О.М.Елина, Н.С.Маринчук - Методическая разработка к фильму The History of Britain - Part 2 (О.М. Елина, Н.С. Маринчук - Методическая разработка к фильму The History of Britain), страница 6

Asfighting broke out, many inside the Abbey, smelling smoke, rushed outside. The ceremony wascompleted in a half empty interior, with William, for the first time in his life, seen to be shakinglike a leaf.When he emerged from the smoke and chaos of the coronation, just what kind of king did thesurviving remnant of the old governing class imagine they had? Did they fondly suppose he wasgoing to be another Canute, who now that he'd won, would disband his army and send themhome? If they did, they were in for a very nasty shock, because even if William had wanted to dothis, it was quite impossible.

His whole campaign had been based on the promise of the lure ofland, the pledge to hand over Saxon land on a golden plate of conquest.So there was never the remotest chance that William was going to be another Canute andassimilate himself into the world of Anglo-Saxon England. His conquest turned the countryaround. England's orientation now was south, away from Scandinavia and towards continentalEurope. The part of the country offering most resistance was the north of England, which stillretained strong Viking sympathies.Just three years into William's reign, York opened its gates to King Swein of Denmark, hailinghim as a liberator from the new king of England.

William's response was to mount a campaign ofoppression in the north which was not just punitive but an exercise in mass murder - thousandsof men and boys gruesomely butchered, their bodies left to rot and fester in the highways.Every town and village burnt without pity. Fields and livestock destroyed so completely that anysurvivors were doomed to die in a great famine.Hard on the heels of massacre and starvation came plague.All across England, William built at least 90 castles, dominating areas of potential revolt,engines of terror that helped William control over two million Saxons with just 25,000 Normans.13Segment 2.00:46:17,630 -->Most of the voices that have come down to us describing the events after 1066 are written fromthe victor's perspective, unapologetic and crowing, sketching the starkest possible contrastbetween the Machiavellian perjurer Harold and the noble, betrayed William.But among this nauseating chorus of congratulation there's at least one that dares break rank, thatin fact sees the conquest as it surely was - a brutal, ruthless and completely successful act ofaggression and cruelty.

The voice is all the more credible because it belongs to someone who byrights, should have found nothing to fault in the Norman Conquest - the monk Orderic Vitalis,whose family came over with William and belonged, therefore, to the conquering class.In the early 12th century, he began to pen his account of the Conquest and its aftermath, and, incomplete contrast to the others, Orderic never minces his words about what he thought of as acolonisation.Foreigners grew wealthy with the spoils of England, while her own sons were either shamefullyslain or driven as exiles to wander hopelessly through foreign kingdoms.His account conveys the traumatic magnitude of what happened in England in the yearsfollowing 1066.

Pre-Conquest England was an old country, as Orderic describes it. Afterwards, itwas a completely new one.Of course, not everything changed, and to look at a list of governing institutions you mightsuppose nothing had changed; that one class of governors had kicked out another class ofgovernors. Big deal!But I rather think it was a big deal. Imagine the county gentry of England - priests, squires,judges - all wiped out overnight, half of them dead, the rest humiliated, broken, replaced by analien class. They speak differently, they look different, they take what they want when they want,and then rubber-stamp the decision in your courts.

They also build differently.Ely Cathedral is one of those places where the intimate scale of Saxon churches was replaced bya statement of massive triumphalism. These columns speak of authority and raw power. Theycommand obedience and reverence. They are, in the most literal sense, awesome.It was the difference between the immense Romanesque bulk of the great Norman cathedrals andthe small spaces of the Saxon chapel.

There is another telling difference between the old and newrulers of England: Anglo-Saxons didn't use surnames. They were Cedric or Edgar of somewhereor other. But the Normans incorporated places into their own names like an act of possession.They were Roger of the beautiful hill - Roger Beau-Mont - as the place was theirs and theyowned it lock, stock and barrel.In fact, preserving the estate intact was what the Norman nobility was all about.

It was they whointroduced the practice of passing on whole estates intact to one heir, to the eldest son.The unsentimental, decisive way with things was the Norman way, giving a hard-nosed edge tothe fuzzy tangles of contracts and customs that had been used by the Anglo-Saxons. And it was14in this spirit that William, in 1085, held court in Gloucester and launched arguably the mostextraordinary campaign of his entire reign, a campaign for information.We tend to think of William as more or less permanently in the saddle.

He grew up in a world,after all, where authority was usually delivered on the blade of a sword. So it's all the moreimpressive that he seems to have understood instinctively that information could also be power.William the Conqueror was the first database king.His immediate need was to raise a tax, but the compilation of the Domesday Book was morethan just a glorified audit.

It was a complete inventory of everything in the kingdom, shire byshire, pig by pig; who had owned what before the coming of the Normans and who owned whatnow; how much it had been worth then and how much now.“The king sent his men all over England, into every shire, and had them find out how manyhundred hides there were in each shire, what land and cattle the king himself had in the county.So very narrowly did he have it investigated there was no single hide nor - shame to relate it, butit seemed no shame to him was there one ox or one cow left out and not put down in record.”While some of the information was taken verbally by William's scribes, some must have owedits existence to Saxon records. The most extraordinary paradox about the Domesday Book is thatwhat we think of as a monument to the power and strength of the Normans owed itself to theadvanced machinery of government left in place by the old Anglo-Saxon monarchy.

And it wasthanks to this that the data was collected at such lightning speed, less than six months. Theresults were presented to William here at Old Sarum, an ancient Iron Age fort inside which he'dbuilt a spectacular royal palace.When he took hold of the Domesday Book, it was as though William had been handed the keysto the kingdom all over again, as if he'd re-conquered England, but this time statistically, becauseits information was more impregnable than any castle.

It was called The Domesday Book, afterall, because it was said its decisions were as final as the Last Judgement.“The Church itself holds Wenlock. There are 20 hides, four of which are exempt from tax underKing Canute. There are 15 slaves, two mills serve the monks, plus one fishery. Enough woodlandto fatten 300 pigs, and two hedged enclosures. Value now twelve pounds.”Two ceremonies took place on Lammas Day, 1087, at Old Sarum.

First, every noble in Englandgathered here to take an oath of loyalty to the king. Then came the handing over of the Book, theultimate weapon to keep them in line. Nobody could hold back anything, and it was this book,the Domesday Book, that made the gathering at Old Sarum unique in the history of feudalmonarchy in Europe. For the Book ultimately WAS England.Segment 3.00:53:49,910 -->For centuries after, this was the secret of English government, a partnership between the powerof the landed classes and the authority of the state, between the guardians of the green acres and15the keepers of knowledge.

In the right hand corner, the gentry; in the left hand corner, the civilservice. In between them, the eternal umpire, the king.But the umpire was finally feeling the strain of it all. Not surprising when, aged 60, William stillcouldn't resist playing the warlord.In 1087, he subdued a border dispute in France by totally destroying the town of Mantes.But perhaps this last devastation was one too many, for a flaming timber from a house burned byhis soldiers fell right in front of the king. William's horse suddenly bucked, throwing the nowoverweight king violently against his saddle, his gut taking the force of the blow.

Mortallywounded, William was taken to a priory at Rouen.At the very end, Orderic Vitalis puts into William's mouth an extraordinary deathbed confession,so penitential, so utterly out of character that it seems on the face of it completely incredible. Butwhether William actually spoke those words or not, they clearly reflected what some, perhapsmany people, felt about William the Conqueror - that when all the battles were won, when thelaws were all laid down, he was what he had always been, a brutal adventurer. And the conquestof England not a righteous crusade, but just a grand throw of history's dice.“I appoint no one my heir to the crown of England for I did not attain that high honour byhereditary right, but wrestled it from a perjured King Harold in a desperate battle with mucheffusion of human blood. I have persecuted its native inhabitants beyond all reason.

Whethergentle or simple, I cruelly oppressed them. Many I unjustly disinherited. Innumerable multitudes,especially in the county of York, perished through me by famine or the sword. Having thereforemade my way to the throne of that kingdom by so many crimes, I dare not leave it to anyone butGod alone, lest after my death worse should happen by my means.”Once he had gone, in the early hours of the morning of the 9th September, 1087, a shockingscene took place.