William the Conqueror and the Year 1066
Most of the kings in history usually waged wars, drank ale, went hunting wild boars and chased pretty girls through the royal court. Only a few of them have changed a country as completely as William the Conqueror. He arrived in the country of England in 1066 as a foreign duke with a shaky claim to the throne. He only needed a few years to change the country completely. Within a few years he had replaced its ruling class, filled it with castles and literally counted every animal that all the peasants owned. Before being so cool, he was a fatherless child nobody would expect to survive. A young duke whose guardians kept being murdered, a man still known to his enemies as William the Bastard. His life is part adventure story, part horror story, and it ends with one of the most disastrous funerals in royal history. What a story, guys! I am eager to tell you this, so stay awhile and be patient.
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William the Bastard: a dangerous childhood
King William was born in Normandy at Falaise, most likely towards the end of the year 1028. His father was Robert I, Duke of Normandy, a high-born man from a respectable family. His mother, named Herleva, was the daughter of a simple local man called Fulbert, who may have been a tanner or an embalmer. Duke Robert and his mother Herleva never married, so William was an illegitimate son, a bastard as they said at that time. Rest assured that William’s enemies didn’t forget that, and they rubbed his nose in it every time they could.
In 1035 Duke Robert I went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and died on the way home, at Nicaea, leaving a son who was only seven or eight as Duke of Normandy. Medieval nobles didn’t take kindly to child rulers, and the country started to fight over power. Several of the men appointed to protect the boy were killed. One guardian, Osbern, was murdered in the early 1040s in the very room where young William lay asleep, in what you may call an assassination attempt. It’s not hard to see where the grown-up William learned to trust nobody and to strike first, and maybe that’s the reason why he wanted to know every detail of everyone. That’s a control issue right there, some psychologists might agree with that.
He survived, grew up tough, and did what needed to be done in those circumstances, beating rebels and rivals into submission. But not all of this was harsh: he also found love and married Matilda of Flanders around 1050, even though the pope had forbidden the match in 1049. The marriage turned out to be strong, with a lot of love, and the couple had at least nine children. That is true love, I can tell you that!
Why did William think England was his?
The thing was that King Edward the Confessor of England had no children. According to the Normans, Edward supposedly promised the throne to William, a cousin through Edward’s Norman mother, as early as 1051. After that, in 1064, Harold Godwinson, who was a powerful English earl, ended up visiting Normandy and, according to Norman writers, swore an oath to support William’s claim. Historians aren’t sure that oath ever happened, and they have good reasons for it, but the Normans certainly treated it as sacred. Good idea! I will go tomorrow to the local bank and tell them I have 4 million dollars in my account. They would trust me for sure!
After King Edward died in January 1066, Harold was crowned king almost immediately. Hey, what about the oath? Did he forget? William regarded this as theft. So did Harold’s exiled brother Tostig, and so did King Harald Hardrada of Norway, who rubbed his palms in excitement at the chance of a change on the English throne. So now we have one country, England, and three very determined men who wanted it for themselves.
1066: the year of three battles
The first battle and a very big blow came from the north. Tostig and Harald Hardrada landed in Yorkshire, and on the day of 25 September 1066, Harold marched his army north and destroyed them at Stamford Bridge. Both of the invaders were killed. It was a stunning victory, a very big blow indeed, but also terrible timing.
Only a few days later, more exactly three days later, on 28 September, William the Conqueror landed at Pevensey on the south coast. Harold and his tired army had to march roughly 200 miles back to London, and after that towards Hastings. On 14 October, the two armies met near Hastings. The battle lasted long, and was an unusual fight for that period of time. It lasted from about nine in the morning until dusk. In the course of the battle a rumour spread that William had been killed, putting him in the position to ride through his lines in order to show his face and prove he was alive, boosting his troops’ morale. Later in the day, Harold fell. Whether he really died with an arrow in his eye is another matter, as the Bayeux Tapestry facts reveal.
The coronation of William was not as fast as he anticipated. He first spent weeks securing the south-east and frightening London into submission. On Christmas Day the crown finally reached his head… Hurray! At Westminster he was crowned king in 1066, in a ceremony that went badly wrong when nervous Norman guards set fire to nearby houses. You can read about that chaotic day in how a medieval coronation worked.
Conquering a country, not just a crown
Winning one battle didn’t make the English accept a Norman king. Revolts broke out across the country for years. William’s answer was castles. Norman lords built them everywhere, at first quick earth-and-timber mounds, later huge stone keeps. The most famous is the White Tower at the heart of the Tower of London, begun in the 1070s, a constant reminder to Londoners of who was in charge.
His most brutal answer came in the winter of 1069–70, when rebellion in the north, backed by a Danish fleet, provoked the campaign known as the Harrying of the North. William’s men burned crops, villages and livestock across Yorkshire and beyond. Writing decades later, the monk Orderic Vitalis claimed that more than 100,000 people died of starvation and that William “made no effort to control his fury”. Modern historians argue about the scale and some think the number is exaggerated, but the destruction was real enough to show up years later as “waste” in the records.
Those records were the Domesday Book. At Christmas 1085, William ordered a vast survey of who owned what across England, and the survey was carried out in 1086. Its royal commissioners recorded land, people, ploughs and animals in astonishing detail. It also showed how complete the conquest had been: the great estates had passed almost entirely from English to Norman hands. For how this new order of lords and landholders worked, see what feudalism really was.
An undignified end
After counting all the pigs in the country, building castles and switching languages at the royal court, William spent his last years fighting in France. In July 1087, while attacking the town of Mantes, he was injured or fell ill, and he died at Rouen on 9 September 1087, aged about 59. What followed was spectacularly undignified.
At his funeral in Caen, a local man stood up and announced that the church had been built on land stolen from his father, and demanded payment before the king could be buried in it. His claim was checked, found to be true and paid off on the spot. Then, according to Orderic Vitalis, William’s bloated body was too big for the stone coffin, and when attendants forced it in, it burst. The stench drove the mourners out of the church. The conqueror of England left the world in a cloud of embarrassment.
Why William the Conqueror still matters
William the Conqueror basically changed England’s rulers and its landscape, by building a lot of castles. He modified the English law and even its language. In place of English, Norman French became the language of the court and the law for centuries. This is the reason why English today has both “cow” from the farmyard and “beef” from the dinner table. Not to mention that every monarch of England since has been descended from him. To see how other medieval rulers grabbed power and hung on to it, explore medieval kings.
What I think of William
From my point of view, it takes a very good strategist, a formidable warrior and commander, and a bit of luck to win an entire country with just a single battle, well, almost. I admire his courage: he set sail across the English Channel with a fleet to conquer a country much bigger than his Normandy. He survived a tragic and dangerous childhood, from which I am certain he learned a lot. And lastly, the national audit he made was something I had never heard of from a king, I mean. That level of control over a country is unheard of.
Frequently asked questions
Why was he called William the Bastard?
Because his parents, Duke Robert I and Herleva, never married. Before 1066 that was how many people, especially his enemies, referred to him.
How old was William the Conqueror when he became king?
About 38. He was born around 1028 and crowned on Christmas Day 1066.
Did William the Conqueror speak English?
Not much, if at all. He spoke Norman French, and the chronicler Orderic Vitalis says he tried to learn English when he was in his forties but gave up.
Where is William the Conqueror buried?
In the Abbey of Saint-Étienne (the Abbaye aux Hommes) in Caen, Normandy. His tomb was disturbed more than once, and today only a single thigh bone is believed to remain.
Sources
- English Heritage, 1066 and a Real Game of Thrones
- Durham World Heritage Site, William’s Conquest of England
- James Aitcheson, The Harrying of the North, History Today (2016)
- David Roffe, Decoding Domesday, first published in History Today (2007)
- Encyclopaedia Romana, University of Chicago, The Death of William the Conqueror
- The Cleveland Museum of Art, Warrior Fighting a Dragon