In considering this, one may also bear in mind the close connection that both the Tapestry and Eadmer had with Canterbury (Eadmer certainly and the Tapestry probably), and the possibility of some now unknown connection between the two accounts and also, of course, the fact that Eadmer was writing with the benefit of hindsight. If no hostages were ever given to William by Edward (we only have William of Poitiers’ word that they were), and Wulfnoth was imprisoned by William on a different or later occasion, then Eadmer’s version would fall to the ground. But there may be reasons for giving some credence to Eadmer’s account. It has been suggested by Harold’s biographer, Ian W. Walker, that Bishop Æthelric of Sussex, who was consulted by Eadmer over his life of St Dunstan, may well have been the Æthelric of Christ Church, Canterbury, whose election as archbishop was rejected by King Edward in 1050 in favour of Robert of Jumièges. If so, he was a relation of the Godwin family; and if so, this connection would have allowed Eadmer access to a relative of Harold’s when he wrote his account of the events of 1064, giving his version some authority.xx At the very least it implies the existence in Canterbury, and possibly further afield, of a reasonably plausible account of events that might reconcile Eadmer’s history with the Tapestry.
Whichever version comes nearest the truth, William appears to have equipped himself in advance with, according to Goebbels, the best ingredient for propaganda – the big lie consistently told: that the kingdom had been promised to him by King Edward (possibly not altogether a lie but certainly not proved and in any case not a valid promise), and that Harold had freely and voluntarily sworn on the bones of the saints to uphold his claim to it. William was to use his advantage skilfully.
THE PRIZE
It is impossible to understand the determination with which the various contenders pursued their claims without understanding the value of the prize for which they were competing. The civilization and culture that in the eleventh century distinguished England from her European neighbours were less important to them than her wealth, which was legendary and colossal, even after the Viking depredations of Æthelred’s reign. Looking back from this distance in time, it is easy to think of Anglo-Saxon England as a remote, comparatively brief and homogeneous phase of history, in much the same way that we think of Tudor or Victorian England. This would be to underrate its duration and its significance. The Anglo-Saxons ruled England for six centuries, as long as from the Middle Ages to the present day, about as long as the duration of the Roman Empire, a period broken only by the twenty-five-year kingship of Cnut and his sons. Naturally, during these six centuries, much changed, and the barbaric paganism of the original settlers evolved relatively peacefully into the rich, sophisticated, Christian kingdom of 1066, of which it has been said that ‘the most important economic developments before the Industrial Revolution took place in the later Anglo-Saxon period’.xxi In the confusion of Dark Age Europe, and unlike the parvenu Norman dukedom founded in 911, England stood out among other European states for its antiquity, its long-established line of kings, most of them highly effective rulers, its well-developed governmental systems, its stable and well-regulated currency and, in consequence, its thriving economy and prosperity.
It was conspicuous, too, eventually, for another characteristic: its unity. How much of this was due to the fact that it was, to all intents and purposes, an island state is difficult to assess; the fact is that, in comparison with other western European states of the time, such as proto-France or Germany, it was a united and self-conscious nation state. The English king’s writ in the eleventh century ran fairly consistently throughout his realm, admittedly less strongly in the north towards the Scottish border, though the legal concessions allowed in the Danelaw were more apparent than significant. By contrast, the French king (or king of the western Franks, as he was more correctly known at this date) had real authority over an area little larger than the Ile de France, and was hemmed in on all sides by vassals who may technically have owed him allegiance but who in fact governed (and contended among themselves) as independent sovereigns in their own lands such as Anjou, Maine, Blois, Ponthieu and Normandy. The English state may have started in the fifth century as a conglomeration of independent kingdoms known loosely as the Saxon Heptarchy; but it was a more homogeneous body than has always been recognized, in which the various petty kingdoms very soon had more in common with each other than with either the former British races whom they encountered on arrival or with the continental districts from which they had come. They quickly came to share a language that would have been in some degree intelligible in any of them. The Venerable Bede, born in the seventh century, described the languages of Britain as English, British (that is, Welsh), Scots, Pictish and Latin; he did not subdivide English into West Saxon, Mercian, Northumbrian or Kentish. Individual kingdoms expanded or shrank by a natural process of ebb and flow. Every now and then, one particularly strong ruler would manage to assert his power over his peers and achieve the slightly legendary title of Bretwalda or ruler of all Britain; this usually ceased at his death and the title lapsed until a successor or a rival was strong enough to claim it. Inter-marriages between the different royal houses produced a network of alliances and kinships that meant there was more to connect the various kingdoms than to separate them. The importance of the conversion of the English and the developing institutions of the Church can hardly be overestimated. Monasteries were being founded the length and breadth of England, all working to the same rule, with monks and abbots (many of them from the most powerful and noble families in the country) moving between them; the importance of their unifying role is obvious, as was that of the metropolitan sees of Canterbury and York.
The ninth-century Viking invasions also played an important part in breaking down what by that time remained of the old divisions and pushing the various constituent parts of the country together. To begin with, it seemed that the old Anglo-Saxon England would be submerged beneath the Scandinavian invaders; but after the fight-back by Alfred and his successors, England in more or less its eleventh-century form had emerged with Wessex predominant, and Alfred’s grandson, King Athelstan, could without exaggeration call himself king of all England. It is said that King Edgar, Athelstan’s nephew, made a point of circumnavigating his entire kingdom every year by sea. If he did, he must have taken in Scotland and Wales as well, over which the English kings rarely had more than a nominal supremacy, but certainly the King of Scotland and Kings of Wales were among the eight subject kings who reputedly rowed Edgar on the river Dee at his coronation. More practically, he promoted the unity of his kingdom by introducing a uniform currency all over England that he alone controlled and that was withdrawn periodically, usually every five or six years, and replaced by another. Apart from providing a significant source of royal revenue for himself and his successors, since all moneyers had to buy the new dies from the king when this happened, this reform promoted the development of the economy at home and abroad, where English coins were much respected. This was to be one of the English customs that the Conqueror did not abolish.
Thus, when the Viking raids resumed in the tenth century, the raiders found a united country in which the Byrhtnoth who confronted them at Maldon in 991 may have been a nobleman of the former kingdom of the East Saxons but who announced himself to them as ‘Æthelred’s earl’, fighting to protect the West Saxon Æthelred’s England, his land and his people, with an army that included at least one Mercian and one Northumbrian, and representatives of all the social classes of England, united in a determination to defend their country. If, as has been suggested, The Battle of Maldon was not written until about thirty years after the battle, it looks even more like a deliberate attempt to portray the defence of a kingdom united in race and class. It throws into sad contrast the verdict of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in 1010, later in the reign of Æthelred, when the demoralization of the country had led to a situation in which ‘no shire would any longer help its neighbour’.
Because of the length of ti
me that the Anglo-Saxon rule lasted, it was naturally not the same throughout, but there were, none the less, consistent threads running through the period. The kingdoms that the seventh-century Ine and the tenth-century Athelstan ruled were indeed very different in many respects, but those over which Athelstan and Edward the Confessor ruled were not in essence very dissimilar. The Domesday Book (1086), one of William’s most famous (and, it must be said, most valuable) achievements, aimed to take a snapshot picture of England ‘on the day King Edward was alive and dead’, 5 January 1066; many of the institutions that it records as having existed then and that survived the conquest have been shown to go far back in history, many of them to a time well before King Alfred or even King Ine. It has been surmised that some of the most important elements of them, for example the system of hundreds, the local government units into which the shires were broken down for administrative and tax purposes, may well go back to a common Indo-European culture, for traces of it have been noted in Carolingian France also. Many of them survived far into the future as well. The shire structure itself continued through the conquest unaltered and untampered with until 1974. A retiring prime minister, resigning his parliamentary seat in the early years of the twenty-first century, still had to apply for the stewardship of the Chiltern hundreds of Stoke, Desborough and Burnham in Buckinghamshire.
The system of justice meant that wherever a man lived, he was rarely in a district so remote that he did not have access to a court of law: the king’s court, the shire court, the hundred court. The involvement of the different ranks of the people in the different levels of the national administration of justice was also a unifying factor, and gave the public at large a voice in national affairs that could never have been imagined in, say, Normandy during the reign of autocrats such as Duke William or his father. There were written law-codes in England from the time of King Æthelberht of Kent in the sixth century, and there are many hints between the times of Æthelberht and Edward the Confessor that not even the king could be regarded as being above the law (not least the agreement between Æthelred and his people that he would be accepted back as king provided he ruled better). In considering why the Angevin kings were to prove more effective legislators in England than in their homeland of Anjou, Patrick Wormald suggests that this could be because in the tenth and eleventh centuries, English kings had laid down the law as no other western rulers did.xxii Henry II, he points out, made law like no other twelfth-century king because he inherited a system of royal justice that was already uniquely well developed and active. There had never been any written law-code in Normandy. It has been said that
the English kings, like the Carolingians but unlike most of the Carolingians’ successors, maintained a system of rule in which their contact, via public courts, with a fairly large number of free classes mattered for them, and for those classes. That those courts and classes survived the Conquest may well have done much to determine the later history of England.xxiii
It has been estimated that in Anglo-Saxon England there were rarely more than two layers of lordship between the yeoman and his king. A situation in which King Alfred could give judgement in a case while he was in his chamber washing his hands was recorded for posterity not because it was unusual but because it was habitual – one of the plaintiffs had appealed to the king from the local shire or hundred court.xxiv It is true that in the days of Alfred’s descendants, particularly during the reign of Æthelred when the need to pay Danegeld led to the frequent levying of extra taxes, this independence of the peasant-farmer was to some extent eroded, probably in the main because of the increasing difficulty smallholders experienced in maintaining themselves. A bad harvest could bring them to the verge of starvation; a Danish raid could reduce them overnight to beggary. It made sense in such cases for a smallholder to trade in his nominal independence for the security of binding himself and the land that he had inherited in some form of servitude to a lord who was able to protect or maintain him. There is little doubt, however, that the process was accelerated and, to some extent, brutalized by the conquest; Stenton has noted that ‘many peasants who in 1066 had been holding land immediately of the king, or as the voluntary dependents of other magnates, are represented in Domesday Book by villani [serfs] on the estates of Norman lords.’xxv
Moreover, the sophisticated system of land tenure in England meant that the kings always knew exactly what they could count on in terms of revenue and fighting men, and their subjects knew what their liabilities were as precisely. It has been calculated that in the whole of England, there was not a scrap of land unaccounted for in the assessment system. Each hundred was broken down into so many hides of land (carucates in the Danelaw, sulungs in Kent). Theoretically, the hide was originally the amount of land sufficient for a peasant family to live on, but very soon the hide ceased to have any relationship to a specific area of land (just as the modern pound has ceased to have any relationship to a specific weight of gold) and became simply a unit of assessment, so that hides in different parts of the country might be assessed differently, often according to the wealth or productivity of the area. A man’s ownership of, say, five hides of land might typically mean that he was liable for so much in taxes, for the provision of a fighting man with all his equipment for a specified number of days a year when the king needed him for the defence of the realm, and for various other services. Such services might include, depending on the owner’s rank, duties of hospitality and escort to the king or his family, food rent (the laws of Ine tell us that the food rent from a ten-hide estate should be ten vats of honey, three hundred loaves, twelve ambers of Welsh ale, thirty of clear ale, two full-grown cows or ten wethers, ten geese, twenty hams, ten cheeses, an amber of butter, five salmon, twenty pounds of fodder and a hundred eels) and other miscellaneous services such as maintenance of hedges. Some of these might be remitted in special circumstances; the three services that were almost never remitted, whether the land were owned by a layman or the Church, were military service, the construction and maintenance of the country’s fortifications and bridge-building. It was this efficient system of assessment that made it possible for Æthelred to raise quickly as extra taxes the vast sums of money that were needed to pay off the Danes between 991 and 1016. It is hardly surprising that they kept coming back for more.
However efficient the tax-collecting system, it would hardly have worked if the money had not been there to be collected. Despite the frequent plundering raids, England was known to be wealthy – indeed, its notorious wealth had much to do with the frequency of the raids. Through the six centuries of its existence, the Anglo-Saxon kingdom had been a trading nation, but it had also achieved renown in various kinds of manufacture. Much of the detail of what the country once produced and contained is still obscure, despite recent archaeological research, and will no doubt remain so because by its nature it was perishable; the remaining archival evidence indicates only a fragment of what must once have existed. But there is enough information in the surviving letters, wills and deeds to give some idea of what people produced and had to dispose of. The evidence of the sheer amount of bullion in the country is impressive, without considering its artistry which, by all accounts, was equally so. As far as imports are concerned, especially those made of precious metals, even William of Poitiers, no friend to the English, and a man who believed that the sooner English treasures were sanitized by passing into Norman hands the better, noted the country’s wealth:
To this most fertile land merchants used to bring added wealth in imported riches. Treasures remarkable for their number and kind and workmanship had been amassed there, either to be kept for the empty enjoyment of avarice, or to be squandered shamefully in English luxury.xxvi
If we consider merely the Sutton Hoo treasure of c.650, the greatest find yet discovered, we are looking at imports from Byzantium, the Mediterranean, Egypt and Sweden at the very least, and at jewellery that may well have been made in Kent, a known centre for this particular kind of fine workmanship.
Frequent references in the various codes of laws drawn up by successive kings make it clear how important trade was to the country and how vital they considered it to be that foreign merchants should be protected and their trade properly regulated.
Commerce was not the only channel through which foreign goods entered the kingdom. The diplomatic and marriage alliances that the English kings had built up throughout Europe meant that there were many ways in which trade could be promoted, and goods and gifts of great value passed backwards and forwards. Dorothy Whitelockxxvii quotes an impressive list of the valuable gifts sent by Hugh, Duke of the Franks, to King Athelstan when he asked for the hand of Athelstan’s half-sister Eadhild in marriage.xxviii The eldest son of King Æthelred who predeceased his father, another Athelstan, left to his brother, Edmund Ironside, ‘the sword which King Offa owned’. One can only conjecture whether this is the Hungarian sword known to have been sent by Charlemagne as a gift to the great Offa of Mercia; it may well have been. Swords were among the most treasured items a man could have, and were passed down as precious heirlooms, as was armour of all kinds, but swords had a particular value and were often decorated with quantities of gold and silver. Offa’s sword was clearly priceless and Edmund Ironside put it to good use; but items of greater monetary though possibly less historical and symbolic value passed regularly between England and Europe.
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