Back to the Mainly The Normans calendar
Almost the first thing William did was to give vast areas of England to his Norman barons who had come over with him.
These barons would have to provide soldiers as and when William wanted them. There were about 200 barons and each one ran his part of the country. It was
estimated that in 1086 just 12 barons held 25% of the land while the rest, less than 200 obviously, held another 25%.
The first thing the barons would do when they were given land
was build a castle. The Normans used to build a special type of castle. It was called a motte and bailey castle and was very quick to build. The motte was a
large mound on which the baron would build a keep, which was really a set of rooms where he could live. The bailey was an area at the bottom of the motte
where the baron could keep his cattle and servants. Then they would build a fence around both parts and, outside the fence, they would dig a ditch. The villagers,
or peasants, would live outside the fence and ditch. They would then work for the barons. The castle was called a motte and bailey because in the language the
Normans spoke motte meant mound and bailey meant enclosure, Simple really, wasn’t it? The clever Normans, if being attacked, would sometimes hang ox skins,
soaked in water, on the outside walls to stop the wood catching fire.
The next thing that happened was that these barons would give smaller pieces of land to wealthy Anglo-Saxons or their own knights. These people
would be called lords. The lords would rule over a manor. The Saxons had divided the country into hundreds, each hundred being approximately a hundred homes.
These hundreds now became the manors that lords would rule over and on this manor the work would be done by peasants who the lord would allow to live there in
return for doing this work. The average life expectancy of a slave or peasant was about 25 years.
This whole structure of life was known as the feudal (pronounced
fewdal) system and the feudal system that William set up, where the lord ruled over the people who worked and lived on his land, remained for 400 years.
The peasants would have to pay the lord some of the goods they produced on their own land while the lords and barons had to pay taxes to the King as
well as providing soldiers. It was all bad news for the peasants as they also had to pay 10% to the church, who also owned 25% of all the land in England. The
King, William, owned the remaining 25%. Peasants couldn’t grind their own corn, they had to take it to the lord who would grind it and then charge the peasants.
Furthermore peasants couldn’t marry without the agreement of their lord.
Forward to 1070AD
