The Monarchs

The Monarchs: William the Conqueror (1066-1087) - The King Who Invaded England and Forged a New Nation

A Norman duke who could not write his own name took England in a single afternoon of fighting - and remade the country so completely that every monarch since descends from him.

Every list of English monarchs has to start somewhere, and by convention it starts here - with a Norman duke who could not write his own name, spoke no English, and took the country by force in a single afternoon of fighting.

That convention is a little unfair to the Anglo-Saxon kings who came before him, some of whom ruled a more sophisticated state than anything in northern France. But it is not arbitrary. What happened in 1066 was not a change of ruler. It was the replacement of an entire governing class, a language of power, a pattern of landholding and a style of building, imposed within a generation and never undone. England after William was a fundamentally different country from England before him, and the England we have now is built on his settlement rather than on Harold's.

Key Facts

Reigned: December 25, 1066 to September 9, 1087
Born: around 1028 at Falaise, Normandy
Also known as: William the Bastard, until Hastings made the other name stick
Became Duke of Normandy at about seven years old
Married: Matilda of Flanders, around 1051
Defeated Harold Godwinson at Hastings, October 14, 1066
Commissioned the Domesday Book, 1086
Died: September 9, 1087 near Rouen; buried at Caen

The Bastard of Normandy

William was the illegitimate son of Robert I, Duke of Normandy, and a woman named Herleva, said to have been the daughter of a tanner in Falaise. In eleventh-century Normandy illegitimacy was not the absolute barrier it later became, but it was a permanent handicap, and his enemies never let him forget it. The chroniclers call him William the Bastard without embarrassment, because that is simply what he was called.

His father died in 1035 returning from pilgrimage to Jerusalem, leaving the duchy to a boy of about seven. What followed was a childhood that would have killed most people. Normandy dissolved into a scramble among the great families, and William's guardians were murdered one after another - one of them, according to the chronicler William of Jumièges, with his throat cut in the room where the child slept. He was moved between hiding places by night. He grew up understanding, in a way few rulers ever have to learn so early, that authority which cannot be enforced is not authority at all.

He began enforcing it in his early twenties. At Val-ès-Dunes in 1047, with help from his overlord the King of France, he broke the rebel barons of western Normandy. Over the following decade he defeated every serious challenge, absorbed Maine, and made himself the most formidable ruler in northern France. He also married Matilda of Flanders, a match the Pope initially prohibited on grounds of consanguinity - the couple went ahead anyway and later founded two abbeys at Caen as their penance. By every indication it was a genuinely close and effective partnership; she governed Normandy in his absence for years at a stretch.

William the Conqueror, from the National Portrait Gallery collection

The Claim

When Edward the Confessor died childless on January 5, 1066, there were three men who believed England was theirs.

Harold Godwinson was Earl of Wessex, the most powerful man in England, brother-in-law to the dead king, and - by the account of the English sources - named as successor by Edward on his deathbed. He was crowned the next day, with what was either indecent haste or entirely sensible speed, depending on which chronicle you believe.

Harald Hardrada, King of Norway, pressed a claim descending from an earlier agreement between Norse and English rulers, and had the Viking world's most fearsome military reputation behind it.

William based his claim on kinship and on promises. His great-aunt Emma of Normandy had been Edward the Confessor's mother, which made him the king's first cousin once removed. He maintained that Edward, who had spent much of his life in exile in Normandy, had promised him the succession in 1051. And crucially he claimed that Harold himself, shipwrecked in northern France in about 1064 and effectively William's captive, had sworn an oath on holy relics to support that claim.

Whether Harold swore it freely is precisely the point at issue - and the Bayeux Tapestry, made for William's half-brother Bishop Odo, is emphatic that he swore it. What mattered in 1066 was less the legal merit than the fact that William secured papal approval for the venture, which turned an invasion into something closer to a holy war and made it far easier to recruit.

1066

The year worked out, in the end, as a problem of wind and timing.

Harold spent the summer with his army and fleet on the south coast waiting for the Normans, who could not sail because the wind was against them. By early September his levies had exhausted their supplies and their period of service, and he stood them down.

Almost immediately, Harald Hardrada landed in the north with the help of Harold's own exiled brother Tostig. Harold marched an army from London to Yorkshire at extraordinary speed and destroyed the Norwegians at Stamford Bridge on September 25. Hardrada and Tostig were both killed. It was one of the most complete victories in Anglo-Saxon military history, and it should have been the making of his reign.

Three days later the wind changed and William landed at Pevensey.

Harold marched back south, gathering what men he could, and met the Norman army on October 14 on a ridge near Hastings. The English fought on foot in a shield wall along the high ground; the Normans had archers and cavalry. The battle lasted most of the day, which by the standards of medieval warfare is an eternity - and for a long time the shield wall held. It broke, according to the Norman accounts, when parts of the English line pursued a Norman retreat, real or feigned, downhill and were cut apart in the open.

Harold was killed toward evening. The tradition that an arrow struck him in the eye comes from the Tapestry, where the identification of the figure is genuinely ambiguous. Two of his brothers died with him. There was no obvious successor left standing.

Norman knights and archers at the Battle of Hastings, as shown in the Bayeux Tapestry

Conquest, and What It Cost

Hastings won William a battle, not a country. He was crowned at Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066 - a ceremony that descended into chaos when the Norman guards outside, hearing the shouted acclamation within and mistaking it for an attack, began setting fire to nearby buildings.

The next five years were spent putting down risings across England: in the west, in the fens under Hereward the Wake, and most seriously in the north, where the Northumbrians allied with a Danish fleet. William's answer in the winter of 1069-70 was the Harrying of the North. His army systematically destroyed the region between York and Durham - villages, stores, livestock, seed corn - to render it incapable of supporting a rebellion.

The result was famine on a scale the chroniclers found difficult to describe, and Orderic Vitalis, a Norman writer generally sympathetic to William, condemned it outright as a crime for which he would answer before God. The Domesday survey seventeen years later still recorded great tracts of Yorkshire as waste. It is the act that most complicates any straightforward admiration of him, and it was not an aberration - it was policy, applied with the same cold competence as everything else he did.

Alongside the violence came the machinery. Castles went up everywhere, first in earth and timber, then in stone - a technology of occupation that had barely existed in England before and was suddenly everywhere. The Tower of London was begun in the 1070s, deliberately sited to overawe the city. Land was redistributed on an extraordinary scale: within twenty years the English aristocracy had been almost entirely replaced by Normans, and by 1086 only a couple of major landholders of English birth remained. Bishoprics and abbeys went the same way, and cathedral building began on a scale that swept away most of what the Saxons had built.

Domesday

At Christmas 1085, William ordered a survey of his kingdom - who held what land, how much it was worth, how many plows and mills and people it carried, and what it had been worth before he arrived.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records the resentment with unusual bitterness: not one hide, not one ox, not one cow, not one pig escaped the record. The English called it the Domesday Book because there was no appeal against it, as there would be none on the Day of Judgement.

It was completed with astonishing speed - most of it within a year - and it remains the single most valuable document in English history. No other European kingdom of the period produced anything remotely comparable. It tells us what England actually was in 1086: its villages, its economy, its people, its ownership. It also tells us exactly what the Conquest had done, because it recorded who had held each estate before 1066 and who held it now, line after line, for thousands of manors.

Death and Succession

William spent his later years mostly in Normandy, fighting to hold his French territories, and in conflict with his eldest son Robert Curthose, who twice rebelled - on one occasion unhorsing his father in single combat before recognizing him.

In 1087, campaigning against the French king near Mantes, he was injured - thrown against the pommel of his saddle, most accounts suggest, as his horse stumbled in the burning town. He died at Rouen on September 9, and by then he had grown corpulent enough that the burial at Saint-Étienne in Caen turned into a grim farce: the stone sarcophagus proved too small, and the attempt to force the body in burst it, filling the church with such a stench that the mourners fled.

He divided his inheritance. Robert received Normandy, the patrimony. His second surviving son, William Rufus, received England. The youngest, Henry, received silver - and, in time, through his brothers' misfortunes, everything.

Legacy

William's reign gave England a Francophone ruling class whose language reshaped English permanently - which is why we still raise swine in the field and eat pork at the table, herd cattle and serve beef. It gave the country a centralized feudal structure in which every landholder ultimately owed allegiance to the Crown, a more powerful monarchy than most of contemporary Europe possessed, and a permanent entanglement with France that would produce five centuries of war.

It also gave England a continuous line. Every subsequent English and British monarch, down to the present day, descends from him. That is the practical reason this series begins where it does.

Whether he was a great king or an efficient conqueror who happened to build well is a fair question, and the Harrying of the North sits in the middle of it. What is not in doubt is that no other single individual has altered the country so completely, or so quickly.

Places Connected to William the Conqueror

Battle Abbey, East Sussex. Founded by William on the battlefield itself, with the high altar reportedly on the spot where Harold fell. The battlefield is open to visitors.
The Tower of London. The White Tower is his, begun in the 1070s and still the most complete Norman keep in the country.
Durham, Ely, Winchester and St Albans Cathedrals. Norman building at its most confident.
Pevensey Castle, East Sussex. Where he landed on September 28, 1066, occupying a Roman fort already a thousand years old.
The Bayeux Tapestry, Normandy. The Conquest told by the winners, two hundred and thirty feet of it.
Abbaye aux Hommes, Caen. His burial place, and his and Matilda's penance for marrying.