A History of Britain - Volume 1: At the Edge of the World? 3000 BC-AD 1603

by Simon Schama

Did England now become as thoroughly Danish as it would be Norman fifty years later? Much of the country, from York through East Anglia – and beyond England in the Norse earldom of Orkney and the Viking port city of Dublin – could already be said to have been colonized, in the sense that their economic and cultural life was redirected northeast and east towards the trading empire of Scandinavia. The countless towns with name-endings in -by and -thorp bear the marks of their Viking origin to this day. But in Wessex and Mercia it was much less clear who was colonizing whom. Cnut began his reign in the usual way with a wedding and a slaughter. In 1002 Aethelred had had no compunction about ordering a general massacre of Danes, the better to pre-empt a fifth column. Now it was Cnut’s turn to wipe out his major competitor, Edmund Ironside’s brother Eadric, as well as those Saxon magnates whom he suspected of disloyalty, in particular the earls of Mercia and East Anglia, whose earldoms were given to the Viking nobles, Eric and Thorkell the Tall, who had delivered the throne of England to him. That was the way things were done in the Mafia-like world of eleventh-century Europe: a nice clean slate, with no athelings (nobles of royal descent) left to cause problems later on. Finally, Cnut lost no time in taking Aethelred’s widow, Emma, as his own wife even though she was old enough to be his mother.

  But the marriage of Emma and Cnut was designed less for carnal joy than political convenience. It was another aspect of what was, in effect, a hostile take-over, rather than a complete effacement. For although he made his Danish friends into powerful earls, Cnut was shrewd enough to run England the English way. He would have been foolish to think of doing anything else since he had inherited the most intensively administered, best organized government in early medieval Europe (and, by the time Cnut had finished with it, the most heavily taxed as well). Late Anglo-Saxon England was politically volatile but institutionally stable. Beyond the mayhem at court and the bloodshed of the battlefield, churches were being built, cases were being heard in court, merchandise was being produced and marketed and a strong and copious coinage was being minted. And from the few fragmentary survivals we can see that this was also a culture of great sophistication and versatility. The stunning ivories, dazzlingly coloured psalters, intensely emotional Passion scenes, vividly animated birds and beasts, coming from the great ecclesiastical powerhouses of Winchester and Canterbury, are the equal of the best work to be found anywhere in Christian Europe.

  In the nineteenth century medieval historians saw in Anglo-Saxon government the foundation of institutions they themselves recognized and celebrated, and while there was a good deal of retrospective sentimentalization about an imagined Saxon ‘golden age’, they were not completely wrong. South of the Humber, England was divided into the shires that persisted to 1974, each one with a court to administer royal justice and governed by the powerful ealdormen who governed in the king’s name. And the shires were themselves subdivided into smaller jurisdictions, called hundreds, with their own courts, which all freemen were supposed to attend and which were held monthly, presumably to hear local disputes and misdemeanours. A famous law from Aethelred’s time even mentions a ‘jury’ of twelve thegns, deputed to seek out and bring malefactors to trial, an institution usually thought of as the invention of the twelfth century. In the hide – the land deemed adequate to support a free family, but usually about 120 acres – the government had the basic statistical unit, always rounded up, through which it could assess the liability of shires, hundreds and burghs for taxes and the military draft. At the local level the reeve was responsible for law, taxes, the upkeep of roads and the provision of men for the fyrd (the part-time soldiery, mostly thegns and their beholden tenants, obliged to do military service). With this governmental machinery at their disposal, it was no wonder that the Anglo-Saxon kings felt empowered to legislate. And when they made laws eliminating cattle-rustling and sent them, signed and sealed, to their senior magnates, the ealdormen, and then on through the sheriff, they expected those writs to be faithfully obeyed.

  There was, then, no reason for Cnut to upset the heavily laden apple-cart that was early eleventh-century England. He kept its bishops in place, and Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, who had been responsible for much of Aethelred’s moralizing legislation, continued undisturbed in his authority. It must have been Wulfstan who was responsible for Cnut’s decision to issue a code of laws (thus aligning himself with Alfred and Edgar), with all kinds of head masterly homilies reminding clergy and laity of their proper duties: reminders about abstinence from meat in Lent; instructions on what part of a dead earl’s property the king might lawfully claim; how a cottager’s wife might defend herself when stolen property, put there without her knowledge, was discovered in her house. Cnut even began the practice of addressing public letters to his subjects, an early exercise in royal damage limitation, offering a kind of contract to the stubbornly disaffected: ‘I will shut down my raiding parties if you submit peacefully to my rule.’

  In so far as Cnut was a successful Danish colonialist, bringing England twenty years of respite from what had been constant warfare, it was because he was prepared to govern the country the Saxon way and from England, rather than as an absentee emperor based in Scandinavia. Add to that his mistrust of the few Viking nobles, like Thorkell the Tall, whom he had promoted to earldoms, and his dependence on shrewd, well-informed English advisers becomes all the more obvious. Such men had to know about hides and taxes; loyalty and conspiracy; when to cosset the Church and when to fleece it; these men could smell treasure or treason miles away, however deeply it was buried. To be reliable, such men also needed to be unconnected with the old royal house of Wessex. And if these new men did their work well, and loyally, Cnut made them noble and rich, powers in the land.

  No one laboured more conscientiously or was more lavishly rewarded than Earl Godwine. He had risen far, fast. The son of a South Saxon thegn, Wulfnoth, he had excelled as a freelance pirate raider along the south coast of England in the years when authority was slipping from Aethelred’s grasp. So Godwine appreciated early on the Danish connection between violence, riches and government. On his way up he took care that he married a Danish aristocratic wife, Gytha, and gave his children Viking names, like Sweyn and Harold. He was, in his own person, a symbol of England’s adaptation to the reality of Viking power. And in short order he made himself indispensable as a source of intelligence and enforcement, permitting the king to present himself as Cnut the wise, Cnut the just, Cnut the magnanimous, while his enemies were expeditiously seen off. So, by 1018 Godwine the ex-pirate made it all the way to becoming Earl Godwine, and he was given great estates and the patronage of grand abbeys in the choice region of the old kingdom, Wessex. Since kings in those days were still prodigal wanderers, moving from estate to estate, sponging off the local magnates, the earl and the king saw a great deal of each other. It was a relationship of perfect, mutual parasitism. And it was too good to last.

  In 1035, by most standards a capable ruler, Cnut died at Shaftesbury before he had reached the age of forty. His two sons, Harthacnut and Harold, the offspring of different mothers, were both in a position to claim the throne and both did, since there was no assumption, either in Danish or Saxon conventions, of the automatic succession of the eldest. Queen Emma, now widow to two kings of England, had thrown her support behind Harthacnut. But a war had broken out between the Danish and Norwegian realms of Cnut’s empire, and Harthacnut decided to fight his battles in Scandinavia. So the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, members of the witan, the national council consisting of the great secular and spiritual magnates of the country, nominated his half-brother, Harold ‘Harefoot’, the son of Cnut’s former wife Aelgifu, and, needless to say, just as soon as he realized its inevitability, Godwine came round to the idea of Harold as king.

  But there was, in fact, a third possibility for the succession: an English possibility. For the dynasty of Wessex had not been entirely wiped out in the Danish years. Two children of Aethelred and Emma, Alfred and Edward, survived and were livi
ng across the English Channel in the duchy of Normandy, where they had been sent for their own protection during the grimmest period of the Danish onslaught on Saxon England. Desperate for help against the Danes, Aethelred had earlier made an alliance with Duke Richard of Normandy. At the time it made a great deal of sense. His wife, Emma, was a daughter of the Norman dukes, and the warrior state, stretching across a great crescent of territory in what is now northwestern France, was a dependent vassal state of the kingdom of France only on paper. In reality, it was very much its equal or senior. Many generations before, the Normans, whose dynastic founder had been known as Ralf, or Rollo the Viking, had done things the Norse way: using hit-and-sail violence to extract plunder; using the plunder to finance a further sailing; and amassing enough power to extort political privileges and implant themselves in the body of their victim-host, in their case, late Carolingian France. But it would be misleading to think of the connection the house of Wessex made with the Dukes of Normandy as another case of ‘our Vikings against their Vikings’. For by the late tenth and early eleventh century, the dukes had long since made the amphibious evolution to creatures of the land, trading in their longboats for war-horses taken from Spain and bred in stud-farms in Normandy itself. The old Norse halls had given way to motte-and-bailey castles: strongholds set atop earthwork mounds, surrounded by palisades and deep-dug ditches. And the defensive strength of those early castles meant that while the dukes were early feudal territorialists, commanding power through their client-magnates, they were constantly in the saddle, fighting off rebellions and defections and keeping shaky coalitions together by bribing prospective allies with the bait of the confiscated lands of their enemies. Politically chaotic, ducal Normandy hummed with piety. Like the house of Wessex, the dukes were patrons of new monasteries, and it was in the eleventh century that handsome Romanesque stone churches began to appear, as well as the first spectacular stone castles like the one at Falaise where, in 1027, an illegitimate son was born to Duke Robert and a tanner’s daughter called Herlève. With all this disorderly energy flowing through Normandy, it could only be a matter of time before the duchy was thought of as the coming power in northern Christian Europe.

  Growing up in that world, it was not surprising that the Wessex princes, Alfred and Edward, imagined that some day, with Norman help, they would be restored to the throne they believed had been usurped by the Danes. And when Cnut died in 1035 they even imagined that their mother Emma might look with favour on their claim. She herself seemed to have encouraged the initiative. In 1036, although they must have known the enterprise was fraught with risk, Alfred and Edward arrived in England, by different routes, to sound out their mother on their prospects. Edward sailed to Southampton but having dipped his toe in the waters of English politics judiciously withdrew it and sailed back to Normandy. Alfred paid the price for his optimism. At first, all seemed to go well. He was met by Earl Godwine, who must have seemed the soul of cordiality, entertaining his guest at his hall in Guildford and even going through the motions of becoming Alfred’s vassal, his ‘sworn man’, by returning to the allegiance of the house of Wessex. The prince relaxed – fatally. For Godwine handed him over to Harold Harefoot’s men, who proceeded to butcher Alfred’s entourage, tear out the young man’s eyes and mutilate his body. What was left of him was dragged off mercilessly to Ely, where he died of his terrible wounds.

  Harold Harefoot lived only another four years to enjoy his triumph. His half-brother, Harthacnut, returning from Scandinavia in 1040 to succeed to his father’s legacy, delivered his own obituary on Harefoot’s reign by exhuming his body from the royal tomb at Winchester and having it thrown in the Thames. Anxious to exculpate himself from any responsibility in the murder of Prince Alfred, Godwine delivered an eighty-man warship to the new king and submitted himself for a trial in which, as expected, he was acquitted. In 1041, pressing this reconciliation with the Saxon nobility further, Harthacnut invited Alfred’s brother, Edward, to return to England. Harthacnut was not making these overtures out of any sentimental goodwill, however. He knew he needed the support of the great Saxon earls if he was to repel his Viking rival, the Norwegian king, Magnus I, who certainly thought he had as good a claim to the throne as the Dane. In the end, it was an agreement between the two Scandinavian kings, by which the kingdom of England would pass to whichever survived the death of the other, that bought Harthacnut time. From the beginning, then, Edward was something of a pawn in the grand strategies of the Viking powers. And if he made the crossing from Normandy in all innocence, he must still have been at least queasy about the decision, given the fate of his brother. But a year later Edward’s prospects seemed suddenly to have brightened when Harthacnut unexpectedly died, ‘falling to the ground with terrible convulsions’ while drinking the health of one of his retainers at the wedding feast, a Viking exit if ever there was one.

  It took no time at all for Earl Godwine to propose to the rest of the witan that Edward now become king. There were still two Scandinavian contenders – Harthacnut’s Danish kinsman, Swein Estrithson, and Magnus I, the king of Norway – but Edward had the enormous advantage of being in the right place at the right time and, through Godwine’s persuasion, also having the support of the earls of Mercia and Northumbria. Godwine’s calculation was that with a weak Saxon on the throne rather than a strong Viking, he would be in a much better position to be the de facto governor of the realm. So Edward, later known as the Confessor, was crowned at Winchester on Easter Day 1043 according to the rites invented for Edgar by Abbot Dunstan. He was thirty-seven years old and unmarried. And despite the usual acclamations and each of the nobles doing homage, Edward might still have felt a chill of anxiety, not least because his own mother (who seemed to have enjoyed her reign as Cnut’s queen rather more than her reign as Aethelred’s) was shamelessly campaigning to have Magnus, king of Norway, put on the throne of England and her son set aside!

  Like Cnut, Edward had little choice but to take things very much as he found them. To keep the king of Norway at arm’s length he needed the support of the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, and no matter how much his stomach may have churned at the memory of the fate of his brother Alfred every time he looked at the Earl of Wessex he could not afford to do without Godwine’s help. After all, Godwine owned almost as much land – and with it the loyalty of client thegns and their foot soldiers – as the king. His son, Harold, had been elevated to the earldom of East Anglia, vastly expanding the territorial base of Godwine’s power. Whichever way Edward looked at it, the old monster was the undisputed leader of the witan and the controller of patronage in Church and state. And there was nothing the king could do about it; not yet, anyway. So when Godwine made him an offer he couldn’t refuse – his daughter Edith in marriage – she duly became queen. No children were born to the couple, however, and later it was thought that Edward had taken a vow of chastity or that he had some sort of insuperable distaste for the sex act. It was just as possible that by keeping his distance from Edith, Edward was deliberately thwarting Godwine’s ambition to insert his own family into the royal line of succession by creating a grandchild who would be heir to the throne of England. In any event, Edward was not yet the ascetic miracle-worker and healer of the sick he became in later legend. Early in his reign Edward was much like any other red-blooded member of the house of Wessex: hunting, drinking and raging with the best of them.

  The model for Edward’s leadership could as easily have been Norman as Anglo-Saxon, however. After all, Normandy, his mother’s birthplace, had been more of a home to him than anywhere else, and he spoke Norman French and looked to Duke Robert of Normandy as a protector and guardian. In addition, the dukes of Normandy had supported his and his brother’s cause (even if inadequately) against the Danish kings while his mother Emma (the Gertrude in this saga) had decided to sleep with them. When Edward thought of himself as a patron of the Church, it was the Norman style of sponsoring reforming orders that he had in mind. And many, if not most, of his
small personal following, such as his nephew Ralph the Timid, were either Norman, French or Breton.

  Although he was twenty years his senior, Edward would have seen little William the Bastard growing up at the ducal court, somehow blessed with whatever it took to survive. When William was just seven or eight years old and much was still made of his illegitimacy, his father, Duke Robert, decided to express his appreciation for the Lord’s support in vanquishing his domestic enemies by going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He died in 1035 on the homeward journey, leaving his little bastard no better than a lamb thrown to the wolves. The wolves lost no time, killing William’s steward in his bedchamber, probably in front of the boy’s eyes. A witness to all this turmoil, which was so much like his own misadventures, Edward might have been impressed by the way in which the boy survived. He had last seen him when he was thirteen years old, but from England, where the king’s authority seemed so frustratingly circumscribed, Edward may well have looked enviously at the progress of the young duke as he overcame conspiracy and adversity and eventually triumphed (with the help of the French king) over a formidable confederation of rebel nobles. Somehow William had managed to put together the aggressively centralizing state that eluded all the Anglo-Saxon kings.

  Taking a leaf from the book of the audacious, risk-taking duke of Normandy, around 1050 Edward began to build up his own party of supporters, some of them with cross-Channel connections. Most crucially, the bishopric of London had been given to Robert, a monk from the immensely important abbey at Jumièges, who in 1051 became Archbishop of Canterbury. The king also found land in Lincolnshire, East Anglia and the West Country for his French and Norman allies. The most important was his nephew, Earl Ralf, the son of his murdered brother Alfred, who had come to England with him in 1042. In Herefordshire they created a little Normandy, complete with the first castles in England and retinues of Norman knights. None of this was done as part of a strategic conspiracy to pave the way for a Norman succession. Edward’s immediate concern was rather to defend the western borders of Mercia and Wessex against the expansionism of the Welsh princes of Gwynedd and Powys. But if, in so doing, he managed to build a power base that would free him from dependence on the Godwines, so much the better.