Introduction
Nearly a millennium after his death, William the Conqueror remains one of the towering figures of English history. His invasion in 1066 and victory at the Battle of Hastings irrevocably transformed England, ushering in a new ruling dynasty, elite class, language, and culture. But William‘s legacy is a complicated one, perhaps most notably his lasting reputation for extreme cruelty and savagery in his subjugation of the Anglo-Saxons. This article will reexamine that reputation, putting William‘s actions in the context of his times while also wrestling with the ethical implications of conquest and the use of violence to enforce foreign rule.
The Nature of William‘s Cruelty
There is no denying that William employed ruthless methods to solidify his grip on England in the years following his coronation. Between 1067-1070, he launched a series of brutal campaigns to put down English rebellions that had arisen against Norman rule. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a contemporary account, paints a grim picture of the destruction inflicted by William‘s forces:
"He caused castles to be built and oppressed the poor…He was given to avarice and greedily loved gain…He took many marks of gold and many hundred pounds of silver from his people, with little need. He was fallen into covetousness and altogether loved greediness."
Modern historians have filled in the details of these campaigns with archaeological evidence and additional written sources. Historian David Bates describes how William‘s armies laid waste to wide swaths of the country with a scorched earth strategy, burning villages, slaughtering livestock, and leaving farmlands fallow. In the winter of 1069-70, William marched his army from the Midlands into the North, crushing rebel forces and inflicting what Bates calls "a vast amount of destruction which affected the whole of the northern shires."[^1]
The Domesday Book, a comprehensive survey of England‘s lands and landholders compiled in 1086, offers a glimpse of the staggering toll. It shows that 75% of the manors in Yorkshire that had been thriving before the conquest were described as "waste" – abandoned or nonproductive – two decades later.[^2] Historian Paul Dalton estimates that across the North, 150,000 to 200,000 people may have died from war-related famine in this period.[^3]
Conquest and Colonialism
But as shocking as these actions may seem to us today, it‘s important to understand them in the context of medieval statecraft. In the 11th century, the gruesomely efficient projection of force was the norm for rulers across Europe. Contemporaries like Matilda of Tuscany and Alfonso VI of León deployed similarly harsh countermeasures against rebels. Earlier Viking and Anglo-Saxon monarchs were certainly no less violent. Seen in this light, William‘s cruelty takes on a more transactional character. It was the price of doing business for a conqueror.
Where William‘s rule took on a more unique caste was in its explicitly colonial nature. The Norman Conquest represented not just a change of rulers, but the wholesale replacement of one people‘s elite by another. As historian George Garnett writes:
"Within twenty years of 1066 the English aristocracy had been almost completely swept away and replaced by a new French-speaking…nobility. A massive amount of land had changed hands, and the upper echelons of lay society, ecclesiastical and secular government had been recast."[^4]
By one estimate, the percentage of land in England owned by the Anglo-Saxon elite plummeted from 100% in 1066 to just 5% in 1086.[^5] In turn, England‘s new Norman lords embarked on a frenzy of castle-building to cement their dominance, with 500 to 1,000 new fortresses constructed in the decades after the conquest.[^6] Domesday Book attests to at least 50 previously-thriving English boroughs that were demolished to make room for castles.[^7]
Beyond the physical and economic upheaval, this Norman takeover also meant the imposition of an alien language and culture. French quickly became the tongue of the court, administration and elite society, while English was relegated to the lower classes. Thousands of French words began to enter English vocabulary. Intermarriage between Anglo-Saxon and Norman was rare for a long time. Together, this amounted to what historian Hugh Thomas calls England‘s transformation into "a colony in a colonial world."[^8]
From this standpoint, William and the Normans‘ actons take on a different, even more sinister cast, one very familiar to other subjugated peoples throughout history. Their cruelty was not just political pragmatism, but a tool of colonial domination.
A Conqueror‘s Complex Legacy
At the same time, a balanced assessment of William‘s reputation also requires acknowledging some of the ways in which his reign did signal a cultural shift, even if its impact was limited only to the aristocracy.
One of the clearest breaks with the past was William‘s surprising reluctance to execute his political opponents. Where Anglo-Saxon and Viking rulers had routinely put captured rivals and rebels to death, William displayed a notable tendency to imprison or exile them instead. In a typical case, when he defeated the Anglo-Saxon earl Waltheof‘s rebellion in 1076, he "held him in fetters" for a year before sending him to Normandy rather than killing him outright.[^9]
Historian Matthew Strickland argues that William‘s restraint here "marked a dramatic break" with earlier practices and "a critical stage in the process by which aristocratic norms of conduct came to be moderated by clerical notions of leniency and mercy."[^10] In effect, it was a harbinger of the medieval chivalric code that placed greater value on the lives of elite combatants.
Nonetheless, as Strickland himself acknowledges, the benefits of this cultural shift were strictly limited to the nobility, while the common people continued to suffer horrifically in warfare. And ultimately, Waltheof‘s story didn‘t end happily. Though spared execution at first, he was eventually beheaded under pressure from William‘s Norman magnates.
William‘s legacy, then, resists easy moralizing. He was a man very much of his moment, a brutal conqueror who operated according to the harsh realities of 11th-century geopolitics. But he was also an unusually thorough and transformative one whose impact is still felt today. The Normans didn‘t just defeat the English; they replaced them, and remade their society in the process. It was a revolution in medieval statecraft and colonialism as much as a military victory.
Perhaps the most telling evidence of William‘s long shadow is the persistent ambivalence with which he is remembered in English popular memory. While the Battle of Hastings and the broader Norman Conquest have long been enshrined as defining events in the grand narrative of English history, William himself has remained a more elusive, contradictory figure.
Tellingly, it wasn‘t until 1897 that a public statue of William was erected in England, a far cry from the romantic lionization of figures like King Arthur or Richard the Lionheart.[^11] In 2002, BBC History Magazine asked its readers to vote on the "10 Worst Britons" of the past millennium. William the Conqueror came in 10th.[^12]
In the end, William the Conqueror‘s reputation for cruelty and savagery isn‘t exactly fair; he was, in many ways, simply an extremely successful conqueror in a brutal time of widespread conquest and cruelty. But given the far-reaching impact of the world he violently forged, it‘s understandable that he remains a polarizing and controversial figure nearly 1,000 years after his death. Love him or hate him, he‘s impossible to forget.
References
[^1]: David Bates, William the Conqueror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 181.[^2]: Thomas H. Dyer, "Ravaging of the North," Archaeology of the Conquest (March 1986), 41.
[^3]: Paul Dalton, Conquest, Anarchy and Lordship: Yorkshire, 1066-1154 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 20.
[^4]: George Garnett, The Norman Conquest: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 24.
[^5]: Daniel Gerrard, The Church at War: The Military Activities of Bishops, Abbots and Other Clergy in England, c. 900-1200 (London: Routledge, 2017), 172.
[^6]: Jim Bradbury, The Battle of Hastings (Stroud: The History Press, 2010), 248.
[^7]: Robert Liddiard, ed., Anglo-Norman Castles (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002), 83.
[^8]: Hugh M. Thomas, The Norman Conquest: England after William the Conqueror (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 61.
[^9]: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, trans. Michael Swanton (New York: Routledge, 1998), 208.
[^10]: Matthew J. Strickland, War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066-1217 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 160.
[^11]: Mark Hagger, William: King and Conqueror (London: I.B.Tauris, 2012), 3.
[^12]: "Who Were the Worst Britons?", BBC History Magazine 3, no. 8 (August 2002), 52.
