[1066 - 1485] Conquest and Kingdoms

The year 1066 began with a dead king and a contested throne, and it would end with the shattering of a world. On a hill near Hastings in October, two armies faced each other. One, the English, stood shoulder-to-shoulder behind a wall of shields, their axes ready. The other, an invading force of Normans, relied on cavalry and archers. For hours, the English shield wall held firm against charge after charge. But then, a rumour spread: the Norman leader, Duke William, was dead. As some of the English broke ranks in pursuit, William lifted his helmet, revealing his face and rallying his men. The tide turned. Late in the day, an arrow, fired high into the sky, struck the English king, Harold, in the eye. With his death, the shield wall broke, and Anglo-Saxon England was hacked to pieces alongside its king. A new, brutal era had begun. William, now known as 'the Conqueror', did not win a kingdom; he took it by force and held it by fear. When the north of England rose in rebellion, he unleashed a campaign of terror so savage it became known as the 'Harrying of the North'. Entire villages were torched, livestock slaughtered, and crops destroyed, leading to a famine that killed over 100,000 people. To cement his rule, he imposed a new social order: feudalism. The land was no longer held by free Englishmen, but was granted to William’s loyal Norman barons in exchange for military service. England was now the personal property of a foreign king. To understand exactly what he owned, William commissioned an unprecedented survey in 1086: the Domesday Book. Agents were dispatched to every corner of the kingdom to record every hide of land, every plough, every mill, and every peasant. It was a staggering feat of administration, a cold, hard inventory of a conquered nation. The results were recorded in two vast Latin volumes, a document that gave the king unparalleled knowledge and power over his subjects. At the same time, a new architecture of dominance arose. Hundreds of motte-and-bailey castles—earthen mounds topped with wooden forts—were hastily erected, soon to be replaced by imposing stone keeps like the Tower of London. These were not homes; they were garrisons, their stone walls a constant, brooding reminder to the English of who was now in charge. This new reality was reflected in the very language people spoke. The ruling class—the barons, bishops, and officials—spoke Norman French. Justice, politics, and high culture were conducted in this foreign tongue. The common people, the vast majority of the population, continued to speak Old English. For centuries, England was a bilingual nation, and the two languages slowly merged, creating the Middle English of Chaucer, a tongue enriched with French vocabulary but still fundamentally English at its core. Daily life for a peasant, or serf, was one of grinding labour tied to the land of their lord. They lived in simple wattle-and-daub huts with thatched roofs, often sharing the single room with their animals. Life was dictated by the seasons and the demands of the lord of the manor, a cycle of ploughing, sowing, and harvesting that had changed little for centuries. After a period of vicious civil war in the mid-12th century known as 'The Anarchy', where law and order broke down completely, a new dynasty emerged, the Plantagenets. The first, Henry II, was a man of immense energy and ambition, ruling over a vast Angevin Empire that stretched from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees. He sought to restore royal authority and bring order to the kingdom, particularly by establishing a system of common law. But his drive for control led to his most infamous conflict. He appointed his friend, Thomas Becket, as Archbishop of Canterbury, expecting an ally. Instead, Becket fiercely defended the Church's independence from royal power. Their friendship soured into a bitter feud, culminating in Henry’s furious outburst: "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" Four of his knights took him at his word. They rode to Canterbury Cathedral and, on the 29th of December 1170, murdered Becket on the steps of the altar. The scandal rocked Christendom, and Henry was forced into a humiliating public penance. Henry’s son, King John, inherited none of his father’s skill and all of his arrogance. He was cruel, greedy, and militarily inept, losing the vast French territory of Normandy. His incessant demands for money to fund his failed wars pushed his barons to the breaking point. In 1215, at a water-meadow called Runnymede on the River Thames, they forced him to affix his royal seal to a document they had prepared: the Magna Carta, or 'Great Charter'. It was not a revolutionary text for the common man; it was a list of demands by and for the powerful, seeking to protect their own rights and property from a tyrannical king. Its most famous clause declared that "No free man shall be seized or imprisoned... except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land." At the time, its impact was minimal—the Pope soon annulled it, and it plunged the kingdom back into civil war. But the principle it established—that even a king was subject to the law—would echo down the centuries, forming a cornerstone of liberty in the English-speaking world. The 14th century brought two new terrors from the continent: a seemingly endless war and a disease of unimaginable horror. The Hundred Years' War against France, begun by Edward III to press his claim to the French throne, saw English armies achieve stunning victories against the odds. At battles like Crécy (1346) and Agincourt (1415), the French nobility, clad in shining plate armour, were scythed down by a terrifyingly effective English weapon: the longbow. Wielded by peasant yeomen, these six-foot bows of yew could fire arrows that punched through armour at over 200 yards, revolutionising medieval warfare. But just as the war began in earnest, a far deadlier enemy arrived. In 1348, the Black Death swept into England. It was the bubonic plague, spreading through fleas on black rats that travelled aboard merchant ships. The symptoms were horrific: agonizing swellings in the groin and armpits, fever, and vomiting of blood. Death was almost certain and came within days. The plague cared nothing for social status, killing peasant and priest, lord and lady alike. Within two years, it had wiped out between a third and a half of England's population—perhaps 2 million people. The scale of the catastrophe is difficult to comprehend. Villages were abandoned, fields lay fallow, and the air was thick with the stench of death and the smoke of funeral pyres. The world that emerged from the shadow of the plague was irrevocably changed. With so many dead, labour was in desperately short supply. For the first time, peasants could demand higher wages and better conditions. Many abandoned their ancestral manors in search of better work, a freedom they had never known. The old feudal bonds were dissolving. When the government tried to impose a poll tax to fund its wars, the simmering resentment exploded. The Peasants' Revolt of 1381 saw a massive mob march on London, burning manor houses and demanding an end to serfdom. Though the revolt was brutally crushed and its leaders executed, the message was clear: the old order was dying. This long period of conquest and turmoil culminated in a final, bloody spasm of civil war in the late 15th century. The Wars of the Roses were not a popular uprising, but a dynastic struggle for the crown itself between two rival branches of the Plantagenet family: the House of Lancaster, represented by the red rose, and the House of York, by the white. For thirty years, the English nobility tore itself apart in a vicious cycle of battles, betrayals, and executions. Kings were made and unmade with bewildering speed. The Lancastrian Henry VI, a pious but mentally fragile man, was deposed by the charismatic Yorkist, Edward IV. After Edward's death, his brother Richard seized the throne, becoming Richard III. His two young nephews—the rightful king and his brother—were placed in the Tower of London and then vanished, presumed murdered, forever tainting his reign. Richard's rule was short and contested. The final act came on a field in Leicestershire. On August 22nd, 1485, at the Battle of Bosworth, Richard III faced the army of a relatively obscure Lancastrian claimant, Henry Tudor. In a desperate gamble, Richard led a cavalry charge directly at his rival. He was unhorsed, surrounded, and cut down, fighting to the last. Legend says his crown, which had rolled under a hawthorn bush, was picked up and placed on Henry Tudor's head. With Richard's death, the Plantagenet dynasty, which had ruled England for over 300 years, came to an end. Henry became King Henry VII, marrying a Yorkist princess to unite the warring houses. A new age, the age of the Tudors, was dawning, built upon the bones of England's long, violent, and formative medieval centuries.