The Norman Conquest: A Very Short Introduction by George Garnett

Author:George Garnett
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2009-04-10T04:00:00+00:00

7. St-Étienne, Caen: William’s foundation, and the setting for his funeral. Notoriously, proceedings were interrupted by a certain Ascelin, who demanded compensation for the land which William had appropriated from Ascelin’s father in order to build the church

William the Conqueror’s role as the source of all tenure in conquered England was unique and unprecedented. It sprang from his claim that he, and he alone, was Edward the Confessor’s successor. That claim, as we have seen, provided the framework for Domesday Book. Legalistic precision, brutal practicality, and the rewriting of history went hand in hand. The claim shaped the way in which land was redistributed in conquered England.

In doing so, it created a logical conundrum for which there was no solution, and which was to have profound consequences for the rest of English history. The unacknowledged difference between the king’s relationship with his antecessor, Edward, and his men’s relationship with theirs, was that his arose solely from Edward’s bequest, whereas theirs, as we have also seen, was created by William’s grant. They depended on him, but he depended on no-one. This discrepancy was intrinsic to the system of dependent tenure which William’s claim had created in England. It meant that the position in which the king’s immediate tenants found themselves was precarious in the extreme. Although that precariousness was ameliorated in the 12th century, the logic of dependency continued to be the dominant fact in English political history for centuries, and determined many of the unique characteristics of medieval England. It is, therefore, necessary to probe in a little more detail the evidence for the imposition of dependency in the early years after the Conquest. Unsurprisingly, much of this is ecclesiastical.

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