Feudal Fiefdom

Following their conquest of England, the Normans rebuilt London as the administrative capital of the new Anglo-Norman kingdom. The ruined Roman city had been re-occupied by the Anglo-Saxons under Alfred of Wessex in the ninth century, while in the eleventh century Edward the Confessor had constructed a new abbey church and royal palace at Westminster. This hegemonic ensemble in the City of Westminster became the locus of state power, separate from the commercial power residing within the City of London. It is a separation that has persisted to this day. Anglo-Norman England was a feudal society based upon an agrarian mode of production in which a servile class of English peasants worked on manorial estates owned by the ruling Norman aristocracy. It was a rigidly hierarchical society tied together by relationships of obligation between the king, the ruling military aristocracy and the subject peasant population. The church wielded great hegemonic authority within this society, operating through its own autonomous power structure led by its bishops. The secular and ecclesiastical power structures of state and civil society were closely intertwined, with power exercised through both military coercion and spiritual consent, according to a dominant ideology that combined feudal obligation with religious faith. London was turned into a fortress city by the Normans to subdue its restless English population. The Roman city wall and gates were repaired and a new castle, the White Tower, was erected in the south-east corner of the city. This great stone castle keep provided a menacing presence in the city landscape. By the thirteenth century the threat of insurrection had faded, allowing the Plantagenet kings Henry III and Edward I to transform the Tower from fortress to fortified palace, extending the fortifications while improving the domestic accommodation. However, England’s feudal kings still preferred to reside in their more spacious and comfortable Palace of Westminster. Here they developed a complex of buildings of increasing sophistication and luxury to house both the offices of state and the royal household, including one of the largest medieval halls in Europe. The history of Westminster Abbey illustrates how the perpetual power struggle between the medieval kingdoms of England and France gave rise to competitive emulation of French monumental buildings by English kings. Edward the Confessor had built his Romanesque abbey church to be longer than any in Normandy, and Henry III rebuilt the church to celebrate the majesty of the Plantagenet dynasty using the thirteenth century Gothic style developed in the Île-de-France. Across London St Paul’s was also being rebuilt, in a more distinctively English version of Gothic. Founded by the Saxons and rebuilt by the Normans, the Gothic successor was larger than any other English cathedral. Standing on top of Ludgate Hill this huge structure, crowned by an elegant spire and surrounded by over one hundred parish churches, dominated the Christian landscape of power in the medieval City.