William the Conqueror
c. 1027-1087
Norman-English Military Leader and King
Although he did not personally invent a single item or develop any specific piece of technology, William the Conqueror had more impact on the material culture of the English-speaking world than all but a handful of individuals. He is best known, of course, as the leader of the Norman invasion that in 1066 supplanted the Anglo-Saxon kings who had ruled England for some six centuries. The Norman invasion—the watershed event in all of English history—brought with it innovations in warfare, political organization,record-keeping, taxation, architecture, and most of all language that are still felt today.
William descended from a line of Vikings or "Northmen"—hence the name Normans—that had lived in northern France for about two centuries prior to his birth. The illegitimate son of Duke Robert I of Normandy (d. 1035) and a tanner's daughter named Herleve, William struggled for many years with the stigma surrounding his birth and his maternal family's low place in society. In 1035, Duke Robert went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and before leaving convinced the nobles within the duchy of Normandy to recognize William as his legitimate heir. He died on the return trip, and in the years that followed young William faced enormous difficulty in establishing and maintaining control over Normandy. Knighted at 15, he survived a rebellion at age 19, and by his early twenties had emerged as a powerful leader. In 1052 or 1053 he married Matilda of Flanders, and they enjoyed a happy marriage that produced four sons and five or six daughters.
By the early 1060s, William turned his attention to England, on which the Normans had entertained designs ever since one of their own, Emma, married Ethelred the Unready (968?-1016) in 1002. The couple's son Edward the Confessor (1003-1066) became king in 1042, and when he died in early January 1066, many Normans took this as a sign that the time had come to place their claim on the throne of England. In this they were opposed by Harold (c. 1022-1066), leading member of the Godwinesons, the dominant family in Anglo-Saxon England.
Taking advantage of the fact that Harold was distracted by a conflict with Norway, William landed his army in southern England on September 28, and the next day took the town of Hastings. The English and Normans fought at Hastings on October 14, and though Harold's army put up a good fight, it was no match for the Normans. Harold himself died in battle, and William received the English crown on Christmas Day.
From a technological standpoint, the Norman conquest was interesting for several reasons. History records few notable land-sea invasions—certainly not on the scale of William's, which involved 400 large and 1,000 small craft—prior to 1066. As such it served as a prototype for another famous invasion, this time from England to Normandy, in 1944. The Norman conquest was also recorded for posterity in the era's equivalent of film, a 231-(70-m) ft-long scroll called the Bayeux Tapestry.
The latter shows the Normans' improvements in the technology of warfare, particularly larger, deeper saddles with stirrups. The superiority of Norman cavalry combined with their use of skilled archers helped them gain the advantage over the Anglo-Saxon infantry at Hastings, and further determined the direction of medieval military tactics. For the wounded, the Normans brought with them a new variety of transportation, a four-wheeled cart bearing a hammock strung between two poles called the hammock-wagon.
As he had done earlier in Normandy, William spent much of his time as king securing his power and faced a number of foes, including his son and half-brother. To secure his control, he reformed England's political organization, greatly strengthening the royal power and centralizing government while granting local earls fiefs that ensured their loyalty to the crown. As part of this process—and with an eye toward increasing the tax burden of the English people—in 1085 he ordered an intensive study of the nation's lands and properties, the Domesday Book, by far the most thorough census up to its time.
Meanwhile, the most lasting effects of the Norman invasion began to work their way into English culture. Norman architecture would prove highly influential on English buildings for centuries to come, but even more important was the Norman effect on the English language. The French-speaking Normans brought a whole new vocabulary to England, whose language was closely related to German. As a result, English today has an amazing array of words, some derived from the French and Latin, others from the German, and historians of the language cite 1066 as the dividing line between Old English and Middle English. A final emblem of William's lasting mark is the fact that, though his direct descendants ceased to rule in 1135, all English rulers to the present day can trace their ancestry back to him.
In spite of his greatness as a leader, William's latter years were sad ones. He lost Matilda in 1083 and grew so extraordinarily fat that on a military campaign in the summer of 1087 he injured his stomach on his pommel or saddlehorn. The wound led to an illness from which he would never recover, and he died on September 9, 1087. His body had become so bloated that the pallbearers had a hard time fitting it into the tomb and in the struggle to wedge it in, thecorpse burst open. The smell of William's decomposing body filled the church, an inglorious end to an otherwise glorious career.
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