butthere are many which cannot be traced beyond the first half of thetwelfth century, and of which the origin must be left an open question.Their distribution suggests that some at least of them were founded by

Englishmen who had been planted by the king or by some Norman lordon lands devastated in the wars of the Conquest. It may be hoped thatmore descents of this kind will be worked out in the future, for everyestablished case helps to reduce the abruptness of the transition fromthe English to the Norman order.In the law and practice of the local courts few changes of the firstimportance had been made by the end of the Conquerors reign. Themost far-reaching was the withdrawal of ecclesiastical pleas from thejurisdiction of the hundred. Of the kings other innovations the chiet wasthe institution of a device for the protection of the Frenchmen who hadcome to England since 1066. It was ordered that if any of them were

killed, and his lord tailed to arrest his slayer within five days, the lordmust pay 46 marks to the king, the hundred in which the murder tookplace being responsible for any portion of this sum which the lord wasunable to produce.The regulation probably belongs to an early part ofthe Conquerors reign, when most of the Frenchmen in England wereattached to the households of knights or barons, and it gives no morethan a point of departure for the mass of custom which rapidlydeveloped round the murder fine and presentment of Englishry. For theorderly settlement of disputes between Frenchmen and Englishmen, theConqueror provided that if a Frenchman accused an Englishman ofperjury, or of one of the commoner sorts of violent crime, the

Englishman might choose for his defence either the native ordeal of ironor the foreign method of the judicial combat. Here the advantage wasclearly with the English defendant. For the rest, there is litlle in theremains of Williams legislation which might not have been prescribedby an Anglo-Saxon king; and the only enactment, which reads like adeliberate modification of English practice is an order that offencesformerly punished by death should in future be punched by mutilation.In most of its details the law observed by Englishmen in 1087 was thelaw of King Edward, and, for that matter, the law of Cnut and AEthelredII.But in spite of these and many other points of continuity, the fact

remains that sooner or later every aspect of English life was changed bythe Norman Conquest. The conclusions which different historians havereached about its significance have naturally varied with their personalinterests and with the line of approach which each of them has chosen.By some, impressed with the Old English achievement in art and letters,the Conquest has been lamented as the destruction of a civilization.Others have regarded it as a clearance of the ground for a cosmopolitanculture of which Anglo-Saxon England gave no promise. Some have


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stressed the survival of English institutions and ideas; others, thenovelty of the social order to which the Norman government shouldoutweigh the havoc done by the Conquerors armies. On all theproblems connected with the COnquest opinion is continually changingas the attention of students shifts from one type of evidence to another,

as fresh materials come to light, and as old theories are tested by a newgrouping of familiar facts.For all this, it can at least be said that to the ordinary Englishman whohad lived fron the accession of King Edward to the death of King William,the Conquest must have seemed an unqualified disaster. It is probablethat, as a class, the peasants had suffered less than those above them.Many individuals must nave lost life or livelihood at the hands ofNorman raiders, and many estates may have been harshly exploited inthe interest of Norman lords anxious for ready money; but the structureof rural society was not seriously affected by the Norman settlement.To the thegnly class the Conquest brought not only the material

consequences of an unsuccessful war, but also loss of priviledge andsocial consideration. The thegn of 1066 who made his peace with theConqueror lived thenceforward in a strange and unfriendly environment.The political system of his youth had been destroyed, he had becomethe subject of a foreign king, and he must have felt at every turn thedominance of a foreign aristocracy which regarded him and his kind, atbest, with tolerant indifference. It was as the depressed survivor of abeaten race that he handed on the Old English tradition of localgovernment to the men who had overthrown the Old English state.To such a man there can have been little satisfaction in the strength ofthe Anglo-Norman monarchy or the scale of its executive achievement.

But it is hard to believe that he can have been wholly unconscious ofthe new spirit which had entered into the direction of English affairs atthe Conquest. The gallantry of individuals in the crisis of 1066 -of Edwinand Morcar at Fulford, of Harold at Stamfordbridge and Hastings- tendsto conceal the troubled insecurity of the preceding years. Throughoutthe reign of King Edward England had been a threatened state, relyingfor existence on a military system which recent events had shown tobe insufficient for its needs. The initiative had always been with itsenemies, it had never found an effectual ally, and before King Edwardsdeath it had ceased to count as a factor in European politics. TheNormans who entered into the English inheritance were a harsh and

violent race. They were the closest of all western peoples to thebarbarian strain in the continental order. They had produced little in artor learning, and nothing in literature, that could be set beside the workof Englishmen. But politically, they were the masters of their world.

the anglonorman state - ok

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