1066 - Andrew Bridgeford [90]
17
The Downfall of Bishop Odo
The conquest of England was the great watershed in Odo's life.1 As the new king's grip on the country tightened, he divided the lands of the dead and dispossessed English among his followers. Bishop Odo's share of these spoils was immense. His initial reward was the earldom of Kent, and in that county alone, as well as holding Dover Castle, he possessed at least 184 manors; he has been described as 'perhaps the greatest single figure in Kentish history'.2 By the 1080s Odo held large estates in twenty-two counties dotted throughout England. The Domesday Book of 1086 records that Odo's total landed income was in the region of £3,000 per annum, an extraordinary amount for the times; it was at least three times more than the amount Eustace gleaned from his own English lands and that in itself was a very sizeable sum. Domesday also reveals that the yield extracted from the men and women who day-long toiled in Odo's fields and did his bidding had risen by 40 per cent from what it had been in 1066.
A striking measure of Odo's newfound wealth was provided by the Sunday Times in 2000 when it compiled a list of the richest non-royal Britons during the last millennium, the 'Richest of the Rich' list.3Odo's English fortune was estimated in modern terms as £43.2 billion, putting him in fourth place overall. Such estimates are deceptively precise but they certainly reveal the broad scale of Odo's wealth. Such was the rapaciousness of the invaders of the Norman Conquest that three out of the first four places in the Sunday Times's list, covering the whole of the period from 1066 to date, were held by men who accompanied William the Conqueror to England and who owed their fortunes to the spoils of invasion: William of Warenne (£57.6 billion), Odo's own brother Robert of Mortain (£46.1 billion) and Bishop Odo himself. When one takes into account the sizeable income Odo continued to receive in his capacity as Bishop of Bayeux, he must have as good a claim as anybody, so far as evidence permits, to be regarded as the richest non-monarch ever to have lived in England during the whole of the last millennium. This should have pleased the tanner's grandson, but the appetite of a greedy man is rarely sated and ultimately Odo's boundless greed and ambition were to be the cause of a sudden downfall.
Not all the land that Odo claimed was of unimpeachable title or undisputed by others. The most famous dispute of all brought him into direct conflict with the Italian-born Lanfranc, the new Archbishop of Canterbury who had been appointed by King William in 1070 from the Abbaye aux Hommes at Caen. The encroachments that Odo was accused of seem to have dated back to pre-Conquest times; they were already part of the Kentish lands of the Godwin family that Odo had 'inherited' following the victory at Hastings. Odo, however, strove hard to retain as much as he could. A dispute such as this between two of William's closest advisers, the scholarly Lanfranc and the avaricious Odo, had to be settled by due process of law. It gave rise to one of the most important legal trials of William's reign. The old shire court of Kent was convened at its traditional meeting place on Penenden Heath, where the Anglo-Saxons had met in the years before. It was presided over by another great Norman magnate, Bishop Geoffrey of Coutances, who,