Succession Crisis?
If there was a succession crisis in 1051, then it was perhaps already assumed that King Edward would have no legitimate child to succeed him. The King was by now in his late 40s. His queen, Edith, was much younger. Either Edward was judged incapable of fathering children, or it was widely supposed that he had no intention of producing an heir by a wife sprung from the family of Godwin. Crucially, in 1051, at the same time that Godwin and Harold were exiled, Edith herself was put away in a nunnery. Even her propagandists were forced to concede that her relationship with the King was more like that between father and daughter than husband and wife. In both political and personal terms the events of 1051–2 marked Edward’s great bid for freedom. In both respects, he failed miserably. The Godwins returned. Rather than risk civil war, the other earls backed down, with the memory of Aethelred’s reign constantly in their minds, fearing that the pursuit of vendettas amongst the ruling class might merely pave the way for foreign invasion. Edward was forced to receive back those he most hated, including Edith, now reinstated as queen.
Peering through the Mist
From this point onwards, our knowledge of the last fifteen years of Anglo-Saxon England is clouded, as the sophistication of our sources fails to keep pace with the complexity of events. What was recorded tended either to be too brief, as with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, or too verbose, as with the contemporary ‘Life’ of Edward the Confessor. The three surviving versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, maintained in at least three different locations, become extremely patchy, in some years recording few events, in others none at all. The so-called ‘Life of Edward’ (the Vita Edwardi), composed in the 1060s, either shortly before or shortly after the Norman Conquest, was the work of a Flemish monk hoping to please Queen Edith, writing in an obscure and poetic Latin which would be difficult to construe, even if the manuscript itself had survived intact, which it has not. These fragments can be supplemented by sources from across the Channel. But with the continental sources we have to be even more cautious. Virtually everything written about Edward’s reign by foreign chroniclers was set down after the great cataclysm of 1066, on the whole to justify the Norman Conquest of England. It has to be read as propaganda rather than truth. Selecting which items of information to believe, and which to reject, becomes as difficult for the historian of late Anglo-Saxon England as it would be for a modern intelligence officer to construe the political development of China using nothing but official press bulletins.
Amidst the shadows, the outline of certain great events can be discerned. Firstly, although Earl Godwin himself died within a year of his return to England, on Easter Monday 1053 (as legend proclaimed it choking on a piece of bread after having challenged God to strike him dead should he have lied about his role in the death of Edward’s brother Alfred), his power lived on, now invested in two of his sons, Harold who succeeded him as Earl of Wessex, and Tostig, promoted, apparently as the King’s favourite, as Earl of Northumbria. Harold fought a series of prestigious and successful campaigns against the Welsh. Having killed the Welsh King, whose head was sent in tribute to King Edward, Harold then married the Welshman’s widow, repeating a feat already associated with the Danish conqueror Cnut and in the process allying himself to another of the great aristocratic families of England, that of Leofric of Mercia. Tostig fared less well in his attempts to impose royal rule and royal taxation on the far north. In 1065, there was a violent rebellion against him. Tostig appealed for assistance from the English court, but then found himself sidelined, as he saw it betrayed by his brother Harold. Edward’s own promise to suppress the rebels came to nothing. Tostig was left without an earldom but with a burning sense of personal grievance against his own family. Edward’s own authority during these closing years of his life is very hard to assess. Certainly it was he who made earls and who continued to rule, in name at least. It was Edward who commissioned the rebuilding of the church of Westminster, intended as a monastic foundation, pledged in penance, so it was said, for his failure to fulfil a vow to make a pilgrimage to Rome. King Cnut had visited Rome, as probably had both Harold and Tostig. Was Edward’s failure here an indication that the King himself was effectively a prisoner within his own court, able to hunt, to feast, to receive tribute, but in all practical respects eclipsed by his brother-in-law, Earl Harold?
Lacking positive initiatives, Edward seems chiefly to have exercised his authority through passive resistance, above all perhaps through his failure to nominate a publicly recognized successor to the throne. Edward the Exile, the son of Edmund Ironside, was invited back to England from his refuge in Hungary, but died in 1057, only a few days after his return. Some have suspected the Godwins of poisoning him. Edward the Exile left a son, Edgar the Aetheling, a mere boy, perhaps, five or six years old, now brought up at court, living in what appears to have been close contact with the King, but without any real power and without lands. There was certainly no official proclamation that Edgar was to be regarded as Edward’s heir. On the contrary, contacts were maintained with Eustace of Boulogne, Edward’s brother-in-law, and with Edward’s mother’s family in northern France. At no point was any one of these kinsmen promoted as Edward’s clear and undisputed successor.
In 1051, at the height of his authority and with the Godwins exiled, Edward is said, according to one version of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, to have received a man named ‘Count William’ from overseas, generally identified as William, Duke of Normandy, great-nephew of Emma, Edward the Confessor’s mother. Many historians have supposed that this visit by William in 1051 formed part of William’s own bid for the English throne. Contemporary Norman chroniclers, although they mention no visit by William to England, claim that specific promises were made to William in respect to the throne, not only by King Edward but by Harold. One such Norman version of events, famously shown on the Bayeux Tapestry, implies that, at some time in the 1060s, perhaps shortly before Edward’s death, Harold crossed to France and there was persuaded to take oaths to William, sworn on the holy relics of Bayeux Cathedral, no doubt promising to recognize William as Edward’s heir.
The problem with all of these stories is that they date from after 1066, when the Normans had not only scooped the jackpot but were in a position to rewrite the history of recent events, if necessary burying the truth in order that their own actions might be justified. Even the story of Count William’s crossing to England in 1051 is open to dispute. Did the Anglo-Saxon chronicler intend to imply here that William was specifically offered the throne? If so, why did he not mention the fact? Why do none of the Norman sources written immediately after 1066 refer to any visit paid by William to England before the Conquest, especially when we bear in mind the very great incentive that such writers would have had to include something so significant and supportive of Norman claims? Could it be that William of Normandy came to England in 1051 not to receive a promise of the English throne but to render homage to his elder and richer cousin, the newly empowered King Edward, for his own lands in northern France?
Certainly, William’s rule over Normandy was especially insecure at the time, with his enemies gearing up towards a great rebellion. Might it even have been another ‘Count William’, not William of Normandy, who made the visit? In 1051, there was at least one other northern French aristocrat, William, Count of Arques, William of Normandy’s uncle, who might have had an incentive to visit the English court. William of Arques was either already in rebellion or about to rebel against his nephew, William of Normandy, and would in 1051 be forced to seek exile in the territory of another of the players, Eustace of Boulogne. In some ways, William of Arques fits the bill for the 1051 visit to England even better than William of Normandy.
As this suggests, we have very little idea of the reality over which all of the chroniclers, English and Norman, were so keen to varnish. What we do know is that, from the 1050s onwards, the various dukes, counts and lords of northern France began to occupy a more significant place in English history th
an had previously been the case. It is time therefore that we turn our attention from Anglo-Saxon England to events on the other side of the Channel, and in particular to the rise of one northern French dynasty: the dukes of Normandy.
Normandy
Normandy enters our story here for the simple reason that Emma, the mother of Edward the Confessor and the wife both of Aethelred and Cnut of England, was of Norman birth, the daughter of Duke Richard I of Normandy, himself the grandfather of the future William the Conqueror. Edward the Confessor and William of Normandy were therefore related in the third degree of kinship as second cousins, with Richard I of Normandy, Emma’s father, as their common ancestor. A series of highly significant facts should be stressed here. Edward and William were cousins, but not close cousins, and not a drop of the blood of the West Saxon dynasty flowed in William’s veins. From the 1050s onwards, there were many others who could claim far closer patrilineal kinship to Edward the Confessor, not least Edward the Exile, son of Edmund Ironside, and the Exile’s son, Edgar the Aetheling. To some extent indeed, in the 1040s, Edward the Exile, already aged twenty-five in 1040, might have been promoted as a more plausible candidate for the English throne even than his cousin Edward the Confessor. Secondly, William of Normandy was a bastard, born of an extramarital liaison between his father, Duke Robert, and a woman, Herleva, whose own father has traditionally been identified as a tanner from Falaise. Tanning is a trade that in the Middle Ages, as in parts of the Third World even today, involved the use of large quantities of human urine and dog dirt. These less than dainty agents were employed to depilate and soften the hides of animals. What remained thereafter of the rotted flesh and bone was rendered, very messily, into glue. No one who has been near even the most hygienic of animalglue factories is likely to forget the experience. One of the smelliest and most disgusting of trades, tanning was entrusted to workers generally placed beyond the bounds of decent society, in locations as far removed from town or city centres as the local population could ensure. Find the tanneries in any medieval town, and you will generally have found the most squalid of slums.
As a bastard, born to a woman descended from tanners, William would have been even less plausible a candidate for the English throne than Harold Harefoot in the 1030s. By contrast to William, Harold Harefoot was merely alleged to be a bastard: he himself might have denied the charge. Recently, it has been suggested that William’s grandfather was not a tanner, but a furrier, a tailor or more likely an undertaker or embalmer. None of these trades would exactly raise the family to the highest levels of aristocracy. Finally, although we now remember Normandy as a cradle of civilization and as one of the most dynamic regions of eleventh-century Europe, the focus of an entire academic sub-industry of Norman studies, things might easily have been otherwise. Normandy’s rise, whatever William’s propagandists might suggest, was very far from inevitable or straightforward.
Between 900 and 1100, during two hundred years in which the inhabitants of that part of western Europe that we now call France were deprived of strong central monarchy, many regional dynasties emerged. Some of these new families enjoyed the most dramatic and impressive of debuts but few of these dynasties survived for more than a couple of generations in anything other than a very localized position of power. Only the dukes of Normandy, through their conquest of England, prolonged their greatness and came indeed to rival the French kings not only in terms of wealth and majesty but in the sheer extent of the territories over which they ruled. In many ways, however, this was to lend Normandy an artificial significance which but for the accidents of 1066 it would never have possessed. Had it not been for the catalogue of errors that culminated in the Battle of Hastings, Duke William, the tanner’s grandson, and Normandy itself might seem as insignificant to us today as the once powerful counts of Vermandois or Ponthieu.
It was against this background that Normandy first entered English history. It was from Normandy that Aethelred chose his bride, Emma, and it was to Emma’s family that he fled in 1014, after his initial defeat by Swein. Thereafter, it was in Normandy that Aethelred’s sons by Emma, Alfred and Edward, were raised after Emma’s return to England to marry Cnut. In later life, Edward the Confessor commemorated the more than twenty-four years of his exile in Normandy by grants of land in England to the monks of Mont-St-Michel, Fécamp and Rouen. Fécamp came to possess land in Sussex, some years before Edward’s death, including an estate at Hastings, a remarkable indication of the ties that already bound the Confessor’s court to the religious institutions of Normandy, many years before the Norman invasion. St Michael’s Mount in Cornwall and its monastery, placed under the protection of the monks of Mont-St-Michel on the Norman–Breton frontier, constitutes another surviving relic of Edward the Confessor’s exile in Normandy before 1040. St Michael himself had battled with Satan and from the high places of the world had thrown him down to hell. Those appealing to the memory of St Michael tended, in the Middle Ages, to have battle in mind. Edward’s gift of a Cornish island to the Norman monks of St Michael, made in the mid-1030s on the eve of his return to England, already describing Edward as ‘King of the English’, thus suggests not only a familiarity with Cornwall (the two ‘mounts’ in Normandy and Cornwall could be mother and daughter) but an intention on Edward’s part to use his Norman alliances to mount an armed campaign against the forces of evil led by Harold Harefoot.
It was Edward’s connection with Normandy, the facts that William of Normandy was his cousin, and that Edward had passed most of his life before 1042 at the Norman court which allowed Norman claims to enter the debate over the succession to the English throne. Whoever Edward actually intended as his heir (and there is no real proof that he opted decisively for any one candidate during the more than twenty years that he sat on the English throne, after 1042), it seems reasonable to suggest that, in the early 1050s, Edward deliberately made use of his Norman connections in an attempt to build up a following for himself in England independent of the English earls. Not only was the archbishop of Canterbury Norman, but other northern Frenchmen, including the bishops of Wells and Hereford, were granted bishoprics or lands in England. Ralph of Mantes, Edward’s nephew, son of Edward’s sister and the Count of Vexin, was granted estates and an earldom in Herefordshire. There is some possibility that, in the 1050s, Edward’s court was partly French speaking. If so, the collapse of Edward’s short-lived period of independent rule, after 1052, would have been even more clearly marked since it led to the expulsion from England of most of his former French protégés. It did not, however, put an end to the claims advanced by William of Normandy for his succession to the English throne. To understand why, we need here to consider the situation of Normandy and its ducal family.
Superficially, by the 1060s, a casual observer might have found little to distinguish Normandy from England. Indeed, for ninety per cent of the human population, bonded to the land in the age-old rhythms of agricultural labour, it is doubtful whether, apart from language and the name of one’s particular lord, there would have been much to distinguish Bedfordshire from Bayeux or St-Lô from St Ives. Normandy’s landscape is similar to, indeed originally was physically attached to that of southern England. Both places have extended coastlines and many rivers allowing access to the sea and hence to seaborne trade. Both were lands of forests as well as of richly productive agricultural land. England came to be defined as the two ecclesiastical provinces of Canterbury and York. Normandy’s frontiers were for the most part coterminous with those of the single ecclesiastical province of Rouen.
Rollo and the Vikings
England had suffered from Viking attacks from the ninth century onwards, still ongoing in the time of the greatest Viking of them all, King Cnut of England and Denmark. Normandy owed its very formation to the Vikings, since it was a Viking raider, Rollo, accustomed to wintering his ships in the estuary of the river Seine, who had first carved out independent rule over the region around Rouen, negotiated in a series of treaties with the kings of Fran
ce according to which, by the 920s, the whole of the province of Rouen, from Eu and the river Somme in the far north, to the bay of Mont-St-Michel and the frontiers of Brittany and Maine in the south-west, was placed under the power of Rollo and his heirs, ruling now as independent counts, later as dukes, no longer directly answerable to the heirs of Charlemagne. Just as English history had been founded upon myths of nationhood, so the Normans commissioned their own national history from a French monk named Dudo of St-Quentin. Dudo deliberately followed Bede in his presentation of the Normans as a people united under one ruler through God’s providence and through that ruler’s wise decision to embrace Christianity. Like Bede, he thus glossed over the fact that the Normans were never a racially distinct people, and that their war bands ruled over a local population still to a large extent made up of the aboriginal Gallo-Roman or Frankish peasantry who had for centuries inhabited this particular corner of France.
Normandy and England
A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485 Page 4
