Conquest A History of Britain by Simon Schama

It was the hand of God that decided the outcome of battles,

the fate of nations and the life or death of kings. Everyone knew that.

It was winter, the season of frost and death, and a king lay dying.

His name was Edward the Confessor.

He was dying childless. And it was far from obvious who would succeed him.

As there was no heir, many thought that they should be the next king,

including some foreign princes, like Duke William of Normandy.

But among those gathered round the bed of the dying Saxon king was the next most powerful man in England,

Harold Godwinson, and he thought the crown would look well on HIS head.

He was hoping for some sign that King Edward felt the same way.

And then Edward stretched out his hand and touched Harold. But was he giving him a blessing or a curse?

Was this the hand of God making Harold king? Nobody knew for sure,

but Harold had no qualms. Harold seized the crown.

The question now was for how long would he keep it?

And then, in the April sky, the hand of God showed itself as a comet, the hairy star.

Everyone knew this was no blessing, but an evil omen.

The year was 1066.

Historians like a quiet life and, usually, they get it.

For the most part, history moves at a glacial pace, working its changes subtly.

In Britain, we like to think there's something about OUR history, like our climate and our landscape,

that's naturally moderate, not given to earthquakes and revolutions.

But there are times and places when history, British history,

comes at you with a rush. Violent, decisive, bloody.

A truck-load of trouble knocking you down,

wiping out everything that gives you your bearings in the world - law, custom, loyalty and language.

And this is one of those places.

It doesn't look like the site of a national trauma,

especially these days, when it looks more suitable for a county fair than a mass slaughter.

But this is the battlefield of Hastings,

and, here, one kind of England was annihilated and another kind of England was set up in its place.

Some historians will tell you that, for most of the people of England,

Hastings didn't matter that much, with Norman knights replacing Saxon lords.

The peasants still ploughed their fields, paid taxes to the king,

prayed to avoid poverty and disease and watched the seasons roll round.

But the everyday can rub shoulders with the genuinely catastrophic.

Yes, the grass grew green here again, but now there were bones beneath the buttercups.

The governing class of the English had been dispossessed. Their men, land and animals taken from them

and given as spoils to the victorious foreigners.

You could survive and still be English, but now you belonged to an inferior race - the conquered.

You lived in England, but it was no longer YOUR country.

Anglo-Saxon England was no stranger to invasions. Viking raids had been part of life for a century.

But since the days of Alfred the Great, the country was stable enough to soak them up.

The longboats came and went, but still the king's law ran the Shires.

His churches and abbeys were built more beautifully than ever.

A town that would one day be called London was beginning to grow and prosper on the banks of the Thames.

And then one invasion succeeded where the others had failed, and there was a Viking on the throne.

His name was Canute, who we remember for trying to hold back the tides.

And while he turned Anglo-Saxon England into part of his vast maritime empire, he changed nothing.

He even chose as his closest advisor

one of the most powerful Anglo-Saxon nobles - Godwin, Earl of Wessex.

A scheming, ruthless man, Godwin became virtual co-ruler with Canute

over what was still recognisably Anglo-Saxon England.

But Canute's death in 1035 began a chain of events that would culminate

in the one invasion that Anglo-Saxon England would be unable to swallow. And what a saga it was.

It started with a bloody and unsparing fight for Canute's throne amongst the surviving elite.

Treachery, murder and mutilation were par for the course.

The last man standing with any kind of claim to the throne was a descendant of Alfred the Great,

a prince of the Saxon royal house.

He was called Edward and would be forever known as the Confessor. He was crowned on Easter Day 1043.

But he inherited more than just the crown.

He also got Earl Godwin, in no mood to lose power just because there was a new king.

Unlike Canute, Edward had reason to hate the right-hand man forced on him,

for Godwin had arranged his older brother's murder.

But there was nothing he could do about his bloodstained rival - yet.

King Edward knew that Godwin held the keys to the kingdom.

And when Godwin offered Edward his daughter in marriage, what could he do but take her?

Godwin was not Edward's only problem.

He also had to learn how to govern a country he knew little about.

For he'd grown up in exile, in a very different world across the English Channel in Normandy.

We think of Edward the Confessor as the quintessential Anglo-Saxon king.

In fact, he was almost as Norman as William the Conqueror.

His mother Emma was a Norman, and he'd lived here in Normandy for 30 years,

ever since she'd brought him as a child refugee from the wars between the Saxons and the Danes.

But Normandy was not just an asylum for Edward,

it was the place which formed him, politically and culturally.

His mother tongue was Norman French, and his virtual godfathers were the formidable Dukes of Normandy.

The Normans were descendants of Viking raiders,

but had long since traded in their longboats for powerful warhorses.

The Duchy of Normandy was in no sense just a piece of France.

Though the Dukes did formal homage to the French king, in every other way they were independent,

possessed of castles, patrons of churches.

These warlords were constantly in the saddle - ruling vassals,

fighting off revolts and forging shaky coalitions. But the Duchy was also humming with energetic piety.

In the 11th century, handsome stone monasteries and churches with Romanesque arches began to appear.

The first grandiose stone castles, as tough as the lords who had built them, became part of the landscape.

So, until the throne of England tempted him back across the Channel at the age of 36,

this was Edward's home,

and, while he was here, a child was growing up who would change the course of British history.

It was on the site of this castle at Falaise in 1027 that William,

known to all his contemporaries - although not in front of his face - as William the Bastard, was born.

He was, indeed, the illegitimate son of Duke Robert of Normandy and the daughter of a tanner called Erleve.

In the cut-throat world of feudal Normandy, it was important that he learn, quickly, how to survive.

He was only a child when his father died on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land,

leaving eight-year-old William as his heir. A lamb thrown to the wolves.

Certainly, Edward would have known the young William.

It's even suggested that he was one of the hand-picked companions entrusted by William's father

with keeping an eye on the vulnerable young boy.

Edward would have seen how William survived childhood traumas, narrowly escaping assassination attempts.

How William was forced, aged just ten,

to witness the brutal murder of his beloved steward in his bedchamber before his very eyes.

And Edward must have marvelled at the way the stripling boy grew into a steely and ruthless young man,

eventually triumphing in battle over a formidable league of rebel nobles.

While William was securing absolute power in Normandy,

Edward was, by now, in the middle of a nervous reign and watching out for his biggest threat, Earl Godwin.

But, in 1051, Edward seized his chance to rid himself of his rival.

Edward had brought over Norman allies,

established them in castles, made one Archbishop of Canterbury.

Feeling his moment had now come,

he confronted Godwin with the crime of his brother's murder and threw him out of the country.

But Edward's bid to rid himself of his sworn enemy failed miserably.

In exile, the Earl of Wessex was as dangerous as at home and sailed back with a fleet to humiliate the king.

Out went Edward's Norman cronies, back came the Godwins,

stronger than ever.

Edward was now little more than a puppet king.

He turned to the religious life, spending days in meditation and prayer, becoming the Confessor,

devoting himself to the foundation of his Benedictine abbey upstream of London, his west minster.

Impotence, though, has its uses.

Godwin, clearly, had ambitions for the future.

He'd foisted his daughter Edith on Edward to get a young Godwin as the next king of England.

But Edward had his own ideas. Yes, he'd married Edith, but he would never sleep with her.

His revenge would be her childlessness.

Now Edward had an even more mischievous thought.

"If Godwin wants an heir to the English throne so badly, I'll give him one. But one more to my liking."

And it's at this point, so Norman chroniclers claimed,

that Edward promised the succession to the Duke of Normandy, William the Bastard.

Of course, nobody knew anything about this in England,

least of all Godwin who, in 1053, died suddenly of a stroke while at dinner with the king.

But there were plenty of other Godwins ready to take the Godfather's place.

His sons now took over where he had left off, controlling England, virtually unchallenged.

And presiding over the family empire was the eldest son Harold.

Harold Godwinson seemed to have everything - land, power, riches, charisma, an aristocratic wife

and a supporting troop of loyal and clever brothers.

He even managed to make himself patron of churches, like this one at Bosham in Sussex.

Though he didn't dare make too brazen a move,

any dispassionate observer would have had to conclude that, once Edward was gone,

the throne was Harold's for the taking.

And then, all at once, an ill wind blew away this fair-weather vision.

It all started with a voyage that no-one can fully explain, even to this day.

In 1064, Harold and a group of men set sail across the Channel for Normandy.

Maybe it was to rescue his younger brother Wolfstan who had been taken hostage by William.

But, to Norman chroniclers, the journey only had one purpose -

Harold was confirming Edward's offer of the crown.

Why would Harold do something so against HIS own best interests?

Perhaps that's why it makes up the first bit of the story

of the most grandiose piece of Norman propaganda - the 70-metre-long Bayeux tapestry.

The tapestry was commissioned by William's half-brother, Bishop Odo of Bayeux, after the conquest.

But it may have been made by Englishwomen embroiderers,

who were generally regarded as the most skilled stitchers in Europe.

Who else would have made such a glamorous hero?

Something seems to have gone wrong in the Channel, perhaps a storm.

Landing in the territory of Guy of Ponthieu,

they were arrested and handed over to Guy's liege lord -

William of Normandy. The embroiderers make it dramatically clear

that Harold and his men now find themselves in an alien world.

The Saxons are moustachioed at this stage in the story

with a certain air about them, despite their predicament.

The Normans, by contrast, shave the backs of their heads.

They are the scary half-skinheads of the early feudal world.

Realising his lucky number has come up, William can afford to show charm and generosity to his prisoner,

cleverly bringing him into his military entourage.

William took Harold on campaign with him in Brittany,

where Harold returns the favour by rescuing two of William's soldiers

from the quicksands of Mont-Saint-Michel, one on his left arm, one on his back.

But William's hospitality is steel tipped.

He makes Harold one of his knights, a solemn ceremonious business, but one involving a two-way obligation.

William, now his liege lord, would be obliged to protect Harold, his new knight.

But Harold would have had to make his own promises,

and there seems no doubt that he did swear some sort of oath to the Duke.

To the medieval mind, there was nothing more serious than an oath.

The tapestry maker makes it clear that this was a religious act

by having a witness point to the word "sacramentum".

Harold's oath WAS a kind of sacrament since it went to the heart of the matter -

what would happen to England after Edward died?

The English said that Harold agreed to be William's man only in Normandy

and that this had no bearing on the English succession.

The Norman chroniclers, though, said Harold had sworn to help William take the throne of England.

The oath became even more binding when, in a cheap theatrical trick,

the cloth was whipped from the table over which Harold had sworn.

Underneath was revealed a reliquary containing the bones of a saint.

Well, how much trouble was he in? Had Harold promised something he couldn't deliver?

Or had he made no promises at all about the English crown?

Norman chroniclers like to imagine Harold returning, haunted by guilt, saying one thing and doing another.

But, in England at any rate, there were no signs of a queasy conscience at all.

In fact, to get his hands on the crown, Harold did something inconceivable for a Godwin,

something which, one day, would have disastrous consequences.

He sold his own brother, Tostig, down the river.

Tostig was the Earl of Northumbria.

He was also the family hothead and had managed to provoke a northern rebellion against him.

He'd been fleecing abbeys and monasteries,

creating his own private army and generally acting like a greedy tyrannical brat.

Inevitably, the local nobles rose against him, declared him outlaw

and put in their own man to be the new earl.

Harold was sent by King Edward to sort out the mess and, immediately, was faced with two tough choices.

He could back his younger brother Tostig against the rebels, but that might create a civil war.

Or he could forget all about blood ties and support Tostig's enemies.

In return, they might feel grateful enough to offer him their support

when the time came for him to make his bid for the English throne.

In the end, Harold put ambition before brotherly love.

He threw out Tostig and replaced him with the Earl Morcar. Harold had broken Godwin clan solidarity

and turned his own brother into a mortal enemy.

It was this merciless war of brothers which, in the end, cost Harold his throne and his life.

More than anything else, it was the cause of the death of Anglo-Saxon England.

The winter of 1065 was marked by tremendous gales

which destroyed churches and uprooted great trees.

As King Edward the Confessor lay on his deathbed, he was visited by a strange and terrible dream

which he insisted on relating to all those who had gathered around him.

Two monks told me that, because of the sins of its people, God had given England to evil spirits.

I said to them, "Will God not have mercy?" And they replied,

"Not until a growing tree cleft in two by a lighting storm

"should come together of its own accord and grow green again. Only then will there be pardon."

But no-one paid much attention to the ravings of an old man.

What was more important was that Edward had touched Harold's hand.

Maddeningly, the king had fallen short of declaring him his heir,

but it was enough of a sign for Harold, and for the northern earls who supported him.

On January the 6th 1066, Westminster saw the funeral of one king in the morning

and the coronation of another in the afternoon.

There are two Harolds depicted in the Bayeux tapestry, but which was the real one?

The confident king who issued coins bearing the optimistic slogan "pax", the Latin for peace?

Or the guilty, twisted usurper, stricken by omens, haunted by a vision of ships?

The phantom fleet which the embroiderers set in the border of the tapestry

suggests Harold could all too well imagine the reaction across the Channel to his coronation.

A Norman historian has William hearing the news while out hunting.

"When the Duke heard the news, he became as a man outraged.

"Oft he tied his mantel, oft he untied it again and spoke to no man.

"Neither dared any man speak to him".

For ten years, William had let it be known throughout Europe that he'd soon add England to his territories.

He was in the lethally dangerous position of looking ridiculous.

He consulted with his feudal magnates in a series of assemblies.

By no means all of them were thrilled with the idea of invading England.

The risks seemed a lot more daunting than the enticement of new lands and wealth.

So the Duke went to strategy number two, turning the matter into an international crusade.

Couldn't the Pope see that his cause was just,

that Harold was an infamous oath breaker, a despoiler of churches,

while William was a builder of abbeys, a protector of bishops against bullying barons?

It was all completely absurd, and it worked like a dream.

The Pope was won over, gave William his papal blessing and invested him with his ring and his banner.

It was now much more than a dynastic feud.

William used the consecration of his wife's abbey here at La Trinite in Caen

to proclaim a crusade against the infidel Harold.

And the barons who'd fought shy of risking their necks on the Duke's personal vendetta

now flocked to join the legions of the blessed.

The Bayeux tapestry shows work got under way immediately to build an awe-inspiring expeditionary force.

Rows of Normandy trees went down to the axe to emerge as 400 dragon-headed ships.

Loaded onto the ships were coats of mail, bows, arrows, spears,

and the most indispensable item of all - vast casks of wine.

And packed so tightly into the boats that they supported each other

were, perhaps, 6,000 horses. 3 for each knight.

Across the Channel, Harold responded by proving he, too, was a phenomenal military organiser.

As the crack troops of his army Harold could call on the elite of, perhaps, 3,000 housecarls,

professional soldiers, trained to handle a two-handed axe

that could slice right through a horse and its rider at one blow.

The core of the army was provided by the 5,000 thanes or noblemen of England.

In addition, there were the 13,000 part-time soldiers -

known as the fyrd - who were obliged to give the king two months' service each year.

With amazing speed, this army was stationed along the south coast.

By August the 10th, William had HIS army in place along the Normandy coast.

Two great fighting forces bent on each other's annihilation

faced each other across a little strip of water to determine the destiny of England.

And there they sat.

William waiting for a southerly wind that never came, and Harold waiting for William who never came.

This waiting was particularly serious for Harold. By the first week of September,

he kept the fyrd in battle position for at least two weeks longer than their two-month obligation.

What's more, it was now harvest time.

So, with who knows what misgivings and uneasiness,

on September the 8th, Harold demobilised the fyrd and sent the soldiers home.

He was right to feel uneasy.

Just 11 days later, Harold had a very nasty shock. His younger brother was back.

Tostig and a Norwegian king, Harald Hardrada had landed in Northumbria with as many as 12,000 men.

Tostig had spent his time in exile looking for allies to pursue his vendetta against Harold.

It was a real coup for him that he'd finally enlisted the support of the awesome king of Norway.

Hardrada was quite simply the most feared warrior of the age.

Built like a Norwegian cliff face,

he had a reputation for superhuman strength and elaborately creative cruelty.

Hardrada also had a flimsy claim to the English throne that went back to Canute

and he wasn't one to flinch at a military challenge that could win him the disputed crown.

Harold Hardrada sailed southwest from Norway on August the 12th.

En route to England, he stopped here in the Viking earldom of the Orkneys

to pick up yet more men and ships to add to his already formidable fleet.

Expectations must have been high. The Norsemen could almost smell triumph in the summer winds.

There would have been feasting,

singing and the reading of poems, some, doubtless, written by Hardrada himself.

And it may be here that Tostig joined the Viking fleet.

If he did, and if he looked out at the water and saw the 300 ships,

his little heart must have skipped a beat to think of the catastrophe awaiting his brother.

Together Tostig and Hardrada would be unstoppable, invincible.

Or would they?

Having landed on the Northumbrian coast,

the Viking army headed for York where it fought off the northern earls to take control of the city.

Complacent with victory, Hardrada and Tostig travelled with just one third of their army

eight miles east of York to Stamford Bridge where they had arranged to collect 500 hostages.

But what they saw on the banks of the River Derwent was not a forlorn group of hostages,

but a massive army - their weapons glittering like sheets of ice, as the Viking bard put it.

Tostig knew it meant trouble. It was his big brother.

Getting his army in position to surprise the Norsemen was an epic feat by any standards.

Harold had travelled from London, picking up his army on the way,

covering 187 miles in four days. 37 to 45 miles a day!

Imagine, then, thousands of men going as fast as their horses,

or, in many cases, as fast as their legs could carry them.

Up the Great North Road to Peterborough, Lincoln, Tadcaster.

The ultimate high-impact hike with the heaviest backpacks imaginable.

And, at the end of it, Harold fought one of the bloodiest battles in English history.

It was the English who broke the Viking line, and the remaining Norse warriors cowered round their chiefs.

We must imagine the great Hardrada swinging his axe beneath the Land-waster flag

before finally sinking down with an arrow in the throat.

Tostig, picking up the Raven flag, and, in his turn, being cut down.

The carnage was so complete that it took just 24 of the 300 ships that had sailed to England

to return the pitiful remnant of the Norse army back to Norway.

In a final act of respect, Harold found his dead brother

and took what was left of him to be buried at York Minster.

But he had no time to grieve or exult over the death of Tostig,

for the day after the battle of Stamford Bridge,

the Norman fleet, at last, felt the wind change direction.

With great haste, the Duke went to sea with his fleet sailing swiftly to the coast of England.

Their first sight of land would have been the cliffs at Beachy Head,

and they landed in the nearby sheltering harbours of Pevensey.

An old Roman fort guarded the beach.

Within its empty shell, William's men erected a prefabricated timber castle - later rebuilt in stone -

as if declaring that THEY were now the heirs to the Romans.

Expeditions for food and forage from the base camp took the usual form -

burning everything that couldn't be seized, striking terror into the hearts of the locals.

One of the most unforgettable details in the Bayeux tapestry is this seemingly incidental detail

of a mother and child turned refugee,

fleeing from their burning house, maybe even Hastings.

Resigned to their fate, not looking back.

This is the first of the images that will echo through European art -

through Rubens, Goya and Picasso's Guernica -

of the victims of war, of civilians, of innocents.

But William soon discovered there was no easy route to get from Pevensey to London.

The country behind the town was waterlogged, crossed by little river valleys that fed into the sea.

But there was one old Anglo-Saxon trail that could take him to the Roman road going north through Kent,

and it was for mastery of this ancient, muddy, rutted track

that the most gruelling battle in early British history would be fought.

Having beaten back the threat of the Vikings and his own brother,

it must have seemed inconceivable to Harold that he'd have to do it all over again within a week or two.

It would not be easy. Who could he call on? The bruised and battered remains of his army.

It would be a long shot but, after Stamford Bridge, perhaps Harold felt he could trust his luck.

Besides, William's public name calling - Harold the Perjured, Harold the Oath Breaker,

Harold the Perfidious - had made it personal now, a mortal duel.

Let the hand of God decide who was the righteous party, who would prevail.

Harold left London at full speed.

He gathered what he could of a new army by an old grey apple tree,

an ancient, blasted tree that stood on a hill at the crossing of the tracks leading out of Hastings.

There Harold planted his banner, the Dragon of Wessex.

The Normans called this place Senlac, which means lake of blood.

Imagine yourself then on the morning of Saturday the 14th of October 1066.

You're a Saxon warrior, a housecarl as it happens, and you've survived Stamford Bridge.

Your position here couldn't be better.

You stand on the brow of the hill and look down hundreds of yards away at the opposition.

All you have to do is prevent the Normans breaking through to the London road.

They have the horses, but then they have to ride them uphill.

Along the hillside, you see a densely packed crowd of Englishmen.

At the front are the housecarls, a wall of solid shields, and, with them, the axemen.

But, behind them, the part-timers, the fighting farmers, who must have time to find THEIR courage.

Down at the foot of the hill, you can hear the whinnying of Norman horses

and what sounds like the chanting of psalms.

You're a Norman foot soldier

and you hope to God the gentlemen on horses know what they're doing.

All around you, you can hear the scraping of metal, the sharpening of blades, the mounting of horses.

On the brow of the hill, you see a thin glittering line of men.

You cross yourself and you finger the rings on your coat of mail and wonder how solid they are.

You wonder what use they're going to be against an axe. You've never seen axes in battle before.

But then you catch sight of the Papal banner and take heart. Surely, God is on YOUR side.

The real beginning must be imagined as the cavalry raced up the hill one by one, getting into range,

hearing the rhythmic chant of "Oot! Oot!" "Out! Out!" from the Saxons,

and then hurling their javelins at the front line.

Then came the slow advance of the archers, unloosing their first arrows under a hail of enemy spears.

And, finally, the foot soldiers breaking into a run behind them.

Then there was just the murderous smashing and crashing of horses, the slicing and thrusting of weapons.

The screams, cries of the wounded and dying.

If the axeman stood firm against the oncoming horse, he'd still only get one good swing.

If he missed, he was left open to the slash of the sword from the rider above.

It was the initial success of the English that also threatened their downfall.

On the left flank of William's army, horses stumbled and retreated.

The right flank of Harold's army, many of them inexperienced fyrdmen, decided to chase them down the hill.

But Harold, always conservative in his tactics, refused to allow others to follow.

He seems to have lost momentary control of his troops,

who couldn't resist following the horsemen, elated by the thought that the Duke of Normandy was lost.

But William threw back his helmet to prove he was very much alive.

He rallied the ranks of the Norman centre round the rear of the pursuing Saxons

and set about slicing them to pieces.

The battle wasn't over yet.

It would take at least six hours to decide.

The Bayeux tapestry is shockingly explicit in exposing the extent of the carnage and mutilation.

But it was the English army that was eventually, and very, very slowly, ground down.

William began exploiting weak points, settling into an alternating rhythm of archers and cavalry.

The arrows now shot high into the air and fell, not on the front line,

but the heads of the unprotected men behind them.

How did Harold himself die? Lately there's been an attempt to read the death scene in the tapestry

as though he was the figure cut down by the horsemen...

..not the warrior pulling the arrow out of his eye, the story you and I grew up with. But it seems clear

that the words "Harold Rex" occur directly, and significantly, above the arrow-struck figure.

Then, certainly, the knights would have been on him, cutting him down, leaving him disembowelled.

The thanes bravely mounted a last stand, defending the body of their king.

But, for many, it was a lost cause. It was time to save one's neck, to get out of the way.

There are such sad stories of what follows, and perhaps some are true.

One of them has Harold's lover, Edith Swan Neck, walking through the heaps of gory corpses

to identify the dead king by marks on his body known only to her.

What we do know is that around half the nobility of England perished on that battlefield.

William had sworn that, should God give him the victory,

he would build a great abbey of thanksgiving at the exact spot where Harold had planted his flag.

And here it is, a statement, if ever there was one, of pious jubilation.

But William had to make sure he'd won not just a single battle, but the war for England.

This was done in the time-honoured way -

cutting a swath of fire, rape and plunder through the countryside of south-east England.

One by one, the Anglo-Saxon cities folded.

William was crowned at Westminster on Christmas Day 1066.

But the event was more like a shambles than a triumph.

At the shout of acclamation,

the Norman soldiers stationed outside thought a riot had started,

to which their response was to burn down every house in sight.

As fighting broke out, many of those in the abbey, smelling smoke, rushed outside.

And the ceremony was completed in a half-empty interior with William,

for the first time in his life, seen to be shaking like a leaf.

When he emerged from the smoke and chaos of the coronation,

just what kind of king did the surviving remnant of the old governing class imagine they had?

Did they fondly suppose he was going to be another Canute

who, now he'd won his realm, would disband his army and send them home?

If they did, they were in for a very nasty shock

because, even if William had wanted to do this, it was quite impossible.

His whole campaign had been based on the promise of the lure of land,

the pledge to hand over Saxon land on a golden plate of conquest.

There was never the remotest chance that William would be another Canute

and assimilate himself into the world of Anglo-Saxon England. His conquest turned the country around.

England's orientation now was south, away from Scandinavia and towards continental Europe.

The north of England, which still retained strong Viking sympathies, offered the most resistance.

Three years into William's reign, York opened its gates to King Sweyn of Denmark,

hailing him as a liberator from the new king of England.

William's response was to mount a campaign of oppression in the north

that was not just punitive, but an exercise in mass murder -

thousands upon thousands of men and boys gruesomely butchered, their bodies left to rot and fester.

Every town and village burnt without pity.

Fields and livestock destroyed so completely that any survivors were doomed to die in a great famine.

Hard on the heels of massacre and starvation came plague.

And all across England, William built at least 90 castles,

dominating areas of potential revolt.

Engines of terror that helped William control over two million Saxons with just 25,000 Normans.

Most of the voices describing to us the events after 1066 are written from the victor's perspective,

unapologetic and crowing, sketching the starkest possible contrast

between the Machiavellian perjurer Harold and the noble, betrayed William.

But among this rather nauseating chorus of congratulation, there is at least one that dares break rank.

That, in fact, sees the conquest as it surely was -

a brutal, ruthless and completely successful act of aggression and cruelty.

The voice is all the more credible because it belongs to someone who, by rights,

should have found nothing to fault in the Norman conquest -

the monk Orderic Vitalis, whose family came over with William and belonged to the conquering class.

In the early 12th century, he began to pen his account of the conquest.

In complete contrast to the others, Orderic never minces his words about what he thought of as colonisation.

"Foreigners grew wealthy with the spoils of England, while her own sons were either shamefully slain

"or driven as exiles to wander hopelessly through foreign kingdoms."

His account conveys the traumatic magnitude of what happened in England in the years following 1066.

Pre-conquest England was an old country, as Orderic describes it.

Afterwards, it was a completely new one.

Of course, not everything changed.

To look at a list of governing institutions you might suppose that nothing had changed,

that one class of governors had kicked out another class. Big deal!

But I rather think it WAS a big deal.

Imagine the county gentry of England - priests, squires, judges - all wiped out overnight -

half of them dead, the rest humiliated, broken, replaced by an alien class.

They speak differently, they look different,

they take what they want when they want and then rubber-stamp the decision in YOUR courts.

They also build differently.

Ely Cathedral is one of those places

where the intimate scale of Saxon churches was replaced by a statement of massive triumphalism.

These columns speak of authority and raw power.

They command obedience and reverence. They are, in the most literal sense, awesome.

It was the difference between the immense Romanesque bulk of the great Norman cathedrals

and the small spaces of the Saxon chapel.

There was another telling difference between the old and new rulers of England.

Anglo-Saxons didn't use surnames. They were Cedric or Edgar of somewhere or other.

But the Normans incorporated places into their own names, like an act of possession.

They were Roger of the Beautiful Hill - Roger Beaumont -

because the place WAS theirs. They owned it lock, stock and barrel.

In fact, preserving the estate intact was what the Norman nobility was all about.

It was they who introduced the practice of passing on whole estates intact to one heir - the eldest son.

The unsentimental, decisive way with things was the Norman way,

giving a hard-nosed edge

to the fuzzy tangles of contracts and customs that had been used by the Anglo-Saxons.

And it was in this spirit that William, in 1085,

held court in Gloucester and launched, arguably, the most extraordinary campaign of his reign,

a campaign for information.

We tend to think of William as more or less permanently in the saddle.

He grew up in a world, after all, where authority was usually delivered on the blade of a sword.

So it's all the more impressive that he seems to have understood that information could also be power.

William the Conqueror was the first database king.

His immediate need was to raise a tax,

but the compilation of the Domesday Book was more than just a glorified audit.

It was a complete inventory of everything in the kingdom, shire by shire...pig by pig.

Who had owned what before the coming of the Normans, and who owned what now.

How much it had been worth then, and how much now.

"The King sent his men all over England into every shire

"and had them find out how many hides there were in each shire,

"what land and cattle the king himself had in the county.

"So very narrowly did he have it investigated there was no single hide nor, shame to relate it,

"but it seemed no shame to him, was there one ox, or one cow left out and not put down in record."

While some of the information was taken verbally by William's scribes,

some must have owed its existence to Saxon records.

The most extraordinary paradox about the Domesday Book

is that what we think of as a monument to Norman power and strength

owed itself to the advanced machinery of government left behind by the old Anglo-Saxon monarchy.

And it was thanks to this that the data was collected at such lightning speed - less than six months.

The results were presented to William, here, at Old Sarum,

an ancient Iron-Age fort inside which he'd built a royal palace.

When given the Domesday Book, it was as if William had been handed the keys to the kingdom again,

as if he'd reconquered England - statistically.

Because its information was more impregnable than any castle.

It was called the Domesday Book because it was said its decisions were as final as the Last Judgment.

"The Church itself holds Wenlock. There are 40 hides, 4 of which are exempt from tax under King Canute.

"There are 15 slaves. 2 mills serve the monks, plus 1 fishery.

"Enough woodland to fatten 300 pigs and 2 hedged enclosures. Value now 12 pounds."

Two ceremonies took place on Lammas Day 1087 at Old Sarum.

First every noble in England gathered here to take an oath of loyalty to the king.

And then came the handing over of the book, the ultimate weapon to keep them in line.

Now nobody could hold back anything.

And it was this book, the Domesday Book,

that made the gathering at Old Sarum unique in the history of feudal monarchy in Europe.

For the book, ultimately, WAS England.

For centuries after, this was the secret of English government,

a partnership between the power of the landed classes and the authority of the state.

Between the guardians of the green acres and the keepers of knowledge.

In one corner, the gentry, in the other corner, the civil service.

And in-between them, the eternal umpire, the king.

But the umpire was finally feeling the strain.

Not surprising when, aged 60, William still couldn't resist playing the warlord.

In 1087, he subdued a border dispute in France by, of course, totally destroying the town of Mantes.

But perhaps this last devastation was one too many.

A flaming timber from one of the houses burned by William's soldiers fell right in front of the king.

William's horse suddenly bucked, throwing the now overweight king violently against his saddle.

His gut took the force of the blow.

Mortally wounded, William was taken to a priory at Rouen.

At the very end, Orderic Vitalis puts into William's mouth an extraordinary deathbed confession,

so penitential, so utterly out of character that it seems, on the face of it, completely incredible.

But whether William actually spoke those words or not,

they clearly reflected what some, perhaps many, people felt about William the Conqueror.

When all the battles were won, when the laws had all been laid down,

he was what he had always been - a brutal adventurer,

and the conquest of England, not a righteous crusade, but just a grand throw of history's dice.

"I appoint no-one my heir to the crown of England for I did not attain that high honour by hereditary right,

"but wrestled it from the perjured King Harold in a desperate battle with much effusion of human blood.

"I have persecuted its native inhabitants beyond all reason.

"Whether gentle or simple, I cruelly oppressed them. Many I unjustly disinherited.

"Innumerable multitudes, especially in the county of York, perished through me by famine or the sword.

"Having therefore made my way to the throne of that kingdom by so many crimes,

"I dare not leave it to anyone but God alone lest, after my death, worse should happen by my means."

Once he had gone, in the early hours of the morning of the 9th of September 1087,

a shocking scene took place.

His closest followers now paid their last respects to William by all deserting him,

racing off around the kingdom to secure their land and property,

leaving the corpse to be looted by the servants -

naked, bloated and beginning to putrefy on the monastery floor.

So the man who'd spent his life taking whatever he could by whatever means possible

was finally robbed of everything, even his dignity.

Perhaps the hand of God had decided that this was a fitting end.

As for his old antagonist, Harold,

he certainly didn't stay buried on the shore facing the Channel as some Norman historians suggested.

Rumours had it that he escaped and lived as a hermit, but another story is much more likely to be the truth.

That, once it was safe,

the female survivors of the family took Harold's remains and had them interred here at Waltham Abbey.

According to William and the Pope, Harold was a despoiler of the Church, deserving of destruction.

But the monks at Waltham didn't seem to agree, for they secretly buried him and prayed for his soul.

Somewhere then, beneath the columns and arches of this Romanesque church,

is the last Anglo-Saxon king,

literally, part of the foundations of Norman England.

Subtitles by Mary Easton BBC Scotland - 2000

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