IN 1075 William the Conqueror faced one of the most serious threats to his kingship of the English people. It was a rebellion that threatened to combine the forces of three of William's own earls across the breadth of England with a Danish invasion fleet. It was a challenge to the legitimacy of William's position and it was the occasion for a battle, a long siege and months of troop mobilisation. According to Archbishop Lanfranc, acting in the absence of the king, there were still ‘three hundred heavily-armed soldiers supported by a large force of slingers and siege engineers’ outside Norwich Castle three months after the rebels had been defeated at the battle of Fageduna. It is not the intention of this paper to reproduce a narrative of the known events of that year, but to re-examine the way in which these events have traditionally been presented and to utilise the evidence from East Anglia to see how William's response to rebellion altered the political, administrative and tenurial structure of the region.

For many historians this is an episode in which the question of individual ethnicity has provided a framework within which the rebellion has been interpreted. In part, this emphasis stems from the importance given to it in contemporary and near-contemporary sources wherein ethnic descriptions are used specifically to distinguish certain individuals. To Archbishop Lanfranc, in a vivid deviation from his usual written style, Earl Ralph of East Anglia was ‘Breton dung’ (spurcicia Britonum), whilst the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in a unique and important genealogical description, portrayed him as the son of an Englishman from Norfolk. As this clearly demonstrates, the concept of ethnicity in this period was not necessarily fixed, but adaptable to specific situations. People could, and did, carry different onomastic descriptors that expressed different potential ethnic ties at different times in their lives. They could also be given different onomastic descriptions, and such vivid differences in the portrayal of the same man in the same year suggest that close attention should be paid to how individuals were described within different contexts. The preoccupation with ethnicity as a framework for discussion, although understandable, is untenable when the sources are examined closely.