Britain may be an insignificant little rock in the North Atlantic,
but for centuries, the island we call home
was coveted by foreign powers,
making fear of invasion a fact of life.
From north to south, east to west,
2,000 years of threats have left their mark.
In this series, we'll seek out these reminders,
from weaponry and castles to warships,
as we tell the story of a centuries-long obsession
with attack from overseas.
From my headquarters here at Walmer Castle,
I'll be exploring how a thirst for power,
both here and abroad, led to some of the most turbulent periods
in British history...
Why did Henry VIII find himself
at loggerheads with the rest of Europe?
..and getting my hands on some truly extraordinary artefacts.
And this is the original?
Engineer Professor Danielle George and historian Dr Onyeka Nubia
will be travelling the UK in search of the physical evidence
that tells of a centuries-long struggle...
For me as an engineer, it's functional.
It looks like it's built to last.
..and experiencing how those foreign threats impacted the lives
of ordinary people.
There were people in Britain feeling that this was going to happen.
I'm Professor Alice Roberts,
and this is the story of Fortress Britain.
CHURCHILL: To defend our island, whatever the cost may be.
1066.
The date that everyone knows, the year that William the Conqueror
invades England, triumphs at the Battle of Hastings,
seizes the crown and establishes the Norman dynasty.
Simple.
Popular history has a habit of boiling things down
to just a few headlines like this,
and we lose so much of the story along the way.
In fact, securing Norman control
was a bitter struggle that lasted years
and would exact a heavy human toll.
This is the real story of the Norman takeover.
It's a tale of how fierce invaders became defenders,
battling to secure their new kingdom,
where determined locals offered brutal resistance,
prompting an epic building programme and a battle for hearts and minds.
The Normans are saying to the local people that we are here to stay.
As with all great stories, we must start at the beginning.
Joining me at Walmer Castle is English Heritage curator
and medieval expert Roy Porter.
Roy, it's 1066, and William the Conqueror,
who I'm going to say is this person here, has invaded.
Now, who were the Normans and why does he want to invade England?
OK, well, the Normans are originally Vikings
and they have settled in northern France in the early 10th century.
By 1066, they're essentially French -
they speak French, they're Christianized,
but they have a sense of being set apart from people around them.
They remember with relish their legendary history,
and they regard themselves
as being people who are skilled in the arts of war.
Right. And William believes he has a rightful claim
to the Kingdom of England.
And that's why he goes on this great enterprise,
this great gamble of 1066... Yeah. ..and brings
an invading force across.
Let's bring his invading force over.
Shall we stick them here in... Is this Normandy?
That's Normandy. We need to bring them across.
I'm struggling a bit with this map, though,
so tell me what's going on here.
I can recognise Britain, I think, and Ireland here.
And this is just a small part of the wider map.
So tell me about this map.
OK, so this is a mappa mundi.
This is a map of the early 11th century,
probably based on Roman models.
And it gives you an impression of how the world was seen
by the sort of people we're talking about today in 1066.
And you can see that Britain, the British Isles,
are on the extreme edge of the map.
OK. So focusing back on north-west Europe, then,
William the Conqueror has decided he's got a legitimate claim
to the throne, brings his army over.
So let's bring them all over like that.
So here he is, then, he's arrived.
He's won the Battle of Hastings.
He's waiting to be crowned in London.
But presumably this isn't job done.
You're absolutely right, Alice.
I mean, effectively, he's in the south-east of England.
He's subjugated that.
He's won the support of the people in London.
But William will know already that he could be facing threats
both within England and beyond the borders of England as well.
In fact, one of the people who has accepted William
is Edgar Aetheling, who is a member of the English royal family.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, we know that he is going to travel
to Scotland and cause all sorts of problems in the north of England.
We know that over the seas in Norway and in Denmark
there are jealous eyes looking at England and thinking,
"Well, if William can achieve this, so can we."
And not only that, also, the sons of King Harold
are travelling to Ireland,
and just a year later they're going to be coming back to England
and causing problems in the south-west of the country.
So William has established himself here,
but the job is very much not done.
He has an invading army of around 7,000 to 8,000 people, we think.
But that's not enough to subjugate a whole kingdom.
And in fact, what William does at the beginning of his reign
is to promise that he's going to rule like any other English king,
that he will obey the laws
which English kings had observed in the past.
It's a really curious sleight of hand, isn't it,
to come in as a Norman conqueror,
put yourself on the throne and then say,
"And now I am English."
That's right. And that is what William tries to do.
But of course, what is going to emerge over the next few years
is inevitably a great change of policy, as he's confronted
by various groups of English people who don't want him.
William needed to win over his new subjects,
and hoped he could do so with his coronation.
And just as significant as the ceremony itself
was where it would take place.
Westminster Abbey.
Dr Onyeka Nubia has travelled to London
to find out more about this momentous occasion.
It was here that William was crowned King of England
on Christmas Day, 1066.
But what would happen outside the Abbey
would be just as important as what was going on in there.
I'm meeting medieval historian Dr Charlie Rozier,
who will set the scene and help me understand
what happened on that fateful day.
So, Charlie, what would this area have been like
at the time of the Norman Conquest?
So Westminster Abbey itself is much smaller,
not like the later medieval Gothic building that you can see behind us.
Outside of the Abbey, there are monastic buildings.
And then beyond the monastic complex,
you've got a town feeding into the City of London.
So you've got shops and houses
where people are coming and going and so on.
It must have seemed strange for many of the local English people,
the fact that Harold had been crowned here the same year, 1066.
Yeah. And I think from William's perspective,
that's key as to why he wants this coronation
at Westminster Abbey. And so Harold being crowned there
means this is what English kings now do,
and William wants to be the King of England,
he wants to show his power, so it's crucial to him -
you've got to be crowned in Westminster Abbey
by a leading member of the English Church
if you want to be recognised as King of England.
And so who's inside? Who's at the coronation?
So we know from Chronicle accounts
that all of the major abbots from England are at the coronation.
All the major bishops from England are also at the coronation,
and some bishops from Normandy
have come over to play their part as well.
We're also told that the Norman nobles are there
and the Anglo-Saxon nobles are there.
And so you could infer that some of the people who fought each other
at the Battle of Hastings a few weeks earlier
are now being made to come together and reconcile with each other
at this act of coronation.
So it looks like it's a recipe for disaster.
Put yourself in the shoes of those people who are present.
If you're an English nobleman
who's likely to lose some of your land and influence
under this new Norman King, the new incoming Norman aristocracy,
there's possibly a bit of tension there. Yeah.
If you're a Norman who's risked your life at the Battle of Hastings,
you are very much a numerical minority in this English kingdom.
You're perhaps nervous as well.
So these groups of people have come together for the coronation.
How would they communicate?
Right. Well, that's a really good question, because you might think
the English speak English and the French speak French
and they can't communicate with each other.
Some of the leading Anglo-Saxon nobles had been
under heavy Norman influence for a couple of generations,
and so it's likely that some of them
may have been able to understand French.
But we can probably infer that the ceremony itself
is largely taking place in English because it's the King of England
being crowned in England by English bishops.
So what happened at the coronation?
William was crowned by a leading member of the English Church.
The English nobles are invited to proudly acclaim William
as the new King of England,
and then the Normans do it in their language as well.
And William has placed a guard outside of Westminster Abbey,
probably his most loyal and his hardiest troops.
And when they hear all the shouting inside,
they think there's an argument, they think there's a riot.
And so the Chronicle sources tell us
they set fire to houses around the Abbey
because they think they're trying to beat down a riot.
They think they're trying to fend off the first argument
against William's reign.
And essentially everybody inside the Abbey leaves,
probably in quite a hurry.
And Orderic Vitalis, the chronicler, tells us William
completes his coronation rites trembling in fear.
We know William is a hardy and experienced campaigner.
For him to be trembling,
it must have been something really, really serious. I mean,
that's one chroniclist's account, so we don't know
it definitely happened, but if I was there, I'd probably be trembling.
The local people who lived around the Abbey,
many of their houses would have been destroyed.
And it would confirm your suspicion... Yeah.
..that the Normans are brutal and savage
and that William's rule is going to be unpleasant and nasty.
It's certainly an unpleasant and nasty start for those people,
definitely. I'm laughing. We shouldn't be laughing.
One of the chroniclers, Orderic Vitalis, tells us
that then the English never trusted the Normans ever again
after what happened at this event.
And you can see how that may come about.
If you're living in the local populace
and you see these things happening,
maybe if you're one of the English nobles, you're thinking,
"Well, this was a disaster.
"How is the rest of this reign going to go?
If you're William, you're probably thinking,
"Maybe I've got a bit more on my plate
"than I thought I was going to have."
The violent debacle surrounding William's coronation
left him in no doubt that securing his kingdom
would be far from straightforward.
William may have been crowned King of England,
but his hold on the country was still precarious.
To maintain control, he had to have the military edge
over his opponents.
Just one look at the Bayeux Tapestry will tell you that the two sides
at the Battle of Hastings were similarly equipped.
And whilst William might have dispensed with
much of the Anglo-Saxon ruling elite in 1066,
that still left hordes of ordinary Anglo-Saxons
across the country ready to fight to protect their lands.
With just a small army at his disposal,
William had to assert his authority as the rightful king of England.
Deep in the Surrey countryside,
Professor Danielle George is keen to find out what that actually meant
for those on the front line.
I'm trying to imagine what would have been going through
William's mind in those early days.
Outnumbered, with potential enemies on all sides.
If his army didn't perform, he stood to lose everything.
I'm here to meet Andy Deane from the Royal Armouries
to discover who was facing the Norman forces
as they fought their way across the country
and how they used the weapons they had at their disposal.
So pretty much it doesn't matter if you're Norman, Saxon, Viking -
this is what you're going to be wearing, is it?
If you're right at the top of the tree
and you're the one with all the money, yeah.
I mean, everything that's on you at the moment
was extraordinarily exclusive.
We think probably 5%, 6%, 10% tops would have all this kit.
Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the front line would look impressive.
But then behind that, the masses that are going to get stuck in
would almost look like a peasant army,
but bristling with all sorts of agricultural weapons.
So assume I'm a rich Norman fighter.
I've got all the gear, I've got a good sword. Mm-hm.
You're a farmer. You've got an axe, let's say.
It doesn't feel like a fair fight.
It isn't. You've got all the advantages
because you've been training your entire life.
But if I was to fight you and I had less kit on,
there's always a way, because partly,
farmers, agriculturalists live with weapons.
They're called tools.
So you have the kit and equipment on a daily basis
around you to survive.
If I was to come cleaving down... Good. Well done.
Now you've done that. But now I do that... Oh, no!
Now the back edge of that is serrated.
And I just slice through there and you're already dead.
I forget about you. Forgotten your name, forgot everything.
That's how quick. Or again, you pull down and you kick in,
or you come straight up and then you move on.
I get overexcited. I feel like I want an axe!
And it wasn't just axes the Norman army had to worry about.
So for me, a little knife like this is perfect.
I know how to skin an animal.
That means I know how to skin you.
So I put this down, and once we're this close,
it's just that - you've gone down
and the next person finishes you off.
I would be relentless, if I could, as a warrior.
But even as a farmer, this is everything. This.,.
You do not leave this battlefield unless you're victors.
And if you're not a victor,
the next victim is your family, is your village. Right.
You often sort of see peasant armies sort of downtrodden.
They've been given the worst kit in the wardrobe
from the film department. It's not that.
When they get there, generally they're galvanised,
because it's a battlefield.
You are either going to be victorious,
or if you're not victorious,
there's either slavery or death waiting for you.
The Normans were clearly facing a determined and well-organised
local population, which begs a question.
So Andy, if the Normans had the same in terms of equipment
as, you know, all the other armies, what gave them the edge?
I think it's the relentlessness.
And once it becomes a disparate group of men
fleeing in different directions, you only need a small professional army
to be relentless, to basically
keep the fight out of the locals and the peasants.
For them, at a lower level, it's just new management.
Now, a lot of the Norman army, after the initial victories,
went back to France.
So those that were left had to deal with things quickly.
Now, very easy to get a Saxon lord who didn't like the people
in East Anglia or the people in Cumbria or Northumbria
to go and get them to do the fighting for you.
Because I was brought up thinking that, you know, the Anglo-Saxons
are the goodies and the Normans are the baddies.
But actually what you're saying is this new management,
the Anglo-Saxons are fighting the Anglo-Saxons.
Anglo-Saxons were always fighting the Anglo-Saxons.
I mean, it wasn't all peace and harmony
before the nasty Normans turned up.
And that's how big nations have always been able to take
vast tracts of land, because they... Same with the Romans,
you get the locals to do the work for you.
And the Normans were quite clever in the sense that they retain
the names of towns, they retain the names of shires.
English is still spoken today. We're not speaking French.
Great leaders understand their...
Not only their armies, but they understand the populace,
and they also understand the human condition.
FLAMES CRACKLE
Very, very occasionally
we have the opportunity to come within touching distance
of those ancient warriors.
Roy, we've got these incredible archaeological artefacts here,
including an 11th-century helmet.
And these are rare objects.
We're looking at armour and weaponry
that dates to nearly 1,000 years ago.
Yeah, I mean, it's an absolute privilege
to stand this close to it, isn't it? Yeah.
How many examples of this type of object do we have?
Well, this is the astonishing thing, Alice.
There are literally just a handful of these in museum collections
across the globe. And it's lovely to be so up close to it
and to actually see how it's made,
because I can see that it's made out of four pieces of sheet metal
which have been joined together to create
this almost cone-like shape. Yeah, yeah.
Which again is exactly what you see in the Bayeux Tapestry.
Yeah. And you can see how the English women
who embroidered the tapestry
were attempting to depict something which people at the time
would recognise as a helmet just like this one. Yeah.
And then what about this sword? I mean, that's a very long sword.
Is that something that would have been used on horseback,
do you think? When you look
at this sword, look how short the tang is.
So essentially this is where the handle would have been. Yeah.
And that's a handle large enough for one hand. Yeah.
So somebody on horseback could have used that, a mounted knight.
It's entirely possible an English soldier
in the shield wall at Hastings could wield a sword like this as well.
I always feel that when I'm looking at weapons
where you're admiring the craftsmanship,
but at the same time, these are all about
creating injuries and even killing people.
They are. I mean, something like this
is a tool to injure and to kill,
but it's an expensive tool to injure and kill with,
and therefore, it's also a demonstration of status.
This is something you have to spend money on.
Well, I haven't been trained, but I am allowed to pick this up,
which is such an honour because it's an incredible object.
Lifting it up like that.
There we are. That is...
And you can see it has a double cutting edge,
on either side, but also sharpened at this end
so you can thrust with it as well as cut with it. Yeah.
I mean, it's quite a terrifyingly
formidable weapon, isn't it?
I think what it brings home to us
is just how brutal fighting on the battlefield was.
As William moved on from invasion to the consolidation and defence
of his new land, he needed a way to ensure his small army
could operate effectively.
Danielle has travelled to East Anglia
to discover exactly how he achieved this aim.
So you're the new French-speaking ruler of England.
You can imagine the locals here aren't overjoyed at your presence.
You need a safe haven for your knights,
a power base from which to crush rebellion.
So what do you do? Well, if you're William,
you build lots and lots of castles.
Mighty stone castles sat atop steep-sided mounds,
or mottes, as they're known,
have become the ultimate symbols of Norman rule.
But in the early years of William's reign,
when his outnumbered forces urgently needed protection,
they'd have looked very different
to the structures that remain to this day.
This is Castle Acre in Norfolk, where I've arranged to meet
Dickon Whitewood from English Heritage.
OK, Dickon, what are we looking at here?
Well, we're looking at a completed motte-and-bailey castle
that in its form as we see it today, although ruinous,
dates to about 1140.
So about 80 years after the Conquest.
The initial castle dates from about 1070,
which rather than a raised mound, it was simply an earth ditch.
And because when the Normans first arrived,
they often needed to erect castles quite quickly,
it would have had wooden palisades.
But these hastily erected fortresses were clearly a stopgap measure,
and the relentless process of their evolution
into fully fledged castles is testimony to
the Normans' confidence that they were here to stay.
This must be a logistical nightmare for them.
Who's building it? How fast are they building it?
Where are they getting the materials from?
How are they getting them here?
Well, some of our early evidence suggests that, for example,
at York and Dover, it only takes the builders eight days
to build the castle, but we're not really sure what form that took.
The larger mounds, however, modern archaeologists
have actually estimated it would take 240,000 man-hours to build...
Wow! ..which is equivalent to about 100 men working a ten-hour day
for over nine months.
But it's probably unlikely that 100 men
could ever actually work for that long consistently. Yeah, yeah.
So a mound or a motte might have actually taken
perhaps a couple of years or more to build.
So it's a logistical nightmare and obviously very expensive.
And probably they're using material from the local area.
And there's some evidence that at the Conquest,
the Conqueror actually brought over some materials
to build a castle as soon as he landed. Really? Yeah.
What, like a flat-pack sort of...? Almost, yes.
Because that would have obviously provided him with
a beachhead to launch his invasion. But most of the castles in England
obviously were built over a much longer time
and took far more resources to build
because they were on such a larger scale.
The man responsible for building this castle was William de Warenne,
who became the first Earl of Surrey.
He fought alongside William at Hastings
and was most certainly reaping the rewards for his loyalty,
amassing extensive lands across 13 counties.
It's a lovely view from up here.
But I mean, was this sort of strategically chosen? Why here?
There were strategic thoughts,
but there were probably more important considerations, too.
So the castle lies where the Peddars Way,
which is an ancient trackway into East Anglia,
meets the River Nar in the valley.
But probably more important than that,
it was already, in the Norman Conquest,
the site of an Anglo-Saxon
sort of what we think is probably a fortified residence.
We even know the name of the owner - he was called Toki.
And so it seems that when William de Warenne takes over this land,
he deliberately builds over the Anglo-Saxon buhr,
or fortified settlement, so that his rule
is seen as a sort of progression
and it's legitimated by the Anglo-Saxon site. Right.
Got you. OK, so paint the picture for me.
What would we be looking at here?
Well, in the 1140s, at least, right in front of us now
would have been a huge tower, perhaps up to 19 metres tall,
that would have commanded the landscape, as well as the mound.
Both of these things were Norman imports.
And they want the wow factor, don't they?
You can imagine if you're coming up to this castle
and people being like, "This looks amazing.
"This must be an impressive Lord." Yeah, very much so.
And I think that was always
consciously in the mind of the builders.
The idea was actually outward display in order to show the wealth,
the status and the power of the man who could build it or owned it.
The Normans would build a staggering 500 castles across the country
in just three decades, with the overwhelming majority
built in the years just after 1066.
It's a breathtaking construction programme,
even by modern-day standards.
And these Norman Castles completely transformed our landscape.
William may have had his army and castles,
but it wasn't always enough.
Just three years into his reign, rebels in the north
teamed up with a Danish invasion force
to present the most dangerous challenge to Norman rule so far.
Being seen not as an invader but as the rightful King of England
was never going to be easy.
After the invasion, William had appointed
a couple of Anglo-Saxon lords
to oversee the North of England, but the first one had been murdered
and the second one had joined a small rebellion.
So William appointed a Norman lord,
but he was murdered as well.
By September 1069, the area was in full revolt
and the rebels had seized York
and slaughtered the entire Norman garrison.
William's brutal reprisal
would become known as the Harrying of the North.
Onyeka has travelled to County Durham to meet an archaeologist
specialising in the Norman Conquest of the North of England,
Dr Alexandra McLean.
So he's coming north to try and secure his kingdom.
And does he act with restraint and calmness and patience?
Not really, yeah.
Is he...? Well, he tried. I think the important part about that
is he tried. He tried three times to give them earls.
He tried to give them native earls.
Like, "Maybe they'll get on a little bit better with these guys." No.
And so what does he do?
He's decided, "OK, I need to make a statement of power here.
"I also need to secure my kingdom in a functional way."
And he decides to lay waste to much of the region.
Why would he do that?
If he wastes that land, it means that any armies
that the rebels want to raise, they can't provision them.
So do you feel that the laying waste actually took place
in the way in which people often say,
you know, no rock left upon another rock,
you know, that kind of thing. Yeah.
Biblical kind of Armageddon. Destruction.
Or do you think that some of that was exaggerated?
Well, it's really interesting, the different sources that we have,
and the ones that happen contemporaneously,
so things like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
the writs of the Archbishop of York,
are in agreement that the Harrying happened
and that it was definitely a quite brutal attack.
The ones where we get the really dramatic detail, so,
more than 100,000 dead,
people resorting to cannibalism and eating the dogs and cats,
or that there was no village inhabited between York and Durham -
all of those are in the 1120s and 1130s,
so it's a good 60 to 70 years after the Conquest.
But I don't think, or at least in my personal opinion,
that we can take those as the gospel truth.
We do definitely have evidence that the North of England
took the conquest harder than a lot of other places.
But the archaeological evidence shows a lot of continuity.
When you excavate, you don't see layers of burning
or complete destruction of crops.
We know that some time in between 1069, when the harrying happens
and 1100, that the North is back on its feet.
The debate continues as to whether the harrying of the North
was an act of brutal oppression or a military necessity to secure
control of England.
But it is certain that whilst Kings start wars, it is ordinary people
who have to fight them.
As Onyeka's discovered, unpicking the truth of events that happened
nearly 1,000 years ago can be challenging.
And with so little evidence, vast swathes of life can go unreported.
Roy, we seem to have almost entirely focused on men so far.
We've got the most iconic image here of the Norman conquest
in the form of the Bayeux tapestry,
and I can't see very many women in it.
You're sadly right.
In fact, it's a rather startling fact, I think,
that within the main frieze of the tapestry,
there are 626 figures, of which only three are women.
Three?
It's incredible, isn't it?
And in fact, to add insult to injury,
those three women are heavily outnumbered by the 190 horses
and 35 dogs.
Do you think that's accurate or do you think there would
have been women coming with those soldiers?
Well, the written information suggests that it's accurate,
but we know that women came soon afterwards, at least in some cases.
So some of those Normans are bringing their wives over later.
Are others of them marrying into existing English families?
Very much so.
One of the best ways in which you can legitimise your position
as an alien, so to speak, is to marry into local leading families.
What about when we get down to lower socioeconomic levels of society?
How much do we know about what women's daily lives
were like and what kind of rights they had?
Well, our understanding of women's daily lives is really based
primarily on archaeology, more than the historical
documentation because of the limitations
of the source material.
But I think it's fair to say that generally speaking,
the lower down in society you go,
the less impactful
1066 appears.
And then we're seeing here a woman whose face is less happy.
This is a scene of the tapestry where William's troops are purposely
ravaging the countryside around Hastings before the battle,
in order to draw Harold down.
And unfortunately, as ever, women are victims of conflict in 1066.
We can be fairly certain about that because we've got
a really interesting piece of evidence which points to it.
There's a letter which is written by Archbishop Lanfranc.
He's Archbishop of Canterbury.
He's writing in the late 1070s, writing to
Gandalf, Bishop of Rochester.
And in his letter he actually says, "As to those who, as you tell me,
"fled to a monastery, not for love of religious life,
"but for fear of the French,
"if they can prove that this was so by the unambiguous witness
"of nuns better than they, let them be granted
"unrestricted leave to depart."
He actually says, "This is the king's policy and our own."
So what he's saying there is that there are women
who have fled to convents and monasteries in order to escape
the Norman and French men who have arrived in England.
And they may be women like this one in the Bayeux tapestry
who are fleeing from a ravaging army.
But they could also be women who are trying to escape
from what you've just described.
These marriages with Norman Lords and knights
who have come to England and they're trying to establish
themselves within local society.
So we're seeing some of that violence that women suffer
through conflicts that we're still familiar with today.
Sadly so.
As William sought to stamp his authority on England, violence
and warfare were a fact of life for all sectors of society
and nowhere more so than in the Cambridgeshire Fenlands
of the early 1070s, where a fierce sense of independence
was still burning brightly and had ignited what would become
the last great Anglo-Saxon uprising of William's reign,
the Ely Rebellion.
Danielle has travelled there to meet archaeologist Ben Robinson,
who as a local, grew up hearing tales of Anglo-Saxon derring-do.
Let's take a walk along the bank here.
So Ben, what was happening here 950 years ago?
This wasn't an obscure corner of England that no-one cared about.
This was, in many ways, part of the economic beating heart
of the new kingdom that William was trying to conquer.
It was a productive landscape.
And you had places like Ely, the abbey there.
That is one of the wealthiest abbeys in the country.
And of course, we look to the North Sea, we look to the Danes.
And William was terrified that the Danes would come back over
to claim this country again.
So who's leading the rebellion?
It's really interesting, because all the sort of disaffected,
dispossessed English earls rally to this place.
They recognise it as a place that could be defended.
But one man in particular emerges as the military leader,
and he's a fairly minor fane, so a Saxon lord.
And what's he called? Hereward. Hereward?
He was a landowner.
His lands were taken.
He came down here and he'd already got military experience.
He'd fought on the Continent.
By all accounts, a very, very capable military leader.
And he was a local, he was a Fenman.
And you've got to look at this landscape with fen eyes.
To my untrained eye, the area looks flat, difficult to defend,
and the last place you'd want to start a rebellion.
But then again, I'm not a local.
It's not a flat landscape.
It's a very subtle landscape, it's true.
But 1,000 years ago, there were winding rivers,
meandering, changing with the seasons.
There were swamps.
Very, very different place.
But you got clues to that landscape all around us.
The blackness of the soil there, that's part of the old reed swamp,
part of the old marsh and the lighter colour soils
on the high land.
That's where the stable ground was, the islands. Right.
This is why it's called the Isle of Ely.
And we're looking at the biggest island in the Isle of Ely,
on which Ely sits.
To get his troops onto that island,
William decided to build a causeway, but he made a crucial mistake.
He starts sort of piling in all the heavy materials, the wood,
the stone, the earth, everything he can get hold of.
And he sends his army across.
But here you've got to build light.
It starts to subside and sink into the bog.
It collapses and an apparently knights lost their lives
just struggling in the water and drowning
because of all their heavy armour.
In true Norman fashion, William and his men didn't give up.
They repeatedly tried to build ever lighter causeways,
none of which were successful.
Problem is, while you're building all this, Hereward and his army
isn't just standing there admiring the construction.
They're lobbing projectiles, firing arrows.
You only have to stop the first few people and you've stopped the whole
army for miles back.
But eventually he settled on pontoons.
Ah, right.
This was corralling all the local boatmen and saying,
"We need your boats."
It's basically creating floating bridges.
So, very, very clever.
But how long does it take them to get to that point, though?
Accounts vary.
I mean, some sources say that the isle held out here
for seven years.
That's a bit of an exaggeration,
but it was certainly months, possibly years as well.
So that's the turning point for William then, that pontoon,
that engineering feat?
But there's other accounts that say it was just treachery.
It wasn't the Normans' engineering prowess,
it was the fact that the abbot up there finally decided
this is not going to end well, so I'd better make peace.
Sent someone to help William's army get through the marshes.
Hearing Ben's accounts reinforces the notion that what gave
the Normans the edge was their relentlessness.
And whether it was the pontoon bridge or an abbot switching sides,
I can see how that quality would have been vital in overcoming
the fierce resistance of Hereward's forces.
But whatever the real truth, we do know that a large army of up to
1,000 men did make it onto the Isle of Ely, and with their arrival,
the Ely Rebellion came to a brutal end.
Many of the leaders are blinded.
Hands and feet cut off.
Those that could run away and escape did.
What happens to Hereward?
Hereward?
We don't really know what happened to him.
He sort of disappears from history.
This heroic figure is just gone.
But round here, he's still remembered.
You know, he's a local boy that fought off this invading army.
So you'll see Hereward this and Hereward that around here.
We remember him.
This was to be the last great rebellion that William would face.
And although there are no physical remains of this extraordinary event,
perhaps a more important mark has been left here.
An idea.
A romantic notion of a freedom fighter who refused to accept
the rule of a foreign invader.
And if history teaches us anything, it's that an idea
can be a mighty powerful thing.
William had seen off a whole series of threats that potentially
endangered Norman England.
But now, in order to discourage rebellion and consolidate his power,
he would appeal to a higher authority.
This is Durham, a city that was at the heart
of the Northern Rebellion of 1069.
In its aftermath, the Normans had built a castle here.
Onyeka has come to the city to explore the next phase
of the Norman Conquest plan.
Here, the Normans would construct a new kind of building,
one that would stand alongside their castle, assert their power,
and crucially, influence and shape hearts and minds.
This is the imposing Durham Cathedral.
Although work didn't start here until after William's death,
it embodies his ambition to dominate England with Norman cathedrals.
Emma Wells is an expert on medieval religious architecture
and can help me understand more
about the significance of this building.
So as we're looking at the cathedral,
how much of it is Norman
and how much of it's from a later period?
The sort of bare bones of it, the footprint of it as it stands
is as it would have looked to the everyday man and woman
in 11th century England.
It must have been awe-inspiring.
It is such a vast and imposing,
dominating structure in the landscape.
Because Durham was unique, it had prince-bishops.
Not just bishops, but prince-bishops.
And prince-bishops, what are they?
Prince bishops essentially had both spiritual and temporal powers,
so they were both churchmen and statesmen.
The reason for this is because we're so close
to the borders with Scotland. Ah!
William the Conqueror wanted Durham to be a bit of a buffer state
between England and Scotland, so his solution was to create
the bishops of Durham as prince-bishops. Right.
They could raise an army, they could have taxes,
they could... they had their own mint as well. Ah, I see.
So these are expected to be military men...
Yes. ..as well as religious leaders?
Yes, absolutely. We're seeing warrior churchmen.
It was no accident that the Normans chose this location,
as it was home to the remains of St Cuthbert,
who had long been revered
by worshippers throughout England and abroad.
The politically astute Normans constructed a new shrine
so that his remains would now be within their cathedral.
He became the number one saint in the country, in the nation,
and therefore pilgrims came, and with pilgrims, offerings came,
which meant money, and it was that which really could drive
the construction of this great structure. Right.
If you were walking in here in the Norman era,
it would be awe-inspiring. Yeah.
But it would also be perhaps quite oppressive.
100%! Dominating. That's the feeling that I would get.
I was trying to put myself into the shoes and the mind
of an ordinary labouring person.
Walking in here, I think I would be overawed. Yeah.
I'm not sure that I would find it entirely enjoyable.
The Normans are saying to the local people
that they are the protectors of Christendom,
that they are the protectors of Christianity.
And I think the other thing is that this seems permanent.
Yes. There was a real sense of permanency.
Yeah. This building shows that we are here to stay.
These new Norman cathedrals changed the English skyline forever,
becoming an integral part of this country's history.
Roy, how did things change for people
after the Normans were in power?
The top of society, things changed very dramatically. Mmm.
All the political leaders of English society before 1066
are effectively dispossessed
and they're replaced by a new Norman class
of knights and aristocracy,
so for them, the changes are really profound.
Lower down the social scale...
Well, arguably the changes are less dramatic,
and for some people,
we ought to say that some things actually got better as well.
So if you were a slave,
and around 10 to 15% of the population before 1066
was formerly of slave status,
well, one of the things which will happen over the next 50 years
after the Norman conquest is that slavery will be reduced
and will disappear.
And so the status of those people actually rises.
Not by very much, but it rises.
Language changes as well.
The written language of English sort of finishes,
because English isn't written down any more.
French is written down, Latin is written down...
Yeah. But English doesn't go away.
It remains the language of the majority of people.
What about people's names?
Oh, well, that's really interesting.
That's one of the things which does change,
and it changes really quite early on after the conquest
of the English choosing to adopt Norman names.
And in fact, some of the most popular names
are those which are associated with the Norman ducal house,
so William, Robert and Richard suddenly become very popular.
What you see falling away are the traditional English names,
and there is a slight gender difference in this,
inasmuch that boys are given Norman names
before girls are given them.
But by the 12th century, generally speaking,
it's Norman names, French names which predominate,
and the old English names die away.
And how does this invasion change Britain's role in Europe?
Because now you've got a king of England
who's also a duke of Normandy.
So this is really important for the future of England
and English affairs.
And previous to 1066, there would have been...
Well, we know that there was a lot of cultural links
and political links across the North Sea
to the Scandinavian realms. That changes
So now, because the king of England owns a lot of land
on the other side of the English Channel,
the focus is north-south across the English Channel,
and William's descendants will be the rulers,
not just of Normandy, but of extremely large areas of France.
They will be rulers, but also vassals of the kings of France.
So there's that tension between being a king of England
and the vassal of the king of France,
which is ripe to explode in the years following.
William's rise to power had been no easy ride -
not for him, nor for those who fought against him.
But for better or worse, his tactics had worked.
The invader had become a defender of his new kingdom.
The Norman conquest was a seminal moment in British history,
and its repercussions would be felt for centuries to come.
From the turmoil a new nation would emerge,
one that would share its culture across the world
on a scale that would have been unimaginable
to William and his Norman knights.
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