Part One: Feudalism, or the Historians Quibble Interminably

First of all, friend, put the idea of a neat, logical, Europe-spanning feudal system out of your mind entirely. Modern scholarship has increasingly challenged the existence of any such system; our own /u/idjet and /u/miles_sine_castrum have written in depth on the topic on numerous occasions, and additional (copious) detail can be found in Susan Reynolds' Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted. While there are some scholars who still feel that feudalism is a useful term if used in a limited manner, even they would agree that the model we were taught in high school - society organized into a big pyramid, with the king giving land to the lords, and the lords giving land to the lesser lords, and the lesser lords giving land to the knights, all in exchange for military service on demand - didn’t really exist.

Now, what did exist, then? Kings and lords and knights and peasants certainly existed. Hierarchy certainly existed. A king, in theory, was suzerain over his kingdom; a count or duke, in theory, was suzerain over his county or duchy. But it was far from an organized system of governance. In France at least (England is a bit wonky), you had a society that was dominated by a landholding, military aristocracy operating under a plethora of inherited or created titles, which do not necessarily denote power or precedence; for instance, the dukes of Normandy only became such during the reign of Richard I or Richard II, and prior to that they were only the counts of Rouen. These lords and, indeed, kings, were linked to one another in myriad ways: by kinship ties, marriage ties, vertical ties (i.e., a more powerful lord grants a lesser lord land in exchange for future service), horizontal ties (two lords of roughly equal power exchange land for mutual support). A great deal of land was held independently of any service-for-land arrangement; inherited land without obligations upon its possession is called allodial land. The degree to which a king or duke or count could exert dominion over his subordinate lords was largely a function of that lord’s power. A weak ruler’s vassals would generally try to hold on to every bit of authority and independence they could, and as a result, rebellions remained commonplace, not only in the 11th century but throughout the High Middle Ages.

Part Two: William the Bastard, or Can’t We All Just Get Along?

To begin, I think it’s necessary to have a brief summation of William’s position in 1066, and to do that, we have to go back a bit. This will also allow me to illustrate some of my earlier points with concrete examples.

William was born in 1028 at Falaise to Robert I of Normandy and a merchant’s daughter named Herleva. He was born out of wedlock, but he was legitimized by his father and named his heir shortly before Robert left on the pilgrimage that would claim his life. Upon Robert’s death in 1035, William was initially protected and supported by four powerful aristocrats and friends of his father: Turchetil, Osbern the steward, Count Alan of Brittany, and the most important of them, Archbishop Robert of Rouen. Between them, they managed to hold the lords of Normandy in check and maintain stability. But this order was shattered when the elderly archbishop died in 1037. In the absence of effective ducal authority, the lords of Normandy took measures to secure their own interests, which is to say they waged private war upon each other. William was shunted off to Brittany, but in 1040, Count Alan died. Thereafter the young duke passed through a succession of guardians: Count Gilbert of Brionne and the aforementioned Turchetil and Osborn the Steward, all of whom were assassinated by rival lords, especially those with claims to the duchy. William's cousins, Guy of Burgundy, and the two younger sons of Duke Richard II, Archbishop Mauger of Rouen and Count William of Arques, grew increasingly restive.

In 1046, the lords of Lower Normandy, led by Guy of Burgundy, rose in outright revolt against William. King Henry of France intervened, and the joint loyalist-French army smashed the rebels in a string of cavalry engagements on the plains of Val-es-Dunes. Val-es-Dunes swung the balance of power in William’s favor, but it did not end the rebellion, let alone the wars and crises that would go on to plague Normandy until at least as late as 1054. William spent three years mopping up the rebellion; Guy of Burgundy was only defeated and exiled in 1050, William of Arques in 1054, and Archbishop Mauger about the same time. In 1051, Geoffrey Martel, Count of Anjou, occupied neighboring Maine after the death of Hugh IV. William and Henry jointly opposed the occupation and succeeded in driving the Angevins from Maine, which thereafter became a Norman outpost. However, in 1052 Henry allied with his erstwhile enemy against William, and in 1054, Henry invaded Normandy in concert with Norman rebels. William’s supporters defeated one of Henry’s two invading armies, and the other withdrew. Henry tried again - unsuccessfully - to invade Normany in 1057, and the war petered out in 1060 with the deaths of Henry and Geoffrey.

In 1066, William found himself in a position startlingly different from the one he had occupied two decades prior. He had enlarged his duchy physically with the occupation of Maine and other lands. Perhaps more importantly, it was a unified duchy. Those who had contested his reign most bitterly had been largely dispossessed, and the others reconciled with him. He possessed a small but reasonably efficient administration, and his financial position was better than his father’s had been. In the military realm, he had control of the mechanisms for raising soldiers, many of whom had been hardened in the constant sieges and skirmishes of the 1040s and 1050s or by fighting in Italy. On the dynastic front, he had secured an alliance with Baldwin V of Flanders through marriage to his daughter, Matilda. His major rivals were dead; the kingdom of France was ruled by a child; in 1066 his last major continental rival, Count Conan of Brittany died, supposedly due to poison.

Part III: The Preparations for Invasion, or No, We Can’t All Get Along, You Saxon Git

Edward the Confessor, second-to-last Anglo-Saxon king of England, died childless and without a clear line of succession on January 5th, 1066. The Witan, the council of English nobles, met and named Harold Godwinson the new king of England, with coronation to follow the next day. At the moment the crown touched Harold’s head, the die was cast for war. It is clear that William possessed a claim on the throne; Edward was his cousin. The rest, however, depends on who you want to believe. The Norman sources claim that Edward promised William the throne as early as 1051. They also claim that Harold Godwinson pledged loyalty to William of Normandy after being shipwrecked off Ponthieu in 1058, and on holy relics no less. Now, obviously the Normans had motive to rewrite history a bit, but it’s impossible to know what exactly happened. In any event, William had a claim, and he used it.

William began preparing for invasion almost immediately. Perhaps most importantly, he sought and received papal authorization for the invasion on the grounds that Harold had betrayed an oath sworn upon holy relics. By so legitimizing his invasion, he both secured his rear and made the recruiting process easier on himself. By summer 1066, William had amassed both a sizeable army and a naval force perhaps as large as 700 ships.

Raising a large army was easier than keeping it together, however. This is a crucial point that I cannot emphasize enough. Medieval polities generally possessed very poor logistics. The armies that they raised were rarely very numerous, certainly not in comparison to antiquity. Unlike Rome, medieval rulers lacked a permanent standing army, an established logistics service, good infrastructure, and the centralized power necessary to create them. In the summer of 1066, William’s invasion was delayed by adverse winds, and he had a devil of a time keeping the army together at its embarkation camp, to say nothing of preventing them from ravaging his own lands. Harold Godwinson, who had mobilized the fyrd (the English levy system) of southern England in response to William’s preparations, ultimately faced the same problem - men under arms must be fed. The delay proved serendipitous for William. Harold was forced to disband the southern fyrd, keeping only his mobile troops with him, and these he took north to fight Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge. William was able to make his landing unopposed, and Harold Godwinson had to double-time back with his mobile forces, picking up what elements of the fyrd he could along the way, and give battle with a weakened - but by no means inferior - army.

The composition of his army is the meat of my post, and is really what I have been building up to this whole long while. William’s army was broadly composed of three elements: his own, personal troops drawn from his household and holdings; those troops brought by allies and vassals in response to his summons; and mercenaries and volunteers who flocked to his banner in search of some combination of glory, wealth, and distinction. While the core of the army was undoubtedly Norman, numerous Bretons and Flemish were present, to the point that they formed the wings of the army and the Normans the center. Below, I’m going to copy and paste several paragraphs I previously wrote on the subject.