1066: does the date still matter?

© Institute of Historical Research 2005. Historical Research, vol. 78, no. 202 (November 2005)Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Blackwell Publishing, Ltd.Oxford, UKHISRHistorical Research0950-3471© Institute of Historical Research 2005XXXOriginal Article

1066: does the date still matter?1066: does the date still matter?

1066: does the date still matter?*

David Bates

Institute of Historical Research, University of London

Abstract

1066 was once regarded as the date everyone knew. It remains widely knownamong the large numbers of the general public with an interest in history. Thisarticle suggests that popular perceptions of 1066 are a range of at times confusedmemories and that so-called academic history has in the last fifty years had littleimpact on them. It acknowledges that revolutionary changes in contemporaryhistorians’ approaches to the past have made 1066 less significant as a date, yetargues that the date’s very popularity with the general public and the centrality ofchange to historical analysis makes a clear perception and extensive disseminationcrucial. It suggests that 1066 was ultimately an act of legitimated and purposefullydirected violence and needs to be discussed as such. It is necessary to guard againstautomatically associating every change in the decades after 1066 with the impactof the Conquest and to see them instead as often being aspects of wider processes.It is also crucial to see 1066 as an event of European significance and to set itwithin the multicultural history of the British Isles. It had consequences whichfundamentally shaped English and British history. Perhaps surprisingly, new

information and new interpretations of long familiar sources are possible.

If my memory serves me well, I first set foot in the Institute of HistoricalResearch (I.H.R.) in the summer of 1967 as a postgraduate student.

1

Ithas occupied an important place in my personal and professional life eversince. I mention these autobiographical details not just in order to makethe point that it is a particular honour for me to have been appointedDirector from 1 October 2003, but to underline what I think is correct,namely that the relationship of many people with the I.H.R. is a personalone. Patrick Collinson has written in the

Oxford Dictionary of NationalBiography

entry for the I.H.R.’s founder and first Director A. F. Pollard

* This article is a revised version of my inaugural lecture as Professor of History and Directorof the Institute of Historical Research, delivered in the Beveridge Hall, University of Londonon 7 Dec. 2004.

1

I am grateful to the staff of the I.H.R. for their willingness to take part in the survey referredto below, and in particular to Samantha Jordan for all her help towards the preparation of thislecture. Many people, too numerous to mention, offered comments on both the original lectureand a subsequent version given at the University of Liverpool. Since I have deliberately keptfootnotes to a minimum, I must apologize to all whose work has been excluded on groundsof space.

© Institute of Historical Research 2005.

444 1066: does the date still matter?

that ‘It is hard to imagine what the condition of academic history inBritain in the twentieth century would have been without the IHR’.

2

Theseare, of course, exceptionally generous words, but they are nonethelessones to which I would want to make an addition from a differentperspective. The I.H.R. is quite simply a place that many people love. Itsacademic achievements – which I believe to be huge – are indissolublylinked to its social side.

Since its foundation in 1921 the I.H.R. has changed with the times inorder to remain at the heart of historical life in the United Kingdom. Ifa twenty-second-century equivalent of Professor Collinson were to feeljustified in writing the same words in 100 years’ time, it will be becausethe I.H.R. will have continued to evolve. An occasion of this kind isnot an appropriate one at which to expand further on strategic planningor indeed visionary dreams. I do, however, think that one extremelyimportant trend needs to be emphasized as a preliminary to this inaugurallecture, namely the way in which the I.H.R. under my three immediatepredecessors as director has taken on an increasingly active role in bothpublic history and the very necessary dialogue between the academy andall who are committed to supporting and developing awareness of andinterest in history. Since 1994 these developments have been located togreat profit within the University of London’s multi-disciplinary Schoolof Advanced Study, an admirable setting for future advances. In thinkingabout subjects within my own area of research expertise, it became clearvery quickly that only one really satisfies the criterion of tackling whatmight be variously described as ‘History and the Public’ or ‘The Publicand History’. It had to be 1066.

According to that book which many still seem to know, Sellars’s andYeatman’s

1066 and All That

, 1066 is one of only two memorable dates inEnglish history. It was the date when England stopped being conqueredand could therefore become ‘top nation’.

3

What they had in mind, I amsure, is that, at the time they were writing in the nineteen-thirties, 1066 wasa date so consciously and unconsciously embedded in national identityand popular memory that everyone knew of it, even if its meaning wasa subject of uncertainty and controversy. It was, as a result, an easy targetfor satire.

There is no doubt that 1066’s status as a date everyone knows has fadedin recent decades. There are nowadays many surveys of schoolchildren’sgeneral knowledge to tell us that it is unfamiliar to large numbers. For allthis, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that it continues to havea unique place in English culture and popular imagination. Battle abbeyand the battlefield of Hastings ranked fifth among the most visited of

2

P. Collinson, ‘Pollard, Albert Frederick (1869–1948)’,

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

(Oxford, 2004) <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35556> [accessed 6 June 2005].

3

W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman,

1066 and All That

(1930), p. 17.


1066: does the date still matter? 445

English Heritage sites between 1 April 2003 and 31 March 2004, with158,645 visitors, re-enactments excluded.

4

Visitors to the Bayeux Tapestryin the Centre Guillaume le Conquérant in Bayeux have consistentlynumbered over 400,000 annually in the last decade, with a notable high atover 500,000 in 1994, the fiftieth anniversary of the D-Day landings whenBritish visitors to Normandy were at a peak. 2004, the sixtieth anniversary,looks likely to be another year of higher than normal attendances.Between fifty and fifty-five per cent of the parties which book to visit theTapestry come from Britain.

5

As might be expected, 1066 and everythingit implies also matters in Normandy. Thousands lined the streets of Caenfor a carnival which commemorated the 900th anniversary of William theConqueror’s death in 1987.

1066 retains a place in political discourse at the highest level; witnessJack Straw’s error-strewn and apparently humorous allusion at the UnitedNations during an exchange with the then French foreign ministerDominique de Villepin (‘Britain was founded in 1066 by the French’)in the tense weeks before the Iraq war.

6

Over the centuries its place ininternational diplomacy can be the source of considerable amusement; myfavourites are the possibility that there was a project to canonize Williamthe Conqueror as part of the negotiations at the Field of the Cloth of Goldand the quip attributed to Clemenceau during the Versailles conferenceabout England’s being a colony which had gone wrong.

7

Historians’sniggers should not, however, detract from the extremely serious pointthat 1066 became from a very early date a reflex point of reference atstressful moments in Anglo-French relations, and has remained so eversince. Writing between 1327 and 1338, for example, Robert Mannyng couldbewail the oppressions suffered by the English at William the Conqueror’shands and warn them that worse would happen in the event of anothersuccessful invasion from France.

8

1066 has also been used as a symbol ofalliance, reconciliation and reassurance in recent international relations.The inscription on the monument at the British war cemetery at Bayeuxis ‘GULIELMO VICTI VICTORIS PATRIAM LIBERAVIMUS’ (‘Wewho were conquered by William have liberated the homeland of the

4

I am grateful to English Heritage for providing me with these figures.

5

I am grateful to Mlle. Sylvette Lemagnen, conservateur de la Médiathèque de la Ville deBayeux et de la Tapisserie de Bayeux for providing some notably detailed information.

6

Quotation at <http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,896143,00.html> [accessed6 June 2005].

7

M. de Boüard, ‘Y-a-t-il eu, au XVI

e

siècle, un projet de béatification de Guillaume leConquérant?’,

Anglo-Norman Studies

, x (1988), 25–34. Clemenceau supposedly said ‘L’Angleterreest une colonie qui a mal tourné’. I have failed to find the precise source of this comment, butit was referred to by several journalists at the time of the invasion of Iraq. There is also aquotation from Alphonse Allais: ‘L’Angleterre est une colonie normande qui a mal tourné’.

8

The Story of England by Robert Mannyng of Brunne, A.D. 1338

, ed. F. J. Furnivall (2 vols.,1887), ii. 261. See, most recently, J. Coleman, ‘Strange rhyme: prosody and nationhood inRobert Mannyng’s

Story of England

’,

Speculum

, lxxviii (2003), 1214–38, at pp. 1228–30;C. Given-Wilson,

Chronicles: the Writing of History in Medieval England

(2004), p. 181.



conqueror’).

9

The Bayeux Tapestry has played a role in the reconciliationof former enemies; the impressively erudite notes on the Tapestry madeduring the Second World War by the distinguished archaeologist and

Sturmbannführer

in the S.S., Herbert Jankuhn – on the orders ultimatelyof Heinrich Himmler – were returned to Bayeux from Germany in 1994.This remarkable episode has recently been quite brilliantly described bySylvette Lemagnen.

10

There have been occasions when academic discourse has drawn inspirationfrom contemporary politics. ‘England’s first entry into Europe’, the titleof the published version of a famous Creighton Lecture given by the lateSir Richard Southern in 1966, linked 1066 with the United Kingdom’santicipated entry into the then Common Market.

11

1066 has also had itsplace in art; witness Ford Madox Ford’s representation of the deathof Harold, now in Manchester Art Gallery. Scenes from the BayeuxTapestry are regularly used by cartoonists as points of reference to whicheveryone can be expected to relate. A glance at publishers’ cataloguessuggests that some among them believe that 1066 will sell books; 1066appears in the theme tunes of children’s television programmes; theNorman Conquest supplies the brand-name for an ale. The diversity ofthese images and usages is striking. Popular culture can utilize the datein a host of ways which bear no resemblance to whatever historicalsignificance it might now be deemed to have.

It would, I think, be fascinating to conduct a survey of how 1066 isnow understood. My own efforts in this direction have, however, beenlimited to a survey of the staff of the I.H.R. This splendid group ofpeople hardly constitutes either a random or a socially representativesection of society, but it does contain professional medieval historians,non-medievalists, non-historians and non-ethnic English. If I try tosummarize the findings, the main points would be that the notion ofthe Normans as ‘baddies’ survives, as for some does the notion of theimportance of the Conquest for the construction of privilege and class.So does the idea that 1066 was the start of a process which broughtBritain closer to Europe. Sir Walter Scott figured at times. There weremixed responses from those few who had studied the subject at university,with a predominant, if largely undefined, sense that it was thought lessimportant than previously. Running through many of the responses

9

Attention is also drawn to the significance of the inscription by R. Barber, ‘The NormanConquest and the media’,

Anglo-Norman Studies

, xxvi (2004), 1–20, at p. 19. Research at myrequest by staff at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission has failed to identify theinscription’s inspired author.

10

On the Jankuhn bequest, see S. Lemagnen, ‘The Bayeux Tapestry under Germanoccupation’, in

The Bayeux Tapestry: Embroidering the Facts of History

, ed. P. Bouet, B. Levy andF. Neveux (Caen, 2004), pp. 49–64.

11

R. W. Southern, ‘England’s first entry into Europe’, in

Medieval Humanism and otherStudies

(Oxford, 1970), pp. 135–57. Interestingly, the title of the original lecture was ‘Englandand the Continent in the 12th century’.



was an awareness that 1066 was the last time that England had beenconquered from abroad. There was also an emphasis on certain potentsymbols as being deeply embedded in popular consciousness; they wereusually drawn from the Bayeux Tapestry, with the death of Harold themost regularly mentioned. This survey and a great deal else that I haveobserved, but failed to document, over the many years that I have beeninterested in the subject, indicate that the popular perception of 1066resembles a pot-pourri of images and memories descended willy-nillyfrom ideas which have sometimes been in existence for centuries.

1066 is, of course, a construct. It is also primarily an English date: as thelate Rees Davies pointed out at the start of the published version of hisdistinguished Ford Lectures, 1093, rather than 1066, is the ‘

annus mirabilis

,or rather

annus horribilis

’ in the history of Wales and Scotland.

12

Ireland’sturn came later. Speculatively, one might wonder why decisive medievalbattles in Britain’s history other than Hastings have not achieved a similarfame. Bannockburn does have similar resonances in Scotland, but why isnot the unmarked site at Carham between Kelso and Coldstream moreprominent in our thoughts? There, in perhaps 1018 – the matter iscomplicated – at a ford over the River Tweed, Malcolm II, king of Scots,gained a victory which arguably consolidated his kingdom’s grip overformer parts of the kingdom of Northumbria and which turned out toensure that the Lothians and Edinburgh became, and have remained eversince, part of Scotland. Like Hastings the battle was deemed so importantthat one of the earliest sources recorded that the cataclysm was presagedby the appearance of a comet.

13

More spectacularly, why not the unknownsite of the Battle of ‘Brunanburh’ where in 937 Athelstan, king of thesouthern English, defeated Olaf Guthricsson, king of Dublin, and thekings of Scots and Strathclyde, as a prelude to the expulsion of the Vikingkings of York in 954? A different outcome to this battle would surelyhave led to a very different political configuration for the British Isles.

Let us turn now to the history of 1066. Its unique entrenchment inthe collective psyche has, it seems to me, occurred through a processwhich is both evolutionary and incremental. A crucial moment is thedevelopment of anti-French xenophobia from the late thirteenth centuryonwards, which led increasingly to the Conquest being identified byfourteenth-century historians with the destruction of English liberties.

14

In the fifteenth century this had evolved into Fortescue’s well-known

12

R. R. Davies,

The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343

(Oxford, 2000), p. 4.

13

Symeon of Durham,

Libellus de Exordio atque procursu istius, hoc est Dunhelmensis Ecclesie

, ed.and trans. D. Rollason (Oxford Medieval Texts, Oxford, 2000), pp. 154–7, with a discussionof the difficulties of the date at p. 156, nn. 17, 18.

14

Given-Wilson, pp. 119–20, 143, 181–2; D. Moffatt, ‘Sin, conquest, servitude: Englishself-image in the chronicles of the early 14th century’, in

The World of Work: Servitude, Slavery,and Labor in Medieval England

, ed. A. J. Frantzen and D. Moffatt (Glasgow, 1994), pp. 146–68.Barber, pp. 4–6, makes essentially the same point.



distinction between England, as a land where the kings governed byconsent, and France and Germany, which were despotisms.

15

Memory ofthe Anglo-Norman past was also dragged out in a complex way as part ofLancastrian propaganda to justify rule over the old duchy in the aftermathof Henry V’s victory at Agincourt.

16

To view the earlier medieval past inthis way, in terms of racial conflict and national difference, must seemsomewhat paradoxical in the light of modern orthodoxy which seesNormans, English and other French peoples as ethnically assimilated bythe end of the twelfth century.

17

Equally, the emphasis on constitutionalliberty as the central theme of politics must also seem something of asimplification when relations between the English kings and their chiefsubjects have for several decades now been frequently seen as having beenlargely determined by power and self-interest rather than principle. Yetthe two themes were to have a profound long-term influence, the legacyof which is arguably still with us.

For all the apparent eccentricity of this later medieval treatment of1066, it was impeccably developed from the writings of the two historiansof the first half of the twelfth century that these fourteenth-centuryhistorians knew best, namely William of Malmesbury and Henry ofHuntingdon. For the former, who was in many ways favourable to Williamthe Conqueror and the Normans, 1066 was a disaster for the Englishpeople from which they had not even begun to recover when he waswriting over fifty years later. The latter wrote in truly apocalyptic terms:God had chosen the Normans to wipe out the English.

18

Inextricablyassociated with the process which created a history of 1066, and one whichhas in many ways endured to the present, is Domesday Book. AlthoughI shall say only a little about it here, a host of messages emanate from thelater history of the Conqueror’s great survey of his new kingdom, arecord unique for its time in its scale and thoroughness. In the end, theytoo, in one way or another, reinforce the idea that a new and differentregime was installed in England after the Battle of Hastings.

19

The latermedieval and the modern histories of 1066 were also filtered through theregular re-issues of Magna Carta and the development of parliamentaryconsciousness in the thirteenth century.

15

Sir John Fortescue,

De Laudibus Legum Anglie

, ed. and trans. S. B. Chrimes (Cambridge,1942), pp. 78–91.

16

A. Curry, ‘Lancastrian Normandy: the jewel in the crown?’, in

England and Normandy inthe Middle Ages

, ed. D. Bates and A. E. Curry (1994), pp. 235–52.

17

In general, H. M. Thomas,

The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, andIdentity, 1066–c.1220

(Oxford, 2003).

18

Henry of Huntingdon

, The History of the English People, 1000–1154

, ed. and trans.D. Greenway (Oxford Medieval Texts, Oxford, 1996), pp. 402–3. For Malmesbury, see furtherJ. Gillingham, ‘Civilizing the English? The English histories of William of Malmesbury andDavid Hume’,

Hist. Research

, lxxiv (2001), 17–43.

19

On Domesday Book’s history, fundamental is E. M. Hallam,

Domesday Book: through NineCenturies

(1986).



The descent of these perceptions of 1066 through the succeedingcenturies is well known. The Conquest was reformulated in the shapeof the so-called Norman yoke in the constitutional arguments of theseventeenth century. John Pym’s contribution to the debate on thePetition of Right in 1628, the writings of the Levellers and John Milton,and much else epitomize an age which disagreed fundamentally onwhether 1066 destroyed the democratic and egalitarian past of Anglo-Saxontimes, a perception in its turn founded ultimately on a famous passage inTacitus, or whether it was only one turning-point in a long evolutionaryprocess. Leading the debate, on all sides, were politicians, lawyers andwriters well read in the latest historical scholarship, itself based on a goodknowledge of Malmesbury, Huntingdon and the medieval chroniclerswho had formulated the view of 1066 which had developed from thefourteenth century onwards; whatever their differences, all were unitedin believing in a national history which was continuous from the earliesttimes to the present.

20

The strength of the link to the pre-1066 past wassuch that, until 1688, English monarchs continued in their coronationoaths to swear to uphold the laws of Edward the Confessor.

21

There were many dissenters in the seventeenth century from thenotion of a continuous constitutionalism of English history; HenrySpelman supplied the raw materials, but in this it is Robert Brady whostands out from the herd. They and others created another enduringversion of the history of 1066, that of feudalism English-style (thisinterpretation of events also found its way to Scotland). The transmissionto twentieth-century historians of the notion of constitutional continuitywas, however, guaranteed by the monumental publications of WilliamStubbs and Edward Freeman. Freeman’s statement that ‘we must recognisethe spirit which dictated the Petition of Right as the same which gatheredall England round the banners of Godwin, and remember that “the goodold cause” was truly that for which Harold died on the field (of Hastings)and Waltheof on the scaffold’ is often quoted and says all that needs tobe said.

22

For me, it is James Campbell who has most recently and bestevoked how Stubbs

felt

continuity from a centuries-old past in hisrelationship with his native forest of Knaresborough.

23

An idea which so powerfully influences individual and collective actionin the present is something that all of us struggle to understand in times

20

See, in general, C. Hill, ‘The Norman yoke’, in C. Hill,

Puritanism and Revolution: Studiesin the Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century

(1958), pp. 46–111; J. G. A.Pocock,

The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: a Study of English Historical Thought in the17th Century

(2nd edn., Cambridge, 1987), pp. 30–53; R. B. Seaberg, ‘The Norman Conquestand the common law: the Levellers and the argument for continuity’,

Historical Jour.

, xxiv(1981), 791–806.

21

Pocock, pp. 239–40.

22

The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman

, ed. W. R. W. Stephens (2 vols., 1895), i. 125.

23

J. Campbell,

Stubbs and the English State

, Stenton Lecture 1987 (University of Reading,1989), pp. 9–10.



when the past seems so fractured and remote. From an entirely personalpoint of view, it is most readily comprehensible from having lived inrecent times within a few miles of the two Glasgow football grounds ofIbrox and Parkhead and brushed against the sectarianism of the west ofScotland; the notion of the dominant power of a created historic pastover a powerless present is only too easily grasped. If we return to thehistory of 1066, the chief impression is of the persistence of so manyfeatures of its modern history – arguably often well past their intellectualsell-by date. While William Stubbs’s Select Charters remained on thesyllabus in some universities until the nineteen-sixties, the debate aboutEnglish ‘feudalism’ continued to be structured within the conceptualframework inherited from Spelman until even later.24 A final paradoxis that when serious women’s history started to be written in the latenineteenth century, it drew lock, stock and barrel on the notion thatEnglish liberties were destroyed in 1066. Florence Buckstaffe’s article, andits central theme of a pre-1066 golden age of equality and freedom forwomen, remained influential for over a century until the whole constructwas ruthlessly and superbly dissected by Pauline Stafford.25 As we lookback over all this, the brilliance of F. W. Maitland shines out like abeacon, yet as a beacon which has not prevented many from sailing onto the rocks.

A nineteenth-century development arguably even more crucial for themodern history of 1066 was the adoption of these old constitutionalthemes into romanticism, nationalism and ethnography. With the racialhistory of Normans v. English created in Sir Walter Scott’s reworkingof the Robin Hood legends in Ivanhoe, and in Charles Kingsley’s laterHereward the Wake, as well as in the entirely unjustified element of racialconflict introduced to the Becket controversy, we witness the way in whichnational pride, alongside ideas which we would probably now regardas racist, took 1066 to centre stage in debates about national identity.26

The transfer of these ideas into serious scholarship is again epitomized byFreeman: ‘the Norman was a Dane who, in his sojourn in Gaul, had puton a slight French varnish, and who came into England to be washedclean again’.27 The counterpart to this English nationalism was a Norman

24 Fundamental here is S. Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: the Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted(Oxford, 1994). For general comment, see D. Crouch, The Birth of Nobility: ConstructingAristocracy in England and France, 900–1300 (Harlow, 2005), pp. 265–73. Seminal is E. A. R.Brown, ‘The tyranny of a construct: feudalism and the historians of medieval Europe’, Amer.Hist. Rev., lxxix (1974), 1063–88.

25 P. Stafford, ‘Women and the Norman Conquest’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., 6th ser., iv(1994), 221–49.

26 See, in particular, C. A. Simmons, Reversing the Conquest: History and Myth in 19th-CenturyBritish Literature (New Brunswick and London, 1990), pp. 76–102, 132–9.

27 E. A. Freeman, The Growth of the English Constitution from the Earliest Times (1872),pp. 73–4 (cited in J. W. Burrow, A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past(Cambridge, 1981), p. 208). In general on this subject, see Burrow, pp. 193–228.



pride in the region’s heroic past. The distinguished Norman antiquaryAuguste Le Prévost, for example, wrote of the many English visits toNormandy in the first volume of his Mémoires de la Société des Antiquairesde Normandie:

Né en Angleterre, il est naturel qu’il soit particulièrement répandu dans notreprovince, dans cette terre des châteaux et des églises où nos voisins de l’autrecôté de la Manche sont obligé de venir chercher le berceau de leurs arts, aussibien que celui de leur monarchie, de leurs familles et de leurs institutions.28

It is salutary to remember that for all this jingoism, scholarly andantiquarian exchanges were frequent and personal relationships cordial.The names of Ducarel, Cotman and Stapleton immediately come to mind.It is also worth noting that Sir Walter Scott was a member of the Sociétédes Antiquaires de Normandie.

Variants of Normans v. English remained on the agenda in serioushistorical writing well into the second half of the twentieth century. Sotoo did the earlier notions of the Normans as a barbarian people, asillustrated by famous quotations from Sir Frank Stenton and H. G.Richardson and G. O. Sayles; the very stuff of examination and essayquestions when I was young.29 The late Professor R. Allen Brown, alegendary figure in I.H.R. and University of London history, and, evenif some, myself included, often did not agree with him, a magnificentcontributor to the history of 1066 and much else besides, could proclaimin deliberate antithesis to Freeman that ‘if it were necessary to take sides,I should be with duke William at Hastings’, while also saying by thenineteen-sixties that it really ought to be possible to be more detached.30

The chief factors in keeping Normans v. English alive in popularimagination must surely, however, have been the regular recycling ofthe nineteenth-century version of the Robin Hood tales and, to a lesserextent, of the story of Hereward the Wake. The wicked Norman sheriffof Nottingham has had a long run in film, literature and journalism.31 Theway in which all this influences how publishers and the media in generalpresent 1066 to this day is arguably demonstrated by their treatment of ajudicious and careful work of ‘popular history’, Peter Rex’s Hereward.Although the author takes pains to point out that Hereward was ethnically

28 For the quotation and other material on this subject, see D. J. A. Matthew, ‘The Englishcultivation of Norman history’, in Bates and Curry, pp. 1–18, at pp. 10–16.

29 ‘The Normans who entered into the English inheritance were a harsh and violent race.They were closest of all western peoples to the barbarian strain in the continental order’(F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (3rd edn., Oxford, 1971), p. 687); ‘The Normans had verylittle to teach, even in the art of war, and they had very much to learn. They were barbarianswho were becoming conscious of their insufficiency’ (H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles, TheGovernance of Mediaeval England from the Conquest to Magna Carta (Edinburgh, 1963), p. 27).

30 R. A. Brown, The Normans and the Norman Conquest (1969), p. 6.31 S. Knight, Robin Hood: a Complete Study of the English Outlaw (Oxford, 1994); S. Airlie,

‘Strange eventful histories: the middle ages in the cinema’, in The Medieval World, ed.P. Linehan and J. L. Nelson (2001), pp. 163–83, at pp. 177–80.



Anglo-Danish, the book’s title reproduces Kingsley’s sub-title ‘The LastEnglishman’. And the headline of the review in the Independent on Sundayis ‘Hereward the Wake, scourge of William the Conqueror, turns out tobe a foreign import’, accompanied by a reproduction of an engravingshowing lightly armed English being butchered by Norman warriors anda caption ‘Hereward . . . who resisted the Normans, at whose handshe probably died’; Peter Rex’s book – and indeed David Keys’s review– both say that Hereward probably died in exile.32 Also, for all themany admirable attributes of his study, Rex cannot resist including a littlebit of twentieth-century anachronism into Hereward’s history. DefendingHereward against the remarkable charge that he was a quisling, heassures us that ‘his [i.e., Vidkun Quisling’s] equivalent in NormanEngland must be sought in the ranks of those who accepted theConqueror as king and aided him in governing the country, men likeArchbishop Ealdred of York, Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester or AbbotÆthelwig of Evesham’.33

The last 100 years has been the century of scientific and theoreticalhistory. It has seen 1066 pass through the prisms of empire, colonialismand much else besides.34 For all the outstanding interpretative scholarshipof recent decades, unprecedented levels of international collaboration andsuperb editions of key texts, the date has receded almost out of sight as asubject of controversy – at least in print – among professional historians.To return to Allen Brown again for a moment, he saw 1066 as a radicalbreak; not just a historical turning-point, but a decisive moment in thehistory of civilization in these islands, and therefore of many other placesbesides. Castles, feudalism, a new aristocracy, knights, Romanesquearchitecture, the conduct of warfare and a reinvigorated Church were allintroduced by the Normans. Domesday Book was a product of Normangenius. No one subsequently has painted so boldly on so broad a canvas.35

There is arguably even a danger of 1066 becoming a demarcation linerather than a subject of historical enquiry. The publication, for example,of journals with ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and ‘Anglo-Norman’ in the title and thelabelling of historians as ‘Anglo-Saxonists’ and ‘Anglo-Normanists’ allhave their perils. Specialization can breed fragmentation and myopia, justas it is ultimately the foundation for advance.

32 P. Rex, Hereward: the Last Englishman (Stroud, 2005); D. Keys, review of Rex, Independenton Sunday, 20 Feb. 2005.

33 Rex, p. 21.34 In general, see F. J. West, ‘The colonial history of the Norman Conquest’, History, lxxxiv

(1999), 219–36.35 For a full survey of the historiography, see M. Chibnall, The Debate on the Norman

Conquest (Manchester, 1999). See also, H. R. Loyn, ‘1066: should we have celebrated?’, Hist.Research, lxiii (1990), 119–27 (repr. in H. R. Loyn, Society and Peoples: Studies in the History ofEngland and Wales, c.600–1200 (1992), pp. 322–38); J. C. Holt, ‘Feudal society and the familyin early medieval England, i: the revolution of 1066’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., 5th ser., xxxii(1982), 193–212; J. C. Holt, ‘Colonial England’, in Colonial England, 1066–1215 (1997), pp. 1–24.



It is easy to rail against the dangers of excessive specialization – andI think that we should in this case do so – but in the decline of 1066 asthe date that everyone knows, many much more powerful forces thanthis are at work. The convincing rehabilitation of the Anglo-Saxon state,even if one might disagree with aspects of the thesis, makes the reign ofAlfred the Great and the efforts of his tenth-century successors the crucialperiod for the start of English state formation. Some might take the genesisback earlier.36 The equally convincing demonstration of the strength ofEngland’s contacts with continental Europe over the centuries prior to1066 has destroyed the notion that 1066 marks ‘England’s first entry intoEurope’. Arguments that Normandy should be located firmly within thepolitical and cultural framework of post-Carolingian northern France,taken alongside work on ethnicity and ethnogenesis, and awarenessthat both are constructs, takes away the Normans’ supposed inheritedVikingness or adopted Frenchness; the racial dimension to 1066 has quitedisappeared.37 The economic take-off of the central middle ages inEngland is now dated to long before 1066. Economic and social history,landscape history and archaeology enforce analysis across the longue durée.In the study of the formation of villages, field systems and parishes, 1066has little part to play; likewise in the history of the English language. Andfinally, as historians have universally ceased over the last fifty or so yearsto read medieval writers literally, the image of 1066 which persisted foreight centuries has been dispelled; in particular, the narrative sources’linking of sin, degeneracy and defeat are not explanations which weshould adopt, but rhetorical devices by which their proponents sought tonegotiate contemporary troubles.

For me, an early twenty-first-century treatment of 1066 must locate thedate within a broad temporal perspective. It must also recognize that,although the old polemics are utterly dead, the materials which fuelledthem are not. Economic history, women’s history, gender history andcultural history – to name only a few of the many mansions of our discipline– may have agendas which make the old constitutional and administrativeemphases actually or seemingly redundant, yet the brutalities of conquestremain, as do the ideology of victory and the consequences of linguisticdifference between victors and vanquished. Change is an unavoidable

36 The work of James Campbell and the late Patrick Wormald is, of course, fundamental toall this (see the former’s collected essays in his Essays in Anglo-Saxon History (1986) and TheAnglo-Saxon State (2000); for the latter, see, above all, The Making of English Law: King Alfredto the 12th Century (Oxford, 1999)). For some assessment of this and other themes, see D. Bates,‘England around the year 1000’, in Hommes et sociétés dans l’Europe de l’An Mil, ed. P. Bonnassieand P. Toubert (Toulouse, 2004), pp. 101–12.

37 For Normandy in its northern French context, see D. Bates, Normandy before 1066 (1982).For these arguments in the context of more recent work, see D. Bates, ‘West Francia: thenorthern principalities’, in The New Cambridge Medieval History, iii: c.900–c.1024, ed. T. Reuter(Cambridge, 1999), pp. 398–419. The most recent of many publications on ethnicity andidentity is N. Webber, The Evolution of Norman Identity, 911–1154 (Woodbridge, 2005).



component of historical analysis. As the discipline has diversified, so too,therefore, must the answers to my question. A new treatment must alsoset 1066 in a European perspective and recognize that it was a Europeanphenomenon. 1066 must finally be seen as another phase in the multi-culturalism and multi-ethnicity which are central features of these islands’history.

Specific discussion has to start from the well-known paradox that, fromthe viewpoint of the victor, what we conventionally call the NormanConquest was not a conquest at all. Every pronouncement associatedwith William stated that he was legitimately vindicating his rights againsta usurper; his charters and Domesday Book proclaimed that his rulewas a continuation. 1066 was both a succession dispute in which rightprevailed and a takeover constructed within a framework of atonementand a display of religious zeal. It was, however, also a human catastrophe.The events of 1066 were followed by several years of intermittent andat times savage war, and by brutal regime change. The secular andecclesiastical aristocracy of pre-1066 England was decimated and largelydispossessed. Many died as the countryside was devastated. Violent incur-sions were made into Wales and Scotland with long-term consequences. Thefamous accounts of William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdonshould be translated not into a loss of non-existent parliamentary liberties,but in part into a tale of extensive human ruin. Their approach to ethnicitynotwithstanding, their writings are built around the processes which werecentral to continuation and reconstruction. From them and from many othersources, we see how, from almost the day of the Conqueror’s coronation,individuals and communities set out to accommodate themselves tonew situations, redefining the past to suit the present and making oftenpainful choices as they submitted to new forms of power and authority.38

Ecclesiastical architecture can serve as one paradigm for a moderntreatment of 1066. Who has not been moved as they travel north on theEast Coast Main Line by the sight of Durham cathedral? It and othergreat churches were the product of 1066, although in many cases inthe second generation, erected by bishops and abbots who had beenappointed by William the Conqueror or his sons. Far larger than anythingconstructed in contemporary Normandy, and in some cases among thelargest churches in Christendom, they are astonishing monuments to theenergy and ambition of the individuals who had them built. In England’smajor churches, the Anglo-Saxon past was as good as obliterated after 1066.

All is not, however, as straightforward as it might seem. Monumen-tality might be an expression of triumphalism, but it might well also be

38 For some aspects of this theme, see D. Bates, Re-ordering the Past and Negotiating the Presentin Stenton’s ‘First Century’, Stenton Lecture 1999 (University of Reading, 2000), pp. 3–10. Seein particular, A. Williams, The English and the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge, 1995);R. Fleming, Kings and Lords in Conquest England (Cambridge, 1991).



a symptom of renewal fuelled by access to new-found wealth. A westernEuropean perspective is also essential here; some difference of scalenotwithstanding, large new churches were under construction everywherein the medieval West, not just in England. The recent magisterial surveyby Eric Fernie, on which my observations rely, shows that when stylisticcriteria are applied, the influences from Normandy are strong, butinfluences from many other parts of western Europe are present as well;some Anglo-Saxon features appear at times.39 Winchester cathedral, builtfor Bishop Walchelin, and where the Conqueror and his sons wouldhave worn their crowns on religious festivals, exemplifies the situation.Drawing in part on the burial church of the contemporary Salian emperorsat Speyer, it seems at first sight to represent the exuberant, perhapsintolerable, ambition of the Normans. Yet influence from the empire wasprofoundly present in England in the years immediately before 1066. Itis perhaps English kingship, rather than the power of the newcomers,which is being celebrated; or most probably both. And 1066 did not forlong remain the dominant cultural force controlling the construction ofecclesiastical architecture. Professor Fernie’s book, as well as outstandingwork by Lindy Grant, has shown that from soon after 1100, the most cogentinfluences on English church architecture ceased to come from Normandy;the two lands went their separate ways and a powerfully insular identitydrawing on fashionable continental models reasserted itself.40

The less accessible subject of charters offers a paradigm different fromthe architectural, with, in the first place, an English documentary form,the writ-charter, spreading from England to Normandy, Wales andScotland as the standard expression of royal, ducal and princely authorityfrom the early twelfth century. The explosion in the number of writtendocuments which occurred from the late eleventh century onwards inEngland involved principally a much more widespread use of diplomaticforms which were for the most part French. If charters are viewed ascultural artefacts, then we can speak of an Anglo-Norman fusion anddiaspora which were both English and French in origin.41

Other paradigms for the remarkable creativity of the series of decadeswhich followed 1066 are the well-known histories of law and historicalwriting. The administration of law in England after 1066 suggests apowerful increase in royal intervention in the shires, perhaps in reactionto the disputes over land-holding and rights created or exacerbated by theredistribution which followed 1066, that is, to circumstances created by

39 E. Fernie, The Architecture of Norman England (Oxford, 2000), with general comments atpp. 19–41.

40 L. Grant, ‘Architectural relationships between England and Normandy, 1100–1204’, inBates and Curry, pp. 117–29.

41 See, in particular, Bates, Re-ordering the Past, pp. 10–18; J. Hudson, ‘Legal aspects ofScottish charter diplomatic in the 12th century: a comparative approach’, Anglo-Norman Studies,xxv (Woodbridge, 2003), 121–38.



the takeover of land. The renaissance in the compilation of law texts inthe generations after 1066, like the extraordinary flowering of historicalwriting, was seemingly inspired by an urgent desire to link with theEnglish past felt to have been devastated by 1066. The framework was,however, very self-consciously English because William and his successorsportrayed themselves as the legitimate successors of Edward the Confessor.42

Importantly, the patrons of the new historical writing were drawn fromthe ranks of the new rulers; William of Malmesbury, unquestionably themost original of these historians, addressed his History of the English Kingsto a panoply of the new élite. In terms of the general evolutionaryframework, Malmesbury’s title and his objective to bring up-to-date thehistory of the English kings since the times of Bede say most of whatneeds to be said; he wrote of 1066 as a disaster for the English people,yet those for whom he wrote were the very people who had profitedmost from it and had assumed a new identity in consequence.43

If the dynamism and vitality of the decades after 1066 is undeniable,the argument about change and impact is ultimately a counter-factualone. Would, for example, churches of the kind described above have beenbuilt in England, and later in Wales and Scotland, without the conquestof 1066? Edward the Confessor’s Westminster abbey, buildings such asGreat Paxton, and the subsequent European-wide universality of what areusually called Gregorian reform and the twelfth-century Renaissancesuggest that something similar would have happened. But in precisely thisform? I doubt it. Counter-factuality rears its head constantly in argumentswhich deal with the pan-European changes of the eleventh and twelfthcenturies. In the Church in England, the two towering figures Lanfrancand Anselm, archbishops of Canterbury from 1070 to 1089 and 1093 to 1109respectively, appear to be agents of change, as undoubtedly they were, yetsignificant developments of a similar kind were occurring elsewhere. Intackling the complexities of counter-factuality, we enter a realm exploredrecently by others and one touched on by the greatest historian to writeon this subject, F. W. Maitland. For Maitland, ‘we can make only thevaguest guesses to the kind of law that would have prevailed in theEngland of the thirteenth century or of the nineteenth had Harold repelledthe invader’.44 This pessimism notwithstanding, the point is that we cantry to distinguish between what did happen after 1066, what happened whichmight not have happened, and what might have happened anyway.

42 For a survey, see J. Hudson, The Formation of the English Common Law: Law and Society inEngland from the Norman Conquest to Magna Carta (1996), pp. 24–51. See also Wormald,pp. 125–43, 398–415.

43 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum: the History of the English Kings, ed. andtrans. R. A. B. Mynors, completed R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom (2 vols., OxfordMedieval Texts, Oxford, 1998–9), i. 2–17.

44 F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of English Law before the Time of EdwardI (2 vols., Cambridge, 1895; 2nd edn., 1968), i. 79–80; see further, Chibnall, Debate, pp. 156–7.



The debate about feudalism – once one about the very foundations ofEnglish identity and social fabric – is now primarily one about socialchange. If I am among those who argue that the power of the newaristocracy was grafted on to that of the displaced one within a frameworkof law and custom, I do so in full awareness that several central subjects needto be revisited.45 To compare pre- and post-Conquest society requiresthat we concentrate more on phenomena than on language, since muchof the latter was substantially new after 1066; Susan Reynolds, RosamondFaith and John Gillingham have done outstanding work in this area.46 Italso requires that the whole subject of personal and tenurial ties before1066 and within the pre-1066 aristocracy be revisited, as is now beingdone, and that Norman society is also re-examined free from oldpreconceptions. But in sweeping away the barrier to understandingimposed by different terminology, we need to work out the significanceof the change of social and legal language, and also to recognize thatthe image and structure of aristocracy which evolved after 1066 wasnot introduced wholesale in that year, but evolved in the decades andgenerations which followed.47 The so-called Norman Conquest wasultimately a complex process of local negotiation, multiple acts of violenceand oppression, and the creation of new social relationships which mustin one way or another have affected almost everyone.48

It may come as a surprise to learn that new things can be said aboutthe events of the year 1066. That they relate to the authorship andpalaeography of the ‘D’ manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle andto the literary genre of William of Poitiers’s contemporary biography ofWilliam the Conqueror introduces a level of technical scholarship whichis inappropriate to an inaugural lecture. The results do, however, merit amention because they are the foundation for a new narrative. This, inturn, suggests that values very different from the nationalism, racialismand constitutionalism of the past need to be applied.

1066 becomes not just the year of three battles, but a discoursebetween victors and vanquished which concentrated on religiousatonement as much as on secular politics.49 It is well known that

45 D. Bates, ‘England and the “feudal revolution” ’, in Il feudalesimo nell’alto medioevo(Settimane di studio del Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, xlvii, 2000), pp. 611–46.

46 S. Reynolds, ‘Bookland, folkland and fiefs’, Anglo-Norman Studies, xiv (1992), 211–27; R. Faith, The English Peasantry and the Growth of Lordship (1997), pp. 178–223;J. Gillingham, ‘Thegns and knights in 11th-century England: who was then the gentleman?’,Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., 6th ser., v (1995), 129–53.

47 D. Crouch, The Image of Aristocracy in Britain, 1000–1300 (1992).48 See R. Fleming, Domesday Book and the Law: Society and Legal Custom in Early Medieval

England (Cambridge, 1998).49 On all this, see my forthcoming biography of William the Conqueror in the Yale

University Press English Monarchs series and, for now, D. Bates, ‘Writing a new biography ofWilliam the Conqueror’, in State and Empire in British History: Proceedings of the 4th Anglo-Japanese Conference of Historians, ed. K. Kondo (Tokyo, 2003), pp. 7–20; D. Bates, ‘William theConqueror and his wider western European world’, Haskins Society Jour. (forthcoming).



William secured papal support, made generous gifts to churches, requiredhis troops to do penance and agreed at his coronation to rule the Englishin the manner of kings before him; much less well known are hisreligious preparations and that those who accepted him as king requiredhim to lead the English in atonement for the collective sins whichhad precipitated their defeat. The sources also show that William hadmade promises which he could not possibly hope to keep; the kinglyduty to be generous conflicted with terrible effect with the oath heswore at his coronation to rule all his people equitably. The new narrativethat I am proposing requires that we think in terms of ritual, ceremonial,conflict resolution and notions of honour and good behaviour, bothas the framework within which conflict was negotiated and as theframework which failed to contain further conflicts. To do this is notonly to reassess the sources, it is to define political culture in terms ofthe anthropologically based – and much discussed – analyses now veryfamiliar to those who write about the early medieval and post-Carolingian West.50

All this can be seen in terms of conceptual frameworks such as ‘Thefirst European revolution’, ‘The feudal revolution’ or ‘La mutation de l’anmil’, notions of global cultural change which, with some honourableexceptions, British historians have been slow to apply to the history ofthese islands.51 In terms of other modern concepts of global change, 1066was also very much part of that diaspora of peoples which constitutedthe first great expansion of western Europe, of which the most powerfulrecent exposition in English has been by Robert Bartlett.52 Itsmanifestations include the early Crusades, the wars against Islam in Spainand the start of the drive to the East. To cite one appealing example,it took the eclectic Flemings to Lithuania, Poland, Strathclyde andPembrokeshire. It also brought the Jews into England soon after 1066.The diaspora was not simply a migration of peoples, but also a culturalmovement which spread widely a particular brand of Christianity and, invarious forms, the military and religious culture of the West; hence, theimportance of the various brands of revolution mentioned above. Itsworldwide consequences are arguably very much still with us. In relation tothe British Isles and Ireland, the chief contributors to a new and brillianthistoriography, the late Rees Davies and John Gillingham, have labelled

50 For a survey of a complex subject, see G. Koziol, ‘The dangers of polemic: isritual still an interesting topic of historical study?’, Early Medieval Europe, xi (2002),367–88.

51 K. Leyser, ‘On the eve of the first European revolution’, in K. Leyser, Communications andPower in Medieval Europe: the Gregorian Revolution and Beyond, ed. T. Reuter (1994), pp. 1–19;R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c.970–1215 (Oxford, 2000).

52 R. Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–1350(1993), pp. 24–51.



its results in terms of ‘The first English empire’ and ‘The foundations ofa disunited kingdom’.53

1066 was analysed in terms of colonization over thirty years ago byJohn Le Patourel and, even if one might argue about terminology andthe explanation of the dynamic, the image retains its potency.54 As withso much else, the expansion throughout the British Isles which followed1066 must be placed very firmly within a framework of pre-1066 powerrelations. Yet while English rulers had claimed imperium over the BritishIsles since the tenth century, and in recent memory threatening Scottishand Welsh rulers had been taken out on the orders of English kings –Macbeth in the ten-fifties and Gruffudd ap Llewelyn, by none otherthan Harold, earl of Wessex, the future short-reigned king, in 1063 – thenotion of a European diaspora makes 1066 at the very least a pivotalmoment in massive changes which affected Wales, Scotland and Irelandin the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The British experience of the diaspora suggests that the wholeparaphernalia of aristocratic leadership and extensive peasant migrationwhich was a central phenomenon elsewhere is at times too easily seenin terms of the work of fortune-hunters and landless younger sons ofaristocratic families, ‘the landless fighters who flocked to William theConqueror’, as some have recently been termed.55 In truth, while there weremany chances in Britain after 1066 for spectacular social advancement, thedominant theme everywhere was for the strong to get stronger. Englandwas not taken over by a colonizing parvenu aristocracy, but by a kingwho claimed to be its rightful ruler, and who then made grants to thepolitical élite of the Norman duchy and to individuals most of whomwere already very well endowed with land in France.56 The real diaspora– if it can so be termed – was, if anything, a second generationphenomenon born in England, rather than the creation of 1066. A crucialfeature, such as the large-scale movement of peasants in lords’ entourages,associated, for example, with the decisive spread of the English language

53 Davies, First English Empire, pp. 142–71; J. Gillingham, ‘Foundations of a disunitedkingdom’, in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, ed. A. Grant and K. J. Stringer(1995), pp. 48–64 (repr. in J. Gillingham, The English in the 12th Century: Imperialism, NationalIdentity and Political Values (Woodbridge, 2000), 93–109); cf. D. A. Carpenter, The Struggle forMastery: Britain 1066–1284 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 3–25. The long-term significance of the subjectis set out in R. R. Davies, ‘The peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400, iv: language andhistorical mythology’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., 6th ser., vii (1997), 1–24; and R. R. Davies, TheMatter of Britain and the Matter of England (Oxford, 1996).

54 J. Le Patourel, The Norman Empire (Oxford, 1976); cf. D. Bates, ‘Normandy and Englandafter 1066’, Eng. Hist. Rev., civ (1989), 851–80; J. A. Green, ‘Unity and disunity in the Anglo-Norman state’, Hist. Research, lxii (1989), 115–34.

55 Bartlett, Making of Europe, p. 44.56 For the same theme, see K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, Domesday Descendants. A Prosopography of

Persons Occurring in English Documents, 1066–1166, ii: Pipe Rolls to Cartae Baronum (Woodbridge,2002), p. 9. For the major modern treatment of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy, see J. A. Green,The Aristocracy of Norman England (Cambridge, 1997).



into lowland Scotland and north of the Tay, indicates that the bulkof the migrants came from England.57 Another central element, a newecclesiastical and moral culture, combined with the ready-made classicalvocabulary of barbarism applied to all Celtic peoples by many twelfth-century writers from William of Malmesbury onwards, derived muchmore from the ideologies of Gregorian reform than from any attitudesheld by the victors of the Battle of Hastings in 1066. For all this, while1093 may indeed be the annus horribilis for Wales and Scotland, the sheerexplosive violence of 1066 and its many aftermaths must figure stronglyin any treatment of this very important subject.

There is one simple and straightforward way in which 1066 is part ofa European world. On 14 October 1066 a consecrated king chosen bythe English people was deposed – and as it happens killed – by an armymarching with a banner from the pope. 1066 was not the first time thatthe papacy had involved itself in the intensely serious matter of thedeposition of a king; the removal of the last Merovingian and the adventof the Carolingians immediately comes to mind.58 The relevance of1066 to the polemic about authority and legitimacy which Karl Leyseridentified as ‘The first European revolution’ was recognized in themidst of the climactic events of the conflict a decade later between PopeGregory VII and the German king/emperor Henry IV by a partisan ofHenry IV, Wenricus scholasticus of Trier, when he condemned Gregory’ssupport for the anti-king Rudolf of Rheinfelden in the following words:

But there are others who, having usurped kingdoms by the violence of a tyrant,themselves paved the road to the throne with blood, placed a bloodstained crownon their heads, and with murder, rape, butchery and wrong-doing establishedtheir rule . . . They all call themselves friends of the pope, are honoured by hisblessings and are greeted by him as victorious princes.59

No names are mentioned, but it is obvious who is meant.This brings us to William of Poitiers’s biography of the Conqueror, a

work which has not often found favour with historians. Normally treatedas a eulogy, and perhaps as propaganda and an innovative and isolatedwork, it actually belongs within a European framework. Beneath itsveneer of confident borrowing from classical authors, it combines the

57 Note the historiographical survey by J. Gillingham, ‘A second tidal wave? Thehistoriography of English colonization of Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the 12th and 13thcenturies’, in Historiographical Approaches to Medieval Colonization of East Central Europe: aComparative Analysis against the Background of other European Inter-Ethnic Colonization Processes inthe Middle Ages, ed. J. M. Piskorski (Boulder, Colo., 2002), pp. 303–27.

58 On this, see now R. McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World (Cambridge,2004), pp. 133–55.

59 Wenrici scholastici Trevirensis epistola sub Theodorici episcopi Virdunensis nominee composite, ed.K. Francke (Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Libelli de Lite, i, Hanover, 1891–7), p. 294 (citedin E. M. C. van Houts, ‘The Norman conquest through European eyes’, Eng. Hist. Rev., cx(1995), 832–53, at pp. 851–2).



characteristics of other eleventh-century lives of kings, such as Wipo’saccount of the Emperor Conrad II, and the anxieties about the moralityand legitimacy of power which surfaced in the polemics of the ideologicalwar between Gregory and Henry. It deploys all the standard authoritieson legitimate and illegitimate kingship, ranging through Pseudo-Isidore,Pseudo-Cyprian, Isidore of Seville and the standard pronouncements ofCarolingian capitularies; its sources are those of Manegold of Lautenbachand other participants in the war of words which swirled around GregoryVII’s intervention in German kingship.60 It even refers to popularinvolvement in political events, in ways which were both traditional andwhich preface the turbulent times of the twelfth century. Poitiers’s widersignificance has perhaps gone unrecognized, either because the conquestof England was a short and ultimately one-sided process in comparisonto events in Germany and Italy, or because in the whig tradition ofhistorical writing 1066 was treated as part of an evolutionary constitu-tional process. In Germany, the framework of interpretation was verydifferent; the Investiture Contest was part of the tragedy of the Reich, acontributory factor to the failure of the state and, in some very influentialanalyses, to the horrors which followed many centuries later. So-calledwhig history which celebrated the continuity of the English state hasarguably obstructed the placing of 1066 in a European context.

The legacy of whig history is, however, also the vehicle to placeEngland very firmly in its European setting and to underline at the sametime similarities and differences. The Conqueror’s pronouncement thatthe law was the law which had existed on the day that Edward theConfessor was alive and dead was not just a device to legitimize histakeover, but an unattainable, indeed undiscoverable, standard which overtime haunted all his successors. It was the standard by which Henry Idisavowed the supposed inequities of his brother William Rufus’s rule. Itwas still around in the early thirteenth century in the negotiations whichpreceded Magna Carta. Royal promises of just rule had, of course, beena feature of the Anglo-Saxon period, but it was only what happenedafter 1066 which gave exacting precision, to my knowledge unique inmedieval Europe, to what was expected.61 Edward the Confessor hadpromised to uphold the laws of Cnut and to rule justly; Cnut, the lawsof his predecessors. Neither was shackled to an increasingly remotegolden age like those who ruled after 1066. The way in which the lagaEdwardi achieved such centrality in political discourse is, of course, yetanother construct created well after 1066. The result was unintended, but

60 For these arguments in more detail, see Bates, ‘William the Conqueror and his widerwestern European world’.

61 For the wider context, see J. C. Holt, ‘The origins of the constitutional tradition inEngland’, in J. C. Holt, Magna Carta and Medieval Government (1985), pp. 1–22; J. Crick,‘Pristina Libertas: liberty and the Anglo-Saxons revisited’, Trans. Royal Hist. Soc., 6th ser., xiv(2004), 47–71.



in legitimizing their rule as they did, the Conqueror and his sons createda rod to beat the backs of many of their successors. Later ages couldcondemn the Conquest as the start of centuries of oppression becauseall rulers had failed to meet the standards that they had set out forthemselves.

One further comment on 1066 and its European context isunavoidable. That quintessentially English document Domesday Bookalso most assuredly belongs in a European framework. Termed by contem-poraries a descriptio, it has a pedigree of descriptiones which stretch backthrough Charlemagne, Caesar Augustus and St. Luke’s Gospel to Moses,with many others thrown in on the way. Of course, its contents arestructured in an English way – it is hard to believe that it could havebeen done otherwise – and, of course, it is likely to have been a productof conquest unparalleled in its scale, but the cultural lineage is Carolingianand ultimately biblical. Where all disciplines now allow for thetransmission of ideas across vast tracts of space and time, the interpretationof Domesday Book remains too resolutely stuck in a time warp ofadministrative history.62

There is also a multicultural dimension to 1066 to be explored. Muchexciting work has been done recently. The acuteness of the problem inthe aftermath of 1066 is perhaps best appreciated if we reflect on whatlanguage might have been spoken in an English shire court in the ten-seventies. Or, indeed, at the court of William the Conqueror; we are toldthat he tried to learn English, but soon gave up, testimony that he did atleast recognize how crucial the linguistic barrier was.63 There were severaltragedies arising from the clash of cultures in the years after 1066: theslaughter of English monks at Glastonbury because they refused toabandon old ways of chanting; the murder, allegedly by Jews, of the boySt. William of Norwich in 1144. Dress, hairstyle, houses, changes inpersonal naming patterns, inter-marriage and hunting preferences have allbeen analysed.64 So has arguably the most intractable issue, language.

England, like Normandy before 1066, was a land which had alreadyreceived and assimilated many different peoples in the centuries before1066. Migration from many lands was a feature of Edward the Confessor’sEngland. The situation after 1066 may not necessarily have been morecomplex than that before, but we do know much more about it. Official

62 See Bates, ‘William the Conqueror and his wider western European world’.63 The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. M. Chibnall (6 vols., Oxford

Medieval Texts, Oxford, 1969–80), ii. 256. On language and much else, crucial is I. Short,‘Tam Angli quam Franci: self-definition in Anglo-Norman England’, Anglo-Norman Studies, xviii(1995), 153–75. See also Thomas, pp. 377–90.

64 Thomas, pp. 46–55, 138–60, provides a guide to the bibliography on many of thesesubjects. See also R. Bartlett, ‘Symbolic meanings of hair in the middle ages’, Trans. Royal Hist.Soc., 6th ser., iv (1994), 43–60; R. Liddiard, ‘The deer parks of Domesday Book’, Landscapes,iv (2003), 4–23.



policy was to integrate. The deposed English bishop of Chichester,Åthelric, was brought along in a cart to the land plea held on PenendenHeath in Kent to pronounce on English law, and the jurors who gaveevidence before the Domesday commissioners were a mixture of Frenchand English. Much has been written to show just how crucial Englishparticipation was to the new regime. Yet what integration there was tookplace only up to a point. William of Malmesbury and other early twelfth-century historians consistently bewailed the exclusion of the English fromsignificant positions of power and authority. The ideology of integrationwas a limited one, determined principally by the kings’ belief that theywere the legitimate successors of their English predecessors, and also ofcourse sustained by common Christian beliefs. As we have seen, the samewriters who bewailed the subjugation of the English were very ready tocondemn all Celts as barbarians. In the history of multiculturalism, 1066matters because it is yet another phase in the migration and integrationof the multitude of different peoples who have made up British society.Conquest and domination complicate the situation, but in relation to therange of international links which had been a feature of British historybefore 1066, it is a distinct, rather than a unique phase.

The start of any conclusion must be that 1066 ultimately mattersbecause it has mattered so much to so many for so long. And because datesmatter as symbols; they have resonances in national histories far beyondtheir actual historical significance. Note, for example, how 1683 has cometo the forefront as Turkey prepares to join the European Union: ‘In 1683Turkey was the invader. In 2004 much of Europe still sees it that way’.65

1066 may not now be in that league, but it does still apparently conjureup undesirable images of confrontation and conflict. There are also manythings to remind us of the importance of 1066, the physical survivals ofbuildings and earthworks and the language of aristocratic rank and of partsof the law, to name but a few; constant jolts to the memory whichrequire regular attention. The disjuncture between apparent publicperception and academic history needs to be addressed. A campaign of‘knowledge transfer’ – to use the jargon – is crucial. The near-absence ofmodern debate among professional historians on the meaning of 1066 isto be regretted.

My starting-point for both would be to say that, while we shouldcontinue to understand and respect the history of 1066 over more thannine centuries, we should very decisively set out to jettison much of thebaggage of the past. We should, however, reconnect with the largequestions which fascinated our predecessors. A new debate and a freshdefinition should begin by recognizing that 1066 can no longer beregarded as an English construct. It is a British and European one. We

65 The Guardian, 22 Sept. 2004 <http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1309636,00.html> [accessed 15 June 2005].



should continue by acknowledging that many of the changes whichhappened in England in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries werenot transported in the fleet which crossed the Channel in the late summerof 1066. We should deploy the immense scholarly achievements of recentdecades to attack again the general question of why 1066 matters.