Monarchy_3of6
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00:00This is the British Commonwealth War Cemetery at Bayeux in Normandy, where are buried 4,000
00:17men who fell during the D-Day landings. Over the memorial archway are inscribed the Latin
00:24words which mean, we, conquered by William, have liberated the conqueror's native land.
00:34At first sight, it's extraordinary that the memory of William and his conquest still lingers
00:41after 900 years. But it does so for good reason, because the Norman conquest was a defining,
00:49arguably, the defining event in English history. William and his descendants were foreigners
00:57who ruled England in a radically different way from previously. Eventually, that way
01:03proved not to work, but it's left its mark on us right up to the present. How we talk
01:11and how we are ruled, what we believe and what we are, were all reshaped by that man
01:19and those events almost a millennium ago.
01:41In the early winter of 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, rode with his army in triumph
02:04to London. He had just pulled off the biggest gamble of his career, but then he'd always
02:18been a chancer. He'd had to be, as he'd been born the obscure bastard of an upstart dynasty,
02:26son of a tanner's daughter. But his boldness and superlative generalship had won him a
02:33dukedom and now a kingdom. The Napoleon of Normandy had come into his own. But what was
02:42it about England that had driven William to risk everything, his career, even his life?
02:59The Normans held the English throne in awe because of its age. Norman power was barely
03:05a hundred years old, but in England there was a continuous line of descent, stretching
03:11back over 300 years to Alfred and beyond. For William and his house had ideas above
03:23their station, as this vast and pompous abbey at Jumièges suggests. Like rulers throughout
03:31Western Europe, the Normans had enlisted the powers of the church to boast to their own.
03:36This alone made the great Christianised monarchy of Anglo-Saxon England attractive. William
03:44also looked with envy across the Channel to the richest, the most stable and the best
03:49administered country in Europe. When, therefore, in 1051, the childless Edward the Confessor
03:59promised to make William his heir in England, it offered the Norman duke the prospect of
04:05a quantum leap in power. As a cousin of Edward's, William had a genuine family claim to the
04:13Anglo-Saxon succession. But then, in 1066, the dying King Edward apparently changed his
04:20mind and offered the crown to Harold, who, although the senior Anglo-Saxon earl, had
04:27no direct blood ties to the throne. William found the idea intolerable and illegal. There
04:36was only one thing to do. He would invade England and seize the throne by force.
04:49The Battle of Hastings was hard fought and several times the Normans came close to losing.
04:55For most of the day, the English held the upper hand. But all that changed when Harold
05:01and his closest followers, the elite of Anglo-Saxon England, were killed.
05:07But in England, power was not just held by an aristocratic elite. William had disposed
05:14of his rival king, but would he be able to win over the kingdom? To do it, he had no
05:20more than 7,000 Norman soldiers against two million Anglo-Saxons. His chosen method was
05:28typical of the man. He would terrorise the population into submission.
05:39William advanced towards London, taking a circular route to the south and west of the
05:44city, his men burnt, destroyed and slaughtered, everything and everyone in their path.
05:51The Norman army sliced through southern England and left a devastated ring of fire in its
05:59wake. William's message to the English could hardly have been clearer. Submit or die.
06:09Within weeks, William's victory was complete and the Witan, the council of Anglo-Saxon
06:15nobles, accepted him as king and on Christmas Day 1066, William was crowned king here in
06:23Westminster Abbey.
06:35William's choice of Westminster and the rituals used in the coronation service were highly
06:41significant. William was determined to demonstrate both the legality of his kingship and that
06:47he was the true heir of the Anglo-Saxon royal line. So his coronation took place here in
06:55the church which had been rebuilt by Edward the Confessor, the Anglo-Saxon royal saint
07:00and he was crowned with Edward's own crown and he used the Anglo-Saxon coronation ritual.
07:06But there was one final, culminating symbol. For William insisted that he should be crowned
07:14in front of the very tomb of Edward the Confessor.
07:20William was now more than just another duke. As the anointed king of England, he had
07:26entered an entirely different league. Internationally, he was the king of England.
07:32He had entered an entirely different league. Internationally, he was one of the three most
07:38powerful rulers in Europe. Whilst in England, this was the start of a new Norman dynasty
07:44that would rule for the next 88 years. Three more Norman kings would be crowned
07:50and each, like William, would lay claim to the Anglo-Saxon inheritance.
07:56But could William build on the achievements of his Anglo-Saxon predecessors
08:02to make the English monarchy once more the most effective in the Christian world?
08:09The signs are that William began by making a serious attempt at winning over
08:15the surviving Anglo-Saxon earls. They were not killed or mutilated in the wake of
08:21the Battle of Hastings, as had regularly happened during the Anglo-Saxons' own
08:27succession struggles. Instead, providing they were prepared to submit and to swear allegiance,
08:33William was happy to pardon them and to make use of them.
08:37But once the initial shock of Hastings was over, most of the Saxon earls weren't
08:43interested in collaborating. Instead, they fled, rebelled or went underground
08:49and their lands were confiscated and given to William's Norman followers.
08:55The barons spoke French and brought French attitudes to their regional power,
09:01which they saw as theirs by right, rather than held at the king's gift.
09:10They also had new French ways of controlling the English population.
09:16The castle.
09:39Hundreds of castles were thrown up across the country,
09:44using the local population as forced labour.
09:47The English had seen nothing like them,
09:50for the English burghs, or fortified towns, were designed to protect the people,
09:56but the Norman castles were there to intimidate them.
10:03The early castles were made of wood, not stone, and could be built in a matter of days.
10:09The Normans would choose a site, often right in the middle of a town or village.
10:14They raised a huge mound of earth, this one at Thetford is 80 feet high,
10:19and then built the castle on top.
10:23With their rough, uncut wood and raw earth
10:27hacked out of a devastated landscape,
10:30each was the symbol of a profoundly alien military occupation.
10:39But, despite the castles and the presence of Norman soldiers in almost every town,
10:45Anglo-Saxon resistance was growing.
10:48William was to find that England would not be defeated so easily.
10:58William the Conqueror had captured the country,
11:01but he had not yet subdued its people.
11:04Instead, in 1069, the townspeople of Durham rose up
11:08and slaughtered a Norman garrison of 700 men.
11:12The revolt spread swiftly across the whole of the north of England,
11:16encouraged by Danish forces who had landed on the east coast.
11:20William's response was typically ruthless.
11:23He marched his army to York, drove off the Danes,
11:27and then perpetrated the most infamous event of his reign,
11:31the harrying of the north.
11:35Over a huge area, from York up to Durham and across to Chester,
11:40his men destroyed villages, burnt crops and food stores,
11:44and killed every person and animal they could find.
11:48Foreign enemies would behave like this, but never an English king.
11:54The scale and savagery of the harrying of the north
11:58shocked an often unshockable age.
12:01And contemporary estimates of the number of victims,
12:04those who were murdered, starved, or subsequently died of the plague,
12:09total 100,000.
12:11Now, such figures aren't necessarily reliable,
12:14but here, in the Doomsday Book,
12:16William's overwhelming number of victims
12:19aren't necessarily reliable.
12:21But here, in the Doomsday Book,
12:23William's own meticulous tax survey,
12:26there's incontrovertible evidence of the extent of the disaster.
12:30Four from York to Durham.
12:32It notes 18 years after the event,
12:35dozens upon dozens of villages,
12:38where the land is largely waste, wasta,
12:41and which are worth only a fraction of their pre-conquest value.
12:46As well, therefore, as the human suffering, the harrying,
12:49put back the economy of the north by decades.
13:02MUSIC PLAYS
13:16MUSIC CONTINUES
13:29The commentators of the time were appalled.
13:32Even the 11th-century chronicler,
13:35Alderich Vitalis, an Anglo-Norman
13:38and usually a partisan of the king, wrote...
13:41Never did William commit so much cruelty.
13:44To his lasting disgrace, he yielded to his worst impulse
13:48and set no bounds to his fury,
13:50condemning the innocent and the guilty to a common fate.
13:54I assert that such barbarous homicide
13:57should not pass unpunished.
14:00The harrying of the north was not mere revenge or ethnic cleansing,
14:05but a deliberate policy of terror.
14:08The Anglo-Saxons of other regions might be tempted to rebel.
14:12They would share the same terrible fate as the north.
14:16But, despite the threat, there were still some Anglo-Saxons
14:20who would not submit to the threat.
14:23And from this struggle came leaders whose exploits
14:26are still remembered today.
14:28Hereward the Wake, lionised by the Victorians
14:31as an Anglo-Saxon hero, was an English landowner
14:35who ran a guerrilla campaign against the Normans
14:38in the Fenlands of East Anglia.
14:40He was the leader of a group of Anglo-Saxons
14:43who fought against the English.
14:45He was the leader of a group of Anglo-Saxons
14:48who fought against the English.
14:50He was the leader of a group of Anglo-Saxons
14:53who fought against the Normans in the Fenlands of East Anglia.
14:56It took William two years to put down this rebellion
15:00and he never caught Hereward.
15:02Thus, a legend was born.
15:09In 1075, William was faced with yet another revolt
15:13as a formidable coalition of Danes and Anglo-Saxon
15:17nobles plotted to overthrow the king.
15:23Among the conspirators was a trusted Anglo-Saxon earl,
15:27Waltheoff of Bamburgh.
15:29Waltheoff had been one of the very few Saxon nobles
15:33who'd tried to work with William.
15:36William was so incensed at his betrayal
15:39that Waltheoff became the only Anglo-Saxon nobleman
15:43to be executed by the Normans.
15:46William had him beheaded for treason
15:49outside the walls of Winchester Castle.
15:54Waltheoff became an instant folk hero.
15:58He was even revered unofficially as a saint.
16:02For Waltheoff was a highly symbolic figure.
16:05With his death, the last of the great Anglo-Saxon earls had gone.
16:11But from William's point of view, his execution had done its work.
16:15After 1075,
16:17there was no further serious Anglo-Saxon resistance in England.
16:25William could now turn his attention to governing the country
16:29rather than to subduing it.
16:31The Doomsday Book tells us much about the scale of his ambitions.
16:36Using the sophisticated system of local government
16:40created by the Anglo-Saxons,
16:42William was able to carry out
16:44the first-ever audit of land ownership in England,
16:48right down to the last cow and pig.
16:52Here was an English king whose aim was not simply to list
16:56but to exploit the entire wealth of his nation.
17:02As a devout Christian,
17:04William was well aware of the power of the church
17:07over a population of simple believers,
17:10and he was sure that the church was run by Normans for Normans,
17:14and he ordered a huge programme of church building,
17:17including spectacular new cathedrals.
17:22This is Ely, one of the most splendid of the Norman cathedrals.
17:27We think of it as a noble monument to God and the Christian faith.
17:32But there's much more to it than that.
17:35For Ely, then an island in the middle of the Marshy Fens,
17:39was one of the last centres of resistance to the Normans
17:43under Herriwood the Wake.
17:45But within ten years of Herriwood's final defeat
17:49and disappearance into legend,
17:51there was a Norman abbot in Ely
17:54and the building of this vast cathedral had begun,
17:57whose massive walls seem to crush out
18:01even the memory of revolt.
18:04So Norman cathedrals are like Norman castles,
18:08at once centres of Norman administration,
18:12advertisements for a new Norman way of life
18:16and monuments to the permanence of Norman power.
18:20And above all, they were visible proof
18:23that God was on King William's side.
18:27Of course, control of the church meant control of its vast wealth
18:31and the fact that England was so rich
18:34had always been a factor in William's decision to invade.
18:39But what had attracted the Normans also drew other eyes.
18:49In 1085, William learned that the Danes and their allies
18:53were once again scheming invasion.
18:55So, next year, he brought over a great force of French mercenaries.
18:59But he also had to take political steps
19:03to head off trouble at home.
19:07He summoned a meeting of the Great Council,
19:10here to Old Sarum, the original site of the city of Salisbury.
19:14Every substantial landowner in the kingdom,
19:17William's only son,
19:19Every substantial landowner in the kingdom,
19:21William's own French barons,
19:23was required to attend and to swear an oath of allegiance
19:27to King William.
19:29No Anglo-Saxon king had ever needed to do such a thing.
19:33The fight that William had showed that though he was a strong king,
19:37he had created a form of kingship that was inherently weak
19:41and depended to a dangerous extent on his own force of character.
19:46Nevertheless, the oath of Salisbury worked.
19:50The planned invasion was called off
19:53and William's regime was secured once more.
19:59Less than a year later, William was dead,
20:03fatally injured in a riding accident.
20:06He may have been born a chancer, but he died a king.
20:10And, as a king, he'd preserved the unity of England
20:14and the strength of the English monarchy,
20:16but at a terrible cost to his people
20:20and, finally, to his own conscience.
20:25William was buried here at Caen Abbey in Normandy.
20:30For though becoming King of England
20:33was William's greatest achievement,
20:35he remained a Norman to the last
20:38and he's the first King of England to be buried abroad.
20:42There was a final macabre postscript to William's life.
20:46In his later years, he'd become very fat,
20:50but his sarcophagus had been made too small,
20:54so that when the body was lowered into the sarcophagus,
20:57some force was necessary to fit it in.
21:00The result was described by the monk Alderich.
21:04William's swollen bowels burst
21:08and an intolerable stench
21:11assailed the nostrils of the bystanders.
21:14Despite the clouds of fragrant incense,
21:17the funeral service had to be rushed to a conclusion.
21:23For all his achievements,
21:25William's violent rule also left a stench
21:29in the nostrils of his people.
21:31What kind of legacy was this for his successor?
21:36And who would his successor be?
21:38For the Normans had no strict rules of royal inheritance.
21:42Instead, it was left to the dying King to make his wishes known.
21:47Normandy, William decided,
21:49should go to his eldest son and England to his second born.
21:53So, at the age of 29,
21:56William Rufus became the second Norman King of England.
22:02Like his father, the Conqueror,
22:04William Rufus was a skilled soldier and a natural leader of men.
22:08He was strong-willed
22:10and determined to enforce his authority on the whole country.
22:14And he was, if anything, even more avaricious.
22:17He'd need to be, because in everything he did,
22:20his ambitions were on the grandest scale.
22:24Hence the fact that he built this,
22:28the Great Hall at Westminster.
22:31It's as big as a cathedral.
22:33And when it was built, it was the largest secular space
22:37in Europe, north of the Alps.
22:39It was the setting for feasts and entertainments,
22:43and, above all, for the crown wearings
22:45which took place in Westminster every Whitsuntide.
22:49The King sat here,
22:52in the middle of the dais,
22:55crowned, robed and enthroned,
22:58whilst the choir sang his praises in Latin,
23:02hailing him like a Roman emperor
23:05and wishing him vita et victoria,
23:09long life and victory.
23:23King William Rufus was always looking for new ways
23:27to extract money from England.
23:29And when he couldn't get it from the Norman barons
23:32or the Anglo-Saxon townsfolk,
23:34he wrung it from the church instead.
23:37He taxed the monasteries hard,
23:39and when bishops or archbishops died,
23:42he often refused to appoint a successor,
23:45keeping instead the revenues for himself.
23:48But William didn't only plunder the church.
23:51He was actively irreligious.
23:54He never married or fathered children.
23:57Instead, he had male favourites
24:00and was almost certainly homosexual.
24:03This unchristian life, in turn,
24:06led churchmen to loathe him.
24:09All this meant that William Rufus
24:12was a very different kind of ruler
24:15from his famously pious Norman ancestors.
24:18And he was even more remote from the Anglo-Saxon tradition
24:22of Christian monarchy,
24:24of Alfred the Great and Edward the Confessor.
24:30England, it seemed, had exchanged the iron rule of the Conqueror
24:35for the dangerous whims of a capricious and degenerate tyrant.
24:43William the Conqueror had been the most resolute of men
24:47and his son, William Rufus,
24:49inherited his father's steely resolve,
24:52but too often it expressed itself merely as a whim of iron.
24:56Take the forest law.
24:58The Conqueror had ridden roughshod over English custom
25:02by inventing this law which gave him hunting rights
25:05over huge areas of countryside.
25:08William Rufus took over this arbitrary law
25:11and made it even harsher.
25:14This is the New Forest,
25:16or rather it's a tiny portion of the vast forest
25:20that once covered most of the county of Hampshire.
25:23To make it, William the Conqueror expelled over 500 families
25:28and seized 90,000 acres,
25:31and William Rufus added 20,000 more.
25:34And the New Forest was only one of many.
25:37At their maximum extent, towards the end of the 13th century,
25:41the forest covered one third of the area of England,
25:44all of which was subject to the special oppressive system of law
25:49known as forest law.
25:54William Rufus increased the penalties
25:57for breaking forest law to barbarous levels.
26:00Killing a deer was punishable by death.
26:03If you were caught shooting at one, your hands were cut off,
26:07and the punishment for simply disturbing a deer was blinding.
26:13The laws were hated,
26:15partly because they were savage and punished poaching with mutilation,
26:20but, above all, because they were perceived as arbitrary
26:24and as being the product merely of the king's will
26:28and only serving his pleasure.
26:30In other words, they were un-English
26:33and they were the most vivid reminder of the fact
26:36that England was a conquered country
26:39with an alien ruler, with alien values.
26:42If the Normans were serious
26:44about trying to win English hearts and minds,
26:47as they sometimes claimed to be,
26:49then the forest laws were the wrong way to go about it.
26:56After only 13 years, Rufus's end was ironic.
27:00For the hunter became the hunted.
27:02In the August of 1100, he was out hunting in the New Forest
27:06with a party that included his younger brother, Henry.
27:10One of the huntsmen fired an arrow that hit William in the chest.
27:14He died on the spot.
27:16No-one knows whether it was an accident or murder.
27:20Henry and the other nobles fled
27:22and it was left to the king's servants
27:24to bundle his body, unceremoniously,
27:27out of the forest.
27:31William Rufus always got a bad press from contemporary writers,
27:35especially after he was safely dead.
27:38And the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for instance,
27:41delivered the damning verdict.
27:43He was hateful to almost all his people and odious to God.
27:48But its authors would say that, wouldn't they,
27:51because they were monks who detested his irresponsibility.
27:55Monks who detested his irreligion, his homosexuality
27:59and his plundering of the wealth of the church.
28:04In fact, William Rufus was a highly competent king
28:08who maintained the unity and the stability
28:11of the kingdom that he'd inherited from his father.
28:14But he added nothing more,
28:16with the result that even after three decades of Norman rule,
28:21the English felt no ownership in their king
28:24and had no investment in him.
28:29But this would begin to change.
28:35Within hours of Rufus's death, his brother Henry rushed to Winchester,
28:39seized the royal crown from the treasury
28:42and rode off with it to London.
28:44There's no proof that Henry was implicated in his brother's death,
28:48but he certainly wasted no time in mourning him
28:52before declaring himself the next king of England.
28:57Henry's claim to the crown was dubious.
29:00Rufus had not named him as his heir
29:03and their elder brother Robert was still alive
29:06and ruling as Duke of Normandy.
29:08In the circumstances, Henry needed all the support he could get
29:12and he turned dramatically to the hitherto despised English people.
29:17Kings traditionally swore an oath of their coronation
29:21in which they promised to rule justly and well.
29:25But Henry's coronation charter,
29:28of which this is the slightly later official government copy,
29:32was different.
29:33It was written down.
29:35It was widely circulated throughout the kingdom
29:38and the promises were more far-reaching.
29:41Above all, it announced Henry's determination
29:44to carry out a legal counter-revolution
29:47and bring back the laws of Edward the Confessor.
29:50In other words, he would rule in the traditional way,
29:54with consent, like an Anglo-Saxon king,
29:58and not with force and extortion, like a Norman.
30:03Henry openly acknowledged the tyranny of his brother and father
30:07by vowing to...
30:09The tyranny of his brother and father
30:11by vowing to take away all the bad customs
30:15by which the kingdom of England was unjustly oppressed.
30:19The fundamental importance of the charter
30:22wasn't lost on later generations.
30:24It was copied almost exactly in Magna Carta
30:27and it was used by all the kings in between.
30:32But the charter was only one of Henry's attempts
30:35at reconnecting his rule with the Anglo-Saxon past.
30:39He married a Scottish princess
30:42who was descended directly from King Alfred the Great
30:46and he gave his only son and heir a double name.
30:50The boy was christened William, after the Norman conqueror,
30:54and Aethling, which is an Anglo-Saxon name meaning king worthy.
31:00There could have been no clearer demonstration
31:03of Henry's determination
31:05to found a new, genuinely Anglo-Norman dynasty.
31:14And an Anglo-Norman England was slowly beginning to emerge.
31:21The ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Mercia, Wessex, East Anglia
31:26and Northumbria were gone, along with the earls who'd ruled them.
31:30In their place were the Norman barons.
31:35The barons spoke French,
31:37but they increasingly claimed the rights of their English predecessors.
31:41Similarly, many Normans took Saxon wives
31:44and their children and grandchildren began to think of themselves
31:48as as much English as Norman.
31:52And alongside this fusion of cultures,
31:55a new social class was emerging,
31:58a class that would dominate our history for the next 1,000 years.
32:05By the time of King Henry, England was a heavily militarised society
32:10in which all landowners were expected to provide troops,
32:13either to their superior lord or directly to the king himself.
32:18The most important of these troops were called knights,
32:21that is, heavily armed soldiers on horseback.
32:25These, too, were a Norman innovation,
32:28as the Anglo-Saxons had ridden to battle but fought on foot.
32:32But the importance of knights went beyond the purely military,
32:36because knights were a social as well as a military elite,
32:40and they gave their name to a new code of values and behaviour
32:44called chivalry.
32:50The key idea of chivalry
32:53was that instead of killing your defeated enemies,
32:56you captured them and treated them honourably.
32:59At least you did if they were of the right social class,
33:03for chivalry was a purely class code.
33:06This, too, was a new idea,
33:08because the Anglo-Saxons had usually killed their defeated enemies,
33:12whatever their rank.
33:14Chivalry was the apex of this new Anglo-Norman culture,
33:19but its foundation was the bedrock
33:22of the old Anglo-Saxon state, the coinage.
33:26England's stable currency had been the envy of Europe
33:29for three centuries, but it was now under insidious attack.
33:37In 1124, Henry's soldiers began complaining.
33:41that their wages were being paid in coins
33:44which were less silver than cheap tin.
33:47The result was what we're all familiar with, galloping inflation.
33:52As the Anglo-Saxon chronicle recorded,
33:55the man who had got a pound
33:57could not get the value of a penny for it in the market.
34:01Henry took decisive action,
34:03which the modern treasury could only envy.
34:06There were 150 men,
34:08who made all the money in England.
34:10Henry had everyone arrested and sent for trial at Winchester.
34:1494 of them were found guilty of debasement of the coinage.
34:21The punishment for what we would regard
34:24as a white-collar crime was barbaric.
34:27First, each one of the guilty men had his right hand cut off.
34:32Then he was castrated.
34:35The vast majority of the moneyers weren't Norman.
34:38Instead, they were Englishmen of high rank.
34:41Even so, there was no popular protest.
34:45Here at last was something which united everybody.
34:49From the Norman king to the lowliest Anglo-Saxon peasant,
34:53everybody was agreed that the value of the coinage,
34:57that great achievement of Anglo-Saxon England,
35:00must be protected.
35:02But the king was about to lose something more precious
35:06even than his coin.
35:16This is the harbour at Barfleur, in Normandy.
35:20Here, William the Conqueror's own ship,
35:23the ship of William the Conqueror,
35:25sailed into the sea.
35:27This is the harbour at Barfleur, in Normandy.
35:30Here, William the Conqueror's own ships were built.
35:33And here, on 25th November 1120,
35:37King Henry and his court were about to embark to return to England
35:41after one of the king's many visits to Normandy.
35:44Then, as now, members of the royal family travelled separately,
35:48and Henry's son and heir, William Eithling,
35:51together with his suite of over 300,
35:54and many of the cream of the young Norman nobility,
35:57were to sail in the white ship.
36:00There was a party atmosphere.
36:02William had bought several casks of wine
36:05and everybody, including members of the crew, had drunk heavily.
36:09They set sail in the evening,
36:11but, within half an hour, disaster struck
36:14when the drunken pilot steered the ship onto a well-known hazard,
36:18a jagged rock that lay just beneath the surface at high tide.
36:23A great gash was torn in the side of the ship
36:26and it sank within minutes.
36:28William's bodyguard managed to get his young master onto the only boat
36:33and began to row him to safety,
36:35but the young prince insisted on going back
36:38to try to rescue his sister.
36:40The little boat was overwhelmed
36:42as men desperately scrambled to get on board
36:45and William and everybody else,
36:48bar a single survivor, was drowned.
36:51It was, as they say, a moment that changed history.
36:58For weeks afterwards, bodies were washed up along the Normandy shore,
37:03though the majority, including William Eithling's, were never found.
37:08Henry was devastated and it was said he never smiled again.
37:13This was a personal tragedy
37:15that would, in time, tear the Norman dynasty apart.
37:21For the rest of his reign,
37:23Henry wrestled with the problem of the succession.
37:26At first sight, there seemed no shortage of possible heirs.
37:30Henry had been an inveterate womaniser
37:33and he'd fathered a score of bastards.
37:36But none of the bastards, of course,
37:38carried the Anglo-Saxon royal blood of the dead prince, William Eithling.
37:43Nor did another possible candidate,
37:46Henry's nephew, Stephen.
37:48Stephen was a tried-and-tested warrior
37:50and he was popular with the church and a large section of the baronage.
37:58But Henry rejected Stephen as well
38:01and instead he decided that his heir should be his daughter, Matilda,
38:06named after her mother, Queen Matilda,
38:09and carrying also her mother's Anglo-Saxon royal blood.
38:14In 1127, Henry summoned a meeting of the baronage,
38:17including Stephen,
38:19and required them all to swear an oath of allegiance to Matilda
38:23and to recognise her as the future monarch of England.
38:27For Henry, this settled the matter.
38:29For everybody else, it raised the fundamental question
38:33of female succession
38:35and whether or not a woman should or could rule in a baronate.
38:41Should or could rule in a warrior age?
38:47If any woman could pull off that challenge, it was Matilda.
38:51She was an indomitable character,
38:54a woman who rode astride like a man and who led her army into battle.
38:59She also had powerful allies, as her husband was the Count of Anjou.
39:04But the Androvines were the traditional rivals of the Normans.
39:08So, if Matilda became queen, the English crown would pass,
39:12many Anglo-Norman barons feared,
39:15out of Norman control and into the hands of their arch-enemies,
39:19and that they were determined to stop.
39:24Matters came to a head in the autumn of 1135.
39:28Henry was on a visit to Normandy here, when he suddenly fell ill.
39:33Within a week, he was dead.
39:35At his request, his embalmed body was taken for burial at Reading Abbey
39:40in the England that he'd made his own.
39:43But already, everybody had forgotten the oath of 1127.
39:47Instead, Stephen moved decisively to seize the throne
39:51and get himself crowned and acclaimed by the English.
40:00Stephen was popular at first,
40:03although he lacked the ruthless touch of his predecessors.
40:07But within a year or two, he had lost control over the barons.
40:11They began ignoring his commands,
40:14and some of them tried to carve out petty kingdoms for themselves,
40:18just like their cousins in Normandy.
40:21If they succeeded, it would be the death of England.
40:25The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle described the situation.
40:31In the days of this king,
40:33there was nothing but strife, evil and robbery,
40:37for quickly the great men who were traitors rose against him.
40:41When the traitors saw that Stephen was a good-humoured,
40:45kindly and easy-going man who inflicted no punishment,
40:49then they committed all manner of crimes.
40:53It's a sign of Stephen's lack of control over the barons
40:57that some of them start to mint their own coins
41:00in the centres of their regional power, just as in Normandy.
41:04This, for instance, is a penny minted by Henry,
41:07Earl of Northumberland, at York.
41:10And this is another, minted by Robert of Gloucester, at Bristol.
41:14It's the first, and indeed the last, coin minted by Stephen.
41:19It's the first, and indeed the last time,
41:23apart from the Civil War of the 17th century,
41:26that an English king loses control of the coinage.
41:30But meanwhile, in Normandy,
41:32a more direct threat to Stephen's authority was brewing.
41:36Matilda maintained her claim to the throne,
41:39and she was gathering allies.
41:41And on 30th September 1139,
41:44she landed on the Sussex coast
41:47with a large army, supported by Robert of Gloucester,
41:51and demanding to be recognised as queen.
41:55Norman England's First Civil War was about to begin.
42:02In petty skirmishes and long sieges,
42:05the armies of Stephen and Matilda
42:07fought it out across the length and breadth of England.
42:17And the rules of chivalry only prolonged the conflict.
42:21When Stephen captured Matilda, he dutifully released her,
42:25even granting her safe conduct.
42:28Matilda then took control of most of the west of England,
42:32with Stephen holding the eastern part of the country.
42:36The fate of England now lay in the hands
42:39of two French cousins, fighting for the throne.
42:43On 2nd February 1141,
42:45the most dramatic incident of the civil wars
42:48took place here, at Lincoln.
42:51King Stephen and his army were here, in the city, high on its hill,
42:56whilst below, on the plain, were Matilda's troops.
43:00It was the feast of the purification
43:02of the blessed Virgin Mary,
43:04or Catholic Virgin Mary,
43:06who was to be crowned the Queen of England.
43:09It was the feast of the purification
43:11of the blessed Virgin Mary, or candle mass,
43:14and King Stephen carried the customary candle to mass,
43:18held in the cathedral.
43:20But as the candle was being lit, it broke apart in his hands.
43:28Despite the ill omen, Stephen persisted with his determination
43:32to give battle to the enemy
43:34in the hope of striking a knockout blow.
43:37But his army was heavily outnumbered
43:39and most of his troops fled,
43:41leaving the king and his bodyguard, who dismounted,
43:44to fend for themselves.
43:46As usual, Stephen fought valiantly
43:49and killed several of his opponents,
43:51but he was felled ignominiously with a stone
43:55and taken in triumph to Matilda's capital at Bristol.
43:59And there, as a final indignity, he was imprisoned in chains.
44:04With Stephen out of the way, Matilda declared herself Queen.
44:09But when she went to London to be crowned,
44:12there was a mass uprising against her
44:14and she was literally chased out of the city
44:17for the first time since the conquest.
44:20The people, as some say, in who would rule over England.
44:29The tide was turning against Matilda.
44:32She was forced to release Stephen
44:34when her greatest ally, Robert of Gloucester, was himself captured.
44:38Stephen was back on the throne.
44:44But even that didn't end the war.
44:47For the next seven years, Matilda refused to give up,
44:51urging her army on in a conflict that was exhausting
44:54the energy and the resources of both sides.
44:59Finally, in 1148, Matilda accepted
45:03that she would never be Queen and returned to France.
45:07Stephen had won, but England had paid a high price.
45:19Stephen, the last of the Norman kings,
45:22died six years later in 1154.
45:25Having settled with Matilda's son, Henry,
45:27that Henry would inherit the throne.
45:29So the English crown went to Matilda's heirs after all,
45:33beginning a new dynasty that was to rule in England
45:37for more than 300 years.
45:43This is Faversham in Kent
45:45and I'm walking across what was once the site of Faversham Abbey.
45:49Here's Stephen.
45:51Here's Stephen's wife, Queen Matilda,
45:53his eldest son, Count Eustace,
45:55and the king himself were buried in the magnificent abbey church
45:59which Stephen had constructed.
46:01But 400 years later, Faversham, like the rest of the abbeys,
46:05was dissolved.
46:07And the abbey was demolished and scarcely a trace of it remains.
46:11And there's no sign either of the royal tomb
46:15of the last of the Norman kings.
46:17There's no sign either of the royal tomb
46:20of the last Norman king of England.
46:29The key to English politics has been a combination
46:33of strong government with government by consent.
46:37The latter was the great achievement of Anglo-Saxon England,
46:41which the Normans were wise enough to keep.
46:45But the Norman kings themselves, with their castles, their knights,
46:50their administrative flair,
46:52and, above all, their indomitable wills,
46:55made the monarchy infinitely stronger.
46:58Their cathedrals and abbeys made England more beautiful
47:02and their language, their courtesy and their chivalry
47:06made it more civilised.
47:08They also, on the debit side, made it infinitely more class-ridden.
47:14Still, there were worse legacies of conquest and colonisation.
47:44.