WILLIAM I. 1066 - 1087
Surnamed the Conqueror, King of England and Duke of Normandy
The Vikings who invaded Britain in the time of King Alfred, also attacked France, and because the French were unable to defeat them, their leader, Hrolf, was granted the district of Normandy and became the first Duke of Normandy.
William, was born 1027, the natural son of Robert II. duke of Normandy, by Ariotta, the daughter of a tanner of Falaise. He succeded to the dukedom in 1035.
Married - Matilda of Flanders daughter of Baldwin V. count of Flanders, by whom he had four sons and six daughters.
Began his reign, of England in 1068. Reigned 21 years. - Died 1087.
DOMINIONS
Before the conquest of England William added Ponthieu,1056, and Maine, 1063, to the Duchy of Normandy, which also included a titular supremacy over Britanny. In 1066 he was acknowledged and crowned king at Westminster. In the spring of 1068 he took Exeter, and really conquered the south-west in the summer of the same year he first conquered the North except Bernicia. In 1069-70 he again conquered the North, including Bernicia, and by the conquest of Chester conquered the North-West Midlands. In 1072 he received the nominal submission of Scotland ; in 1081 he invaded Wales, received homage. Most of modern Cumberland and West-moreland were not in his dominions, but were ruled by a Scandinavian chief .His county of Cheshire included the lower parts of Flint and Denbigh as far as the Conway; Shropshirere included parts of Montgomeryshire; Herefordshire parts of Radnor and Brecknock; Gloucestershire parts of Monmouthshire.
PRINCIPAL EVENTS
| 1066. | Claim of William of Normandy : The popes Declaration: |
| The invasion of Tostig & NorwegiansBattle of Stamford Bridge. Prepeperation and invasion. Battle of Hastings 14th August 1066 | |
| William crowned 25th December 1066 | |
| London receives its first charter, and is made the capital of the kingdom | |
| 1068. | The curfew bell established |
| 1069. | A rebellion in the north suppressed |
| 1070. | Harsh government of William, towns and villages burned, and confiscated |
| 1072. | Malcolm, king of Scotland, to acknowledge William's authority |
| 1077. | Robert rebels against his father. |
| 1086. | Doomsday Book completed |
| 1073-74. | With Anjou |
| 1075 - 80. | Although the English had been completely subdued, William had to suppress several formidable revolts by his on vassals. |
| 1080 | Open war with his son Robert. |
| 1087 | War with France, whose king had encouraged a rebellion of Norman nobles. |
The opportunity of gaining a wider dominion presented itself to William on the death of his second cousin Edward the Confessor, king of England, whose crown he claimed. Duke William of Normandy claimed the crown on three different grounds, none of which was particularly good, but which, nevertheless, gave him a good excuse for invading.
Firstly, he claimed the crown through a relation of his; secondly, he maintained that he had been promised the crown by Edward the Confessor; and thirdly, Harold himself had been captured while in Normandy, and had promised the crown to William to obtain his release. Whatever truth there may be in these claims, there is no doubt that William was prepared to stake all to get the crown.
William had an ally in England. Tostig, the brother of Harold, had quarrelled with Harold, and was prepared to help William to secure the crown. To do so, he first invaded the south and east coasts, and joined up with the King of Norway on the Tyne. Then he marched south with an army, and Harold had to march north to fight and defeat him.
When the weather conditions were right.William's
to enforce his claim invaded England, he landed at Pevensey Bay and marched to Senlac Hill, near Hastings, where
they awaited the arrival of the English. It was here that the important Battle of Hastings was to take place. Harold and his men fortified their position on the top of the hill,
and looked as though they were to prove a match for the Normans, who were unable to break through the defences.
Then William put into practice two plans which proved very effective. One was to get his bowmen to shoot their
arrows into the air. Even William could not have hoped that the result of this would end in the death of Harold,
who was struck in the eye and mortally wounded. The other plan was to get his armies to pretend to run away. The
English gave chase, and, when they were in confusion, the Normans rounded on them, thus winning the battle. Later, William built on the site of the battle an abbey, which is still known to-day as
Battle Abbey.
William then marched on London. There was no need to hurry, and he decided first to strike fear into the Londoners.
Marching via Dover to Canterbury, he had to stay for a month in that old city owing to illness, but while he was
there he received the surrender of Wessex. He marched south of London to Wallingford, where he received the acknowledgment
of the Church, and then to Berkhamsted, where the people of the city of London received him.
Amidst great jubilation, he was crowned King of England,
after being accepted by the Witan, on Christmas Day, 1066, in Westminster Abbey. So great were the cheers after
the people had been asked in English and French whether they would accept him as king, that the Normans outside
the Abbey, thinking it to be a rebellion, set fire to some of the outhouses. William became William I of England
in an almost empty abbey.
One of his first tasks was to organise the country to his liking. He had conquered the land, and he claimed that it was all his. Shortly after William had been crowned,
he returned for a short while to Normandy many English people resented the Norman overlords.
The English, especially in the north, took the opportunity of rebelling, but William speedily returned and suppressed the insurrection. The resistance of two powerful English nobles, Edwin and Morcar, who had formed an alliance with the kings of Scotland and Denmark, and with the prince of North Wales, soon after drew William to the north, where he obliged Malcolm, king of Scotland, to do homage for Cumberland. In 1069 another insurrection broke out in the north, and at the same time the English resumed arms in the eastern and southern counties, only, however, to be suppressed with merciless rigour. As a precaution against a similar rising in the future, he built a number of castles to house the Norman soldiers. One of the most famous of these castles, built by the Conqueror, is the White Tower of the Tower of London. Another small rising, which took many years to quell, was that of Hereward the Wake, who withstood the Normans in the Isle of Ely, hiding in the marshes, and causing quite a lot of trouble to the Normans.
GREAT EARLDOMS
Four palatine earldoms were created by William, Chester, in the hands of Hugh Lupus; Shrswsbury, in the hands of Roger de Montgomery; Kent, in the hands of Odo, Bishop of Bayeux; and Durham, in the hands of the Bishops.
[Kent was suppressed by William himself, 1082; Shrewsbury by Henry I., 1102. Chester continued till it lapsed to the Crown in Henry III.'s time, 1245, but retained its separate organization much later, returning no members to Parliament till Henry VIII.'s reign. Durham, in the hands of the bishops, returned no members to Parliament till 1675, and retained features of its palatine jurisdiction till the reign of Victoria (1894 )]
By palatine earldom is meant an earldom, in which the earl, though under the king, exercised regal power. Writs ran in his name, and offences were against the peace of the earl, not of the king. Chester, for instance, had not only its own courts and judges, but its own parliament. Lancashire was created a Palatine Earldom in 135l, but, like Chester, speedily became (in 1399) an appanage of the Crown.
There were, however, many people to whom William owed something, some of his followers had given up lands in Normandy to come to England, and he had to repay them. He did this by introducing the feudal constitution of Normandy in regard to tenure and services, giving some large areas of land to tenants-in-chief. The land was then further divided between barons, knights and farmers, all of whom owed allegiance to the king and also to their immediate overlords. At any time, they could be called upon to give advice or military service.
William was able to achieve many things in his reign. He established the administration of law and justice on a firm basis throughout England, he also expelled numbers of the English Church dignitaries and replaced them by Norman.
THE NEW FOREST
A cause of discontent was the planting of the New Forest, many people resented the fact that they were being made homeless, just because the king liked privacy while he was hunting the deer.
His royal court, consisting of a number of the great barons, dealt with all matters of government, finance and justice; The Commune Concilium, or, as English writers continue to call it, the Witenagemot, consisted after the Conquest of the king's feudal tenants-in-chief - ecclesiastical and lay -thereby differing from the Norman Council, in which apparently ecclesiastics were not as a rule present . The lesser tenants-in-chief probably seldom attended, and asking the counsel and consent of the Council to their measures was a form only with the Norman kings.
The moots, which had been kept from Saxon times, were kept for local administration of the counties, hundreds, and towns and as far as possible were unaltered by the Norman kings, who discouraged the extension of the influence of the great barons. The Sheriff of the county is however, brought more closely under the control of the central government The organization of the central government and its extension so as to touch the whole of the affairs in the country, is the great constitutional effect of the conquest.
William was a king with a sense of purpose and allowed nothing to stand in his way, he set the standard for the Norman kings. Towards the end of his reign he instituted that general survey of the landed property of the kingdom, the record of which still exists under the title of Domesday Book. This book gave details of all the land in the country, and showed how much was open land, how much was forest, how many mills there were, and so on. Moreover, it told William just how much he could expect by way of money and military service from those who held the land.
He may be regarded as cruel, and yet he felt that these actions were necessary to keep the country in order. After twenty-one years of William's reign he entered into French territory, and committed great ravages, his horse trod on some hot ashes and threw the king against the protruding part of the saddle. He died later, as a result of this injury, at the abbey of St. Gervais, near Rouen (1087).
William I. left on his death the Dukedom
of Normandy, to Robert and England
to William .
OFFICIALS
| Archbishops - | Stigand, deprived 1070; Lanfranc. |
| Justicars - | Odo Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent, the half-brother; and William Fitz-Osbern, 1067; |
| William de Warenne and Richard Fitz-Gilbert, 1073; Archbishop Lanfrac, Geoffrey Bishop of Coutances, and Robert of Mor-tain ,Earl of Cornwall, the King's half-brother, 1078. |
| Chancellors - | Herfast, afterwards Bishop of Elmham and Thetford, 1068; |
| Osbern, afterwards Bishop of Exeter,1070 - 74; Osmund, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, 1074-78; Maurice, afterwards Bishop of London, 1078 - 83; William de Beaufeu, afterwards Bishop of Thetford, 1083-85; William Giffard, afterwards Bishop of Winchester, 1086-1087. |
Of these officials the Archbishop was ex-officio the spiritual and constitutional adviser of the king - a place which he retained, though with waning influence latterly, unless the office of Chancellor was conferred upon him, down to the Reformation. Even after that, Cranmer, Pole (Chancellor), and Laud may be said to have retained something like this position.
