Governing the Conquered

Abstract

England not only had to be conquered: it had to be governed. In administrative (as in so many other) terms England was already an ‘old country’: in some regions, particularly the north, but also observable elsewhere, as in Kent for instance, institutions of government and the exercise of lordship were now centuries old, perhaps predating the Saxon settlement in origin.¹ That the kingdom was the most ‘organised’ state in western Europe in the eleventh century is generally recognised. By 1066 the whole country, with the exception of the region north of the Tees to the east and the Mersey to the west, of the Pennines, along with the anomalous region of the latter-day shire of Rutland, was divided into shires, which were further subdivided into hundreds or wapentakes, which were the fundamental units of local administration. Though the shires were not of uniform creation, and though local customs continued to operate within the shire structure, the establishment and expansion of West-Saxon rule throughout most of the country during the tenth century gave a degree of organisational cohesion to the structure of local government.² Each shire usually contained a number of hides, on which taxation and military burdens were assessed. The hide itself, it has been argued, has its roots, or at the very least parallels, in early Irish society. Post-war research has increasingly demonstrated that the administrative history of England from the Roman to the Angevin centuries is, if not a seamless robe, at least woven from long lengths of cloth. This does not, of course, mean that adjustments were not constantly made. Shifting political frontiers, and in particular the division between those areas subject for long periods to Scandinavian control and influence, and those dominated by Wessex, and the extension of the authority of the Wessex kings into the midlands, inevitably affected administrative organisation.