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0n August 2nd 1100, William II Rufus was killed in a hunting accident in the New Forest. His body was immediately taken to Winchester Cathedral for burial. Three days later, his younger brother, Henry (who may possibly have been implicated in Rufus's death), was crowned at Westminster Abbey in London.
The New Forest, Winchester, Westminster: all these sites have resonances in Anglo-Norman England. Though Anglo-Saxon kings had been keen huntsmen, the creation of a new landscape whose primary function was hunting rather than agriculture was a Norman innovation which came to be seen by contemporaries and later polemicists alike as the most enduring symbol of alien domination, the 'Norman Yoke'. Winchester had long been the ritual capital of the Wessex dynasty, but Rufus was the last king to be buried there as Winchester inexorably shrunk from being the pre-eminent royal power base to merely an important regional and episcopal centre. Its ceremonial function was already being usurped by the new abbey of Westminster as the new Centre of the English monarchy. Shortly before his death, Rufus had completed a magnificent new hall in the palace complex adjacent to the abbey, clearly proclaiming the imperial pretensions of the new order. Westminster Hall has remained at the heart of government for 900 years.
Henry I (r 1100-35) inherited an administrative system of considerable sophistication. The long-established institutions of English government were the most highly developed in western Europe. A grid of hundreds, a subdivision of a county or shire, having its own court, (or their Anglo-Danish equivalents, the wapenstakes) and shires overlay almost the entire country, though in the north governmental structures remained fluid. Through their courts justice was administered - and to contemporaries Henry I was the 'lion of justice' and the rex pacificus - and taxes were raised. These were both onerous and efficiently collected. Here, too, royal writs were proclaimed conveying the executive will from the centre to the localities. Henry I was almost certainly the last king before Henry VIl to die solvent. By expanding the competence of the royal courts, by maximising the profits of royal justice, and by the subtle use patronage, the political centre of gravity was gradually shifting to the king�s benefit. Under Henry royal administration grew both in the localities and at the centre. The Exchequer began to audit the sheriffs' accounts: it and the Treasury can be seen as the first 'government departments' in England. However, in spite of this, royal government and administration, though increasingly systematised and reliant on written records, remained essentially personal, not bureaucratic.
When Henry I succeeded to the throne the Norman Conquest of England was substantially, though not entirely, complete. Early Norman incursions and settlement in Wales had been largely thrust back, to be resumed during Henry's reign, while there had, as yet, been no significant Norman penetration of Scotland. It was only with the accession of David I in 1124 that Normans settled the Lowlands by royal invitation, though there were already some cultural arid religious ties fostered by Margaret of Scotland (1046-93), a descendant of the Wessex dynasty; both Anglo Saxon and Norman exiles had taken refuge there. Neither had Normans yet ventured into the troubled waters of Ireland, though archbishops of Canterbury had begun to interfere in Irish ecclesiastical politics, and Ireland, too, had proved a convenient refuge for some, like the sons of Harold Godwineson, who were hostile to the Anglo Norman regime. At this point, therefore, the Norman settlement was essentially of England alone. Even here it was drawn-out and long unsure, and the northern shire's were only fully colonised during Henry's reign. But this colonisation now encountered no opposition. In the years immediately following 1066, Anglo-Saxon resistance was endemic across the country, especially in the north: this was followed by a major baronial revolt in 1075, which involved not only disaffected Norman magnates, but Anglo-Saxons arid Danes. Thereafter there was little more native hostility, although tensions remained high as antipathies within the ruling dynasty itself dominated political life, and occasionally led to outright war. Familial rivalries between William I and his eldest son, Robert, and then between Robert and his brothers, William II Rufus and Henry I, focused on Robert's claim to rule Normandy. This claim was supported by the king of France, who saw these disputes as a means to maintain control over a principality which, though theocratically subordinate, was by virtue of its inclusion in the Anglo-Norman realm, far more economically and militarily powerful than his own.
   Though the Norman settlement was protracted, it was certainly far-reaching. There had been earlier re-distributions of property on a large scale following conquest, for example during the reign of Cnut, but the appropriation of land and its reallocation by the Normans was unequalled until the dissolution of the monasteries. None profited more than the king himself. The royal demesne doubled in extent, ensuring a significant shift in the balance of power between king and aristocracy, such that the Norman kings were never threatened by an over-mighty subject as Edward the Confessor had been by Earl Godwine and his family. Not only were royal revenues greatly enhanced, but more land was available to reward loyal service, thereby further consolidating royal power. The new king had benefited most from the Conquest: beneath him a tightly-knit group of magnates emerged, often related to each other and to the new dynasty by marriage. These men might dominate whole shires, as did William I�s half-brother, Robert of Mortain, in Cornwall, or Hugh of Avranches in Cheshire. While many were already well established in Normandy, others came from nowhere. The origins, for example, of William de Briouze, a major beneficiary of royal patronage in Sussex, whose family was to play a major role in thirteenth-century politics, are extremely obscure.
    Not all of these aristocratic families survived more than one generation: the wheel of fortune that had brought them such wealth kept on spinning. 'New' men, such as Robert fitzHaimo and William of Warenne, emerged through the patronage of William Rufus and Henry I; other families, like the Clares, continued to reap further rewards for their enduring loyalty. But many others lost out. The royal family itself was not exempt from fortune's reversal. William I's other half-brother, Odo, bishop of Bayeux and earl of Kent, had lost his lands and liberty in 1082. Odo's brother, Robert of Mortain, temporarily lost his lands in 1088, following his support of Duke Robert of Normandy against Rufus, while William of Mortain, Robert's son, irretrievably fell in 1106 after the battle of Tinchebrai, in which, like his father before him, he fought for Duke Robert. Already in 1102 Robert of Belleme had had all his estates confiscated: a generation earlier Earl Ralph of Hereford had paid the price for his role in the baronial rebellion of 1075.
   Most studies of the Norman settlement have traditionally concentrated on this aristocracy but the colonisation ran much deeper. Incomers included not only great lords and their military vassals, prelates and monks, but also francigenae, the lesser men and women, and servants such as the gardener recorded at the Bishop of Lincoln's manor of Buckden early in the 12th century. While most of the incomers were Normans, others came from Brittany, Anjou and elsewhere in France. Some were merchants, who often settled in their own quarter in towns, as, for example, in Southampton or Norwich. They may often have enjoyed a favoured status as merchants, giving them an advantage over native traders, as they certainly did in Hereford. By 1100 the first Jewish settlers since Roman times were established in London. Most came from Rouen, where there was already one of the largest Jewish communities north of the Alps.
   The colonisers inhabited a country that, in Reginald Lernnard�s memorable words, was already old. Unlike the Saxons in England or the Vikings in both England and Normandy, the Normans named few places in England or Wales, and those they did, like Montgomery or Caus, generally reflect an attachment to the home country rather than the establishment of new settlements. Most changes in the landscape were more attributable to economic developments, and in particular to the needs of a rising population, than they were to Norman settlement. The creation of royal forests and other hunting preserves after the Conquest was essentially a legal development which was keenly resented.                      More in Part B...