Battle of Hastings, The Read online

  Duke William did not delay in appealing to public opinion in Europe; according to William of Poitiers, he sent delegations to the Holy Roman Emperor and to the King of Denmark; what answer he received from the empire is not known, probably at best neutral, but it appears that Sweyn Estrithson sent men to the support of his cousin Harold rather than to William. But these were comparatively small fish. His most important appeal was to the Pope. His delegate to the Vatican is said to have been Gilbert, Archdeacon of Lisieux. No records of his appeal have survived, but it is not difficult to imagine its grounds: his promise from the late king and Harold’s oath and perjury would have formed the central plank of it, but there would have been more. And for an understanding of what he could offer and what the Pope could offer him, we must look at the situation in the Vatican in 1066.

  The occupant of the papal chair at that time was Pope Alexander II, who had succeeded Nicholas II in 1061. The short reign of Nicholas had been marked especially by three policies: the energetic pushing forward of the movement for ecclesiastical and monastic reform, the transfer of the responsibility for the election of the Pope to the College of Cardinals; and an intensification of the Vatican’s relationship with the Normans of southern Italy. In all of these Nicholas had the vigorous support of Cardinal Hildebrand, himself to succeed Alexander II in 1073 under the name of Gregory VII. Hildebrand’s power under his two predecessors was enormous; once he had succeeded, his ambitions went much further than earlier popes would have contemplated. His reign has been described by the historian of Europe, H. A. L. Fisher:

  With imperious courage Hildebrand conceived of the world as a single Christian polity governed by an omnipotent and infallible Pope, a Pope bound by no laws, by whom an offending prince might be driven from his throne, cut off from the sacraments of the church, and severed from the allegiance of his subjects. Believing that the time had now come to reconstruct the militia of the Catholic church, he preached the doctrine of a celibate clergy under the undivided control of the Vicar of Christ. At one and the same time he was prepared in the interests of an autonomous clerical profession to break up the family life of the German clergy and to sap the power of the German king. His claims were exorbitant.lxxiv

  What Fisher does not mention is the third plank of the papal policy under Nicholas II, the link with the Normans of southern Italy. The infiltration of the southern states, then a multiracial if turbulent mix of Greeks, Saracens and the indigenous inhabitants, had been started about 1000 by bands of younger sons of Norman families, hungry for land and wealth. They operated at first as mercenaries, selling their swords to whichever ruler in the wartorn district paid best. The arrival in the 1030s of several younger sons of the minor Norman baron Tancred de Hauteville, changed the situation; from then on, the Normans fought for themselves. By 1066 the de Hautevilles dominated southern Italy and Sicily, and their leader, Robert Guiscard, had in 1059 been invested by the Vatican with the titles of Duke of Apulia and Calabria and King of Sicily, in return for oaths of fealty and promises of assistance to the Holy See. The methods by which he attained this eminence are perhaps best indicated by Dante, who compares a sight in the eighth circle of hell in which countless shades lie horribly wounded with a battlefield on which Robert Guiscard had fought. The alliance between Hildebrand and the Italian Normans in the papal battles against other enemies, which may be compared to the policy of casting out devils through the prince of devils (or indeed to Æthelred’s policy of hiring one lot of Vikings to cast out another), was to rebound upon Gregory VII in due course; in 1066 it still held good, to the extent that Norman priorities mattered to the Vatican and could, when necessary, be enforced.

  This was not only because Guiscard and his cohorts were in effect the protectors of the papacy. As part of the ecclesiastical reform movement, the campaign against the heathen that very shortly afterwards was to lead to the first Crusade was already gathering strength and enthusiasm. Norman mercenaries who fought the Saracens in Spain did so as soldiers of Christ. In Italy, the Norman campaigns against the Muslims in Sicily were conducted with papal blessing to ‘win back to the worship of the true God a land given over to infidelity’, according to William of Malmesbury. The first Crusade was not to be preached until 1095, but the spirit that caused thousands of knights all over Europe to enlist in it was already widely disseminated. The prospect, therefore, of a venture that combined the virtue of a religious mission to bring down a perjurer and usurper and to bring spiritual health to the Church in England with the promise of land and booty was irresistible.

  The closeness of the assumptions and theories that underpinned the first Crusade to those that supported the conquest is uncanny. As the Pope launched the Crusade, so, we are told, he blessed the conquest. Where those who preached the Crusade declared that infidels were untrustworthy and unfit to rule Christians, so William maintained that Harold was forsworn and, as a usurper, unfit to rule over England. As Crusaders were promised God’s aid and absolution for past sins and the wealth of the conquered infidels, so were the soldiers of fortune who enlisted in William’s army (indeed, William pointed out to his mercenary recruits that whereas he had the power to promise Harold’s lands and wealth to his followers, Harold had no power to give anything of William’s to his men). As the main objective of the Crusade was to rescue the holy places of the east and the Christians who worshipped in them, so one of the main objectives of the conquest was to be the reform of the English Church.

  There was, in fact, little wrong with the English Church. For centuries, indeed, there had been a particularly close relationship between the English Church and the papacy. Since before the time of Alfred Rome had been regarded as the mother church by Anglo-Saxon England. The origin of the voluntary tax paid to the Pope (known variously as Peter’s pence, Rome-Scot, hearth-scot) by England is unknown, but it is thought to have started in the reign of Alfred; no other Christian country paid it. Most of the English payment was appropriated by the reigning Pope, though part is thought to have gone to the Church in the English quarter in Rome, known by the English as their burh or borough, a name supposedly perpetuated in the present Roman Borgo. Alfred had secured exemption from taxation for this area, and Pope Leo IX had acknowledged its right to bury all Englishmen who came and died there. During the two waves of Viking raids, contact with Rome had become more spasmodic than before, but between them, during the tenth century, it had resumed its previous regularity. Alfred’s successors had been hailed by the Vatican as Christian kings; Edgar in particular had played a prominent part in the monastic revival headed by the three great monastic saints, Dunstan, Oswald and Æthelwold, and had founded many monasteries. But Edgar’s death and the second wave of Viking raids ended this, and by the time Edward succeeded to the throne, the English Church was still recovering the energy it had lost during half a century of war and turmoil. Unfortunately, this coincided with the beginning of the reform movement in the Vatican in the 1040s, and by 1066 this was in full flood.

  Under normal circumstances, the urgency of the Vatican to raise ecclesiastical standards, to stamp out simony and plurality, and to enforce a celibate clergy, and the slightly exhausted state of the English Church could have been reconciled over time. England was not the only Christian state that found difficulty in accepting immediately the new principles such as the celibacy of the clergy that were being formulated in Rome, and the papacy itself was not immaculate by the new standards; many of the highest ranking clergy there held in plurality. The situation in England was complicated by one particular problem: the status of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  As we have seen, when Robert of Jumièges, appointed and consecrated archbishop in 1051, fled in 1052, Stigand, then Bishop of Winchester, was appointed in his place without reference to Rome. Since Robert had never been canonically removed, this, in the eyes of the Pope, constituted an illegal intrusion, and Stigand was never recognised by the Vatican as validly appointed, and was never accorded the palliumlxxv by which the Pope conf
erred his authority on archbishops. Stigand survived the conquest and, indeed, the first few years of William’s reign, the latter having presumably found him too useful to discard immediately; but he was deposed at a legatine council in 1070, on grounds that included the accusations that he had retained his bishopric of Winchester and thus held in plurality and that he had been summoned and excommunicated by four Popes. It is true that Stigand’s relations with Rome had caused problems and that, while he was archbishop, no English bishop had accepted consecration at his hands except for one, who later pleaded rather improbably that he did not know that Stigand was under interdict. Harold had clearly taken care that his new church at Waltham should not be consecrated by Stigand, and, if Florence of Worcester is to be believed, Stigand did not crown him either. None the less, the accusations made against him in 1070 are hard to square with the facts that, in other respects, Stigand exercised his functions as archbishop normally from 1052 to 1070 and was in no way shunned by either clergy or laity, English or foreign. The papal envoys who visited the English Church in 1062 made no criticism of him although they did criticize Ealdred for holding the archbishopric of York and the bishopric of Worcester in plurality. Irregular as his position might be, it could hardly be compared, for example, with the scandal of the appointment of William’s half-brother, Odo, to the bishopric of Bayeux at the uncanonically early age of thirteen. It seems, however, that, as far as Rome was concerned, Stigand’s presence cast a taint over the whole English Church, and presented William and the reformers in the Vatican with a very convenient stick with which to beat the English. William of Poitiers takes pains to assure us that the duke’s intention was ‘not so much to increase his own power and glory as to reform Christian observance in those regions’.

  When Gilbert of Lisieux arrived in Rome in 1066, therefore, he had a very strong case to present. His master had been promised the succession by the recently deceased king, Harold had sworn to uphold his claim and was now forsworn and perjured by usurping the crown himself; and, most persuasively, Vatican support in placing William on the throne that was his due would be repaid by a cleansing of the Augean stables of the English Church by a man who had proved himself effective in implementing every aspect of the papal reform agenda in Normandy. No record of the council in which he presented his case has survived; all that is known is that there was no English presence to represent the other side, and, as far as we know, no request was made for an English reply to the allegations made by Gilbert. There was, of course, no reason why there should have been a reply; the election of the king of the English was a matter for the English alone and had never been subject to Vatican approval. The only clue we have is a letter written many years later to William by Hildebrand, by then Pope Gregory VII, that indicates fairly clearly the part he had taken in the proceedings and places it in the context of the Hildebrandine policy of attempting to persuade the temporal rulers of Christendom to swear fealty to the Holy See. His letter was the preliminary to his making his demand for fealty to William (which in fact came the following month – and was refused). On 24 April 1080, he wrote:

  I believe it is known to you, most excellent son, how great was the love I ever bore you, even before I ascended the papal throne, and how active I have shown myself in your affairs; above all how diligently I laboured for your advancement to royal rank. In consequence I suffered dire calumny through certain brethren insinuating that by such partisanship I gave sanction for the perpetration of great slaughter. But God was witness to my conscience that I did so with a right mind, trusting in God’s grace and, not in vain, in the virtues you possessed.lxxvi

  The man who later in the same letter expressed the Church’s policy in the words, ‘Cursed be the man that keepeth back his sword from blood’ was certainly not the man to have been distressed by the carnage of Hastings. The promise of root and branch ecclesiastical reform in England was a cause in which Hildebrand would have regarded any amount of bloodshed as justifiable, impelled, as he says he was, by his conviction that it was his duty ‘to cry aloud and spare not’; but if it had not been for the low esteem in which the English Church was then held in Rome and, in particular, the scandal of Stigand’s situation, it is doubtful whether even he could have persuaded his brethren to support the unprovoked invasion of a peaceful and law-abiding nation, close for many centuries to the Vatican, by a foreign adventurer in search of a crown. As it was, the Hildebrandine arguments ultimately prevailed, William was apparently sent, along with the blessing of Pope Alexander II, a papal banner as witness to the justice of his cause, and the invasion took on the complexion of a holy war. It was, in words that have since been used to describe the first Crusade, ‘a monstrous exercise in hypocrisy in which the religious motive [was] used merely as the thinnest of disguises for unashamed imperialism’.lxxvii With his objectives achieved, William only had to complete his preparations and wait for a suitable wind. After waiting long for this, as William of Poitiers tells us, he transferred his forces to St Valéry, either to take advantage of a shorter crossing to England or, according to William of Poitiers, blown there by a prevailing west wind.

  There is, however, an alternative scenario. The whole business of William’s appeal to the Pope rests on the unsupported evidence of William of Poitiers. Catherine Morton has examined the evidence for the episode and rejects it for a variety of reasons, among them that no other contemporary chronicler mentions it, that there was no more wrong with the state of the English Church than with the Norman, that the Pope’s own legates had sat in council with Stigand in 1062 without complaint, and that the Normans of southern Italy were unlikely to concern themselves particularly with the diplomatic niceties of their former duke’s proposed activities.lxxviii Primarily, she rejects it on the grounds that William of Poitiers was demonstrably a liar who did not even take the trouble to make his lies fit together. Harold’s biographer, therefore, on the basis of Morton’s research and a realistic assessment of the probabilities, suspects that no papal support was in fact provided for William’s invasion. He points out that William of Jumièges, the only other contemporary Norman chronicler of William’s deeds, makes no mention of any such support for William, which would be a curious omission for a churchman if it had been made public – and the duke would have had to make it public to benefit from it in recruiting. He guesses that what William of Poitiers describes in his account is ‘a later retrospective sanction by the Papal court for the fait accompli represented by William’s conquest’.lxxix This solution would clarify a lot of matters. Papal legates were sent to England in 1070, and it was as a result of their visit that Stigand was formally deposed, William was crowned (again) and a penance was imposed by Bishop Ermenfrid (who was one of the legates) on the Normans (not the English) who had fought at Hastings and had killed Englishmen after it. This would be very strange if the battle had been fought with papal sanction. It can only be explained by the assumption that William’s invasion was not seen by the Vatican as a just war but, even in 1070, as one of aggression, though one that by that time it was obliged to accept and ratify.

  This explanation of a retrospective sanction would explain the events of 1070 very convincingly; not only the penance imposed on the Norman troops by the papal legates, but also the second coronation of William during their visit (surely unnecessary after his coronation by Ealdred in Westminster Abbey in 1066 except as a papal endorsement of a fait accompli). It is tempting also to see this legatine council as the cause of William’s foundation of Battle Abbey on the site of the English defence, as his own personal part of the Norman penance.lxxx Battle Abbey was not completed and dedicated until 1094; the legend, originated and maintained by the monks of Battle that William had vowed a monastery on the site of the battle before it had ever taken place, has now been demolished. The council, in short, could be seen as a general ratification of the fact of conquest and clearing up of unfinished business.