In Caen at last their work to crown
Two abbeys rose within the town:
Two monasteries side by side,
That should for monks and nuns provide.11
William and Matilda wasted no time in setting their architects and craftsmen to work, and both buildings sprang up with astonishing speed—thanks in part to the preponderance of the famous white stone of Caen.12 Before the year 1059 was out, La Trinité was operating under the supervision of the appropriately named Abbess Matilda, who was a cousin of William, and a choir of resident nuns “daily praised the Lord in their hymns.” The abbey must have been built in phases, because in its final incarnation, it was a vast, elaborate edifice that could not possibly have been constructed in the space of a few months. It would be another seven years before it was consecrated, and even then it was unfinished.13 But it is a testament to Matilda’s relief and gratitude at finally having her marriage sanctified that she threw herself into the project with such abandon. She was unquestionably the driving force behind the building of her abbey—and its later success as one of the most influential and prosperous religious houses in the duchy. Her enthusiasm may also have stemmed from a possible interest in architecture inherited from her father, who commissioned a series of splendid new buildings in Flanders during his ascendancy. Her mother, Adela, would surely have proved another inspiration during the project, having herself founded several abbeys and collegiate churches in Flanders.
The attention to detail that Matilda lavished on La Trinité extended to ensuring that the abbey had a sufficiently impressive collection of relics. Once more her interest no doubt derived from her natal family. Her aunt Judith was a renowned collector of relics, and Count Baldwin had once given her a vial of the Holy Blood. Among Matilda’s array were splinters of wood from Christ’s manger and cross, a piece of bread that he had touched, and a strand of his mother Mary’s hair. Meanwhile there was a veritable Aladdin’s cave of minor saints’ body parts: the finger of St. Cecile, a hair of St. Denis, the blood of St. George, and even several entire corpses. This may seem macabre to modern observers, but enormous importance was placed upon such items in the Middle Ages. Bones, body parts, or other items closely associated with saints were believed to be imbued with that saint’s power, and many miracles were attributed to such relics in popular tales and legends. The better a religious house’s collection, the more blessed it was considered to be.14
That Matilda should amass such an impressive collection for La Trinité reveals not just the meticulous care she showed in the creation of her new abbey, but her own belief in the “magical” powers of the relics. For all her political shrewdness and guile, Matilda was known to be superstitious, and during critical periods of her life she occasionally sought the advice of mystics or magicians—she is recorded to have once consulted the bones of a sheep’s shoulder in the hope of foretelling the future, a practice that was common in her native Flanders.
Matilda’s superstition was by no means unusual among the ruling elite. Interest in magic extended across the entire society of medieval Europe, from kings, princes, and dukes to members of the clergy and even the papacy. It also cut across social boundaries, uniting peasants and noblemen, the uneducated and intellectuals. Most communities had a “wise woman” or “soothsayer” who used the mystical arts to heal the sick or protect against evil. Reading palms, rolling dice, and using randomly selected passages from the Bible to predict the future were widely practiced by such individuals, as well as by members of the clergy. There was also a more sophisticated profession dedicated to the exploration of astrology and alchemy. Training for such a profession took place at universities and other educational establishments, but its expert practitioners were often found at court, which provided an invaluable source of patronage for their endeavors. It was common for rulers to seek the advice of these practitioners, particularly at times of crisis in their reign.
Although many ecclesiasts were involved in the practice of magic, during the tenth and eleventh centuries it was increasingly condemned by the church, which saw it as a threat to its own authority. There was thus an interesting dichotomy between Matilda’s celebrated Christianity and her belief in the mystical arts. In the years to come, it was the latter that she would draw upon more at times of crisis, casting doubt on the apparently intense piety that she was always so keen to display in gestures such as the creation of La Trinité.
Like his wife, William took enormous pride in the building and fitting out of his abbey. Work on St.-Étienne apparently progressed more slowly than on La Trinité, because it was not consecrated until 1077, but like its sister abbey, it was functional from a much earlier date. Lanfranc, by now the duke’s closest ecclesiastical adviser, was appointed abbot in 1063. The Italian’s influence had been increasing steadily during the 1050s and 1060s, and this appointment signified the preeminence that he now enjoyed. It was said that “William venerated him as a father, respected him as a teacher, and loved him like a brother or son.”15
Although they were built for the same purpose, William’s and Matilda’s churches were as different architecturally as their founders were in character. In contrast to the functional starkness of William’s St.-Étienne, with its vast, unadorned west front and imposing towers, La Trinité was complex, intricate, and elaborate. As one later commentator observed: “The one is the expression in stone of the imperial will of the conquering Duke; the other breathes the true spirit of his loving and faithful Duchess.”16 Comparatively little survives of Matilda’s original building today, but the fragments that do—such as the bases of the towers and the arcading of the nave—give an impression of how spectacular it must have been in its heyday.
Both St.-Étienne and La Trinité were of huge personal significance to William and Matilda. Just how much they meant to the duke and duchess is demonstrated by the fact that they would later choose to be buried in them. There could have been no more fitting a resting place. They may have been built as a penance, but there was nothing apologetic about William’s and Matilda’s abbeys. They were symbols of the power and magnificence of the ducal family, and of just how far William had come since the turbulent days of his minority. According to one authority, they represented a “golden age” in Normandy’s history.17
Orderic Vitalis claims that the commissioning of St.-Étienne and La Trinité sparked a new religious fervor in the principality, providing a role model for the nobility to follow: “The barons of Normandy were inspired by the piety of their princes to do likewise, and encouraged each other to undertake similar enterprises for the salvation of their souls.”18 Suddenly, powerful magnates were vying with each other to create the most lavish ecclesiastical buildings. These would prove a lasting legacy of William and Matilda’s regime.
By the beginning of the 1060s, when Matilda was in her thirtieth year, she had grown in influence and prestige, not just as the wife of the duke and the mother of his children, but as a political power to be reckoned with in her own right. Her active involvement in the building of La Trinité was one indication of her influence, and it gave her the confidence to undertake other pious commissions elsewhere. In 1063, for example, she began work on the magnificent cathedral of Nôtre Dame du Pré at Emendreville, a suburb of Rouen.19 She also founded two other abbeys, St.-George at Boscherville and St.-Florent at Saumur.
Matilda’s growing importance was also beginning to manifest itself in other ways. Whereas before their marriage William had relied upon older relatives for support in government, notably his uncles Mauger, the archbishop of Rouen, and William of Arques, now he began to place his trust in his wife and children. As a result, Matilda began to play an increasingly important role in the political life of the duchy.
Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the charters. One of the earliest documents that she witnessed as William’s consort dates from 1053 and relates to Holy Trinity in Rouen. This marked the beginning of a dazzlingly successful career on the political stage. Although t
he lists of witnesses indicate only who was present, not who participated in any accompanying debates, the sheer frequency with which Matilda attested these documents is proof that she played an active role. During her tenure as duchess, she put her signature to a total of one hundred charters, covering a wide range of business.20 This far outweighs the number attested by even the most powerful members of the aristocracy, second only to William himself. Often it was specified that she was acting alongside William, or that the grants were made with her consent as well as her husband’s. This was particularly true of the charters relating to her abbey at Caen, but there are various other examples.21 Her consent for such grants is sometimes placed on the same level as William’s—an honor that was not even accorded to his sons.22 Only very occasionally was Matilda able to grant charters in her own right: she did not have the financial resources to do so. She had brought a relatively meager dowry and no titles to her marriage, and the lands with which William had endowed her were confined to some modest estates in the Pays-de-Caux region of Normandy.23 This was rather less than her predecessors had received, or than she might have expected as duchess of Normandy. The fact that she was able to lavish independent bequests upon La Trinité must therefore have required her to levy funds from elsewhere.
As well as granting land and titles, Matilda also became increasingly involved in the legal affairs of the duchy. The cases that she dealt with varied enormously in nature and complexity. One of the more unusual concerned some property at Bayeux that had been granted to the abbey of St. Peter in Jumièges. This property had formerly belonged to Stephen, the nephew of a ducal chaplain, who had married a widow named Oringa by whom he had a son. This son had died without Stephen’s knowing, and Oringa had bought a replacement child from a woman named Ulburga. Stephen had made this boy his heir, but after the couple’s death, Ulburga tried to reclaim her child. Oringa’s relatives, realizing that they would then have to forfeit the land, prevented her from doing so, which prompted her to bring the case before William and Matilda at Bonneville-sur-Touques. It was decided that the woman ought to undergo an ordeal by carrying a red-hot iron rod, and that if she emerged unscathed, she might have her son back. Ulburga passed the test, which meant that the property was forfeit to the duke. William subsequently gave it to Matilda, who in turn passed it to Rainald, a ducal chaplain.24
Up until this point, women had rarely played even a supporting role in the history of the reigning dukes. They had been obscure mistresses or illegitimate offspring, easily dispensed with and rarely named in the sources. Now Matilda was enjoying a position of such prominence that she would have been the envy of consorts across western Europe. The fact that she had carved out such a position for herself was all the more impressive given that her husband was a ferocious and indomitable ruler—far from the likes of Edward II or Henry VI, whose weakness enabled their wives to gain the ascendancy. It seemed that William had met his match—and he appeared to revel in the fact.
Although Matilda’s power was remarkable in the context of other ruling dynasties at the time, she was not the only woman to play an active role in political and legal affairs. Indeed, in this respect, Normandy seems to have been more enlightened than many other countries. In the collection of charters relating to the Caen abbeys, twenty-three out of thirty mention women as signatories, grantors, attestees, or involved in the transaction in some other way.25 Wives, mothers, and even daughters became involved in the granting of property or land, not just alongside the male members of the family but sometimes, like Matilda, in their own right. For example, a contemporary of Matilda, Mabel, heiress of Bellême in the heart of Normandy, was one of the most formidable noblewomen of the eleventh century. She was as remarkably fecund as the duchess, mothering nine children, but this did not distract her from her primary objective, which was the defense of her inheritance. She had considerable resources at her disposal—it was said she traveled with a retinue of one hundred armed men—and possessed a dangerous combination of cunning and ruthlessness, poisoning her own brother-in-law and disposing of any other rival who crossed her path. Having lived by the sword, she died by it, too. According to Orderic, she was murdered in her bath by a man whose land she had taken. Her epitaph describes her as “A shield of her inheritance, a tower guarding the frontier; to some neighbours dear, to others terrible.”26
Perhaps it was the growing equality of their relationship that meant that after a decade of marriage, William and Matilda seemed to have settled into a pattern of mutual respect and harmony. The tempestuous beginning of their courtship had apparently been forgotten. William’s respect and admiration for Matilda grew with every child she bore him. He was immensely proud of his large family, and even more so of his wife, “whose fruitfulness in children excited in his mind the tenderest regard for her.”27
As far as aristocratic marriages were concerned, affection was a rare and unlooked-for quality—politics, not passion, was the driving force. But on the surface at least, that very quality was what the ducal couple seemed to enjoy. The nineteenth-century historian Agnes Strickland paints a picture of increasing intimacy and accord, claiming that the duke and duchess were “reckoned the handsomest and most tenderly united couple in Europe.” She continues: “The fine natural talents of both had been improved by a degree of mental cultivation very unusual in that age; there was a similarity in their tastes and pursuits which rendered their companionship delightful to each other in private hours, and gave to all their public acts that graceful unanimity which could not fail of producing the happiest effects on the minds of their subjects.”28 A similarly rosy picture was painted by a poet of the same era who dedicated a verse to Matilda, describing her as “The fond, the faithful cherished wife/Who shared each counsel, cheered each strife.”29
The records contain no instances of Matilda’s defying William in this period, and there is indeed evidence to suggest that she had come to feel a certain degree of affection for him. Sometime between 1063 and 1066, William fell seriously ill at Cherbourg. So grave was his condition that “his life was wholly despaired of and he was laid on the ground, as at the point of death, and gave the canons of that church the relics of the saints which he carried [about] in his own chapel.” As if striking a bargain with God, the duke vowed that he would establish canons in the cathedral church of St. Mary in Coutances “if God and St. Mary would raise him from this sickness.” Meanwhile, Matilda went to the same cathedral and made a gift of one hundred shillings at the main altar, praying “that God and St. Mary might give her back her dearest husband.” The monks were surprised by her informal attire, for she wore her hair loose—a detail they recorded for posterity. Her disheveled appearance may have been due to the fact that she had stayed by her husband’s side all night, frantic with worry. After making her plea, Matilda hastened back to William. It seemed that her prayers had been answered when he made a full recovery. As a token of thanks, “she helped him in her joy to re-establish the church [of St. Mary]” and to build a new one outside the castle walls in Coutances. The couple also made various other generous bequests, and their two eldest sons, Robert and Richard, were there to witness the resulting charters.30
That Matilda had been so panic-stricken by her husband’s illness suggests that she cared for him deeply—and this is certainly how it was interpreted by the chronicler who recorded the episode. Malmesbury approvingly noted Matilda’s “willingness to please her husband,” and all the sources concur that she was a useful and devoted spouse.31 But there is another explanation for her behavior, and it is perhaps more in keeping with what we know of her character. By the time William fell dangerously ill at Cherbourg, Matilda had come to enjoy a degree of influence and prestige as duchess of Normandy that was matched by few of her predecessors or contemporaries. The active role that she played in the political sphere fulfilled the ambitions she had cherished since her youth, and she was by no means ready to relinquish them. Yet if William had died, this was precisely what she would have had to do.
No matter how able she had already shown herself in the governance of Normandy, as dowager duchess the most that she could have hoped for would have been to act as regent for her eldest son until he came of age. After that, she would have been expected to retire gracefully from public life. This was not a prospect that would have appealed to Matilda’s sense of ambition. At least for now, the influential position she had been building for herself depended very much upon her husband’s survival.
By contrast, William’s attitude to his wife seems less complex. Both his words and his actions suggest that he adored her. Malmesbury claims that Matilda’s obedience and fecundity “kindled a passionate attachment in the spirit of that great man.”32 In 1079, after some twenty-eight years of marriage, the duke himself would openly declare that he had been “a companion so faithful and devoted in his affection,” and referred to Matilda as “the wife of my bosom, whom I love as my own soul.”33 Even in a letter of business that he wrote to her, he prefaced the formal details with a tender address to “his dear wife,” wishing her “perpetual weal.”34 These sentiments form a sharp contrast to the image of a brutish warrior. It seems that Matilda brought out a softer side to him.
The duke appeared genuinely attracted to his wife, and the sheer number of children that they had together suggests a degree of sexual compatibility. The sources certainly suggest that Matilda was an attractive wife. She regularly won praise for her beauty from the likes of Jumièges and Fulcoius of Beauvais, as well as later writers. A nineteenth-century poet extolled her elegance and poise:
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