Great Tales From English History by Robert Lacey

Anglo-Saxon coronation ceremony - a call for the people’s consent to his rule. Questioned in both English and French as to whether they freely accepted William as their lord, the assembled congregation obediently burst into shouts of ‘
Vivat Rex!
’ - ‘Long live the King!’ But outside the abbey, William’s guard of Norman knights misinterpreted the pandemonium. Maybe they panicked, or maybe they wanted an excuse to panic. The mounted warriors went on a rampage, setting fire to the surrounding buildings and slaughtering any Saxon not quick enough to get out of their way.
    England’s first Norman king might have asked for popular consent inside Westminster Abbey, but the burned houses nearby made it clear that the Conqueror was well named - his power rested on force of arms. William’s first project in the New Year was to throw up a wooden fortress on the banks of the Thames, the original Tower of London. The new arrival wished to make clear who England’s new boss was, and castles became the trademark of his reign. The weathered stone towers and battlements of Norman England remain romantic landmarks to this day. But they were anything but romantic to the Anglo-Saxons who were conscripted to dig the ditches for the moats, raise and ram solid the great mound of earth on which the central fort would stand, then live the rest of their lives with the fortifications towering above them.
    In the twenty-one years of his reign, William and his followers built hundreds of castles. Wherever there was trouble or discontent, the Normans rode in on their destriers, taught the agitators a lesson, then raised a castle to make sure it did not happen again. They built in wood to start with, throwing up pallisades of sharpened stakes that were replaced with stone in later years. And if a community had been particularly irksome, the castle would be built on the site of Saxon homes that had been trashed.
    There is some evidence that William’s original intent was to be conciliatory. He tried to learn some English, and for several years he kept most of the local English sheriffs in place. The new king’s early official documents bear the names of senior Anglo-Saxon office-holders, still in positions of high trust at court. But when William went home to Normandy in 1067 to check on the affairs of his duchy, a series of uprisings broke out. Three of Harold’s sons by Edith Swan-Neck tried to raise Devon and Cornwall in revolt. Danish raiding parties sailing up the east coast found themselves being welcomed by the anti-Norman locals. The north rose, and Mercians on the Welsh border joined forces with the ever-defiant Welsh.
    It was time to take off the kid gloves. Back in England, criss-crossing the Midlands and the north with his armies, William mercilessly punished neighbourhoods that had risen against him. Villages were destroyed and the countryside burned so that it remained derelict and uninhabited for years. Scorched earth, ethnic cleansing - all the horror words apply. It was a time of famine and tears that seared itself on the folk memory as the tyranny of the ‘Norman Yoke’.
    Just one centre of resistance held out. In the tradition of King Alfred, it was only in the Fens, in England’s watery wastelands of treacherous swamp and brackish lagoons, that some local defiance survived. Hereward of Peterborough, a Saxon gentleman who had been deprived of his lands by the Normans, retreated into the East Anglian marshes around Ely with a band of fellow freedom fighters.
    For a time Hereward received help from the Danish raiders in the area - and in 1070 he joined forces with them to plunder the Abbey of Peterborough. But when William bought the Danes off, the English kept on fighting. Hereward’s guerrilla warfare became the symbol of native resistance. As the Saxon squire used the mists and marshes of the Fens to outwit his lumbering enemy, folk tales multiplied of his bravery and cunning, and of his legendary sword, which he