Writing historical novels about the twenty year conquest of England by a culture of vicious slave masters, requires describing England as it was before the era of the Anglo-Normans. It is difficult to separate reality from all of the popular misconceptions about the era. For example, think of all of the connotations and misconceptions attached to just one phrase: Anglo-Saxon.
Pre-Norman England was very much an Anglo-Danish kingdom. Not only were most of the nobles and lords Anglo-Danes, but about half of the villages were Anglo-Danish. York was the second largest Danish city in the world, after London, and was a wealthy place because of the wealth of the Anglo-Dane farms of the Danelaw. Before the Normans, the Danelaw was more Danish than Denmark, and larger, and wealthier, and more populated.
By 1076 the northern Danelaw was still a wasteland, emptied of folk by the genocidal Harrowings of the Normans. The Anglo-Danish lords had given up on ever living in England again, and were becoming mercenaries for Norman-fearing kings and nobles from Wales to the Byzantine. There was no longer any English Earls left in the kingdom.
Conquering England had been extremely costly to the Conqueror, both in terms of resources, and of lost opportunities on the continent. The ranks of his ruling warrior class, and his knights had been thinned again and again. And not just from battle wounds and ambush, but because there were enticing opportunities for warriors with the Norman lords who were carving out a new empire from the western border of the crumbling Byzantine Empire.
When the young King Philip of France took as his wife, Bertha, the step daughter of Robert the Frisian, Count of Flanders, he did so because he needed a strong ally against Normandy. With the support of Brugge and Paris, rebels rose on all of Normandy's borders. Norman psycho-culture was hated in all of the places that William had conquered. Even William's eldest son, Robert, turned against him and William was critically wounded while trying to capture Robert.
To keep events from turning against him, William needed more money and more land to give as honours to warriors who would join his armies. The source was in England, where a third of the land was not deeded to land lords, but instead was held as in-common land for the communal clans and villages. William's new Forest Law used legal trickery to claim vast stretches of communal land as his own land. It was the greatest real estate swindle in English history.
The same brutal tactics were brushed up and used again in later centuries to clear the clans from the communal land of the Scottish Highlands, and to clear the native tribes from their communal land in the USA and Canada.
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Fully charged hurricanes rarely reach England, but on Saint Lawrence's Day, August 10, 1103, a huge one hit the south of England. Since it arrived just before harvest with ripping winds and deluges of rain, it became a historically documented event. Crops, roofs, and ships were destroyed en masse. The continuing damp caused disease and pestilence in animals and folk.
The new King Henry, youngest son of the Conqueror, and his English Queen Edith (Matilda II), had within three years, navigated an invasion by his older brother Robert of Normandy, and a revolt of wealthy earls lead by Belleme the Impaler of Shrewsbury. By rallying the support of the English folk, they had evaded a Norman Civil War in the kingdom.
The devastation caused by the hurricane complicated everything for the royal couple, because how long would the English folk rally to them if they were allowed to starve. Meanwhile, Belleme's most powerful ally, Mortain, the Earl of Cornwall was still making trouble in the West Country. Henry did not want Mortain in England, and his brother Robert did not want him in Normandy where Mortain could again join with Belleme, who was now in exile on his huge estates in Normandy.
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The Hoodsman - Forest Law by Skye Smith Copyright 2010-13