In the tumultuous years of the English Civil Wars (1642–1651), the ancient fabric of English society was torn asunder. For any aristocratic line tracing its roots to the deep feudal past, this was an existential trial. The conflict between King and Parliament shifted the very basis of legitimacy from lineage and tradition towards a brutal calculus of military control, unwavering ideological conviction, and the ability to command fiscal resources. Power, once inherited, now had to be actively seized and held. This was England’s second great revolution, a constitutional and internal convulsion that determined which great houses would remain relevant and which would fade into memory.
But this was not the first time such a totalising test had been forced upon the English aristocracy. Over five and a half centuries earlier, a more profound and violent revolution had swept the land, one that did not merely challenge the existing order but obliterated it. This first revolution was not internal; it was an invasion. It was the Norman Conquest of 1066, an event that did not just change the occupant of the throne, but fundamentally remade the English ruling class, redefined the concept of land ownership, and forged a new, militarised state from the ruins of the old. To understand the crucible of the seventeenth century, we must first understand the cataclysm of the eleventh, for it was then that the very grammar of power in England was rewritten.
The World Before the Storm: Anglo-Saxon Lincolnshire
On the eve of the Conquest, the kingdom of England was one of the wealthiest and most sophisticated states in Western Europe. It possessed a unified currency, a mature system of local government centred on the shire and the hundred, and a vernacular written language used for administration. Its aristocracy, the thegns, held their lands (or bocland) by royal charter, owing service to the king but possessing a strong sense of heritable right.
In Lincolnshire, this Anglo-Saxon world was deeply coloured by its recent Viking past. As a core territory of the former Danelaw, its culture, dialect, and legal customs bore a strong Scandinavian imprint. Its landscape was dominated not by castles, but by the fortified manors of local thegns and the great minster churches. The county’s immense wealth stemmed from its fertile fenlands, rich pasture, and its access to trade routes via the Humber and the North Sea. The city of Lincoln, one of the five boroughs of the Danelaw, was a bustling centre of commerce.
Power in the region was concentrated in the hands of great magnates, chief among them the Earl of Northumbria, Morcar, whose vast authority stretched across the north. But beneath him was a complex web of lesser thegns, men whose names now survive only in the terse records of their dispossession. In the small settlement of Brattleby, a few miles north of Lincoln, the principal estate was held by a man named Ulf Fensces, or Ulf the Fenman. He was a man of substance, his holding valued at £8 in the time of King Edward the Confessor—a considerable sum. Ulf, like thousands of other Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Danish landowners, was part of a stable, ancient order. He would have owed allegiance, paid his taxes, and expected his sons to inherit his lands. In 1065, this seemed the natural and perpetual order of things. By 1070, Ulf the Fenman and his entire class had been politically, and often physically, annihilated.
1066: The Shattering of an Order
The death of the childless Edward the Confessor in January 1066 triggered a three-way struggle for the English throne. The ultimate victor, Duke William of Normandy, secured his claim through one of the most decisive encounters in military history: the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066. The death of King Harold Godwinson and the cream of his warrior aristocracy on that Sussex hillside did more than decide a succession crisis; it decapitated Anglo-Saxon England.
William’s subsequent march on London, followed by his coronation in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day, was not an act of reconciliation but of domination. He accepted the crown but made it clear he held the kingdom by right of conquest (iure belli). This legal fiction had terrifying practical consequences. According to Norman thinking, all who had fought against him at Hastings, or had failed to submit to him immediately, were traitors. Their lands were therefore forfeit to the Crown. In one stroke, William declared the entire landholding class of England dispossessed.
The initial transfer of land was piecemeal, rewarding the key foreign participants of the invasion. But a series of brutal rebellions across the country between 1067 and 1071 gave William the pretext to enact a wholesale regime change. The most savage of these was the northern uprising of 1069, which prompted the infamous ‘Harrying of the North’ (1069–70). William’s armies marched through Yorkshire and Durham, systematically burning settlements, slaughtering livestock, and destroying food stores. The chronicler Orderic Vitalis, himself of mixed Norman and English parentage, wrote with horror of the consequences: "Nowhere else had William shown so much cruelty... he made no effort to control his fury and punished the innocent with the guilty. He ordered that all crops and herds, chattels and food of every kind should be brought together and burned to ashes with consuming fire, so that the whole region north of the Humber might be stripped of all means of sustenance."
While Lincolnshire was spared the worst of this devastation, the message was unmistakable. The Harrying created a wasteland north of the Humber and instilled terror throughout the kingdom. It demonstrated that the new king’s power was absolute, his methods ruthless, and that loyalty was not a matter of choice but of survival. The old legitimacy of ancestry was replaced by the new legitimacy of the sword.
Domesday Book: An Audit of Conquest
By 1085, nearly two decades after the Conquest, William’s new England was taking shape. To consolidate his power and, crucially, to assess its taxable capacity, he commissioned an unprecedented survey of his kingdom. As the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle starkly records: "he sent his men over all England into every shire... to find out... what or how much each landholder had in land and livestock, and how much it was worth... So very narrowly did he have it investigated, that there was no single hide nor a yard of land, nor indeed... one ox nor one cow nor one pig which was left out, and not put down in his record."
This record, known to a terrified populace as the Domesday Book, is the single most important document of the period. It is not a narrative history, but a cold, hard audit of a revolution. Laid out shire by shire, it lists every manor, who held it in 1066 ("in the time of King Edward" or T.R.E.), and who held it in 1086. The result is a stark ledger of dispossession. By 1086, only about 5% of land in England south of the River Tees was still held by major English landlords. The Anglo-Saxon aristocracy was gone, replaced by a new elite of around 200 tenants-in-chief, predominately Normans, Flemings, and Bretons who had backed William’s venture.
The Domesday entry for Brattleby provides a perfect microcosm of this seismic shift. The lands once held by the Anglo-Dane Ulf the Fenman are gone from his family. The manor is now part of the vast fiefdom of Gilbert de Gant (Gilbert of Ghent), a Fleming nobleman and nephew of William the Conqueror’s wife, Queen Matilda. Gilbert was one of the greatest of the new magnates, a tenant-in-chief who held a staggering 172 manors, the bulk of them in Lincolnshire, with his chief seat, or caput, at Folkingham Castle. He had not simply inherited Ulf’s estate; he had been granted a sprawling barony carved from the holdings of numerous dispossessed Englishmen.
The entry for Brattleby further reveals the new layers of lordship. While Gilbert de Gant is the tenant-in-chief, holding the land directly from the king, the manor itself is held from him by a sub-tenant, a man named Rainer de Bratellebi. Rainer was likely one of Gilbert’s own retainers or knights, rewarded for his service with direct tenure of the manor. Thus, the local lord was no longer an established native thegn like Ulf, but a follower of a new foreign magnate. The entire structure of power had been re-engineered from the top down.
The New Feudalism: A System of Control
The revolution was not merely one of personnel, but of system. William established in England a far more rigorous and militarised version of the feudal structures developing on the continent. In theory, all land now belonged to the king. He granted vast tracts to his tenants-in-chief—the barons like Gilbert de Gant—in return for a specified quota of knights for the royal army. This ‘knight service’ was the bedrock of the new military and political order.
These barons, in turn, granted manors to their own knights and followers (like Rainer of Brattleby) in a process known as subinfeudation, creating a pyramid of allegiance where every landholder was bound by an oath of fealty to the lord above him, culminating in the king. This system provided William with a permanent, professional fighting force, funded entirely by land. It also ensured that power and loyalty were inextricably linked. A baron who defied the king risked losing his lands, the source of all his wealth and status—a process known as forfeiture.
This new order was physically cemented into the landscape. Across England, and particularly in strategic locations like Lincoln, the Normans erected castles. These were not the stately homes of a later era, but aggressive military outposts, often built using forced local labour. The castle at Lincoln, begun in 1068, involved the demolition of 166 Anglo-Scandinavian houses to clear the site, a brutal imposition of foreign power upon the existing urban fabric. These motte-and-bailey fortresses served as administrative centres for the new lords and as constant, visible reminders to the English population of who was now in charge.
The Anarchy: A Test of the New Order
The Norman system, for all its ruthless logic, was itself tested in the generations that followed. The death of William the Conqueror’s last son, Henry I, in 1135, led to a disputed succession between his daughter, Matilda, and his nephew, Stephen of Blois. The ensuing civil war, known as ‘The Anarchy’ (1135–1153), plunged England into chaos as barons played one side against the other to advance their own interests.
Lincolnshire became a central theatre of this conflict. The pivotal Battle of Lincoln in 1141 saw King Stephen himself captured by the forces of Matilda’s half-brother, Robert of Gloucester, and his powerful local ally, Ranulf de Gernon, Earl of Chester. The battle raged through the streets of the city, a terrifying experience for the populace. According to the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon, Stephen fought with immense personal bravery "like a lion," his sword shattering before he was finally overwhelmed and taken.
For the great baronial families, the Anarchy was a perilous test of loyalty and political calculation. Survival depended on backing the right horse, or, more shrewdly, on fortifying one’s own castles and consolidating regional power while the crown was weak. The descendants of the first Gilbert de Gant had to navigate these treacherous waters, their allegiances shifting with the tides of war. This period reinforced a key lesson of the Conquest era: that holding land and title was not a passive right, but an active, ongoing struggle requiring military strength and political acumen. Legitimacy was not just inherited; it had to be continually performed and defended.
From Conquest to Constitution: Magna Carta and its Lincolnshire Roots
Over the century following the Anarchy, the Norman conquerors and their descendants gradually assimilated. They began to see themselves not as a foreign garrison, but as the natural leaders of the English realm. The French language of the court slowly mingled with Old English, and the sharp distinction between Norman and Saxon began to blur. Yet the power structures created by the Conquest remained. The king, as the ultimate source of all land and law, wielded immense authority.
Under King John (1199–1216), this royal power was pushed to its breaking point. John’s financial exactions to fund his failing wars in France, his arbitrary justice, and his high-handed treatment of his barons precipitated a major crisis. The result was Magna Carta in 1215. This was a document born of rebellion, in which the barons—the heirs of William’s companions—sought to place formal, legal limits on the power of the king.
This moment, a cornerstone of constitutional history, has deep roots in Lincolnshire. The intellectual architect of the charter was Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was almost certainly a Lincolnshire man, likely born at Langton-by-Wragby. Furthermore, in the tense months leading up to the confrontation at Runnymede, the rebellious barons are known to have gathered in force at Lincoln.
Most tellingly, among the twenty-five surety barons elected to enforce the charter’s terms upon King John was another Gilbert de Gant, a direct descendant of the Fleming magnate who had taken possession of Brattleby in 1066. In an extraordinary historical irony, the successor of the man who had benefited so immensely from the absolute, arbitrary power of a conquering king was now at the forefront of a movement to constrain it. It demonstrates a profound evolution: the family had transitioned from foreign instruments of royal will to English magnates defending their own "ancient liberties" against that same will. The revolution of 1066 had created the very class that would, 150 years later, invent a new form of constitutional politics.
A Legacy of Rupture and Reinvention
The Norman Conquest was England's first and most total revolution. It was a catastrophic rupture that replaced a native aristocracy with a foreign one, imposed a new language and culture of rule, and fundamentally re-engineered the relationship between the ruler, the land, and the people. The power of the Anglo-Saxon thegn, rooted in tradition and heritage, was swept away by the power of the Norman baron, forged in conquest and maintained by military obligation.
For the Barony of Brattleby, the story of Ulf the Fenman and his replacement by the fiefdom of Gilbert de Gant encapsulates this transformation in miniature. The Conquest established a new paradigm of power, one that would be tested and refined through the fires of civil war and constitutional conflict. The descendants of the conquerors themselves evolved, becoming the English aristocracy that would face its own existential test centuries later during the Civil Wars. That second revolution, fought over constitutional principles and ideologies, could only happen because the first revolution, fought with fire and sword, had created a centralised, powerful kingdom and a potent baronial class whose destiny was forever entwined with that of the crown. The legacy of 1066 was not just a chain of castles and cathedrals, but the very political DNA of the English state.
Sources & Further Reading
Primary Sources:
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Translated by G.N. Garmonsway. J.M. Dent, 1992. Domesday Book: A Complete Translation. Edited by Ann Williams and G.H. Martin. Penguin Classics, 2003. (The entry for Brattleby is in the Lincolnshire section, folio 355v). Henry of Huntingdon. Historia Anglorum: The History of the English People. Edited and translated by Diana Greenway. Oxford University Press, 1996. Holt, J.C., editor. Magna Carta. 3rd Edition. Cambridge University Press, 2015. Orderic Vitalis. The Ecclesiastical History. Edited and translated by Marjorie Chibnall. 6 vols. Oxford University Press, 1969–80. Open Domesday: [https://opendomesday.org/place/SK9278/brattleby/](https://opendomesday.org/place/SK9278/brattleby/) for the specific entry on Brattleby.
Secondary Sources:
Bates, David. William the Conqueror. Yale University Press, 2016. Chibnall, Marjorie. The Normans. Blackwell Publishing, 2000. Crouch, David. The Reign of King Stephen, 1135–1154. Longman, 2000. Hill, Sir Francis. Medieval Lincoln. Cambridge University Press, 1948. Holt, J.C. The Northerners: A Study in the Reign of King John. Oxford University Press, 1961. Huscroft, Richard. The Norman Conquest: A New Introduction. Pearson Longman, 2009. Morris, Marc. The Norman Conquest. Windmill Books, 2013. Stenton, Frank. The First Century of English Feudalism, 1066–1166. 2nd Edition. Oxford University Press, 1961. The Victoria History of the County of Lincoln*, Volume II. Edited by William Page. Archibald Constable & Co., 1906. (Contains analysis of the Domesday survey in Lincolnshire).