Life in England after the Conquest
In spite of the severe measures taken by William I there were many supporters of his policy. His great supporters were the Norman barons. The Normans enjoyed many privileges in the conquered country. All the members of the Great Council were Normans. All the sheriffs and other royal officials were Normans too. The same was true in the English Church where nearly all the priests, bishops and abbots were also Normans. England was ruled by a foreign king and foreigners occupied all the highest offices. To defend these privileges the Normans who were in the minority in the conquered country had to unite under a strong royal power. And the Norman barons supported William as they were interested in strengthening the royal power which helped them to suppress the Anglo-Saxons.
The Conqueror won the support of the Anglo-Saxon lords too. Those who had not fought against him were left in possession of their estates. They became the king's allies in his struggle against those great lords who dared to disobey William I. The Church helped greatly in strengthening the royal power. In return for its support of the Conquest the Church of England, the greatest feudal lord in the country, was granted some privileges. William established separate church courts which decided all cases that concerned marriages, wills and accusations against the clerics. Many new churches and cathedrals were built all over the country.
The townspeople supported the royal power too. William the Conqueror took severe measures to establish peace in the country, and now men could travel without fear of being robbed or murdered. In the reign of William the Conqueror there was more trade and traveling than before. More merchants could move about without fear of losing their goods. Towns began to grow and the townspeople paid high taxes to the royal treasury. The townspeople gave William their full support for granting them certain privileges and for protecting trade.
Before the Norman Conquest the Anglo-Saxon lords lived in timber houses. After the Norman Conquest strong castles began to appear in each county. At first they were built of wood and later of stone. The first of these stone castles was the Tower of London. The old timber houses were pulled down, and the villagers were forced to build strong castles in which the new lords and their fighting men lived.
The Norman noble considered war his chief occupation. Each noble was a knight, or a fully armed warrior. Nobles were trained in warfare from childhood. It was honorable to be a knight and the sons of nobles were trained to become good knights. They were not taught to read and write. They spent their childhood and youth in military training and as they grew up they spent their time in wars or feasting with the guests in the halls оf their castles.
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The victorious Normans made up the new aristocracy and the Anglo-Saxon people became their servants. The Norman aristocracy spoke a Norman dialect of French, a tongue of Latin origin, while the Anglo-Saxons spoke English. Thus there were two different languages spoken in the country at the same time. Norman-French became the official language of the state. It was the language of the ruling class spoken at court; it was the language of the lawyers, and all the official documents were written in French or Latin. But the peasants and townspeople spoke English. The Normans looked upon English as a kind of peasant dialect, and continued to speak their own language.
But the Normans could not subdue the popular language which was spoken by the majority of the population. Many of them married Anglo-Saxon wives and their children and grandchildren grew up speaking English. In a few generations the descendants of the Normans who had come with William the Conqueror learned to speak the mother tongue of the common people of England. In time English became the language of the educated classes and the official language of the state.
At the time when the two languages were spoken side by side the Anglo-Saxons learned many French words and expressions which gradually came into the English language.
As a result of the Conquest, the English language changed greatly under the influence of the French language. The two languages gradually formed one rich English language which already in the 14th century was being used both in speech and in writing. Gradually the Normans mixed with the Anglo-Saxons and the Danes and from this mixture the English nation finally emerged.
QUESTIONS FOR CONTROL
1. What kingdoms were more powerful at the end of the 8th century and what become the strongest at the beginning of the 9th century?
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2. Why was the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms into one kingdom in the 9th century necessary?
3. Who was the first king of England? What were his rights?
4. Speak about the raids of Danes on Britain. What was the difference between their early and later raids?
5. What kind of people were Danes and how did they differ from Anglo-Saxons?
6. What were the conditions of the treaty concluded in 886? What is Danelaw?
7. Speak about the Danish raids on Britain in the 10th-11th centuries. Why did they speed up the impoverishment of the peasants? What is Danegeld?
8. What had happened with Danes in the 11th century?
9. What were the reasons and the pretext for the Norman invasion?
10. What can you tell about William the Conqueror?
11. What facts prove that the Norman army was greatly superior to the Anglo-Saxon army?
12. What battle took place near Hastings and what were the reasons for the defeat of the Anglo-Saxons?
13. Prove that William the Conqueror became the greatest feudal lord of England after the Norman conquest.
14. How did William the Conqueror reward the barons who had helped him to conquer the country?
15. What prevented the feudal lords in England from becoming as powerful and independent as those in France in the 11th century?
16. What made it possible for William to strengthen his royal power so greatly? Who were his allies?
17. When did the first registration of people take place?
18. What was the Domesday Book? Why was it called so?
19. What useful information does Domesday Book give us about England in the second half of the 11th century?
20. How did the registration consolidate the position of the Norman conquerors in England?
13. What effect did the Norman Conquest have upon the development of feudalism in England? Prove that the Conquest resulted in greater feudal exploitation in England.
14. Describe the way of life of a Norman noble. What were his main occupations?
15. How did the Normans live in England?
16. What was the effect of Norman Conquest on English language and development of culture?
LECTURE 3 DEVELOPMENT OF TOWNS AND CRAFTS IN THE X-XIIITH CENTURIES. DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE
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Plan:
1. Appearance of towns.
2. The artisan’s workshop.
3. Medieval guilds.
4. Culture in Middle ages.
Appearance of towns
By the end of the 10th century new towns appeared in England. Such old towns as London, Winchester, York grew into centres of trade and crafts. The Domesday Book mentions about 80 towns where 5 per cent of the population lived. In the 11th-12th centuries the towns were very small. London had only 20,000 people but it was considered a large centre of population. An average town had from six to four thousand people.
By the 13th century there were already more than 160 towns in England. But most of the towns were still quite small. Most of these early towns did not differ very much from the villages. London was then the largest city in the country. But many districts which are now in the heart of London were then separate villages or forests.
Towns were surrounded by walls which had a number of gates, guarded by gate-keepers, who opened them at dawn and locked them at sunset. Outside the town were the fields which came right up to the walls of the town. Three arable fields were divided into strips and the townspeople grew crops in then. There were common pastures and meadows where they fed their cattle and geese. In such a town a man could be a smith or a carpenter or a weaver, but he was also a tiller of the soil. As time went on a baker or a weaver would find it less and less possible to do both things at once. He preferred to spend all his days working at his craft and to buy most of his food instead of growing it.
Nearly all the houses in the town were made of wood and frequent fires would destroy whole districts. Very few houses had their own water-supply. The shops where different goods were sold were on the ground floor. The workshop where the craftsmen worked was also on the ground floor and the owner and his family lived upstairs.
There was an important difference between the first towns and the villages: while the villagers produced the necessities of life mainly for consumption, the townspeople produced goods for sale. Crafts and trade began to develop now on a larger scale than before. The growth of towns was a new and very significant stage in the development of feudal society.
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The land on which the towns grew belonged either to the king, baron, or abbot, and the people of the first towns had to pay for it by working for the lord of the manor. The medieval workshop was a small-scale enterprise where there was no division of labour and onlymanuallabour was used. At first there was no clear division between the craftsmen who made the goods and the trader who sold them — both functions were performed by the same person. The workshop was a kind of shop for the sale of goods produced in the same workshop. Later trade grew too and craftsmen separated themselves from selling their goods.
The artisan’s workshop
The medieval workshop was a small-scale enterprise. It occupied a small room and only a few people worked in it. They were the master-craftsman, one or two journeymen and two or three apprentices. As a rule, the members of the master’s family worked in the workshop too.
There was no machinery in the workshop. Only primitive hand instruments such as knives, hammers, drills, files or hand-operated tools. The medieval workshop was based on manual labour.
Although the master-craftsman was the owner of these tools and instruments, raw materials and ready articles, he himself worked side by side with the men whom he employed. It took many years to become a good craftsman. Any young boy who wanted to learn a craft had to become an apprentice to a master. The apprentice had no right to leave his master before he completed the term of his apprenticeship. He lived with his master who gave him food, clothes and shoes and promised to teach him all the secrets of the craft. The apprentice did the less skilled jobs in the workshop and had to help with the housework in his master’s home.
The life of the apprentice was very hard. He was bound to work for his master for seven or even more years and during these years his master often scolded and beat him hard. After seven years the apprentice would become a workman and for his hard work he would receive wages. The workmen were called journeymen - from the French joiirnee, meaning “day”, because they were paid by the day. They were free to change their master and even to look for work in another town.
The medieval workshop was, thus, a small-scale enterprise where there was no division of labour and onlymanuallabour was used. The labour productivity of the medieval craftsman was very low. For example, it took a skilled locksmith fourteen days to make a good lock.
As the population of the towns grew and more goods were demanded, both crafts and trade grew too and they required more time and energy and skill. The craftsmen began to devote themselves entirely to their crafts. Alongside with the travelling merchants, tradesmen engaged in home trade appeared. They made up a special class of men who devoted all their time and energy to the business of trading. Thus trade and handicrafts gradually became the occupations of different groups of townspeople.
Medieval guilds
The master-craftsmen of the same trade who lived in the same town united into societies which were called craft guilds. Each craft had its own guild. The right to organize a guild was granted by the owner of the land (king, abbot or powerful lord). Nobody had the right to produce or sell goods in a town if he was not a member of a guild. Each guild in the town had its guildhall where the master-craftsmen met from time to time. The charter they adopted for their guild obliged all the guild-members to follow its rules. The charter set up a certain standard for the finished product. There were severe punishments for those who broke the rules. The master-craftsmen elected the elders who headed the guild and saw that all the guild-members followed the rules. The guild fixed prices on the articles. The guild charter designated how many journeymen and apprentices the master could employ and how many hand-operated tools could he keep in the workshop. Other rules did not allow the craftsmen to work at night and on holidays. These rules were made in order to help each small producer to sell his goods and to prevent the craftsmen from competing with one another.
In the 11th-13th centuries when the town crafts began to grow the guild system was of great importance. The guild was a military organization; it had its municipal guard detachment and a levy of guildsmen to fight against the enemies of the town. It was also a religious society. A merchant or a craftsman was supposed to be a Christian. The guildsmen went to church together. They had their own saint that was considered the patron of their craft. Often they built their own chapel where a priest conducted services in honour of their patron saint. On holy days the guild arranged joint festivities. All the guildsmen contributed to the Church.
The guild had a special fund to help needy craftsmen and their families. If a guildsman fell into debt through illness or accident the guild would help him to start anew. If he died his guild would take care of his wife and children.
Besides, the guild protected its members from the competition of the non-guildsmen. In the 11th-13th centuries natural economy still existed in England and the bulk of the population produced all the necessities of life themselves. That is why the demand for goods at the market was very low and the competition of the non-guildsmen was dangerous. It was very important for the townsmen to produce articles of higher quality than those produced by the village artisans.
The guild also tried to prevent competition among the guildsmen themselves. It forbade them to win over each other’s customers; it limited the production of each workshop so as to ensure the sale of goods for every craftsman. A system of payment by money instead of by services grew up in towns. As a result, the number of craftsmen in towns increased and new crafts appeared. English craftsmen became highly skilled and some of the goods they produced were among the best in Europe. Of all trades the most important to England was the wool trade.
Culture in Middle ages
Christian ideology was predominant in feudal Europe, and England was no exception to the rule. The majority of the cathedrals and monasteries were built late in the 11th and early in the 12th cc. primarily by French architects and craftsmen in the so-called Romanesque style. Later on Gothic architecture was introduced.
During the reign of the first Norman kings after the Conquest, three languages existed side by side within the kingdom: Latin as the language of the clergy and the learned, French as the language of polite intercourse and English as the language of the wide masses of the people. The English, or rather, the Anglo-Norman literature of the 11th-13th cc. reflected the complicated linguistic situation quite faithfully: church literature was in Latin, the so-called chivalric poetry was predominantly French, while folk-lore continued to develop in Anglo-Saxon.
QUESTIONS FOR CONTROL
1. What caused the rise of the first towns in the 11th century?
2. Why did the separation of crafts from agriculture take place in the 10th – 11th centuries and not earlier?
3. How did medieval towns differ from villages?
4. How did the craftsmen live?
5. What kind of enterprise was the medieval workshop?
6. Describe the life of apprentice and journeyman. What were the differences between them?
7. What was the medieval guild? How was it administered?
8. What urgent problems did the first townspeople have to solve? How did the guild system help them to solve the problems they faced?
9. What role did the medieval guild play in the life of its members?
10. What was the Guild’s Charter about?
11. What do you think caused the division of labour?
12. What caused the separation of trade from crafts?
13. How did the architecture of the towns develop?
14. What styles were predominant in architecture in the 11-12th centuries?
15. What languages dominated in the life of Englishmen in the 12th century?
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