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

by Robert Lacey

  With the return of the Godwins, Edward scaled down his bid to be an effective king. Delegating his military power to Harold, he took consolation in his beloved minster, to which he devoted a tenth of his royal income.

  On the riverbank nearby he built himself a home, the Palace of Westminster - the site of today’s Houses of Parliament; and he spent his days there, praying with his monks and reading the Bible.

  Edward’s saintliness was confirmed when he started laying his hands on sufferers from scrofula, a form of tuberculosis that causes swellings in the lymph glands of the neck. Victims believed that their swellings decreased after the king had touched them, and it became a tradition for English monarchs to lay their hands on sufferers from this disease, later known as the ‘King’s Evil’. The ceremony of kings and queens ‘touching for the King’s Evil’ continued into the eighteenth century and the reign of Queen Anne, who touched the infant Dr Johnson in 1712, without effecting a cure.

  Edward’s great Abbey of Westminster became the spot where the English monarchy did its business with God, the place where every monarch would be crowned except the twentieth-century king, Edward VIII - Edward the Abdicator, as he would have been called in the Middle Ages. Many kings and queens were also buried there, to be joined over the centuries by the nation’s non-royal headline-makers. In Poets’ Corner lie the writers, beside a historic cavalcade of statesmen, soldiers, scientists and other heroes - with just a few heroines - in a marble forest of statues and tombs. The Confessor’s abbey has become England’s hall of fame.

  Edward himself was too ill to attend the dedication of his minster when it was finally completed in December 1065, and a week later he was dead, leaving England up for grabs. Since the saintly Confessor had failed to produce any children, the succession came down to a contest between Godwin’s son Harold and the Duke of Normandy, William the Bastard. Harold had no blood connection at all, and William had only a distant claim. But both men knew how to fight a good battle.

  THE LEGEND OF LADY GODIVA

  C.AD 1043

  THE IDEA OF A BEAUTIFUL NAKED LADY riding her horse through the streets in broad daylight has an appeal that extends far beyond history. Today the name ‘Godiva’ is used as a trademark all over the world for striptease clubs and skimpy underwear, advertised by smiling young women with long, rippling hair. Yet these modern Godivas do not deploy their long hair to conceal their nakedness. On the contrary, they seem rather keen to reveal it - and they would certainly shock the pious Anglo-Saxon lady to whom they offer their naughty tribute.

  The original Godiva was generous, kind-hearted and, by all accounts, highly respectable. In Anglo-Saxon her name was Godgifu, or ‘God’s gift’. She was a prominent figure in Edward the Confessor’s England, owning large estates in her own right in the Midlands and East Anglia, and she was married to Leofric of Mercia, one of the three powerful earls who had placed Edward on the throne in 1042. Leofric effectively controlled most of central England, and he was selected by Edward to join the posse that raided the property of the King’s mother Emma (see p. 79).

  Godgifu and Leofric followed Edward’s example of giving generously to the Church. Nowadays ambitious bigwigs buy the local football team and spend their money trying to help it to success. In the Middle Ages they showered their riches on the local church - or churches, in the case of Godgifu. In Coventry she devoted a great deal of her wealth to making its humble abbey the pride of the county of Warwickshire and beyond. ‘There was not found in all England a monastery with such an abundance of gold and silver, gems, and costly garments,’ wrote the chronicler Roger of Wendover in the early thirteenth century. And it was Roger who first wrote down the tale:

  Longing to free the town of Coventry from the oppression of a heavy tax, Lady Godiva begged her husband with urgent prayers, for the sake of Jesus and his mother Mary, that he would free the town from the toll, and from all other heavy burdens. The earl rebuked her sharply. She was asking for something that would cost him much money, and he forbade her to raise the subject with him again. But, with a woman’s persistence, she would not stop pestering her husband, until he finally gave her this reply. ‘Mount your horse, and ride naked before all the people, through the market of the town, from one end to the other, and on your return you shall have your request.’ To which Godiva replied, ‘But will you give me permission if I am ready to do it?’ ‘I will,’ her husband replied. Whereupon the countess, beloved of God, loosed her hair and let down her tresses, which covered the whole of her body like a veil. And then, mounting her horse, and attended by two knights, she rode through the market place, without being seen, except her fair legs. And having completed the journey, she returned with gladness to her astonished husband, and obtained of him what she had asked. Earl Leofric freed the town of Coventry and its inhabitants from the taxes.

  So there you have the story, translated from the Latin that Roger scratched into his parchment around the year 1220 - and you will notice that, like Alfred’s ‘cakes’ and Canute’s waves, this colourful episode was not recorded until many years after it was supposed to have happened. Roger of Wendover’s description of Lady Godgifu is rather like Trevor McDonald reporting on the Battle of Trafalgar. Long before Roger was born a number of historians had mentioned Godgifu in their chronicles, and not one of them had anything to say about naked horseback riding.

  But there are several reasons for believing that Roger did not make the whole thing up. He was a monk at the Benedictine Abbey of St Albans, which had close links with the abbey founded in Coventry by Leofric and Godgifu. The monks went for prayer and study sessions at each other’s abbeys, and their libraries exchanged manuscripts. So it is quite possible that the St Albans chronicler might have come across some since-vanished Coventry document that recounted Godgifu’s stratagem for relieving the community’s over-taxed poor.

  Taxation was certainly a bitter and controversial local issue in 1043 when Leofric and Godgifu built their abbey at Coventry (a small part of which is now the site of the modern Coventry Cathedral). Just two years earlier feelings had been running so high in nearby Worcester that a couple of royal tax collectors had been set upon and murdered by the irate townsfolk. Leofric had been a commander of the army sent to discipline the community, and the brutal punishment he exacted involved ravaging the town for five days, before setting it alight and, according to the chronicler, John of Worcester, retiring ‘with great booty’.

  What did Godgifu think of her husband’s role in slaughtering Worcester’s tax protesters? It is tempting to wonder whether the ‘gold and silver, gems, and costly garments’ that she presented to her abbey two years later did not, perhaps, come from the booty of Worcester - Godgifu’s own quiet way of making amends. But did her protest go as far as we have been led to believe?

  In recent times, respectable members of the Women’s Institute have stripped off so as to raise money for good causes, strategically placing apple pies and cookery books to substitute for Godiva’s legendary long hair. But one cannot, sadly, imagine a grand and pious medieval lady doing any such thing. Godiva was one of the last great Anglo-Saxon women landowners. She inherited Leofric’s vast estates after his death in 1057, and her possessions were listed in the Domesday Book. This God-fearing founder of monasteries and nunneries would hardly have ridden naked through rows of gawping peasants, however complete the camouflage of her luxuriant hair.

  What does seem possible, however, is that Godiva may have ridden out symbolically naked - that is, stripped of the fine jewellery and sumptuous costume that denoted her status as one of the great of the land. Roger’s source for the story may have used the Latin word denudata, which means ‘stripped’ - not necessarily total nudity. Maybe the jewels and fine outer clothes that Godiva took off for her ride were the very treasures that she was presenting to the abbey - and without fancy hairpins, of course, her hair would have come tumbling down voluptuously.

  Symbolism was a powerful force in the Middle Ages. Riding penitentia
lly through Coventry, an unadorned Lady Godiva would have made a forceful and startling statement by the standards of 1043. Her performance would have been well understood as a gesture of the sympathy she felt with the people of the community - which we should not, by the way, think of as much of a town. According to the Domesday Book, eleventh-century Coventry was scarcely a village: just sixty-nine families are listed as living there.

  But real nudity is much more fun, and that is how the story has not just endured, but developed. As Coventry grew into a bustling centre of trade, the citizens became so proud of their naked lady that they started their own annual Godiva pageant, a saucy cut above the attractions of any other Midlands market town. An account of 1678 describes a Godiva procession that attracted tens of thousands of visitors, and it was around this time that another detail was added to the legend. According to the seventeenth-century version, the medieval villagers had shown their solidarity with Godiva’s protest by staying indoors on the day of her ride, with their shutters decently closed so that she could pass by unobserved. No one, it seems, was so cheeky as to look out at her, with the single exception of a tailor called Thomas, who was promptly punished for his curiosity by being struck blind (or even struck dead, depending on the storyteller). And this is the origin of another English folk character-Peeping Tom.

  THE YEAR OF THREE KINGS

  AD 1066

  AS EDWARD THE CONFESSOR LAY ON HIS deathbed, too ill to attend the dedication of his beloved west minster, he summoned Earl Harold of Wessex to his side. Harold had no blood claim to the throne, but he was Edward’s brother-in-law. He had helped run England for a dozen years and he was the candidate preferred by the other Anglo-Saxon earls, so now the dying king named him as his successor. That, at any rate, was the story according to Harold, and on 6 January 1066, the day that Edward was buried, he had himself crowned King of England.

  The story was rather different according to William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, who thought the succession was rightfully his through his French connections with the dead king. Out hunting in Normandy when the news of Harold’s enthronement reached him, he was so angry that he could not speak. His followers kept their distance while the imperious Duke, in his wordless fury, kept tying and untying the fastenings on his cloak. (It is just a detail, but buttons and buttonholes had not been invented in 1066.)

  William’s view of events and of why he should succeed to the English throne was to be set out in a stupendous piece of graphic evidence and propaganda, the Bayeux Tapestry - a unique work of art and one of history’s most remarkable documents. Stitched to the orders of William’s half-brother, Bishop Odo, to decorate his new cathedral at Bayeux near the Normandy coast, the tapestry is a vast panorama, 50 centimetres high and over 70 metres long - the width of a football field. It features 37 buildings, 41 ships, 202 horses and no less than 626 characters, including lifelike images of Edward, William and Harold, who act out the drama in a wide-screen production of seventy-three picture sequences.

  The tapestry tells us the Norman story, starting in England where Edward is still on the throne, and shows Earl Harold sitting proudly in his stirrups, a hunting hawk on his wrist, as he rides to set sail for France. Here the tapestry gives a comic-strip version of a journey that Harold probably made to Normandy in 1064, when he is thought to have sworn some sort of oath to William. Harold’s supporters maintained that it was a simple pledge of friendship between the two strong men who controlled the different sides of the Channel.

  The story according to William, however, was that Harold’s pledge involved much more than mere friendship. The tapestry shows Harold making a deeply serious oath of allegiance - we see his hands outstretched, and he is swearing on not just one, but two large boxes of holy relics. Later Norman chroniclers had no doubt that Harold had promised to support William’s claim to the English throne once the Confessor was dead.

  For nine centuries people have argued fiercely about what Harold did or did not promise. It hardly seems likely that the ambitious and dynamic earl would have sworn away a kingdom voluntarily, and if the oath had been forced out of him, then he clearly did not feel bound by it when he took over England on Edward’s death. But we know from the tapestry what happened next: a flaming ball of fire, described by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a ‘hairy star’, appeared in the heavens.

  Modern astronomers have identified this hairy star as Halley’s Comet, named after the seventeenth-century astronomer Sir Edmund Halley, who identified it when it passed over England in 1682. Elmer the flying monk saw the comet pass over England in both 989 and 1066, and realised that it was the same ‘star’ returning (see p. 69). Halley was able to work out the other dates when the comet’s seventy-six-and-a-half-year-long circlings of the solar system would have brought it close to the earth - and April 1066 was one of those moments. But William of Normandy was certain that the hairy star was a sign of God’s anger at Harold for breaking his oath, and it served as God’s authorisation for the busy picture that soon follows on the tapestry - a tableau of Norman axemen chopping down trees and building an invasion fleet.

  In England, meanwhile, Harold was trying to strengthen his position. His lover for many years had been the beautiful Edith Swan-Neck - they had had five sons and two daughters together. But to cement his power within the English aristocracy, Harold now arranged a marriage of convenience with Ealdgyth, the sister of two of the country’s most powerful earls. Ealdgyth and her brothers were grandchildren of Leofric and Godgifu of Mercia. In other words, brave King Harold’s legal wife, the last queen of Anglo-Saxon England, was the granddaughter of Lady Godiva.

  Harold might have done better to foster his relationships within his own family. The previous autumn, with ghastly timing, he had fallen out with his fiery brother Tostig who had stalked off indignantly into exile. And in the summer of 1066 Harold learned that his brother had teamed up with Harald Hardraada, the King of Norway. Hardraada believed he had a claim on England through a treaty concluded by his father with Hartha Canute, and in September 1066 Harold heard that Tostig and Hardraada had landed their forces in Northumbria and had taken control of York.

  Harold knew that William’s fleet was poised on the other side of the Channel ready to sail at any moment, but he had no choice. He marched his army north, covering no less than 180 miles in four days and making such good time that he took the invaders by surprise. On 25 September, outside York, he won a fierce and brilliant battle at Stamford Bridge in which both Tostig and the King of Norway were killed. The remains of their army were driven back to their ships.

  Harold’s lightning triumph at Stamford Bridge was one of the great victories of early English history. His Saxon army could claim to be the nimblest and most lethal fighting force in Europe. But just three days later, on 28 September 1066, William of Normandy landed with his troops in Sussex, and when Harold received the news he knew he had to march south at once. He reached London, again in record time, picked up reinforcements and proceeded towards Hastings, where William had established his headquarters. Harold and the English army took up their position on the ridge above the valley of Sandlake, or Senlac, just north of Hastings, at the spot now known as Battle.

  The Bayeux Tapestry shows the Norman knights riding their horses into battle on the morning of Saturday, 14 October. In modern movies Norman soldiers, who are usually depicted as ‘baddies’, are identified by the sinister long, flat nose-guards that project downwards from their pointed, dome-shaped helmets. In fact, both sides at Hastings wore these helmets, along with chainmail armour, and they are both shown carrying the same long, kite-shaped shields.

  One thing that does distinguish Saxon from Norman is their haircuts: the Anglo-Saxons are shown with long hair and with even longer droopy moustaches, while the Normans are moustacheless and are coiffed in ‘short back and sides’ mode, the backs of their necks shaved bare to the crown of the heads. This gave them an advantage in hand-to-hand fighting - they could not be grabbed by their hair or mous
taches.

  The more significant difference is that the Normans are shown fighting from horseback, while the Anglo-Saxons are fighting on foot. Harold’s army did have horses - they rode them to the battle. But then they tethered them and found they were facing the formidable cavalry that William had shipped over the Channel. The Normans had bred themselves a compact and powerful warhorse, the destrier, whose arched neck and small head indicate that it may have had Arab blood, and this battle-bred charger would play a crucial role at Hastings.

  The Norman cavalry rode powerfully out of Senlac valley, casting their javelins into the Anglo-Saxon shield wall, then retreating. The battle wavered both ways, and there were moments when it seemed that victory could be Harold’s. But the English had not regained their strength after their extraordinary forced marches to Stamford Bridge and back, and now they were worn down by the charges of the Norman horsemen. Armchair generals have criticised Harold for the speed with which he rushed south to confront the Normans, staking all on his stand north of Hastings. He could have held back closer to London, it has been argued, thereby regaining energy and forcing William to come to him.

  But dash and courage were always Harold’s way, and as the sun went down the Norman army found itself master of the field. Lasting more than six hours, the Battle of Hastings was one of the longest-recorded military encounters of the Middle Ages, and its outcome changed the course of English history. England became Norman. Duke William of Normandy became England’s third king in the tumultuous year 1066. And his defeated enemy, Harold, lay dead on the battlefield, slain by an arrow to the eye. Or so we have always thought . . .