1066: The Year Everything Changed… Or Did It?

On Monday, the 13th of October, I was sitting in Exam Schools listening to Professor George Garnett unravel the Anglo-Saxon state. His argument, built on extensive reading of the likes of Campbell, Wormald, and Molyneaux, was succinct: Anglo-Saxon society and its organisation were much greater in complexity than they are given credit for.

Most British people are taught about the importance of 1066 at school. It is a focal point in particular for the British monarch, as King Charles III is the 26^th great-grandson of William the Conqueror. Our school curriculum is often Norman-centric for the ‘Middle Ages’, and for a long time, the importance of the Battle of Hastings has made it appear as a starting point for British history in general.

However, this is not the case, particularly in terms of state organisation. Taking the arguments presented through the evidence of our professor, this post highlights the ways in which 1066 was perhaps not as significant for the state as you may think it was.

 

Domesday, Taxation and Coinage

Campbell and Wormald have both argued that the state must have had an efficient system in place to get large administrative tasks done promptly before the Conquest. This is no clearer than when William the Conqueror ordered the commissioning of a report in the December meeting of the council of the Witan in 1085.  At this meeting, attended by clerics and noblemen of the realm, William would have given instructions for how his survey should be completed which would have been taken to each shire (an area of governance) and further dispatched to the hundreds of the shire (another unit of measure for land, but smaller than a shire itself; often multiple hundreds made up the administrative areas of the shire). Here in these smaller administrative units, data could be collected quickly. In essence, they aimed to find out who lived where, how much land was worth in 1066 and how much it was now worth in 1086. The purpose of this was so the King could see how many resources could be used for taxation purposes.

The prompt completion of Domesday by August 1086 suggests that there must have been a complex arm of administration. Without a clear and organised system of scribes and individuals to collect the information, the task itself would have taken much longer; going from one hundred to the next would have been ineffective. The speed at which the survey was put together, a mere 8 months, demonstrates that 1066 had little impact on the uprooting of complex administrative systems as they clearly continued and were put to work by the new Norman overlords.

Furthermore, Professor Garnett argues that taxation, a practice used by the Anglo-Saxons, continues to be a feature of society today. From around 1012, an annual land tax levy known as geld was applied. It was used to pay off attackers and mercenaries - key to protecting the kingdom. This was quite unique, as direct taxation across had not been implemented for many in Europe since the rule of the Romans.

In addition, coinage underwent significant reform in 973 at the hands of the Anglo-Saxons, but did not see mass change under the Normans. From 973 onwards, there is clear numismatic evidence of coinage achieving standardisation. They were all from the same die-casts and the same weights. However, the identification marks of each coin remained: a key for identifying each coin’s origin. Authority was consolidated through leaders’ faces being present on their coins, becoming symbols present in the daily lives of their people. A small token reminder of who was in charge, in some ways always watching.

Having coinage that people used in their everyday lives and an administrative system designed to transfer information at speed, both from the king to the people and back again, shows how crucial the administrative branch of the Anglo-Saxon ‘government’ was.  It also tells us that whilst the shake-up from 1066 did bring a new monarch it was not as earth-shattering as people may expect; if anything, it appears as though William maintained these systems knowing how useful they were.

Yet, while these systems were maintained, small tweaks did indeed occur. In the next section I argue that the arrival of the Jewish communities did provide a form of change to the status-quo for the financial branch of administration.

 

Minority Communities: The Jewish Community

Professor Garnett pays close attention to the mechanisms of the Anglo-Saxon state, highlighting its efficiencies through central and local administration and how the king projected power. However, following 1066, the Norman administration brought with it a Jewish community to help with its financial administration. This community came as an extension of the state, protected by it but ultimately at the discretion of the King, whilst integrating into their new communities. Jewish communities, as such, were new features of post-1066 society.

Jewish communities were invited to settle in England by William the Conqueror, and many of them established homes near places like Bury St Edmunds, Northampton, Cambridge, London and Lincoln – to name only a few. Often these communities were used, as Roth argues, as a ‘milch cow’. By this, he means they were exploited for their financial services by the elite classes in a symbiotic relationship for protection.

The arrival of this community was, therefore, a difference. Jewish communities were not present before 1066, and they were indeed present after it, with their Expulsion being noted as announced for 1290. However, we could view their presence in England as part of the administrative system. In doing this, we must accept that people were key players of the system, increasing its efficiency, acting as cogs in the wider machine. 1066, as such, was less a revolutionary shift but an adaptation – rulers changing over but not of the remarkable state they ruled.

 

The system's fundamental reliance on efficiency did not change—in fact, it endured, as evidenced by the ease with which projects like the Domesday Book were achieved. However, the system did change subtly to reflect the Normans' preferences, including having the Jewish community act as a new financial arm to streamline taxation and loans. While the memory of 1066 endures in our national image – a result of our love for a fiery story – the story that is revealed is one of adaptation and endurance, not reinvigoration.  

Want to read what actual historians think? Try the following:

C. P. Wormald, The Making of English Law vol i. (2000)

J. Campbell, 'Observations on Anglo-Saxon government', TRHS, 1975

J. Campbell, 'The Anglo-Saxon State: a maximum view', Proceedings British Academy, lxxxvii, 1994

G. Molyneux, The Formation of the English Kingdom in the Tenth Century, (2015)

C. Roth, A history of the Jews of England (1964)