Edward the confessor, King of England from 1042 to 1066, did
not clearly settle the issue of succession. William the Bastard of Normandy thought
he had been promised the crown. Harold Godwinson believed it was to be his.
Harold was at hand when Edward died, so he grabbed the reins. Incidentally,
centuries later when Edward’s tomb was opened, it was discovered that his
corpse was still in pristine condition. It had not suffered decay. We don’t
know why.
In late 1066, after Saxon king Harold had been up north
fighting the Norsemen, he had to immediately march his men back south to straight
way, without having slept, face William and his Norman warriors who had landed
with the intention of seizing the crown of England. Harold was defeated at the
battle of Hastings by these descendants of Vikings, and William now became
known as The Conqueror. William rewarded his men with grants of land
confiscated from the Saxons, and so established the Norman rule over England.
Rouen was to become primary over York and London as the capital of the
expanding Norman empire. The Normans lorded it over their Saxon population for
centuries. Although the populations started to blend, none of the Kings of
England spoke English until Edward I, great-great-great-great grandson of the
conqueror, and even then it was his third language. French was the language of
the privileged, with Latin being used in ecclesiastical business. England was
so peripheral to some of the later Normans, that one queen, Berengaria the wife
of King Richard Couer de Lion, never even once set foot on English soil.
Richard did though: England was an important tax base.
William was succeeded by his sacrilegious son, William
Rufus. When he died, a sizeable portion of the younger generation of nobility had
already perished in the sinking of La Blanche-Nef in 1120. This appears to have
been a poor medieval example of a gay cruise vessel. Amongst the Normans,
homosexuality did not have the same stigma as among the conquered Saxons, and
to the Saxons, the sinking of The White Ship was God’s punishment upon the
irreligious Normans.
The Conqueror’s fourth son, Henry, succeeded Rufus as Henry
I, an able administrator (hence his name Beauclerc). He took to wife a Saxon
princess, who has come down in history as Good Queen Mold. They had a daughter,
Matilda, but no surviving sons, their son having died in the disaster of the
White Ship. The laws of primogeniture were not followed in the realm in those
days, and Matilda did not automatically inherit the crown. In fact, Henry had
been negotiating with Stephen of the House of Blois to become his heir. Matilda
went on to become Empress of the Holy Roman Empire, but eventually came back to
England to cause huge troubles.
Funny….I set out to tell about perhaps the greatest warrior
of history, William the Marshall, and wanted to first set the stage, but that
took more than I was planning.
I intend to pick up the story soon…..
Gordon, I too am an Anglophile. I very much enjoyed this post, but I think that many historians have overreached in their attempts to underscore the contrast between Anglo-Saxon and Norman England. Edward the Confessor's mother was a Norman, and his court had a decidedly Norman flavor long before 1066. In fact, he and William were close cousins. And, as you know, William always insisted that Edward had promised him the throne when they were younger. Moreover, your readers may be unaware of the fact that William's wife, Matilda of Flanders, was herself a descendant of Alfred the Great. Hence, all of William's offspring had the blood of the House of Wessex coursing through their veins! Of course, part of my interest in this subject is self-serving - I know my descent from William the Conqueror and William the Marshall (I state it that way, because it is a mathematical probability that most of the folks on this planet who have English ancestry are descendants of the Conqueror.
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