William’s 15 chiefs of staff were given huge estates to hold for the new king. In turn, they granted land to their officers: 170 tenants-in-chief.18 It took only a few years for the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy to be completely replaced by a Norman, French-speaking elite, which protected itself so successfully that it has survived to this day.19 The top tier of landowners in England remains Norman: 70 per cent of the country is owned by 10 per cent of the people,20 most of them descendants of Norman invaders.21 The Grosvenor family, headed by the Duke of Westminster, descend from William of Normandy’s master huntsman, Hugh le Grand Veneur, and are the richest family in England after the monarchy, owning around 140,000 acres of land in Britain, including much of Mayfair and Belgravia in London.22 Asked the secret of his success, the late duke said that it helped to arrive with William the Conqueror.

  The Anglo-Saxons had an elective monarchy – their king was chosen by a parliament of lords – but William won the throne in battle and then left it to his sons. His lords copied him: lands were inherited by male heirs, however distant, however incompetent, overlooking all daughters. The Normans brought patriarchy to England, formalised it in law and kept women from the throne for five centuries.

  One of the few women to be given land was William’s niece Judith. She was endowed with properties and married to a defeated Anglo-Saxon lord: Waltheof, Earl of Northumbria. The attempt to lock the earl to the invaders failed: Waltheof rebelled against William in the ‘revolt of the earls’ and was executed, leaving Judith a wealthy widow. When she defied King William, refusing to marry his next choice, he took her lands back.

  The most powerful woman in England, Queen Matilda, the wife of William, was less honoured than Anglo-Saxon queens, who had been anointed with special holy oil and crowned as monarchs in their own right. Matilda was only crowned in 1068, nearly two years after William, and she was not consecrated with holy oil.23 She did get the work: her husband gave her huge royal lands and fees and the title of regent, relying on her to rule the Duchy of Normandy when he was in England, and England as regent in his frequent absences. Lords’ wives also devoted their lives to managing the lands and houses, workers, industries and communities for the men of their family to inherit. Wives became unpaid managers, tenants for life, not owners.

  William’s great demand of England proved to be money to pay his army and to send back to Normandy. But the England he invaded was a subsistence economy with little use for coins or precious metals. Goods produced locally were bartered and exchanged; people only needed cash for luxuries or rarities that could not be made or grown locally. William tried to stimulate a cash economy, encouraging Jewish merchants from Rouen to settle in England from 1070. Under church laws against usury, Christians were not allowed to loan money and charge interest, and the work was given to Jewish people. Their reliability and honesty led to Jewish financiers managing huge state and private debts, essential to the European economies but hated by their debtors. In London, Jewish men and women settled in the district called ‘Old Jewry’ close to the Guildhall, and by the twelfth century had expanded to other towns, specifically protected by the king as his wards, with the freedom of the highways, so that they could travel the kingdom on business.24 At the end of the century, the Jewish population of England would be less than 0.25 per cent but contributing 8 per cent of taxes, and English people found themselves deep in debt to Jewish moneylenders – their resentment sowed the seeds of antisemitism.25

  After the invasion, everyone had to earn coins to pay taxes. This hit women food producers who fed their family and bartered surplus produce for other goods in the community. As cash became the only measure of value, women’s domestic production looked as if it were done for free and women’s work at home appeared to be unpaid.

  Such a woman was Juliana Strapnel, a tenant renting her cottage and lands in the manor of Ingatestone, in Essex, in 1275. She paid most of her annual rent in labour: she had to do two days of ploughing and one and a half days of weeding, and one and a half days of harrowing the manor fields. She had to help with haymaking and reap one acre at harvest time. Three times a year, she had to work on projects for the manor – like road repair or ditching – and join in nut gathering in autumn.26 She also worked for herself: ploughing, sowing, weeding and harvesting her own strips of land in the common fields, growing her own food and cooking it, raising her own animals, collecting firewood, cutting turves and gleaning after the harvest. She probably brewed her own ale and baked bread and pies in the communal village oven. She was self-sufficient, highly productive, bartering for the things she needed. The new taxes changed this economy. Juliana had to earn cash, selling her surplus food – not bartering – in the market, spinning for a fee for a manufacturer or working for another employer for cash.

  William I kept a fifth of the entire lands of England for himself, as the royal estate, and decreed new laws to preserve vast areas for royal hunting, as much as a third of southern England. ‘Forest law’ became one of the most hated consequences of the invasion – excluding men and women from the land that supported them. The Rime of King William, written in 1087, probably by an Anglo-Saxon cleric, names forest law as one of the worst sins of the king, second only to taxation:

  He had castles built

  and poor men terribly oppressed.

  The king was severe

  and he took many marks of gold and

  hundreds of pounds of silver from his underlings . . .

  . . . He established many deer preserves

  and he set up many laws concerning them

  such that whoever killed a hart or a hind

  should be blinded . . .

  His great men complained of it,

  and his poor men lamented it;

  but he was so severe

  that he ignored all their needs.

  But they had to follow above all else

  the king’s will,

  if they wanted to live

  or hold on to land . . .27

  This land grab took thousands of acres from previous owners and from community use as ‘common land’ and made them the private preserve of the king. The forest law that applied in these huge areas of England was the will of the invading king; there was no other law or courts. Anglo-Saxon kings had hunted for food and for sport, but they had never created royal forests for their exclusive use, nor banned people from the land. For women, who specialised in harvesting and gathering, the countryside that surrounded their villages offered a free source of wild fruits, herbs, nuts and mushrooms, firewood, turves and grazing land. They fished in streams and rivers, gathered rushes for making baskets and to scatter on floors. They took game and wild birds, collected eggs and put beehives on meadows and moorland. On the coast, they made salt, fished and gathered crabs, lobsters and shellfish. The medieval women lived off the land that was all around them, some of it named as ‘common land’ for all to share in grazing and harvesting rights, some as ‘waste’ where anyone could build a shelter and take up residence. To the women, whose first occupation was food production, the English countryside was both home and larder.

  But by the end of the 1100s, about a quarter of England had been closed to the English people: a third of all southern England and all of the counties of Essex and Huntingdonshire. There was frequent, probably daily resistance against the forest laws, and opposition to the expansion of the hunting preserves resulted in the Forest Charter of 1217, which restored some rights to the people and limited the expansion of the protected lands. Hunting and trespass were recorded, prosecuted and punished with deaths and fines, but the women and children who carried out daily minor incursions and pilfering were rarely caught and rarely punished. Women’s defiance of forest law became a civil resistance that would be seen again and again in the following centuries, as women defended their rights, their communities, their food, their markets and traditions.

  One such defence was recorded in the late 1100s at a Suffolk abbey, where the chronicler Jocelin of Brakelond made a rare mention of women who came to the aid of a cottager who had fallen behind with his rent. When the abbey cellarer arrived to collect payment or take goods and food in lieu of rent from a tenant near Bury St Edmunds, he and his men were set upon by ‘old women brandishing their saucepans, threatening and abusing them’.28 The village women won the battle, frightened the bailiffs away, and the cottager kept his furniture for another day.

  The Normans defended their land grab by building castles: more than 535 of them were thrown up in a hurry in the 30 years after the invasion, by a patriarchy that knew they could only keep their new territory by force. People took to arms to oppose the Norman invaders, and the medieval poet Baudri of Borgeuil described the English resistance: ‘In a pathetic effort at defence, an unwarlike legion of girls, old men and boys gird up the city walls with whatever they can find.’29

  Other rebellions were led by Anglo-Saxon women. Gytha, mother of the dead king Harold, organised a revolt at Exeter, before taking a group of women into voluntary exile from the new rulers.30 There were uprisings on the Welsh borders from 1067 and a year later in the north of England, where an army of 900 Normans were massacred. This would provoke the ‘Harrying of the North’ by William that devastated Yorkshire, causing famine and depopulation, and prompted guerrilla warfare in the east of England led by Anglo-Saxon rebel Hereward the Wake in 1070.

  In 1075, Emma de Gauder (1059–99) defied William I to marry the man of her choice, Ralph, Earl of East Anglia, and recruited him into the ‘revolt of the earls’ with her brother against William’s rule. When the rebellion collapsed and her husband fled, Emma – aged only 16 – held William’s own castle of Norwich against him for three months, forcing the king to make a truce with her, granting her and her troops safe passage to Brittany, where she rejoined her husband. She died while travelling with him on the First Crusade.

  One of the other leaders of the revolt, Anglo-Saxon Waltheof, Earl of Northumbria, became a focus for female disobedience when the nuns of Romsey Abbey declared him a saint and his execution by William a martyrdom. Abbess Athelitz proclaimed his tomb to be the source of miracles, causing Archbishop Anselm to write to the abbess to order her silence, without success. He had to threaten to suspend Romsey Abbey’s right to celebrate mass before Abbess Athelitz bowed to the greater force, ended the cult and asked Waltheof’s son to leave Romsey village.31

  Country

  England was a rural country with a small population of about 1.5 million people speaking Scandinavian languages, different regional English dialects and overnight about 6,000 new Norman invaders speaking Old French. Most of the country remained empty, called ‘waste’: coastal plains, floodland or moorland, mountains and fens, forests and heath. Small wooden-built villages nestled around the stone-walled old manor houses, or sprang up around the new castles, where the ex-military commanders lived. Strips of common land, farmed by each family, petered out into moorland, heath or forest, where packs of wolves and wild boar roamed, and charcoal burners – often teams of women – set up little camps. Vast areas were unknown to anyone but the few poor families who scraped a living from hovels at their edges, or the vagrants or outlaws who used them as hiding and meeting places. Higher lands were used as pasture for flocks of sheep, or left as wild desolate moorland, unmapped and untouched except for the occasional mines or quarries worked by families: husbands, wives and children digging side by side. It was cold and damp, thanks to a ‘little ice age’ in the last quarter of the 1200s. Travellers needed a guide to take them from one village to another, and most poor people never left their village except to go to the nearby market. People could drown in the fords or even in the deep puddles that had opened up on the old Roman highways built centuries before. But the pilgrim ways linked one hospitable abbey to another, beacons of culture and wealth, often run by elite women, offering healthcare, education and a bed for the night. The inns and alehouses of the bustling and lively market towns, run by women who brewed and baked, were busy with men and women visiting for the day, or making the journey of a lifetime to the holy shrines in churches, monasteries and co-ed abbeys and women-only convents – unique places where women could hold power, manage wealth, study and create a life independent of men.

  Abbeys and Convents

  The only Anglo-Saxon women to retain their wealth and power through the conquest were the women of the convents and abbeys. To buy support for his invasion, William I gifted a quarter of all the agricultural land to the church and as the religious houses flourished, so did the elite group of women who managed them. They did not answer to any man in England but reported directly to the pope in Rome, with status equal to a bishop or lord. They created the great religious houses of Wilton, Romsey, Barking, Shaftesbury, St Mary’s Winchester and Wherwell, which were famous for their wealth, landholdings, culture and prosperity.32

  There was a rush of women to enter the safety of the convents after the invasion. Seven or eight new houses for women were founded after 1066 and in the next century, the new cult of Mary, Mother of God, inspired another 100 new houses, offering places for 3,000 women.33 Theodora, in 1096 Huntington, broke her betrothal promise and, disguised as a man, ran away from home before her parents could force her to marry. Once safe, she discarded her disguise, became an anchoress – a female hermit – and took her vows.

  In the twelfth century, the new doctrine of ‘purgatory’ – the belief that sinful souls must wait in discomfort before ascending to heaven – created a new business for enclosed, or ‘cloistered’, women. Patrons hoping for a fast track to heaven left rich endowments in their wills, to buy masses to be sung by the chantry choirs, creating a new income stream for the chantry and careers for musician nuns.

  Under Norman rule, English abbesses improved their wealth, power and status, and some became advisors to the new royal court. In England as in Europe, abbesses were drawn from upper-class families and moved easily between church and court. Abbess Jean de Valois was authorised by the pope himself to leave her post at Fontenelle Abbey to arrange a peace between her son-in-law Edward III of England and her brother Philip VI of France. Mother superior Hildegard of Bingen advised four popes, two emperors and several kings and queens. Queens endowed nunneries, and sometimes retired to them; junior royal daughters might take the veil. Young Matilda, who would marry Henry I, proved an unruly postulant at Romsey, pulling off her black veil and stamping on it. But when crowned queen, she chose her ladies-in-waiting from her convent friends, and after her death they returned to a religious life at the Kilburn convent.34

  Nunneries increased their wealth and influence by charging high fees to novices – they could demand the full dowry of a noble-born girl. This became such a successful way to raise funds that in 1257 it was noted as an abuse by the general church council. Senior nuns could rise to be brilliant administrators: managing employees, working many acres of land and running a huge nunnery as a big business. A class of professional women accountants and managers served as priors, sub-priors and treasurers. Choir mistresses organised the complex music of the church services, while the sacrist cared for the precious vestments, and the fratress was responsible for the tables and linen. An almoner took charge of donations to the convent or abbey and the overall finances; a chamberer looked after the beds and bedding; a cellarer supervised the food and often ran the home farm; a kitchener oversaw the kitchens; an infirmarian managed the hospital, where nuns worked as surgeons, physicians and nurses, diagnosing, prescribing and treating the sick of both sexes. A novice mistress supervised and taught the novice nuns; scholars copied, translated and wrote books; and artists illuminated manuscripts, carved sculptures and painted murals. The buildings themselves were huge mansions, almost palaces, the lands extensive.

  Some enclosed women became famous scholars, musicians, theologians, mystics, philosophers or saints. Euphemia (?1100s–1257), the abbess of Wherwell in Hampshire, was an architect, builder and gardener. Elected to her post on the death of the previous abbess her aunt, Euphemia doubled recruitment at the abbey from 40 to 80 nuns. She built a mill, a hall, rebuilt two manor houses at Middleton and Tufton, planned and built a homestead, a hospital, a dormitory and latrines with a fully working sewage system. When the old abbey bell tower collapsed, she designed a new one, and conceived and built a new sanctuary with 12-foot-deep foundations. She created a landscape garden with a meditation area – all this before the profession of architecture was invented or any theoretical training was available.

  Before the arrival of the printing press, the nunneries were centres of research and writing, book-copying, illustrating, book-making, publishing and book collecting in their great libraries. They were places of education for girls, teaching novices and pupils reading, writing and in some cases mathematics, music and languages. Convents became so successful as schools that the first written instructions for hermit women forbade them the distraction of teaching and told them to study alone.Enclosure and solitude developed into a female speciality after the Norman invasion, and the first instruction for all hermits by Aelred of Rievaulx was addressed exclusively to women.35 More women than men lived as hermits in England from 1100, until the Reformation of the church ended the practice.36 Julian of Norwich was one of them.

  Some women outside the church chose to live and work together in communities called ‘beguinages’, sometimes following the hours of the convent but without taking religious vows or submitting to the control of the church. The Maison Dieu at York in the 1300s may have been one of these – more like a spiritual female commune than a convent.37 Some widows chose to become ‘vowesses’, taking a vow of celibacy on the death of their husband and following the hours of a convent, and some even separated from living husbands and managed their secular households according to convent hours and nunnery vows.