the Thames to retreat.
Perhaps if Cnut or his successors Harold Harefoot and Harthacnut had lived longer, his reign might have marked out a very different path for Britain’s history, in joint sovereignty with Scandinavian countries. ‘Anglo-Saxon freedom’ was not all myth. ‘Freemen’ had obligations of military service, but also the rights of security of property and protection under the law. The Domesday Book accordingly distinguishes between serfs and freemen. But Cnut’s heirs died early and the survivor of the Wessex dynasty, Edward the Confessor, was recalled from exile in Normandy to take the throne in 1043.
From then on, Norman nobles took an increasing interest in England. When Edward died in 1066 the Witan, a group of about sixty lords and bishops, met to decide who would become the next king of England. They chose Harold, the son of Earl Godwin of Wessex, over William of Normandy, to whom Harold had previously promised the throne. The Norman invasion and the Battle of Hastings reversed that decision.
So began the Norman conquest of London, the last hostile foreign invasion the capital has endured to date. Centuries later, in the English Revolution, Levellers would complain that ‘the Norman Yoke’ had robbed ‘free-born Englishmen’ of their rights. Perhaps they were inventing less, and remembering more, than modern historians have been willing to allow.
2
Lords, Lollards, Heretics and Peasants in Revolt
I am the saviour of the poor.
William Longbeard
THE ‘COMMUNE’ OF LONDON
Westminster Abbey was consecrated in 1065, but the first monarch to be crowned there did not last twelve months. Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex, lost his life the following year at the Battle of Hastings. Despite his victory, William of Normandy knew that he couldn’t control England without occupying London. As the twelfth-century Song of the Battle of Hastings had it: ‘London is a great city, overflowing with forward inhabitants and richer in treasure than the rest of the kingdom. Protected on the left side by its walls, on the right side by the river, it neither fears its enemies nor dreads being taken by storm.’ And indeed William could not conquer London by storm. An assault on London Bridge failed, and so William laid waste to Southwark and the countryside for miles around. He did, however, eventually gain the City but not without meeting opposition:
Upon entering the city some scouts, sent ahead, found many rebels determined to offer every possible resistance. Fighting followed immediately and thus London was plunged into mourning for the loss of her sons and citizens. When the Londoners finally realized that they could resist no longer, they gave hostages and surrendered themselves and all they possessed to the most noble conqueror and hereditary lord.1
William was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. The London that William now ruled was already the largest and richest city in his kingdom, the centre of national and international trade, but it was not the political or royal capital. William’s need to guard himself ‘against the fickleness of the vast and fierce population’ led to the construction of three towers: Baynard’s Castle, Montfichet Tower and the White Tower. The first two were later demolished, but the limestone White Tower still dominates the Tower of London, surrounded now by the walls added in the thirteenth century.
The City government that would come to dominate the affairs of the capital was still embryonic. There would be no mayor for 100 years and the two sheriffs, royal appointees responsible for delivering tax to the Crown, were named the leading officials. But the City was already divided into twenty-four wards, and the aldermen who would represent them on the City’s governing council were beginning to appear. The trade guilds and fraternities were also in formation.
An important opening episode in the City of London’s long struggle with the Crown followed the death of Henry I in 1135. The succession was disputed between Henry’s daughter Matilda and Henry’s nephew, Stephen of Blois. The powerful group of nobles backing Stephen got their way, but at the cost of plunging the nation into nearly twenty years of civil strife. Chroniclers describe this period as one in which ‘Christ and his saints were asleep’, while Victorian historians called it simply ‘The Anarchy’.
Stephen’s base of support was in south-east England, but the Crown was too weak to impose order. This gave the City of London an unusual moment of leverage. In Stephen’s time of greatest danger, while held captive in Winchester by Matilda in 1141, he obtained the support of London by granting it virtual commune status. This is the closest the City came to being a self-governing urban confederation able to collect its own taxes and choose its own officials on the European model. In return, when Matilda tried to have herself crowned queen while she held Stephen captive, the masses of London rose and attacked her and her supporters at their pre-coronation feast. They were driven from the City and Londoners also provided the arms to free Stephen from his captivity in Winchester. The commune status of London was reasserted in 1191.
London first began to express its independence from the Crown in the twelfth century. This was, of course, nothing resembling democracy but rather the ability of the aldermen to select their own sheriff following the model of city states, like those in northern Italy. But the concessions that the City was able to extract from weak or cash-strapped monarchs fell far short of the ideal. Italian Republics or the communes found in Flanders and the Rhineland were widespread in the feudal period, but not in England. They were based on a pledge of allegiance among citizens that released them from aristocratic or royal control. This pact offered a completely different form of social coexistence: a ‘community of equals’ governed by a social contract.2 London never achieved this status, but its struggle for autonomy was a feature of the conflicts with the Crown in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What the London elite wanted was the liberty to appoint their own administrative leader, run their own legal system, gather their own taxes, and regulate their own trade. Even powerful monarchs might be minded to grant some of these wishes, if they thought it would enhance London’s prosperity and therefore their own income.
London’s would-be governing classes only began to achieve some autonomy in the reigns of King Richard I and King John, between 1189 and 1216. Richard’s absence in Palestine gave the City the chance to ally with John against Richard’s unpopular deputy, William Longchamp, Constable of the Tower. In return for supporting John’s claim to rule in Richard’s absence, London’s aldermen were given the right to choose a mayor. On Richard’s return, however, the City refused to back John’s attempt to take the throne in 1194. Yet when he eventually became king in 1199, and upon payment of a gift of 1,500 marks, he allowed the commune to stand. For the further sum of 3,000 marks the City was permitted to elect its own sheriff.
Paradoxically, King John’s defeat by the barons who forced him to sign Magna Carta in June 1215 at Runnymede was the event that finally institutionalized the concessions he had made to the City years before. In order to buy London’s loyalty against the barons, John granted the City a new charter in May 1215 that introduced the principle of an annually elected mayor. But a minority of the City sided with the barons and, despite John’s concessions, opened the gates to the barons a few days later. This allowed the barons to use the City as a base for their negotiations with the king, and as a result the City’s ‘ancient liberties and customs’ were inscribed in Magna Carta itself. From now on the sheriffs were elected by the City oligarchy and increasingly subordinate to the mayor. And the mayor was elected from among the aldermen each October at a gathering of the ‘commonalty’, those who had gained by inheritance, purchase, or apprenticeship the right to name the ‘citizen’ or ‘freeman’ of the City. From now on, mayor and aldermen became increasingly responsible for the law in the City.
This was obviously not democracy in the modern sense, since it excluded apprentices, masterless men, wage labourers, the poor in general and women in total. But neither was it a complete sham, for these
