A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons

by Geoffrey Hindley

  Emma died on 6 March 1052 in Winchester, about seventy years old. King Edward arranged for his mother to be interred next to her Danish warrior husband Cnut in the church of St Swithun, the Old Minster. She was the first queen to be buried there. She was also the first queen since Alfred the Great’s Æthelswih to be buried with her husband. Nunneries were the normal place of retirement for widowed queens, and the normal place of their burial. Emma/Ælfgifu’s death was still commemorated in the later eleventh century and the house where she had lived was still identified as hers in the twelfth.

  Hard woman, hard world

  Emma of Normandy’s life reads like a feminist metaphor for a woman’s frustration in politics. The Encomium Emmae reginae (‘In Praise of Queen Emma’), written about 1041 and which she almost certainly commissioned and may well in part have dictated, reads as the anonymous CV of a great talent woefully underused. A frontispiece, not a common feature of books at this time, depicts the queen in royal regalia seated upon a throne, an early example of a secular figure seated in majesty, with the kneeling author at her feet presenting the volume into her hands. Behind him stand her two royal sons, the half-brothers Edward, son of Æthelred, and Harthacnut, son of Cnut. The kneeling author is presumably of no interest to anyone, except perhaps himself, but the trio of royals represent the tense up-to-the minute story of English politics in the pages that follow, told very much from Emma’s viewpoint. The information on the English scene is no doubt provided by her and so we may assume that the narrative reveals how the people it deals with were viewed by her and her party.

  Her antecedents, she boasts, lie with a victorious people that wrested the province of Normandy in Gaul (echoes of imperial Rome) from the Franks and their prince. Rich in wealth and lineage, beautiful and wise, the most outstanding woman of her day, she is now a famous queen. As if to validate her vaunted wisdom, the Encomium opens with a general survey of Denmark before her birth to explain the decision by Swein, father of Cnut, to invade England in 1013. More than a praise text, though it was that, the book urges the claims of Harthacnut, her son by Cnut, as the next king of England. Emma was no mere wife or bedfellow but a fit companion for a warrior monarch in the true Viking mode:18 a woman familiar with war at sea as well as on land; a lady as at home with the warrior band as in the mead hall; above all, a worthy ‘consort in his imperium’.

  For fourteen years she was the wife of Æthelred, king of England. The fact is suppressed by the Encomium and the sons of that marriage, Edward (later ‘the Confessor’) and Alfred, barely mentioned. The Encomium was meant to influence the future, through a version of the past that met the questions of the present. It was aimed at her sons, and more widely at the great men of the English. It was a political work, from a political woman in the thick of politics19 – but politics in a man’s world. When the son she had backed for the crown died and the son she had dispraised (some said wished dead) succeeded, retirement from the scene was all that was left.

  For England the legacy was more serious. In 1038 that favourite son had struck a deal with Magnus of Norway that if either died childless the other would succeed to his kingdom. In 1042 Harthacnut died – and was succeeded by Edward. Preoccupied by threats to his crown, Magnus was never able to follow up his claim. In 1066 his son and heir Harald Hardrada invaded England and helped ensure that King Harold II was in battle at Stamford Bridge, 250 miles away from the beaches of Pevensey Bay, when William of Normandy was preparing to disembark his invasion force there. No doubt Emma of Normandy would have approved.

  12

  EDWARD THE CONFESSOR, THE CONQUEST AND THE AFTERMATH

  Edward was crowned king at Winchester on Easter Day, 3 April 1043. He had been exercising the powers of the kingship for ten months since the death of Harthacnut in June 1042 and may have been joint king since 1041. A contemporary saw a man in his late thirties, tall above the average and to be feared in his rage. He was passionately addicted to hunting with dogs – English hounds were renowned throughout Europe – and had inherited an impetuous streak from his father. He was half Norman by birth and spoke Norman-French as fluently as, if not more so than, English. His entourage comprised Bretons as well as Normans and the Lotharingian Herman, whom he appointed bishop of Sherborne. His most influential councillor, Earl Godwine of Wessex (according to Robert Fleming ‘a parvenu’1), had been raised to power by Cnut the Dane. The earl’s Danish wife, Gytha, far more distinguished than her husband, had been the great king’s sister-in-law and Edith (i.e. Eadgyth) his half-Danish daughter, was shortly to become Queen of England. The family had connections with Ireland (possibly trading in slaves to that country) and Queen Edith would prove a fluent Irish-speaker, as well as mistress of various other languages. There was nothing about the vigorous and cosmopolitan court of this Edward of Wessex and England, third of his name since Alfred the Great, to suggest the milksop image history sometimes associates him with as ‘Edward the Confessor’.

  Just months after his coronation, in November 1043, Edward moved in company with the three great earls, Godwine, Leofric of Mercia and Siward of Northumbria, against his once-powerful mother Queen Emma/Ælfgifu and her adviser Bishop Stigand, ensconced at Winchester, home of the kingdom’s treasury. The next year Edward had his Norman counsellor, Robert, abbot of Jumièges, appointed bishop of London (in 1051 he would move him to Canterbury). It seems he aimed to use churchmen to counterbalance the influence of the lay advisers already in place. Equally he acted with royal assurance as he wished, banishing a kinswoman of Cnut’s and her family, and then a powerful Danish magnate. He even overrode Earl Godwine in one vital matter by refusing support for Denmark, which was then under attack from Magnus of Norway. In fact, Godwine was probably right: Magnus had a claim on the English throne, as we know, and had he overrun Denmark England would have been next in line. Magnus died in October 1047, but the danger did not die with him.

  That same year Edward banished Swein, the eldest son of Earl Godwine, because he had abducted and raped the abbess of Leominster, in the Welsh marches. This was a direct confrontation with the mighty dynasty. Swein Godwineson, for five years earl of Herefordshire, as well as Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Somerset and Berkshire, was in local rivalry with Ralph of Mantes, Earl of Worcester, a French nephew of the king’s, who now displaced him in his earldom, along with their cousin Beorn. The following year Swein was back in the king’s favour, but almost at once he breached the king’s peace, this time with the murder of Earl Beorn, from what motive is still unknown. He was declared ‘nithing’ [of absolutely no account or social standing] by the king. (Three years later, he was to make the extravagant penance of a barefoot pilgrimage to Jerusalem.) Yet, after a further brief exile in Bruges with Count Baldwin of Flanders, the impetuous and twice-exiled Swein was once again restored to the king’s grace.

  For much of his life Edward had been in the exile zone between England, Flanders and Normandy. Tostig Godwineson, another exile on the run, would marry the Count’s daughter, Judith. Orderic Vitalis claimed that in April 1066 he actually visited the court of William of Normandy (a cousin by marriage) to offer him assistance in his invasion of England, before going north to join the Norwegian king. But in general we know little of the bargains, deals and understandings that were currency among the players – only that the throne of England seemed to be perennially in the hazard. Had not Edward himself won it against the odds? Earl Godwine had been a power in the land long before Edward arrived from exile. For Edward the royal court must sometimes have seemed a luxurious form of house arrest with Godwine’s daughter, Queen Edith, the turnkey. Between 1050 and 1052 Edward would manoeuvre for a break-out.

  The challenge that failed

  Quite apart from anything else, his dynasty needed an heir. Married in January 1045 and at least fifteen years the king’s junior, the talented and solicitous young queen seems to have been a major figure in the protocol and ceremonial of the court. She controlled that department of the royal treasury dedicated to th
e visual presentation of the dignity of the king. She saw to it that ‘[he was] arrayed in garments of splendour’ and had the throne adorned with gold-embroidered mantling. In her fascinating book Queen Emma and Queen Edith, Pauline Stafford mentions five goldsmiths listed among Edith’s servants, one of whom, Leofgeat, held land in return for the service of producing aurifrisium, presumably the same luxury product as the London guild of silk women was famed for in the later Middle Ages. The queen also provided him with a staff encrusted with gold and gems for his everyday use and directed the smiths to hang his saddle and horse trappings with golden birds and beasts. (Any collector of antique horse brasses must surely get the picture . . . at the bottom end of the market!) The goldsmiths who worked for her and the king included a certain Theoderic, who with his wife held lands in Oxfordshire, and a German, Otto, who married an Englishwoman and held properties in Essex. Edith excelled as a mistress of the wardrobe and director of ceremonies. It was almost certainly she who would commission the King’s Life (Vita Edwardi Regis), which often reads like a eulogy of the Godwine family. But she had yet to produce children.

  Any move against the queen inevitably entailed a move against her family and, of course, her father. Next to the earl and the king the most powerful man in the kingdom was the archbishop of Canterbury. The huge wealth, extensive lands and great powers of patronage that went with the primacy made for contentious politics. In October 1050 the archdiocese fell vacant with the death of Archbishop Eadsige. Godwine, as lay lord of Kent, was adept at encroachments on the property of the see and had hopes that the electors, the monks who ran the cathedral, favoured a kinsman of his. Strictly speaking, the election of archbishop required papal approval, but this had usually followed automatically on the wishes of the lay ruler. However, church reform was in the air. The German-born Pope Leo IX, though himself appointed by Emperor Henry III at the end of a period of church decline, was not the man to approve a courtier’s puppet at Canterbury and during his reign (1049–54) he did much to re-establish the authority of Rome. And Godwine faced another obstacle – King Edward was keenly interested in church matters. The year before he had sent Duduc, bishop of Wells, a learned Saxon appointed by Cnut in the 1030s, Wulfric, abbot of St Augustine’s, Canterbury, and Abbot Ælfwine of Ramsey to the synod at Reims presided over by Leo: this was the first time a pope had left Italy in 300 years. In 1050 other English churchmen were dispatched to the papal council at Rome and Bishop Ulf of Dorchester, one of Edward’s Norman appointees, attended the council at Vercelli in northwest Italy. (Did he take the Codex Vercellensis with him?) By contrast William of Normandy, who extracted papal support for his conquering raid into England, never permitted any clergy of his to attend papal councils.2 Edward had received papal permission for certain reforms and, famously, built the great minster or collegiate church of St Peter’s to the west of London. With the exception of the contemporary cathedral built by the German emperors at Speyer on the Rhine, this building, later known as Westminster Abbey, was the largest church built north of the Alps since the fourth century.

  Edward’s acceptance of reforms in the church marked royal compliance with papal wishes beyond anything seen in England for centuries. For years, one man had been both archbishop of York and bishop of Worcester. When Ealdred of Worcester became archbishop of York in 1062, Rome insisted that such plurality, the holding of more than one see by one man, should end and Wulfstan succeed him in Worcester. Edward concurred.

  In 1050 Edward’s candidate for Canterbury was Robert of Jumièges, since 1044 bishop of London. Robert departed for Rome to receive his pallium. On his way he is supposed to have negotiated an alliance between the twenty-three-year-old Duke William of Normandy and King Edward; later Norman writers were to claim that at this time Edward nominated the duke his heir to the English throne. Robert was also a tough defender of church property against lay predators and an advocate of general church reform. Pope Leo approved as much as Earl Godwine objected. Robert also provoked Edward’s hostility towards Godwine by allusions to the death of Prince Alfred, the king’s young kinsman reputedly murdered on the earl’s orders. On his return from Rome in the summer of 1051 Robert’s devotion to reform heightened: he now refused to consecrate the king’s own candidate as bishop of London.

  The king had further trouble in store. Plenty of people in England resented the French/Norman presence at court. A visit from his brother-in-law, Count Eustace of Boulogne, triggered a crisis. On his way to embarkation, the count and his retinue were badly mauled in the streets of Dover. The cause of the fracas was naturally contested, but an assault on a guest of the king was an assault on the dignity of the king himself and Edward ordered Earl Godwine to punish the citizenry by sending in armed men to sack the place. Godwine refused. This made him popular with the people but not with the king. Summoned to account for himself, Godwine called up his sons Swein, back from exile, and Harold, who ordered their household warriors to assemble. The king summoned Earl Leofric of Mercia and Siward of Northumbria with their men to meet with his councillors at Gloucester, along with Ralph of Mantes and his men. Two armies, one royalist and the other potentially a rebel force, were now mustered in the region of Gloucester. Civil war seemed possible but was averted for the time being. The D Chronicle records that there were men on both sides who considered that conflict ‘would be a great piece of folly’, since battle between the ‘noblest in England’ would open the country to attack from its enemies and ‘cause much ruin among ourselves’.

  By his refusal of the king’s order Godwine might be guilty of contumacy and it was agreed he should stand trial in London. The two forces began the march to that city, but the rebels began to melt away and Earl Godwine looked to make his peace with the king when Edward outlawed Swein. Using as his messenger Bishop Stigand of Winchester, reckoned one of Godwine’s party, Edward replied that the earl could have peace when he restored Prince Alfred to him. The king’s distrust and hostility could not be made plainer: apparently he still held Godwine responsible for his brother’s death. Equally obvious was that Stigand, if willing to carry such a message, had switched his allegiance.

  England’s most powerful family was in disarray. The earl himself, his wife and their sons Swein and Tostig took ship from their port of Bosham for Flanders. Harold sailed for Ireland. The whole family was declared outlaw, except of course for Queen Edith. On the king’s orders she was sent to the nunnery at Wilton; Robert of Jumièges even felt able to recommend divorce. Her removal from the royal presence was logical, both as a member of a disgraced family and as a royal consort who had not produced an heir. Later it was said that she had been accused of adultery, too, though had proved her innocence in the ordeal of fire, walking unharmed over red-hot ploughshares.3 Her humiliation did not last long. Her family were planning their return.

  The king ordered a fleet to stand by at Sandwich and alerted coastal commanders. Godwine’s fleet was intercepted as it made its way from Flanders to England. Although Harold was able to join up with his father, gales scattered both royalist and rebel forces. But the Godwine family regrouped and in mid-September, ‘the sea covered with [their] ships and the sky aglitter with weapons’, thanks to their opponents’ inertia they crossed ‘the Kentish sea’ and were able to establish themselves on the south bank of the Thames, threatening the king’s party of loyal earls and its French supporters in the city. But the Englishmen’s hearts were not with the king. Edward realized that he could not rely on the Londoners’ support against England’s chief noble dynasty. Robert of Jumièges and the French bishops of Dorchester and London, together with the rest of the French party, had to force their way out against the hostile citizenry. It was a Godwine triumph. The entire Godwine party was declared innocent of all crimes with which they had been charged and their lands and honours were restored. On the advice of his councillors Edward gave Godwine the kiss of peace, Queen Edith was returned to court and the king was obliged to accept a huge loss in authority and prestige. Godwine’s e
nemies were outlawed.

  Some of the French/Norman refugees from the events of 1052 fled to Scotland, always ready to fish in England’s troubled waters and the court of King Macbeth (1040–57). Malcolm Canmore, son of Duncan, the king whom Macbeth had defeated and killed in battle near Elgin, was in exile in England where he found an ally in Siward, Earl of Northumbria. The earl twice invaded Scotland in Malcolm’s cause, with the approval of Edward, and English levies were prominent in the army that Malcolm himself led to victory over Macbeth to become king as Malcolm III (d. 1093). He established the Scottish monarchy through which James VI of Scotland and I of England traced his descent. Macbeth and his wife Cruoch suffered character assassination in the version of history encouraged by Malcolm’s descendants. (Not surprisingly, when Shakespeare came to write his Macbeth for performance before James VI and I about 1606 he followed this tradition.)

  While the historical Macbeth could hardly have been a figure of the towering complexity of his tragic namesake, neither was he the murderer of his predecessor. Shakespeare’s Edward, on the other hand, was ‘gracious England’, and had ‘the most miraculous’ power to cure ‘people all swollen and ulcerous’ (Macbeth IV, 3). The ability to cure the unsightly disease of scrofula, a tuberculosis of the lymph glands, was attributed to Edward from an early period, as it was to the Capetian kings of France, his contemporaries. Shakespeare has Malcolm reporting that Edward left ‘to the succeeding royalty . . . the healing benediction’. James I himself offered the healing gesture and his granddaughter Queen Anne was the last British sovereign to do so. (In France Charles X, reigned 1818–30, still performed the practice.)