Great Tales from English History: The Truth About King Arthur, Lady Godiva, Richard the Lionheart, and More: 1

by Robert Lacey

  For many of their raids, the Danes got help from their kinsmen in northern France. In 912 the French Channel coast had fallen to the Norsemen - Normanni in medieval Latin - and the sheltered harbours of Normandy provided ideal staging-posts for the Danes as they raided the south coast of England. Ethelred complained to the Pope, who got Duke Richard of Normandy to promise to stop helping Danish longships that were hostile to England. To strengthen his links with the Normans, Ethelred later married Richard’s young sister Emma.

  But the invaders kept coming, and in 1002 Ethelred took a desperate step: he ordered the massacre of all Danes living in England. It was a foolhardy and wretched measure that gave the excuse for some Anglo-Saxons to settle local scores - the community of Danes living in Oxford were burned to death in the church where they had taken shelter. But even Ethelred’s massacre was incompetent. There is little evidence that this dreadful ethnic cleansing was widely carried out - with one exception. Among the Danes who were killed was Gunnhilda, the sister of Sweyn Forkbeard, the King of Denmark.

  It was a fatal mistake. The following year Sweyn led a huge Danish army up the River Humber, to receive a warm welcome from the inhabitants of the Danelaw. He returned in 1006 and again in 1013, fighting a campaign that eventually gave him control of all of England. England became a Danish possession, and Ethelred fled into exile in Normandy.

  History books usually conclude Ethelred’s story with the confused fighting that consumed the years 1013-16, ending with the deaths of both Ethelred and his son Edmund Ironside. But one episode tends to be overlooked. Sweyn died in 1014, and in a desperate attempt to regain his throne Ethelred offered to turn over a new leaf. Harking back to the conditions that Danish communities demanded when giving their allegiance to English rulers, Ethelred negotiated a sort of contract with the leading Anglo-Saxon nobles and clerics.

  It was the first recorded pact between an English ruler and his subjects. Ethelred promised that ‘he would govern them more justly than he did before’, reported the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The king parleyed a comeback deal whereby ‘he would be a gracious lord to them, and would improve each of the things which they all hated’. In return the nobles and clergy agreed to obey him, ‘and full friendship was secured with word and pledge on either side’.

  This contract, which appears to have been sealed in writing, was one of several last-ditch measures to which Ethelred had been driven in his weakness. As his authority eroded he had turned for help to the council of great lords and bishops who traditionally gave advice to Anglo-Saxon kings, the witan (plural of the Old English wita, meaning ‘wise man’). Ethelred had used the prestige of the witan to bolster his appeals for taxes, for a national day of prayer against the heathen Danes and even for a nationwide fast during which just water and herbs would be consumed.

  None of these frantic steps saved him. Though Ethelred was allowed back to England, he died in April 1016, and following the death of his son Edmund later that year the throne of England passed to the Danes in the shape of Sweyn’s warrior son, Canute (Cnut). But some good came of the disaster. The ineffectualness that had compelled Ethelred to enlist the witan and that had inspired his last-gasp promise of good behaviour helped sow the seeds of a notion that would be crucial for the future - that English kings must rule with the consent of their people.

  ELMER THE FLYING MONK

  C.AD 1010

  ELMER WAS AN ENQUIRING YOUNG MONK who lived at Malmesbury Abbey, and who loved to gaze up at the stars. During the troubled early decades of the eleventh century, he would look to the heavens for signs and portents of things to come, but while many of his contemporaries were content to draw simple lessons of doom and disaster, Elmer gazed with a scientific eye. He noted that, if you were to live long enough, you could see a comet come round again in the sky.

  Elmer applied his experimental mind to classical history, making a particular study of Daedalus, the mythical Athenian architect and engineer who was hired by King Minos to build his sinister labyrinth in Crete. To preserve the secret of his maze, Minos then imprisoned Daedalus and his son Icarus, who only escaped by building themselves wings of feathers and wax. Their escape plan was working beautifully until Icarus, intoxicated by the joy of flying, flew too close to the sun, which melted the wax in his wings. The boy fell into the Aegean Sea below, where the island of Ikaria perpetuates his legend to this day.

  Elmer decided to test the story of Daedalus by making wings for himself, then trying to fly from the tower of the abbey. In an age when Britain was still suffering Viking raids, many Saxon churches had high bell-towers, both to serve as a lookout and to sound the alarm. Whenever the Vikings captured a church, the bell was always the first thing they tore down. Its valuable metal could be beaten into high-quality swords and helmets - and anyway, to capture the Christians’ unique sound was a triumph in its own right.

  Modern aeronautic experts have recreated Elmer’s flight, and they calculate that his launch platform must have been at least 18 metres high, which corresponds to the height of surviving Saxon church towers. They also presume that he built his paragliding equipment from willow or ash, the most lightweight and flexible of the woods available in the copses of the nearby Cotswolds. To complete his birdman outfit, the monk must have stretched parchment or thin cloth over the frame, which, we are told, he attached to both his arms and his feet. Today the ravens and jackdaws that live around Malmesbury Abbey can be seen soaring on the updrafts that blow up the hill between the church and the valley of the River Avon, and Elmer may have tried to copy them as he leapt off the tower and glided down towards the river.

  According to William of Malmesbury, the historian who recorded Elmer’s feat in the following century, the monk managed a downward glide of some 200 metres before he landed - or, rather, crash-landed. He did catch a breeze from the top of the tower, but was surprised by the atmospheric turbulence and seems to have lost his nerve.

  ‘What with the violence of the wind and the eddies and at the same time his consciousness of the temerity of the attempt,’ related William, ‘he faltered and fell, breaking and crippling both his legs.’

  William of Malmesbury probably got his story from fellow-monks who had known Elmer in old age. The eleventh-century stargazer was the sort of character dismissed as mad in his lifetime, but later seen as a visionary. In his final years Elmer’s limping figure was a familiar sight around the abbey - and the would-be birdman would explain the failure of his great enterprise with wry humour. It was his own fault, he would say. As William told it, ‘He forgot to fit a tail on his hinder parts.’

  KING CANUTE AND THE WAVES

  AD 1016-35

  KING CANUTE (CNUT) WHO RULED THE English from 1016 until 1035 and who tried to turn back the waves, has gone down in folklore as the very model of arrogance, stupidity and wishful thinking.

  One day the King invited his nobles down to the beach as the tide was coming in, ordering his throne to be placed where the waves were advancing across the sands. ‘You are subject to me,’ he shouted out to the water, ‘as the land on which I am sitting is mine . . . I command you, therefore, not to rise on to my land, nor to presume to wet the clothing or limbs of your master.’

  Not surprisingly, the sea paid no attention. According to the earliest surviving written version of the story, the tide kept on coming. The waves ‘disrespectfully drenched the king’s feet and shins’, so he had to jump back to avoid getting wetter.

  King Canute’s soaked feet are a historical image to rival King Alfred’s smoking cakes, and, as with the story of the cakes, we get our evidence not from an eyewitness but from a manuscript that was not written until about a hundred years later. In the case of Canute we can identify the storyteller precisely as Henry of Huntingdon, a country clergyman who lived on the edge of the Fens around 1130 and who wrote a History of the English in praise of ‘this, the most celebrated of islands, formerly called Albion, later Britain, and now England’. An enthusiast for his local wetlands - ‘beauti
ful to behold . . . green, with many woods and islands’ - Henry compiled his history from other manuscript histories, most notably Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and from the personal memories of people who had lived through the great events.

  Henry was a conscientious reporter. His account of his own times has a careful ring, and if I were putting money on it I would feel safer betting that Canute got his feet wet than that Alfred burned the cakes. History’s mistake has been the belief that Canute really did think he could stop the waves - according to Henry, the King thought quite the opposite.

  ‘Let all the world know,’ cried Canute as he retreated from his throne and contemplated his wet feet, ‘that the power of kings is empty and worthless!’ He shouted at the waves, in other words, to convey the message that he was not as all-powerful as he might seem, and he embellished his point with an additional, religious, lesson. ‘There is no king worthy of the name,’ he proclaimed, ‘save God by whose will heaven, earth and sea obey eternal laws.’

  The King of Heaven was the king who mattered, was his second message; and after this episode on the beach, according to Henry of Huntingdon, Canute never wore his golden crown again, placing it instead atop a figure of Jesus Christ. This tallies exactly with what we know of Canute’s entire reign. As the son of the Viking Sweyn Forkbeard who had ousted Ethelred the Unready, he was anxious to emphasise that his family had converted from paganism and was now Christian. He gave generous gifts to embellish the cathedrals at Winchester and Canterbury, and also donated royal estates to support the abbey at Bury where pilgrims were starting to pray to Edmund, the saintly king who had been so cruelly murdered by a previous generation of Danish invaders (see p. 55). It was a matter of reconciliation.

  Canute was a battle-hardened Viking chief who had slaughtered mercilessly to secure his power. In later years he liked to take the helm of the royal ship, so he could steer himself when he was travelling along the Thames, and if you attended his court you were likely to be jostled by Icelandic bards ready to declaim the latest epic poem. In the course of his reign he took control of both Denmark and Norway, to create a huge North Sea empire that stretched from Greenland to the Baltic and from the White Sea off north-western Russia to the Isle of Wight. But Canute had a touching wish to be considered English. He always saw England as his power base, and he understood that the key to success there was reconciliation between Anglo-Saxon and Dane.

  He achieved it. Realising he could not hope to control the whole of Engla-lond, Canute delegated his powers to trusted local governors, jarls in Danish, the origin of our word ‘earl’. His reign saw the consolidation of England’s counties and shires, with their own courts and administrators - the shire-reeves, or sheriffs. He produced a law code embodying the idea behind the contract to which Ethelred had agreed in the last moments of his reign: that a sort of bargain should exist between the King and his subjects. He wrote newsletters to the people of his adopted country, describing his personal impressions and feelings, for example, after a long trip when he had met the Pope in Rome.

  ‘I have never spared,’ he wrote, ‘nor will I in the future spare, to devote myself to the well-being of my people.’

  Canute was especially keen to discourage superstition, and anxious to educate those of his people who had not seen the light. For the sake of their souls he urged them to forsake their surviving pagan habits - the worship of trees, wizards and weather prophets, together with the magic charms that people offered up when they were trying to track down stolen cattle. Some of his laws sound barbaric today: ‘If a woman during her husband’s life commits adultery with another man,’ read law 53, ‘her legal husband is to have all her property, and she is to lose her nose and her ears.’ But one hundred years later the comprehensive law code of Canute, with its respect for both Anglo-Saxon and Dane, was still regarded as an authority.

  After the chaos of Ethelred’s reign, this rough, tough Dane proved to be England’s best king since Alfred - both wise and realistic. Realism was one of the lessons he was aiming to teach when he had tried to turn back the waves, and it is one of history’s injustices that the monarch who took his throne down to the beach in order to spread wisdom has ended up looking an idiot.

  EDWARD THE CONFESSOR

  AD 1042-66

  EDWARD THE CONFESSOR IS THE ONLY English king to have been declared a saint by the Pope. When people ‘confess’ anything nowadays, it is to actions they are ashamed of - their mistakes, their sins and, perhaps even, their crimes. If you hear someone say, ‘I must confess’, you know there is some sort of an apology coming up. But in Old English the word had an altogether more positive meaning. Confessors were a particular category of saint who had not been martyred but who had demonstrated their saintliness by testifying actively to their faith - in the case of King Edward, to the spiritual happiness that Christianity had brought to his not-always happy life. He was Edward the Testifier.

  King Edward’s testifying took the form of the immense abbey that he constructed in the fields a mile or so to the west of the walled city of London - the west minster (or monastery church), as opposed to the east minster of St Paul’s that was London’s cathedral. The soaring grandeur of the Westminster Abbey that we know today reflects the reshaping of the building in later centuries. But Edward’s original abbey was grand enough. Built of stone, nearly 100 metres long and towering above the banks of the Thames, it was the largest church - in fact, the largest building of any sort - in Anglo-Saxon England. Edward modelled his great minster on the impressive new Romanesque architecture of Normandy where he had spent most of his youth.

  He had had a lonely childhood. He saw little of his parents, Ethelred the Unready and Emma, the Norman noblewoman whom Ethelred married in 1002 (see p. 66). Through most of his boyhood Edward’s distracted father was busy with the losing battle that he was fighting against the Danes, and after Ethelred’s death in 1016 and Canute’s Danish conquest of England, the boy took refuge with his mother’s relatives in Normandy.

  Emma, however, did not join her eleven-year-old son in exile. Following the custom of conquerors, Canute secured his hold on his new kingdom by marrying the widow of his defeated enemy, and Emma seemed to enjoy the experience. In the eighteen years that she was married to Canute, she became so Danish it was as if she had never been married to Ethelred. When Canute died and Edward finally returned to England, his mother scarcely welcomed him. She had had a son by Canute, Hartha Canute, whom she preferred. So after Hartha Canute died in 1042, clearing Edward’s path to the throne, it was hardly surprising that once he had established his power the new king rounded up his earls, rode to Winchester where his mother was living, and confiscated all her treasure.

  By now Edward was thirty-seven. He was a tall, skinny man with blond or prematurely white hair. Some later accounts suggest that he may have been lacking in normal pigmentation in skin, hair and eyes - an albino. One description hints at a pale, almost translucent complexion, so that the blood vessels in his cheeks would show bright pink beneath his skin. Looking otherworldly, speaking Norman French and spending much of his time at prayer, the Confessor was something of an outsider among the hard men of Anglo-Saxon England - a choirboy in a den of gangsters.

  Edward owed his throne to the consent of the three great earls who controlled the country - Siward of Northumbria, Leofric of Mercia and Godwin of Wessex. Their landholdings were such that they could dictate terms to someone like Edward who was, in many ways, a foreigner. Of the three powerbrokers Godwin was the wealthiest and most powerful. In gangster terms, he was the boss of bosses, and in 1045 he received the pay-off for his role as kingmaker: Edward married Godwin’s daughter Edith, and gave her brother Harold the earldom of East Anglia.

  Six years later, Edward rebelled against his minders. He ordered old Godwin, Harold and the rest of the Godwins into exile, and packed Edith off to a nunnery. But his independence was short-lived. While Earls Siward and Leofric had been happy to see the back of the scheming Godwins, they
were rapidly antagonised by the pro-Norman policies that the King now adopted. Edward had spent most of his life among Normans. They were the people he really understood and trusted. So to his Norman nephew Ralf the Timid he gave large estates in Herefordshire, where Ralf started building a mini-Normandy, complete with castles.

  Edward also worried the English with the favour he showed to his forceful and ambitious relative, William the Bastard. William was the son of Emma’s nephew, Duke Robert of Normandy, and was known as ‘the Bastard’ because his father never married his mother Herlève, a tanner’s daughter, whose beauty, according to later legend, was said to have caught Robert’s eye while she was washing clothes, bare legged, in a stream. After his father’s death, William built Normandy into a dynamic military power, displaying ambitions that many English found disturbing. It was rumoured that, out of gratitude for Norman hospitality during his days of exile, Edward had even promised this distant kinsman that he could inherit the English throne after his death.

  When old Godwin and his son Harold sailed defiantly up the Thames the following summer, the fleet that Edward raised against them refused to fight. The confessor king was humiliated. He had no choice but to accept the restoration of Godwin power, which Harold wielded after his father’s death in 1053. Harold now took his father’s title as Earl of Wessex. Edward was also compelled to bring his wife Edith back to court from the nunnery, though it was rumoured that he refused to have sexual relations with her. The loveless marriage certainly proved to be childless, and Edith’s family was denied the satisfaction of welcoming into the world an heir who was both royal and half Godwin.