With the sole exception of Earl Waltheof, no Englishman was executed as a result of the Conquest. Along with their belief that slavery was wrong, the Normans had introduced the notion that it was better to spare one’s opponents after they had surrendered. The English had been practising political murder right up to the eve of the Conquest, but very quickly thereafter the practice disappears. ‘No man dared to slay another’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, praising William’s law and order policy, ‘no matter what evil the other might have done him.’ The last execution of a nobleman on royal orders took place in 1095, and after Waltheof’s execution in 1076 no earl was executed in England until the early fourteenth century.
Dönem: Norman
Fatih William’ın Cenaze Fiyaskosu
Even the funeral was farcical. A distinguished crowd of bishops and abbots had assembled inside the abbey to lay the king to rest, and the bishop of Evreux preached a long and eloquent sermon, extolling William’s many virtues. When he concluded, however, by asking the assembled crowd to forgive their former lord if he had ever done them any harm, an aggrieved local man stepped forward to complain in a loud voice that the land they were standing on had once belonged to his father, and had been violently seized by the Conqueror in order to provide for the abbey’s foundation. Claiming the land for his own, he forbade the funeral to go any further. After a hurried inquiry established that he was telling the truth the protester was appeased by an immediate cash payment and the service continued. But the greatest indignity was reserved until last. When William was finally lowered into the ground, it became clear that his bloated corpse was too big for its stone sarcophagus, and efforts to press on regardless caused his swollen bowels to burst. No amount of frankincense and spices could hide the resultant stench, and the clergy therefore raced through the rest of the funeral rite before rushing back to their houses.
Fatih William ve Köle Ticareti Yasağı
slavery, slave-raiding and slave-trading were accepted institutions across the whole of the British Isles. In England, nothing had changed in this respect since the days of Cnut. Confining ourselves to reports in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, we see that Godwine sold some of Alfred’s followers for money in 1036; that Harold seized both men and cattle from Somerset on his return from Ireland in 1052, and – lest it be thought that the Godwines were running a family monopoly – that the Northumbrian rebels in 1065 ‘took many hundreds of captives, and carried them off north’. Right up to the eve of the Conquest, the slave trade in England was flourishing.
Once upon a time you could have groaned at similar scenes in Normandy too. Back when the Normans had been Norsemen there had been a constant traffic in human cargo from northern France back to Scandinavia, with a thriving slave market in the centre of Rouen. But during the first half of the eleventh century this trade had died out: the last reference to the Rouen market occurs in the late tenth century, and the last references to slavery occur in the 1020s. Traditionally historians have put its disappearance down to economic factors, but more likely it was due to moral objections, as the dukes of Normandy came increasingly under the influence of reforming churchmen. Significantly, the decline of slavery coincides with the rise of chivalry, suggesting that in Normandy and elsewhere in northern France, those in power had come to place a higher value on human life.
Banning the slave trade, of course, was not the same as banning slavery itself: with ten per cent of the population classed as slaves, such a move would have been nigh-on impossible. But banning the slave trade was still immensely significant, and shows that William was in step with the humane thinking of the reformed Church, even if it cost him financially.
Kraliyet Av Alanı Olarak ‘Forest’ Kavramı
William’s love of hunting that he imported the very concept of ‘the Forest’ into England – the word occurs for the first time in an English context in the Domesday Book. We tend to think of forests as heavily wooded areas, but originally the term could be applied to land of any sort. It probably derived from the Latin word foris, meaning ‘outside’, for the Forest’s defining aspect was that it was a jurisdiction apart: an expanse of land reserved for the king’s own recreation, with its own rigorously enforced law.
Resmi Belgelerde İngilizce’den Latince’ye Geçiş
In one crucial respect, however, the Normans deliberately spurned the linguistic tradition they encountered. As we’ve already noted, English was highly unusual in being a written as well as spoken language. In England, not only were books and chronicles composed in the vernacular; so too were official documents – the charters, writs and diplomas issued in the name of the king. But in or around 1070 the use of English for such documents suddenly ceased. This must have been a decision taken at the highest level, and the coincidence of its timing with the arrival of Lanfranc might lead us to identify him as the prime suspect. That said, the purge of the Church hierarchy that same year, along with the steady attrition of English secular officials, must have made the abandonment of written English a fairly obvious development: what, after all, would have been the point of addressing orders to Continental newcomers in words they could not understand? From 1070 onwards, therefore, all royal documents were written in Latin, a language that was familiar to both literate Normans and educated Englishmen.
Fatih William’ın Kuzey Kıyımı
As Orderic explains, the king left York and divided his army into smaller contingents that could comb the mountains and forests where the rebels were hiding. They spread out, we are told, over more than a hundred miles of territory, slaying many men and destroying the lairs of others. This, however, was only the beginning of William’s strategy. ‘In his anger’, continues Orderic, ‘he commanded that all crops and herds, chattels and food of every kind should be brought together and burned to ashes with consuming fire, so that the whole region north of the Humber might be stripped of all means of sustenance.’ The Conqueror’s aim was to ensure that no future army, English or Danish, would be able to support itself against him and, as Orderic makes clear, this scorched-earth policy was brutally effective. ‘As a consequence, so serious a scarcity was felt in England, and so terrible a famine fell upon the humble and defenceless people, that more than 100,000 Christian folk of both sexes, young and old alike, perished of hunger.’
Fatih William’a Karşı Osurulması
Inevitably, therefore, the matter was decided by violence. Exeter was a walled city and on his arrival William found the rebels manning the whole circuit of its ramparts. In a final attempt to induce a surrender he ordered one of the hostages to be blinded in view of the walls, but, says Orderic, this merely strengthened the determination of the defenders. Indeed, according to William of Malmesbury, one of them staged something of a counter-demonstration by dropping his trousers and farting loudly in the king’s general direction.
İngiliz ve Norman Kraliyet Anlayışı Farkı
Did this mean that William was England’s new king? To English minds, the answer must have been yes. As we’ve seen, English kingship was elective: a ruler’s reign began the moment he was accepted by the magnates. This means, of course, that the ætheling must have been regarded as king as well. Although the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is understandably very coy about saying so, Edgar’s rule had clearly been proclaimed in the days immediately after Hastings. We are told, for example, that after the death of their abbot from wounds sustained in the battle, the monks of Peterborough had sent his successor to Edgar for confirmation, and – more to the point – Edgar had ‘gladly consented’. William of Poitiers is even more explicit: ‘They had chosen Edgar Ætheling, of the noble stock of King Edward, as king.’ Evidently Edgar, like the Confessor before him, had not been crowned in the early days of his reign, but in English eyes this did not matter. Coronation, to repeat, was simply confirmation – it conferred God’s blessing, but not the kingship itself.15 The Normans, however, saw matters differently. On the Continent, a king was created at the moment of his coronation, not before. The Edgar episode, of course, gave them good reason for insisting on this point: the boy had not been crowned; ergo he was not king. The English may have thought this was rather irregular, but they were clearly in no position to debate constitutional practice, and so fell quickly into line with Norman thinking.
Bayeux İşlemesinde Harold’un Ölümü
On many occasions we can see that the Tapestry includes images which are not truly original, but which have been copied and adapted from other illustrated manuscripts that the artist had to hand, and it looks very much like this process was at work in Harold’s death scene. Immediately before the king dies, we see a Norman soldier about to decapitate an unarmed Englishman. This otherwise inexplicable image seems to have been lifted more or less unaltered from an illustrated version of an Old Testament story, namely the fate of King Zedekiah and his sons, one of whom is shown being beheaded in exactly this manner. This artist may have lighted on this particular image because of the resonance of the story – Zedekiah and his family were punished because he had broken his oath of fealty to his overlord, and Zedekiah’s own punishment was blinding. It could well be, therefore, that the arrow in Harold’s eye is simply a piece of artistic licence based on nothing more than an allusion to this particular Bible story, and that blinding was felt to be a fitting end for a king who was similarly foresworn.
William’ın Normanlara Ganimet Vaadi
According to William of Poitiers, the duke pointed out that Harold could offer his men nothing in victory, whereas he, William, was promising those who followed him a share of the spoils. This may explain why, in the end, the Normans agreed to having the terms of their service written down, for the greater the service rendered, the greater the eventual reward.