The Norman Conquest

by Marc Morris

  Complaints about Tostig’s rule all date from a decade after his appointment, but evidently applied to the entirety of his period in office. According to the C version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the principal charge against him in Northumbria was that ‘he robbed God first’. This is somewhat surprising and perhaps unfair (the C Chronicle, composed in Mercia, is a hostile source). The pro-Godwine Life of King Edward informs us that the earl was a notably pious individual, whose generosity to the Church was encouraged by his equally devout wife, Judith (a daughter of the count of Flanders, whom Tostig had married in 1051 during his family’s Flemish exile), and this testimony is supported by later sources written at Durham Cathedral, which remember the earl and his countess as munificent benefactors. Just possibly the accusation of ‘robbing God’ is Tostig being tarred by association, for one of his first acts as earl had been to help replace Æthelric, the unpopular bishop of Durham, with his even more unpopular brother, Æthelwine. Both men, like Tostig, were southerners, and later remembered for having despoiled Durham and other northern churches in order to enrich their alma mater at Peterborough.7

  If the Church did suffer directly at the hands of Tostig, it was more likely as a result of his tax policy, which was perceived to be disproportionately harsh. According to John of Worcester, another complaint against the earl in 1065 was that he had raised a ‘huge tribute’. Exactly how excessive the earl’s demands had been is impossible to say, but most likely the problem was one of differing expectations. Historically the north had paid very little tax at all: later records show that land was assessed at only one-sixth of the rate customarily applied in the south. This may have been in deference to the northerners’ tradition of independence, or in recognition of the region’s lower population and less productive economy. Perhaps Tostig had some grand scheme to improve revenues and bring the earldom into line with southern norms; more likely he simply tried to increase the tax yield to meet his own needs, and his expediency was seen as a nefarious attempt to introduce into the north the more onerous type of government to which the south had long been subject. Either way, Tostig’s attempts to raise taxes above their traditional low levels plainly made him extremely unpopular.8

  The same was true of his policy on law and order. Northumbria, says the Life of King Edward, was a notoriously lawless region, where even parties of twenty or thirty men could scarcely travel without being either killed or robbed; Tostig’s sole intention, being ‘a son and lover of divine justice’, was to reduce this terrible lawlessness, to which end he killed and mutilated the robbers. The C Chronicle, conversely, says that Tostig simply killed and disinherited ‘all those who were less powerful than himself’. Again, we might suspect that the truth lay somewhere in the middle, were it not for the fact that the author of the Life, rather less loyally, chose to report rather than refute such allegations. ‘Not a few charged that glorious earl with being too cruel; and he was accused of punishing disturbers more for the desire of their confiscated property than for love of justice.’ Elsewhere the same author ruefully remarks that Tostig was ‘occasionally a little too enthusiastic in attacking evil’.9

  Tostig, then, was unpopular because of what his friends chose charitably to regard as the overzealous execution of two of his principal duties, namely raising revenue and doing justice. By contrast, no contemporary complaint has come down to us about his discharge of a third and even more fundamental responsibility, namely the defence of his earldom from external attack. Indeed, the Life of King Edward, in a section that heaps praise on both Tostig and Harold, declared that just as Harold had beaten back the king’s enemies in the south (i.e. the Welsh), so too his brother had scared them off in the north. The absence of contradiction here is surprising, in the first place because the Life’s statement was patently untrue, and, secondly, because Tostig’s failure to defend his earldom led directly to the crisis that eventually engulfed him.10

  Since the turn of the millennium, being earl of Northumbria had meant having to contend with the expansionist ambitions of the kings of Scotland. In the first half of the eleventh century the Scots had invaded northern England on three separate occasions, and on the last of these in 1040 they had laid siege to Durham. As we have already seen, Tostig’s predecessor, Earl Siward, had dealt robustly with this problem, invading Scotland in 1054 and deposing its king, Macbeth. In his place the earl had installed Malcolm, son of the late King Duncan, the man whom Macbeth had famously murdered in order to ascend to the throne. Malcolm had apparently grown up as an exile at the court of Edward the Confessor, who seems to have backed Siward’s scheme to reinstate him. The thinking, no doubt, was that a Scottish king who owed his position to the force of English arms would be less likely to pursue a policy of aggression against Northumbria.11

  If that was the theory, it held good for only a short while. In the opening years of his reign Malcolm was preoccupied with his ongoing struggle against Macbeth (who, contrary to theatrical tradition, did not die after Dunsinane, but three years later, after the Battle of Lumphanan). But with Macbeth dead, and his stepson Lulach also killed in 1058, Malcolm reverted to type and, in the best tradition of his predecessors, began launching raids into northern England. The Life of King Edward explains that the new Scottish king was testing the even newer Earl Tostig, whose ability he held cheaply. But, the same source continues, the earl was too clever, and wore down his opponent ‘as much by cunning schemes as by martial courage and military campaigns’. This was true, up to a point: in 1059, Tostig, aided by the bishops of Durham and York, somehow persuaded Malcolm to return to England for a personal interview with Edward the Confessor, who may have ventured across the Humber expressly for the purpose. A peace was agreed, hostages were exchanged and, as was the northern custom on such occasions, Malcolm and Tostig became ‘sworn brothers’.12

  But this was only half the story. Not long afterwards, in 1061, Tostig and Judith, accompanied by other members of their family and a number of English bishops, piously departed on a pilgrimage to Rome, thereby presenting Malcolm with what proved to be an irresistible open goal. That same year, says the twelfth-century chronicler Simeon of Durham, the Scottish king ‘furiously ravaged the earldom of his sworn brother, Earl Tostig’. So thorough was the devastation that the Scots did not even deign to spare the Holy Island of Lindisfarne, the cradle of Christianity in northern England.

  It was probably also at this moment that Malcolm invaded Cumbria. Of all the debatable territories in the volatile north of England, none had been more frequently contested than this famously mountainous region on the north-west coast. Originally a British kingdom (its name derives from the same root as Cymru, the Celtic word for Wales), Cumbria had been absorbed into the English kingdom of Northumbria in the course of the seventh century, but lost around AD 900 to another British kingdom, Strathclyde, whose kings nominally ruled there for the next 120 years. During this time, however, Cumbria was invaded and settled by Norwegian Vikings operating out of Ireland, and then repeatedly conquered, ceded, harried and reconquered in a struggle for overlordship between the kings of England and Scotland. Latterly the region had been overrun by the Scots in 1018, an invasion which finally ended the rule of the kings of Strathclyde, but subsequently recovered for England during the rule of Earl Siward. Although the evidence is circumstantial, it seems fairly certain that Malcolm used the opportunity of Tostig’s absence in 1061 to reverse the situation once again, and that Cumbria was reclaimed by the Scots.

  The loss of Cumbria, not to mention the sacking of Lindisfarne and the devastation of the rest of his earldom, clearly demanded some sort of military response on Tostig’s part. As far as we can tell, however, there was still no sign of the ‘martial courage and military campaigns’ ascribed to the earl by the Life of King Edward. On his return from Rome, Tostig appears to have accepted Malcolm’s invasion as a fait accompli, for once again he sought out the Scottish king and offered to make peace. Cumbria, it seems, was going to remain a part of Scotland.13
/>   But not everyone was as willing to let bygones be bygones. Among those likely to have been infuriated by Tostig’s failure to defend his predecessor’s conquests was Gospatric, a scion of the house of Bamburgh. Had the historical dice rolled differently, Gospatric, not Tostig, would have been earl of Northumbria. In ancient times, as we have noted, his ancestors had ruled the region as kings, and as recently as fifty years ago his father, Uhtred, had governed the whole province as earl. As we have also noted, however, the house of Bamburgh had lost out badly after the coming of Cnut. Earl Uhtred had been murdered in 1016 on Cnut’s orders and the southern half of his earldom awarded to a Danish newcomer. Twenty-five years later, Gospatric’s brother, Earl Eadwulf, was similarly betrayed and murdered at the behest of Earl Siward, who had subsequently taken over the remainder of the earldom. Gospatric, therefore, had ample excuse for feeling bitter about the way events had unfolded, but Siward had been smart enough to try to assuage such resentments. Soon after his taking over the house of Bamburgh’s territory he had married Ælfflaed, a granddaughter of Earl Uhtred, thereby linking the fortunes of the defeated dynasty with his own. Around the same time, he had granted Gospatric a subordinate role in the running of the earldom by making him responsible for the government of Cumbria.14

  Thus, while Tostig may have viewed the Scottish recovery of Cumbria with equanimity, for Gospatric it meant the loss of his consolation prize. We cannot say for certain that this was the cause of the subsequent bad blood between the two men – the earl was unpopular on so many other scores – but it certainly seems the likeliest one. We can see that fighting broke out between them soon afterwards, because in 1063 or 1064 Tostig is known to have invited two men, both members of Gospatric’s affinity, to his hall at York for a peace conference – or so they thought. What the earl had actually arranged was an ambush of the kind practised by his Danish predecessors, and the two men were treacherously murdered. Their deaths probably prompted Gospatric to complain directly to the king, for at Christmas 1064 he was present at Edward’s court. It was, however, his last appearance, for he had failed to take into account the loyalty of the Godwine family. On the fourth night of Christmas, Gospatric was himself assassinated on the orders of Tostig’s sister, Queen Edith.

  For a time it must have seemed that Tostig’s decapitation strategy had worked: in the immediate wake of Gospatric’s death the north seemed calm enough. But throughout the following year a far larger and more co-ordinated response to the earl’s misrule was steadily gathering momentum. Had he been present in Northumbria Tostig might have read the signs. In March, for example, when the clerks of Durham staged a public protest by digging up and displaying the bones of King Oswine, a seventh-century Northumbria ruler who had died at the hands of his treacherous relatives. But such unsubtle propaganda seems to have passed Tostig by. The earl was frequently absent from his earldom, preferring to leave its day-to-day management to his deputies. Hence it was they rather than he who bore the immediate brunt of the northerners’ fury.15

  On Monday 3 October 1065, a group of thegns loyal to Gospatric entered York with a force of 200 armed men. John of Worcester, our best informed source, explicitly links their action to the treacherous betrayal of their master and his men. They seem to have taken the city by surprise, for on that Monday only two of Tostig’s Danish housecarls are said to have died, hauled back and executed as they tried to escape. But the following day there was evidently a more hard-fought struggle with the rest of the earl’s retainers, more than 200 of whom perished as a result. The rebels went on to smash open Tostig’s treasury in York, seizing all his weapons, gold and silver.16

  It was the beginning of a massive rebellion. The thegns from beyond the Tees, it is clear, had managed to defeat Tostig’s sizeable retinue because they had been joined by the men of York – a remarkable testament to the earl’s unpopularity, that the two traditionally hostile halves of his earldom should come together in order to oppose him. The rising was also clearly well co-ordinated and directed personally against Tostig. The Life of King Edward speaks of the slaughter of the earl’s adherents wherever they could be found, not just in York but also on the streets of Lincoln, as well as on roads and rivers and in woods. ‘Whosoever could be identified as having been at some time a member of Tostig’s household was dragged to the torments of death without trial.’17

  The rebels’ plan, it transpired, was to replace Tostig with a young man named Morcar, the second son of the late Earl Ælfgar, formerly the Godwine family’s most hostile opponent. According to the Life, Morcar and his older brother, Eadwine, had inherited all their father’s ill will, particularly towards Tostig. It may be that for a time Tostig and Harold had contrived to keep Eadwine out of his paternal inheritance, for he does not appear in the record as earl of Mercia until the spring of 1065, some three years after his father’s death. The speed with which the two Mercian brothers fell in with the rebels suggests that they had long been privy to the conspiracy. Morcar immediately accepted the proffered role as the rebels’ leader and marched them south, raising the shires of Lincoln, Derby and Nottingham as he went. Meanwhile Eadwine assembled his men in Mercia, where he was also joined by his father’s erstwhile allies, the Welsh. Everyone who had suffered as a result of the relentless rise of the Godwine family was uniting to try to end their monopoly.18

  Tostig was at his brother-in-law’s court when news of the revolt broke. Edward was in Wiltshire at the time, apparently for the rededication of the church at Wilton Abbey, childhood home of Queen Edith, who had funded its reconstruction. Since this was an important occasion, taking place in the heart of his own earldom of Wessex, we may assume with some confidence that Harold was also present. It was certainly Harold who was sent north to meet the rebels in order to negotiate.19

  By the time the earl reached them, Eadwine and Morcar had united their forces in the town of Northampton. From Mercia, Wales and the whole of northern England, their army had ‘gathered together in an immense body,’ according to the Life of King Edward, ‘like a whirlwind or a tempest’. Harold delivered the king’s message, which was essentially that the rebels should desist, and that any injustices they could prove would in due course be corrected. This, unsurprisingly, failed to pacify his audience, who replied that Edward should dismiss Tostig, not merely from Northumbria but from the realm as a whole, or else he too would be regarded as their enemy. Such was the counter-offer that Harold conveyed back to the king in Wiltshire.20

  Back in Wiltshire, Edward had summoned a council to his manor of Britford, a few miles east of Wilton, close to where the city of Salisbury now stands. When the meeting assembled there were ugly scenes. It was at this moment that many magnates charged Tostig with having ruled his earldom with excessive cruelty, effectively blaming him for having brought the crisis upon himself. It was, however, the demands that Harold brought back from Northampton that caused the greatest acrimony, for at this point Tostig accused his brother of being in league with the rebels; indeed, of having provoked the rebellion in the first place. The author of the Life of King Edward, who reports Tostig’s accusation, personally professes not to believe it, and assures us that Harold cleared himself of the charge by swearing his innocence. At the same time, the same writer also slyly reminds us that an oath from Harold was not really worth very much (this seemingly an allusion to the earl’s visit to Normandy).21

  Despite this innuendo, it seems most unlikely that the earl was behind the plot to bring down his brother. If Harold had entertained such an idea, there were surely safer ways to go about it than provoking the kind of unpredictable storm that was now raging. Since his departure from Northampton the rebels had begun harrying the countryside around the town, knowing that much of it belonged to Tostig. Not only did they kill people, says the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and put houses and barns full of corn to the torch, they also seized thousands of head of cattle and hundreds of human captives, all of which they subsequently led back to the north. They then advanced further south to
Oxford, where the line of the River Thames marked the boundary between Mercia and Wessex, leaving no doubt that England was on the very brink of civil war.22

  The more reasonable conclusion is that Harold, in his capacity as a negotiator, did all he could to try to appease the rebels and to save his brother. Such was the belief of John of Worcester, who insists that the earl had acted as a negotiator at Tostig’s own request. What Harold was evidently not prepared to do was fight the rebels for his brother’s restoration. According to the Life of King Edward, when the negotiations proved fruitless, the king ordered a royal army to crush the uprising. But no army was forthcoming. The Life blames the difficulty of raising troops on the winter weather that was already setting in, as well as a general reluctance to engage in a civil war. Yet the king and his court were in Harold’s earldom, and in the end it must have been Harold’s own refusal to commit his men to a suicidal struggle that condemned Tostig to his fate. It was Harold who on 27 October conveyed to the rebels in Oxford the king’s acceptance of their demands, recognized Morcar as Northumbria’s new earl and restored to the Northumbrians what the Chronicle calls ‘the Laws of Cnut’ – shorthand for the rights they had enjoyed in the good old days, before the novelties and taxes introduced by Tostig. Meanwhile, much to the grief of his mother and his sister, the queen, Tostig himself prepared to go into exile; on 1 November, the earl and his family, along with many of his loyal thegns, crossed the Channel to Flanders, where they were once again welcomed by his wife’s father, Count Baldwin.23