Tales From the Tower of London

Tales From the Tower of London Read Free Page B

Book: Tales From the Tower of London Read Free
Author: Mark P Donnelly
Tags: History, London
Ads: Link
him. Leaderless and defeated, the Anglo-Saxons surrendered to William of Normandy, now the Conqueror of England.
    After the battle, King Harold’s mother and his mistress, the beautiful Edith Swansneck, managed to identify the king by sorting through the mountain of corpses one at a time. Among his many other wounds, it is likely that King Harold had been shot through the eye with an arrow during the final volley from the Norman archers. Despite the women’s pleas, and the queen mother’s offer of gold equal in weight to her son’s body, William would not give them the dead king for a decent Christian burial. There would be no martyrs to stand between William and the throne of England.
    William, Duke of Normandy, may have become William I, Conqueror and King of England, but he had made no friends in his new realm and he knew it. His next job was to ‘pacify’ the land and control what William referred to as ‘the fickleness of the vast and furious population’. But William understood the art of domination as thoroughly as battlefield tactics. Like most early medieval princes, he ruled essentially by terror. To consolidate his power, he devastated the land of anyone who might even conceivably put up resistance, systematically destroying the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and duchies and wiping out remaining Viking strongholds in the Danelaw, so recently freed by King Harold’s victory at Stamford Bridge. Anglo-Saxon noblemen were stripped of their titles and nearly all land was confiscated to be divided among the Norman lords.
    Rather than waste time and resources trying to take London in a straight assault, he simply devastated the surrounding land for miles in every direction and sat down to wait for the city to capitulate. His tactics were so brutal, even by the standards of the day, that one of his closest supporters, Ordericus, was appalled by the devastation: ‘William in the fullness of his wrath ordered that the corn and cattle, with all the farming implements and provisions, to be collected on heaps and set on fire.’ For months, the Normans laid waste to such vast tracts of land that the resultant famine would not subside in some areas for seventeen years. The compiler of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle prayed ‘may God will an end to this oppression’.
    If all this were not enough, to make certain his new subjects did not forget who controlled their country, William began a programme of castle building that would last for the rest of his life. Most of these early castles were little more than one or two wooden buildings inside a series of wooden palisade walls, which could serve as supply depots and redoubts for army patrols. Thanks to all the free Saxon labour he now commanded and an average construction time of only three to four months apiece, within a few years there were somewhere in the neighbourhood of eighty castles dotting the English countryside.
    But above all, William knew, as had the Romans and Anglo-Saxons before him, that the key to controlling England was controlling London. It not only guarded the mouth of the Thames estuary, but major roads from every point on the island converged on the capital. London alone boasted three of the new wooden fortresses. William chose the best situated of these London strongholds as his base of operations.
    When the Romans moved into Britain in the first century AD they made London, which they called Londinium, the administrative centre of the province. Surrounding the city with more than 3 miles of stone wall 8 feet thick and 20 feet high, they constructed a massive fortress in the south-east corner to protect the town and the Thames harbour. Although the Romans abandoned Britain in the fourth century, many of their fortifications remained and William set about repairing the surviving sections of wall around London, building his timber castle on the foundations of the ancient fortress.
    In 1077, more than a decade after the Norman invasion, London was devastated

Similar Books

Scary Out There

Jonathan Maberry

Top 8

Katie Finn

The Robber Bride

Jerrica Knight-Catania

The Nigger Factory

Gil Scott Heron

Rule

Alaska Angelini

Scars and Songs

Christine Zolendz, Frankie Sutton, Okaycreations

Going to the Chapel

Janet Tronstad

Not a Fairytale

Shaida Kazie Ali