There is a lot of debate about how King Harold died. One of the most popular sources for the events of the Battle of Hastings is the Bayeux Tapestry. Some people think that the tapestry shows King Harold with an arrow in his eye. Other people think that King Harold is actually the soldier whose leg is being cut off by a Norman knight.

Part of the difficulty is that the tapestry was made on the orders of Bishop Odo of Bayeux. Bishop Odo was the half-brother of William the Conqueror and would probably support the Norman side. The tapestry was also made about 1077, several years after the Battle of Hastings and some details could have been forgotten. Accounts of the battle which state that Harold Godwinson was killed by an arrow in his eye are produced after the Bayeux Tapestry, whereas accounts of Harold’s death that were produced before the Bayeux Tapestry do not mention him being hit by an arrow.

Once William had won the Battle of Hastings, he had to make sure that the English would obey him. One of the first things he did after becoming king, was to send his army north to put down any rebellions. His soldiers destroyed land and set fire to people’s houses. William wanted to teach the English a lesson that anyone who rebelled against him would die. If the English were afraid of him, they wouldn’t rebel against him. 

The Harrying of the North refers to the brutal slaughter and pillaging of Northumbria in 1069-1070 by the army of William the Conqueror. This is thought to have been devastating to the extent that 100,000 people starved to death. The presence of the last Wessex claimant, Edgar Atheling had encouraged Anglo-Danish rebellions that broke the Norman hold in the North of England.

In particular, the Harrying of the North was a response to the strong resistance to Norman rule shown by the Northumbrian people. It was sparked by the murder of William’s newly-appointed earl, Robert de Comines, in 1069. Following the Harrying of the North, many of the key positions formerly held by the Anglo-Saxon nobles were given to Normans.

Another way in which William tried to make sure the English obeyed him was by building castles.  Castles demonstrated that William and his followers were in charge and they also helped protect them against attacks from the English. The first types of castles were Motte and Bailey castles. These took between 7 and 14 days to build and they were made of wood. They were built wherever the Normans wanted them, even if it involved pulling down houses.

However these wooden castles had were easy to burn and also the wood kept having to be replaced because it rotted. So the Normans started to replace the Motte and Bailey castles with stone castles. Stone castles took longer to build and were more expensive, but they were also much stronger and offered greater protection from attack.

Although all the land in England belonged to the king, it was impossible for William to control England by himself. He needed landowners that he could help him protect the country from invasion, keep the English under control and collect taxes. He also needed to reward his followers who had fought at the Battle of Hastings.

William used the Feudal System to help him keep control of England. The word ‘feudal’ is Latin for ‘land’. Under this system, William still owned the land but he could ‘lend’ large areas of land to his followers (Barons) in return for their loyalty. The Barons could show their loyalty to William by paying homage and promising to provide him with knights to fight in his army.

Like William, the Barons would also distribute some of their land to their followers (knights). In return for this land, these knights would promise to serve in the army for 40 days a year. Finally the knights would grant land to the villeins (peasants who were tied to the land) who would pay for the land by working for the knights.

William also needed to know how much England was worth. So in 1085 he sent officials all over England to interview villages and find out how much they owned. Soldiers went with the officials and threatened to kill anyone who lied. The results of these surveys were sent to Winchester and copied out in Latin into two books.

Originally the book was called the Winchester Book, but later it became known as the Domesday Book after ‘doomsday’ (the day of judgement) because people were not able to argue with what the book said. The Domesday Book was very important for King William, now he knew how much England could afford to pay in taxes, how many men he could get for his army and he could settle any arguments about who owned which bit of land.

Life in Medieval England was very different to today. Most people lived in small villages for their entire lives and farmed the land. If there was a bad harvest they could easily starve. Most land was farmed using an Open-Field System. The fields were divided into strips and each person had strips scattered across all fields. Each field would grow a different crop and the crops rotated each year so that the soil was not farmed too intensively. Every year, one field was left fallow (empty) to allow the soil to recover.

Some people lived in towns. There were not very many towns in Medieval England. When William became king in 1066, there were only ten towns in the whole country. Most towns had less than 2,000 people living in them. They were usually busy and smelly places – there was no sewerage system so most waste was left in the streets. Towns often grew near to a castle or a monastery (a monastery was a large building where monks lived and spent their lives praying and caring for others).  This was because a castle could give the town protection if needed and being near a monastery meant that lots of people would visit town when they visited the monastery. Towns usually had a market once or twice a week and shops so people could come and buy what they needed or sell items that they had made.

It is very hard to find out about the lives of medieval peasants. Most lords didn’t think they were important enough to make records about them and usually villeins couldn’t read and write. In addition to this, their belongings and houses were usually of poor quality and would not have survived. Rich people in Medieval England had a much more comfortable life. They did not have to work all the time like the villeins and they were able to spend more time hunting and enjoying themselves.