Marc Morris, welcome to Viral History.
First question - why did the Norman
Conquest matter? Marc The Norman Conquest
matters because it is the single biggest
change that England ever experiences the
fact that William defeated Harold
at Hastings on the fourteenth of October
1066, causes enormous change, the biggest
change at the time was that the
aristocracy of Anglo-Saxon England was
swept away, thousands and thousands of
people who had been in charge of England
the Earls, the Thanes and all their
underlings, round about 8,000 people are
within a generation replaced by a class
of people who speak a different language,
i.e. French, and who have a different
set of ideas in their head so the
Normans do warfare differently, they
build castles, not only do they sit on
horseback and do cavalry tactics, they
build castles which were a brand-new,
foreign imposition on England, they fill
the land with hundreds and hundreds of
castles. They rebuild every single major
church, every Cathedral and every major
abbey is ripped down and replaced. So
they have different attitudes to warfare,
they have different attitudes to
architecture, they have different
attitudes to human life itself, the
Normans abolish slavery, the English had
regarded the bottom ten or twenty
percent of the population as slaves, no
better than beasts-in-the-field, people
with no rights at law at all who could
be branded or beaten or even killed by
their owners. The Normans do away with
that, at the same time the Normans
introduced chivalry which means they
spare their opponents once they have
defeated them. They don't, as the Vikings
and the Anglo-Saxons had done, kill
them when they're on their knees begging
for mercy. Now these are big changes
because these attitudes, these new
attitudes filter down very quickly to
the rest of the English population and
they mean that by the 12th century when
the English start looking at their
neighboUrs in the British Isles, i.e. the
Welsh, the Scots, and the Irish, they start
to see this big difference in the way
that each each of them do warfare for
example, the way each of them
treat other human beings and they decide
as they start to invade these countries
that the people they are invading are
barbarians, that they are going into
these countries as a civilizing mission
so the Norman Conquest affects the way
that the English perceive their Celtic
neighbours and it underpins, it gives a
rationale for the invasions of those
Celtic countries for the rest of the
Middle Ages and way beyond. Paul - In what way
was it a righteous conquest for William
of Normandy? Marc- First of all in 1066 one of
the first things he does when he
realizes that he is going to have to
fight Harold for the throne, is he
appeals to the Pope, to get the Pope's
blessing and William, we know since his
boyhood or at least since his teens, has
been under the personal tutelage of a
very at the time very celebrated scholar
called Lanfranc of Bec, so this
internationally famous theologian has
schooled William and affected many of
Williams beliefs and you can see in William
I think the almost like a proto-
crusading or a sort of puritanical
Christianity, so he's convinced of the
righteousness of his claim and I think
this is crucial to understanding why
William embarks upon the Conquest and
why he thinks it's possible because you
tend in some books to see William
represented as just another Norman or
continental "chancer" it's just a punt
the Norman Conquest, nothing more, he's
doing it because England is a rich
country. Now, that's true - England IS a rich
country and there must be many hundreds
of thousands of people in William's army,
who are doing it because they think
they'll make themselves rich, but I think
William himself, it's an insanely risky
undertaking. If you look at his of
warfare up to that point, it's been
cautious, he's been careful to avoid
battle it's been attritional. To raise an
army and a fleet, to commit yourself to the
wind, to risk shipwreck and bad weather
to land on foreign soil to fight an
unknown enemy,
is literally to commend the Justice
of your cause to the judgment of God and
so William you know is is that kind of
mentality, he thinks he's right he knows
he's right and he's putting his case
before God. Paul - And what were the practical
consequences of the Conquest to the
people of England? Marc - In the first instance
the Norman Conquest causes huge loss of
human life, I mean the Battle of
Hastings, we don't know how many people
were fighting on each side some
historians would say you know more than
10,000 each side, others as few as five
thousand, but however big the armies, the
body count was huge, we know it was a very
bloody battle, not just Harold that
got killed, but his brothers and
countless hundreds maybe thousands of
other Englishmen, as well as Normans, so the battlefield the next
day is strewn with bloodied bodies. There
after, the Battle of Hastings is just the
beginning of the Norman Conquest it's
not that you know that William takes
over and then the Anglo-Saxons accept
him, the first four or five years of
Williams reign are ones of constant
insurgency and rebellion by the English
and repression by the Normans,
increasingly violent repression. So
William is marching into various bits of
the country, in the West Country, the
Midlands and the North, planting castles
and putting down English rebellions with
extreme prejudice, so there are tens of
thousands of people being killed in
those years of rebellion. The most
devastating result of the Norman
Conquest happens in Yorkshire or points
north of the river Humber when, at the
end of this cycle of rebellions, William
decides he's never going to be able to
hold northern England by peaceful means
or by planting castles and leaving
garrison's in them. His very barbaric
solution, brutal solution, is to simply
break up his army into smaller units and
send them around the various towns and
villages north of the Humber, to destroy
the crops and the animals. Incidentally
lots of people get killed in that
process, it's known as "Harrying" and it's
a perfectly normal and as contemporary
would have seen it, legitimate way of
waging war but the scale on which
William does it shocks contemporaries,
because he lays waste to everything
north of the Humber, making it incapable
of supporting animal life and human life,
and so the consequences, lots of people
may be killed in the "harrying" process,
but tens of thousands, spilling over into
a six-figure number more than a hundred
thousand people perish as a result of
the famine that follows. So the
consequences of the Norman Conquest for
the English people were, in the first
instance terrible, this was a very brutal
very violent conquest, the land is filled
with castles, they are now second-class
citizens in their own country. Paul - Alternate
history is very much in vogue at the
moment, with programmes like "The Man in the
High Castle", if we applied that to
Hastings and Harold had won, what would a
longer period of Anglo-Saxon rule have
looked like? Marc - I think it would have been
very different, I think today perhaps
after nine hundred and fifty years, we
wouldn't notice the differences
obviously that much because we're
talking about nearly a millennium having
passed. I think the one big difference we
noticed even today is that the words I'm
saying now the language we speak is of
course heavily dependent on the Old
English's fusion with Norman French. So
we wouldn't have nearly so many French
loan words and the language would be
closer to the language spoken by the
Anglo-Saxons. We wouldn't have certainly
as many castles because castles are
introduced as a result of the Conquest
as military installations. So all the
changes that come about as a result of
the Conquest, the point about the
Conquest is they happen very quickly
within the space of one or two
generations, so you get castles,
cathedrals, massive, massive change, many
of those things may have happened after
the Conquest in a much more piecemeal,
long drawn-out way so you would have had
a sprinkling of castles, you would have
had the gradual replacement of Old
English churches with Romanesque Norman
churches, but the totality of the Norman
Conquest means that much of much of the
culture that had existed up to 1066 is
erased, so many of the literary treasures
are lost, many of the artistic treasures
lost, almost all of the major churches
are pulled down and replaced so we would
have more surviving Anglo-Saxon history
and the transition to what we think of
as a high Middle Ages would have been
much more drawn out. Paul - Turning to King
John, another area of study for you, it's
800 years now since King John's
death at Newark Castle, is his terrible
reputation deserved? Marc - Yes I mean in a
nutshell, I thought you were going to say is
his reputation deserved without
qualifying it, and of course his reputation
in recent years has been improved
because, as some scholars in the 20th
century looked afresh at the evidence
and decided John wasn't as bad as medieval people had claimed. They looked at
the products of his writing office, they
looked at basically administrative
documents and said look how dynamic he
is, look how conscientious he appears to
be in doing justice, look how industrious
he is in doing the business of kingship.
But the problem with that rehabilitation
is you have to discard all of the
contemporary evidence, the chronicles, both
lay and ecclesiastical, in unison telling
us what a jerk the man was! So it's
very easy to discard it when it is so
across the board, the other thing is even
judged by his own actions, even if you
didn't have that Chronicle evidence, John's
actions are beyond the pale, even by
medieval standards, so if you look for
example think of the Middle Ages as a
brutal time, it should be, you know, maybe
it was compared to the modern age, but
then we have brutalities in the age in
which we live. But this is a period the
period in which John lives is a period
where for example it is not politically
acceptable to do away with, to murder
your political enemies, it's a period of
high chivalry so if you capture someone
you imprison, them you can keep them in
comfortable captivity for years, if they
promise to behave, you might eventually
ransom them. What you're NOT allowed to
do, what is absolutely taboo, is kill them.
And what does John do to his nephew
Arthur when he captures him in 1203, er 1202?
He kills him or makes him disappear
the following year in 1203. What does
John do when he captures the wife of
William de Braose, Matilda de Braose and her
son, her adult son? He starves them to
death in one of his castle dungeons. What
does John do with Arthur's supporters in
1202? He starves them to death en masse in
Corfe castle. This is not acceptable, this
kind of Game of Thrones style behavior
was not acceptable in this period of the
Middle Ages and John was condemned by
contemporaries for his cruelty and his
cowardice. Paul - How far did King John's misrule
create the conditions in which a
mechanism like Magna Carta had to be
created in order to avoid war with the
Barons? Marc - Well I think Magna Carta, there
are historians who would rightly look
for antecedents far earlier than John, so
they would say if you look at certain
clauses in Magna Carta, these grievances
on the part of the Barons, stretch way
back to the time of his brother Richard, to
the time of its father Henry the second,
arguably even further back into the 12th
century past, so there is in some
people's view a sense in which John is
simply the Patsy at the end of this
process he's the man who happens to be
king when the lid finally you know
explodes off the pot. But I have only
limited patience with that argument
because as we've already said
John is such a terrible person and
clearly people have tolerated the abuses
of power of Henry the second, and Richard,
because they were on a lesser scale but
John precisely because he preys on the
women folk of his barons, because he
deprives people of their property with
such sort of authoritarian disregard for
the law, he provokes enough people to say
not only we need to rein him in or we
need to get rid of him even, but we need
to make sure no one in future behaves
this badly, so I see and I'm not alone in
this because I think contemporary saw this
as well that Magna Carta was John's
particular fault. Paul - And wha's next for you?
Well I've done a very short biography of
William
the Conqueror which has just come out
and I'm hopefully, this is the plan, going
backwards in time a bit before that now
to do the Anglo-Saxons so, but that is a
big period I've only done previously
sort of 100 150 years at a stretch, I'm
now proposing to undertake six or seven
centuries of history so there's a lot to
get through. Paul - Marc Morris thank you.
You're very welcome, nice to speak to you.