by Marc Morris
This rise to prominence of his friends suggests that William’s personal authority was beginning to grow; that he was, as Poitiers says, selecting his own associates and dismissing those who had appointed themselves during his minority. At the same time, the ducal chaplain tells us, his young master began ‘forcefully demanding the services owed by his own men’. William, in other words, once surrounded by a team he could trust, set about reining in the counts and viscounts who had grown accustomed to ignoring his authority. Inevitably, such behaviour provoked a reaction.28
Towards the end of the year 1046, a new rebellion raised its head. Unlike the successful coup of five years earlier, it was directed squarely at the duke himself with the aim of killing and replacing him. According to the chroniclers, the leader was one of William’s cousins, Guy, who had been raised alongside him in the ducal household, and rewarded with the castle and county of Brionne. The suspicion remains, however, that Guy was little more than a figurehead; as a legitimate grandson of Duke Richard II, he could be talked up to justify opposition to the bastard William. The real ringleaders, one suspects, were Guy’s known associates, a group of viscounts and nobles based in western Normandy, displeased by the duke’s efforts to curtail their independence.29
Sadly, no contemporary writers go into any great detail about this most dangerous challenge to William’s rule. Over a century later, however, a Norman historian called Wace wrote a dramatic account that fits well with the other known facts and is therefore likely to be true in its essentials. According to Wace, William was staying at Valognes in the far west of Normandy when he was woken one night and warned that his life was in immediate danger. At once the duke leapt on his horse and rode hard across the country, fearfully fording rivers in the dark and taking care to avoid major towns in case he was recognized and captured. Near Bayeux he met a loyal lord whose sons helped him to reach Falaise, over sixty miles from the start of his frantic dash.
But Falaise, as Wace explains, offered only a temporary respite. Realizing that he was powerless against the combined might of the western viscounts, William left Normandy and sought the assistance of the king of France— a fact confirmed by both William of Jumièges and William of Poitiers. Given the events of a few years earlier, this action might seem surprising; it was certainly desperate. William probably appealed to Henry as a vassal to his superior lord; very likely the duke had sworn allegiance to the king, either on the occasion of his knighting, or perhaps at the time of his accession. If so, William was now calling in his side of the bargain, demanding his sovereign’s assistance.30
Henry agreed. Early in 1047, the French king summoned his army and rode to William’s aid. The duke assembled such forces as he could from eastern Normandy, and together they set out into the west to confront the rebels. The rebels, for their part, rose to the challenge, summoning their kinsmen and vassals to create a formidable army of their own, and thus setting the scene for that rarest of medieval military events: a set-piece battle.
The rebels had marched east, crossing the River Orne at various points, and congregated about nine miles south-east of the town of Caen, at a place called Val-ès-Dunes. This topographical detail is provided by Wace, who as a sometime resident of Caen clearly knew the area well, and who once again compensates for the brevity of more strictly contemporary chroniclers. As Wace explains, it is wide-open country: ‘the plains are long and broad, without great hills or valleys … there are no wooded areas or rocks, but the land slopes down towards the rising sun’.
It was out of the rising sun that the young duke of Normandy and the king of France emerged to meet their enemies. Wace’s blow-by-blow description of the battle itself is the least credible part of his account; his casual mention of ‘common’ troops might be taken to indicate that infantry as well as cavalry were involved, but apart from that we have no idea of the size or composition of the two armies. William of Poitiers, naturally, assures us that the crucial factor in deciding the outcome was the prowess of the duke himself. ‘Rushing in, he spread such terror by his slaughter that his adversaries lost heart and their arms weakened.’ Wace, while allowing that William ‘fought nobly and well’, believed that the result was determined by the defection of one of the leading rebels, Ralph Taisson, on the eve of battle. Whatever the true cause, all writers agree that the combined French and Norman forces eventually gained the upper hand, and the remaining rebels turned and fled. At that point the battle became a rout, and those fugitives that were not cut down by their pursuers drowned as they tried to re-cross the Orne. (According to Wace, the mills downriver came to a standstill, so great was the number of bodies.)31
Count Guy, the revolt’s nominal leader, managed to escape the battlefield and shut himself up in his castle at Brionne. Of his few known accomplices, some were killed in the battle, while others fled to exile in Brittany. The fate of Grimoald of St Plessis, whom Wace names as the lord responsible for the attempt on William’s life at Valognes, provides a particularly good illustration of the importance of the victory, since he had built an unlicensed castle at Le Plessis-Grimoult, the remains of which can still be seen today. Grimoald was captured during the battle and cast into prison, so the assumption is that his castle was destroyed as part of the general pattern described by the chroniclers. ‘Happy battle’, exclaimed William of Jumièges, ‘that in one day ruined so many castles of criminals and houses of evildoers.’ Val-ès-Dunes, said William of Poitiers, was momentous, and deserved to be remembered by future ages, because it ‘threw down many castles with the impelling hand of victory’.32
It was indeed a great victory. William, nineteen years old, had vindicated his right in the face of those who had tried to overthrow and destroy him. There remained much to do in restoring the authority of the duke of Normandy to what it had been in the time of his illustrious ancestors, but the threat to the duchy’s integrity had been banished. That Val-ès-Dunes had shifted the balance of power decisively was made plain for all to see the following autumn, when the duke convened a great council outside of Caen, close to the site of his triumph. Relics were brought especially from Rouen, the great magnates and the bishops of Normandy dutifully assembled, and, at last, the Truce of God was proclaimed.33
4
Best Laid Plans
In the autumn of 1047 Edward the Confessor was also breathing a huge sigh of relief, a major threat to his rule having providentially passed.
Five years earlier, the new king’s reign appears to have begun well enough— unsurprisingly, since his candidacy for the throne had been accepted by all parties before his accession. It was surely a mark of confidence on the part of Edward and his counsellors, rather than any lingering sense of uncertainty, that caused them to wait almost ten months before staging a coronation. English kingship was elective— a reign began when the new ruler was recognized by his leading subjects, just as Edward had been recognized in June 1042, within days of Harthacnut’s death. Coronation, by contrast, was simply confirmation— a ritual designed to secure God’s blessing. Edward, being both devout and unhurried, probably decided to delay his own coronation so it could be held on the holiest day of the year. The new king was eventually crowned in Winchester on Easter Sunday 1043— ‘with great ceremony’, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘before all the people’.1
Before the same year was out, however, Edward discovered that certain people had already failed him. In mid-November 1043, continues the Chronicle, the king went to Winchester and deprived his mother, Emma, of all her possessions, both lands and treasure— ‘all that she owned in gold and silver and things beyond description’. Given her treatment of him since his childhood, Edward might be thought to have acted simply out of long-standing resentment, and indeed one version of the Chronicle explains the king’s actions by saying that his mother had been very hard on him in the past. But it also goes on to imply that Emma had offended her son far more recently, saying ‘she did less for him than he wished, both before he became king and afterwards as well
[my italics]’.2
The real reason Edward had taken offence in 1043 is illuminated incidentally in a saint’s life. written later in the century. While the king was reigning in peace like Solomon, it says,
his own mother was accused of having incited the king of the Norwegians, who was called Magnus, to invade England, and of having given countless of her treasures to him, as well as her support. Wherefore this traitor to the kingdom, enemy of the country, betrayer of her son, was judged, and all of her property was forfeited to the king.3
Some modern historians have dismissed this story as nothing more than rumour, pointing out that within a year Emma had apparently been pardoned and at least partially rehabilitated.4 But whether the former queen was guilty or not, the notion that Edward suspected her of treason accords perfectly with his actions as described by the Chronicle, where the king is seen to act as a result of information he has only just received, racing to Winchester from Gloucester and catching his mother unawares. He also reportedly confronted her in considerable force, taking with him all three of his major earls and their military followers. This was clearly not a cold dish of revenge, but a heated response to a breaking crisis.
Moreover, the notion that Emma might have made overtures to Magnus of Norway was far from being an absurd conspiracy.5 She was a serial hatcher of plots and his designs on England were becoming alarmingly real. Elected around ten years earlier by Norwegian nobles opposed to the imperial rule of Cnut, Magnus had gone on to vie for power with Harthacnut, keeping the latter pinned down in Denmark from 1035 while the English succession crisis had unfolded. At length the two rivals had come to terms, agreeing that, in the event of one of them dying, the survivor should be the other’s heir— or such at least was the tradition by the mid-twelfth century.6 True or not, when Harthacnut died in 1042 Magnus had moved swiftly to make himself Denmark’s new master, and it soon became clear that England was to be his next target.
The seriousness with which Edward and his counsellors regarded the threat from Norway is evident from their actions during the years that followed. In 1044, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ‘the king went out to Sandwich with thirty-five ships’. Sandwich, now a landlocked little town close to the east Kent coast, was then one of England’s principal seaports— ‘the most famous of all the ports of the English’, as the author of the Encomium calls it— and the place where royal fleets would assemble to protect the country against invasion.7 The summer of 1045 saw Edward again at Sandwich, this time with men and ships in even greater numbers. ‘No one had ever seen so large a naval force in this country’, says the C Chronicle, while the D version tells us explicitly that this force had been assembled ‘because of the threat of Magnus of Norway’.
In the event Magnus did not sail for England in 1045, a fact which the D Chronicle attributes to his struggle against Swein Estrithson. Swein, the son of Cnut’s sister, Estrith, had acted as regent in Denmark for his cousin, Harthacnut, during the latter’s reign in England. After Harthacnut’s death he had advanced his own claim to the Danish throne, though apparently without much initial success. In 1045 he seems to have done rather better, and his progress clearly frustrated Magnus’ plan to invade England.
But, as subsequent reports in the Chronicle make equally clear, Swein’s luck failed to hold: ‘Magnus conquered Denmark’, says the D version for 1046. The following year, we are told, Swein sent messengers to England, hoping to enlist the support of fifty ships, but his request was turned down ‘because Magnus had a great naval force’. ‘And then Magnus drove out Swein and seized the country with great slaughter, and the Danes paid him a large amount of money and accepted him as king.’
With Swein defeated and Magnus established as master of both Norway and Denmark, it was surely only a matter of time before the plan to conquer England was revived, and the Anglo-Scandinavian empire of Cnut was restored. But, providentially, in October 1047—even as the Truce of God was being proclaimed in Normandy— Magnus suddenly died. Accounts of his death differ, but all are late and none is very exciting. According to one thirteenth-century writer, the king was riding a horse which was startled by a hare and dashed him into a tree. Another thirteenth-century source says Magnus simply fell sick and died in bed.8
But, boring or not, Magnus’ death meant that England was suddenly released from the threat of invasion. Swein was able to assert his right to Denmark, while in Norway power passed to Magnus’ paternal uncle. As his earlier request for help shows, Swein was already on good terms with the English, and the new Norwegian king began his reign by sending ambassadors to England in order to make peace.9 Once again, Edward had triumphed over a younger rival by the simple expedient of living longer.
During these anxious years of invasion fear, Edward had clearly been worried about the possibility of Scandinavian sympathizers lurking in England. First there had been the rumour in 1043 that his mother was plotting to replace him with Magnus; then the following year the king had banished a niece of Cnut named Gunhilda, along with her two children, while in 1046 he had similarly sent into exile one of Cnut’s supporters called Osgod Clapa. As in his mother’s case, Edward was probably responding to a mix of present fears and past grievances. These people may have constituted a genuine Scandinavian fifth column, or simply have been the victims of what the king regarded as a long-overdue house-cleaning exercise by which the effects of the earlier Danish conquest were gradually undone.10
So where did that leave Earl Godwine, by far the greatest beneficiary of Cnut’s takeover? Despite his efforts to exculpate himself, Godwine had clearly been deeply implicated in the murder of Edward’s brother, Alfred. Yet by all accounts the earl had also been the key figure in helping Edward ascend to the throne.11 Did this indicate that at some point between the two events the pair had agreed to sink their differences? Had Edward forgiven his brother’s murder in exchange for Godwine’s support in recovering his birthright?
A case can certainly be made for their reconciliation. At the very start of the reign, the earl sought to appease the new king by presenting him with a magnificent warship, ornamented with gold, and manned by eighty soldiers, their helmets, armbands and armour all similarly gilded. It was the subject of a lengthy contemporary poem, and the poet explicitly links the gift with Godwine’s newfound loyalty:
This he gave to the newly enthroned king, begging that it be received and found acceptable, promising that he will often and with pleasure add to it. Wherefore he holds out his hands, takes oaths of loyalty, swearing to protect Edward as his king and lord with faithful vow and service.12
In the early years of his reign the Confessor had also agreed to raise three of Godwine’s kinsmen to the highest rank. In 1043 the earl’s eldest son, Swein, had been given an earldom in the south-west Midlands, and two years later his second son, Harold, had been handed control of East Anglia: both were in their early twenties. Another of Godwine’s young male relatives, his nephew Beorn, was similarly promoted to an earldom in the south-east Midlands at some point in 1045.13
More significant still was the fact that, at the start of the same year, Edward married Godwine’s daughter, Edith. We know a reasonable amount about Edith because several decades later she commissioned one of the most important sources for her husband’s reign, a text known as the Life of King Edward. Unsurprisingly the anonymous author is fulsome in praise of his patron’s appearance, character and accomplishments. Edith, we are assured, was ‘inferior to none, superior to all … recommended by the distinction of her family and the ineffable beauty of her surpassing youth’. Educated by the nuns of Wilton in Wiltshire, she was also apparently quite the bluestocking, fluent in four languages, and so learned and talented that she was famous for her own poems, prose, needlework and painting. Dignified and reserved, serious and modest, affectionate, generous and honest: Edith was clearly ‘a wife worthy of so great a husband’. She and Edward were married at an unknown location on 23 January 1045.14
But did Edward really have an altern
ative? Any assessment of his relationship with Godwine has to take into account the fundamental weakness of the king’s position at the start of his reign. Although he was fast approaching forty, he had not lived in England since his childhood; for a quarter of a century he had been living the life of an exile in Normandy. This meant that on his arrival in 1041 Edward had exceedingly few friends and allies— his only real confidants were the handful of Continental supporters who accompanied him from Normandy, many of whom were clerics. Godwine, by contrast, had been the principal force in English politics for almost all of the same twenty-five-year period. His lands and wealth, great as they were, could not quite rival those of the king; but in terms of lordship, the earl greatly outclassed Edward, with scores of followers in almost every shire in southern England, all ready to do his bidding. Events suggest that his will was all but irresistible. In 1040 he had supported Harthacnut, but the following year he had changed his mind and given his backing to Edward. What if he changed his mind again, and switched his support to another candidate— Magnus, for example, or perhaps Swein Estrithson? The reality was that, if Edward wanted to survive, he had little choice other than to do what Godwine suggested— and probably no say at all in choosing his own bride. As the author of the Life of King Edward explains with surprising candour, ‘Edward agreed all the more readily to contract this marriage because he knew that, with the advice and help of Godwine, he would have a firmer hold on his hereditary rights in England.’15
The corollary of this statement is pretty clear: had Edward refused, he would probably have found himself out of a job.
The suspicion, borne out by later events, is that Edward never forgave Godwine for Alfred’s murder, and merely went through the motions in marrying Edith. It is a suspicion reinforced by the fact that the match never produced any children. Later chroniclers insisted that this was because it was never consummated; most modern commentators, by contrast, ascribe it to sheer bad luck, and point to infertility as the more likely cause. Yet according to Edith’s own testimony (i.e. the Life of King Edward), the reason there were no children was because Edward had lived ‘a celibate life’; indeed, ‘he preserved with holy chastity the dignity of his consecration, and lived his whole life dedicated in true innocence’. This testimony deserves to be taken seriously; after all (as one modern historian has observed), had the reality been different, the Life would have been a laughing stock. More importantly, subsequent events do not support the idea that Edward was anxious to beget an heir. The reasonable conclusion remains that Edward agreed to marry Edith for purely political reasons and resisted her extensively chronicled charms.16
