[1066 - 1399] The High Middle Ages: Normans and Plantagenets

The year is 1066, and the destiny of an island is about to be forged in blood and iron. On a hill near Hastings, the Anglo-Saxon shield wall, a bristling fortress of wood and courage, finally breaks. King Harold Godwinson lies dead, an arrow in his eye, and a new master has come to England. His name is William, Duke of Normandy, soon to be known as the Conqueror. This was not just a change of king; it was a revolution. William did not simply rule the old kingdom; he remade it. The Anglo-Saxon ruling class was systematically dismantled, their lands seized and gifted to William’s loyal Norman-French barons. A new language, Norman French, filled the halls of power, while the common folk continued to speak their Old English. For decades, to be English was to be subservient. To cement his grip, William unleashed an architectural blitzkrieg. Mighty stone keeps, like the iconic Tower of London, rose across the landscape—brutal, beautiful symbols of a new and unshakeable authority. This was the dawn of the feudal system in England. The king owned everything. He granted vast estates to his great lords, who in turn granted smaller parcels to knights. At the bottom of this pyramid were the vast majority of the population: the peasantry, or serfs, who were tied to the land. They worked the fields of their lord in exchange for protection, their lives governed by the seasons and the church bell. Their world was small, perhaps only a few miles from the village of their birth, their diet a monotonous cycle of coarse bread, watery ale, and a vegetable stew known as pottage. To understand his new realm, and more importantly, to tax it, William commissioned an unprecedented audit in 1086: the Domesday Book. Scribes went to every corner of the kingdom, counting every man, ox, plough, and mill across 13,418 settlements. To the peasant farmer, seeing these royal clerks with their ink and parchment, it must have felt like the final judgement itself—an accounting from which there was no escape. William’s death led to squabbles between his sons, culminating in a period of devastating civil war known as "The Anarchy" (1135-1153). For nearly two decades, law and order collapsed as rival claimants to the throne, Stephen and Matilda, tore the country apart. Barons built unlicensed castles, terrorised the countryside, and a chronicler lamented that "men said openly that Christ and his saints were asleep." Out of this chaos rose one of England’s most formidable kings: Henry II, the first of the Plantagenet dynasty, who took the throne in 1154. A man of boundless energy, Henry was not just King of England. Through inheritance and a brilliant marriage to the formidable Eleanor of Aquitaine, he ruled a vast territory stretching from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees mountains in Spain—the Angevin Empire. To govern this sprawling domain, he needed a system. He aggressively restored royal authority, tearing down the illegal castles and, most importantly, establishing the foundations of English Common Law. He sent travelling judges across the land, creating a legal system that was consistent, royal, and available to all (free) men. The concept of the jury, a group of local men who would investigate a case, began to take root. But Henry’s desire for control brought him into a fatal collision course with the one institution more powerful than any king: the Church. To bring it to heel, he appointed his trusted friend and drinking companion, Thomas Becket, as Archbishop of Canterbury. Henry expected an ally; instead, he got a zealot. Becket transformed overnight, defending the Church's privileges with a ferocity that stunned the king. Their friendship curdled into a bitter rivalry that split the kingdom. In a fit of rage in 1170, Henry famously roared, "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" Four of his knights, taking the words literally, travelled to Canterbury Cathedral and murdered Becket at the altar. The backlash was immense. Henry was forced into a humiliating public penance, and Becket became a martyr and a saint, his shrine a destination for pilgrims from all over Christendom. Henry's sons were as troublesome as his priest. The most famous was Richard I, the Lionheart, a magnificent warrior but an absent king, spending only about six months of his ten-year reign in England. He bled the country dry to fund his crusade in the Holy Land. His brother, John, was a different sort of disaster. Cruel, greedy, and militarily inept, John managed to lose Normandy and most of his father's French lands. His endless demands for taxes to fund his failing wars pushed the barons too far. In 1215, at a water-meadow called Runnymede, they forced him to seal a document: Magna Carta, the Great Charter. It was not, as is often thought, a declaration of rights for the common man. It was a deal, a pragmatic list of demands by the powerful to limit the power of an abusive king. But within its clauses were seeds that would grow into towering oaks of liberty: the right to a fair trial, and the revolutionary idea that even the king was not above the law. The 13th and 14th centuries were dominated by the clash with neighbours and the long, draining struggle with France. Edward I, "Longshanks," was a fearsome warrior who brutally conquered Wales, ringing it with a chain of technologically advanced concentric castles like Caernarfon and Harlech. He turned his attention to Scotland, earning the title "Hammer of the Scots," but ultimately sparking a fierce war for independence. His grandson, Edward III, initiated what would become known as the Hundred Years' War against France. At battles like Crécy (1346), a new force changed the face of war. The English longbow, wielded by free peasant archers, unleashed storms of arrows that could pierce plate armour, scything down the flower of French chivalry. The age of the armoured knight as the undisputed master of the battlefield was ending. Then, in 1348, a different kind of invader arrived. It came silently, on fleas carried by rats on merchant ships. It was the Black Death. The bubonic plague swept through the country with terrifying speed, killing with horrific symptoms. Within two years, it had wiped out between 30% and 50% of the population. Entire villages were abandoned, their fields left to go wild. The air was thick with the smoke of funeral pyres and the stench of disease. But this unimaginable catastrophe had a profound, unintended consequence. With so few people left, labour was suddenly in high demand. The old feudal bonds shattered. Peasants could now demand wages for their work and, if a lord refused, they could simply walk away and find another who would pay. Serfdom was dying. This new-found confidence, combined with simmering resentment over taxes to fund the French war, exploded in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. For a few shocking weeks, commoners marched on London, burning mansions and demanding an end to all social hierarchy. Though brutally suppressed, the revolt showed that the old order was gone forever. The chapter closes at the end of the century, with the troubled reign of Richard II. Dressed in magnificent silks and velvets, he was a king who believed utterly in his divine right to rule, but he lacked the political skill of his predecessors. His tyrannical and erratic behaviour led to his own downfall. In 1399, he was deposed and likely murdered, the crown violently seized by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke. The long, dramatic reign of the Plantagenets had ended not with a whimper, but with the clang of a closing gate on a deposed king. A dangerous precedent had been set.