by Lisa Hilton
According to the chronicler William of Jumièges, Matilda’s parents, Adela and Baldwin, did not consummate their marriage until 1031, which suggests that Matilda could have been no older than about nineteen when she married William. Since there is no evidence that she was the eldest of their four children, she might well have been considerably younger. Whatever her personal opinion of the match, both her father and her bridegroom were sufficiently keen on it to defy papal sanction, and Count Baldwin brought his daughter to Eu, where the wedding was celebrated. Afterwards the ducal couple travelled together to Rouen.
What were the motivations behind William and Count Baldwin’s arrangement? Matilda’s father was in the process of reorienting his small but strategically important country with the aim of distancing it from the German-controlled Holy Roman empire and forging stronger links with France, as evinced by his own marriage to the French princess Adela. Having become one of the principal vassals of the King of France, he saw his ambitions further consolidated by the marriage of Matilda’s brother Baldwin to Richildis, the widow of the Count of Hainault, in 1049. Having fought unsuccessfully against Flanders in the settlement of Richildis’s inheritance, and concerned by constant skirmishing along the Flemish-German border, the German Emperor, Henry III, was apprehensive about a Norman-Flemish alliance which would diminish his influence still further. (Since the current pope, Leo IX, owed his throne to the Emperor, it is unsurprising that he agreed to return the favour by opposing the marriage between William and Matilda.) Normandy could also prove a powerful ally against the English crown, which was at the time hostile to Flanders: King Edward had summoned a fleet to serve against Count Baldwin on the Emperor’s side if necessary. In his turn, Duke William was conscious of his own hitherto vulnerable position, dependent as he was on the continued cultivation of the goodwill of the French King and a small group of loyal aristocrats. He was frequently in conflict with the lords of Arques, Ponthieu and the Vexin, who periodically aligned themselves with Count Eustace of Boulogne, one of Count Baldwin’s most rebellious vassals. The marriage with Matilda would thus provide both William and Baldwin with a mutual reinforcement of power to subdue the rebels whose territories lay between their lands. Further, it has been suggested that Matilda’s impeccable bloodline went some way to enhancing William’s own prestige and eradicating the stain of his illegitimacy.
That William was known to his contemporaries as ‘the Bastard’ and not ‘the Conqueror’ is not in doubt, but the implications of this status in terms of the eleventh century need to be examined carefully. The chronicler Orderic Vitalis’s claim that William ‘as a bastard was despised by the native nobility’ may be dismissed as an anachronistic judgement from a later age. Contemporary perceptions did not necessarily stigmatise or even fully recognise illegitimacy. The regularisation of ecclesiastical marriage was still very much an ongoing process, and William’s grandfather, Duke Richard II, had been the first of the line to make a Christian marriage, at the turn of the previous century. His sons continued to take concubines, as was still the prevailing custom, and William’s father, Duke Robert, did not make a dynastic marriage. His concubine Herleva of Falaise, William’s mother, was the daughter of Fulbert, ‘the chamberlain’, which was not necessarily a high office at the time. That William was sensitive on the subject of his birth was clearly known, as the soldiers of Alencon were to find to their cost, but this may have been more to do with his maternal grandfather’s profession than his mother’s unmarried status. Fulbert was a skinner, though he appears in some accounts as a ‘pollinctor’, which in Roman usage meant undertaker. When William besieged the castle of Alençon, the troops ‘had beaten pelts and furs in order to insult the duke’4 with his grandfather’s dirty, menial origins. William had the hands and feet cut off thirty-two of them.
(The ancestry of the English kings was, incidentally, still good for a giggle a century later. Henry II, having quarrelled with the bishop of Lincoln, refused to greet him at a picnic one day. The King was mending a leather bandage on his finger with a needle and thread and the bishop, daringly trying to amuse him, remarked: ‘How like your cousins of Falaise you do look.’ Luckily for the bishop, Henry fell about laughing.5)
Norman chroniclers do display discomfort with William’s birth, as well as with his defiance of the papal ban on his marriage. Flouting the authority of the Pope was a highly risky form of disobedience, since it could provide rebels in the duchy with a religious sanction for political disloyalty. William, however, had been dodging traitors for most of his life, he was a brilliant military strategist and he was possessed of an extremely powerful will. William of Malmesbury recounts how, in the aftermath of his mother’s life-threatening labour, the newborn William was left on the floor of Herleva’s room while she was cared for. The tiny baby grabbed at the rushes covering the floor with such strength that his attendants predicted he would ‘become a mighty man, ready to acquire everything within his reach, and that which he acquired he would with a strong hand steadfastly maintain against all challengers’.6 So William wanted Matilda of Flanders badly enough to defy the Pope, and he got her.
The prestige of Matilda’s ancestry was obviously considered a sufficient compensation for someone of William’s relatively uncertain status, as she brought no dowry of land or titles to the union. The desirability of an elite bride was based on the power of her male relations, her wealth and her lineage, and the first two attributes did not necessarily outweigh the third. Ancestry — specifically maternal ancestry — was also to be the principal factor in the choice of the next English queen, the bride of Matilda’s son Henry.
At the time of their marriage, William was in his early twenties and Matilda, as has been noted, probably in her late teens. He was a tall man by the standards of the day, about five feet ten, clean shaven and short-haired in the Norman style. Matilda, by contrast, was tiny, just four feet two inches tall. William of Jumièges describes ‘a very beautiful and noble girl of royal stock’ while Orderic Vitalis declared that she was ‘even more distinguished for the purity of her mind and manners than for her illustrious lineage … She united beauty with gentle breeding and all the graces of Christian holiness.’ Conventional tributes such as these appear so frequently that it is difficult to attach much real meaning to them, but William and Matilda were sufficiently attracted to one another for their first child, Robert, to be born within three years of the wedding. They would go on to have three more sons and at least five daughters. Accounts concur that the marriage was happy, and that very happiness was crucially to affect the structure of political power in Normandy and, eventually, in England.
Aristocratic marriages were not made in the expectation of affection. Matrimony was the primary means of advancing family and dynastic interests. A woman of Matilda’s status was required to marry as the concerns of her family directed, but this did not mean she would be merely handed about Europe like a diplomatic doll. All eleventh-century politics were family politics, and political legitimacy was dependent not only on military power but on claims of blood, and therefore on women. A particular emphasis was placed in dynastic marriages on the role of the wife as a ‘peaceweaver’, a mediator or intercessor. In the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘Beowulf’ a match is arranged is arranged between the children of two enemies, Hrothgar and Froda, ‘to settle with the woman a part of his deadly feuds and struggles’. Even if women were no longer carried off as booty from the battlefield as they had been a few centuries previously, in an extremely violent society the grace and good manners of an aristocratic wife were vital to the domestic interactions of powerful men:
The woman must excel as one cherished among her people and be buoyant of mood, keep confidences, be open-heartedly generous with horses and with treasures, in deliberation over the mead, in the presence of the troop of companions, she must always and everywhere greet first the chief of those princes and instantly offer the chalice to her lord’s hand, and she must know what is prudent for them both as rulers of the hall.7
The country where Matilda had grown up was considered an extraordinarily violent region even by the standards of the time. In comparison with France and England it was a primitive, backward area — Dudo of St Quentin claimed that when the Scandinavians were offered the province by Charles the Simple, they rejected it in favour of Normandy A twelfth-century account, The Life of St Amulf, describes the state of Flanders in the eleventh century: ‘Daily homicides and spilling of human blood had troubled the peace and quiet of the entire area. Thus a great number of nobles, through the force of their prayers, convinced the bishop of the lord to visit the places where this atrocious cruelty especially raged and to instruct the docile and bloody spirit of the Flemings in the interest of peace and concord.’8 These turbulent conditions hampered development. No town had a population of more than 5,000 and there were few stone buildings. Nevertheless, the mid-eleventh century saw the beginning of an increasing prosperity which would make Flanders one of the most important European centres of commerce and culture in the centuries to come. By the fifteenth century, it was ‘completely founded on the fact and course of merchandise’9 and the centre of mercantile activity was Bruges, already in Matilda’s time a key port. In 1037, her parents had been in the city to greet a famous visitor, the exiled Queen Emma of England.
A dynastic connection between Flanders and England had been established in the ninth century. Judith, the daughter of Charles the Bald, became England’s first consecrated queen in 856 on her marriage to Aethelwulf, King of the West Saxons. After Aethelwulf’s death, Judith was briefly married to her own stepson before eloping with Baldwin ‘Iron Arm’, the first Count of Flanders. Their son, Baldwin II, married Aelfthryth of England, a daughter of Alfred the Great, the first monarch to be recognised as ruler of all England. Matilda was descended from both England’s first anointed queen and one of its greatest kings.
When Emma, daughter of Duke Richard I of Normandy, married Aethelred of England nearly 150 years later, she was able to take advantage of the growing customary power attached to the role of queen. In 973, Aelfthryth, her motherin-law, had been consecrated, and after her death the new queen became ‘the axis around which English politics turned’.10 Extraordinarily, Emma was crowned queen twice, as after Aethelred’s death she married Cnut of Denmark, who reigned from 1016 to 1035. The conflicts between the children of these two marriages led to Emma’s exile in Flanders and formed the background to Matilda’s own coronation as queen of England.
Emma’s marriage to Aethelred was influenced by the Viking descent of the Norman dynasty. Within a century of the 911 grant of Normandy to Rolf the Viking, Scandinavian language and customs had largely died out, and the duchy was Christian, but the Normans retained some loyalty to their seafaring, pillaging cousins. In 996, Richer of Reims was still referring to the Norman duke as ‘pyratum dux’ and in the year 1000 a Viking fleet was permitted to shelter over the winter in Normandy before crossing the Channel to raid England in the spring. As late as 1014, a pagan horde led by Olaf and Lacman was received in Rouen to recover from its exertions in laying waste to a large area of north-western Gaul. The alliance created by Emma’s marriage put a stop to such attacks on England, at least temporarily. By 1013, England was again under threat from a Danish force, and Aethelred, Emma and their sons, Edward and Alfred, took refuge in Normandy as the invaders swiftly overcame the north and east. Aethelred returned in 1014, but died two years later, in April 1016. As well as his two children with Emma, he left an elder son, Edmund, by his first wife. Edmund, who became known as ‘Ironside’ for his fierce resistance to the Danes. Edmund succeeded in driving the invaders north of the Thames, whereupon it was agreed that the kingdom would be thus partitioned. But Edmund himself died in November 1016 leaving Cnut, the newly elected Danish ruler, as king of England. The following summer, Cnut married Emma. He also had two children with an Englishwoman, Aelfgifu, Swain and Harold ‘Harefoot’. It was decided that the rights of the couple’s previous children should be waived in favour of a son from the new marriage, and a boy, Harthacnut, obligingly appeared.
Emma is the first and only pre-Conquest English queen of whom an image survives. In the Liber Vitae of the New Minster, Winchester, Cnut and Emma present a gold cross to the abbey. Emma wears a diadem and is styled ‘Regina’. Her biographer sees the illustration as especially important in the development of queenship, noting the ‘special status of the king’s wife, as queen, that is as a consecrated person and as an office holder’.11 Until she became queen dowager, Emma was the richest woman in England, and established herself as a leading patron, commissioning illuminated manuscripts from Peterborough and her own (highly flattering) life story, the Encomium Emmae Reginae. In the frontispiece to this work, Emma is shown crowned and seated on a throne beside her sons Edward and Harthacnut, but her figure is larger than theirs. Enthronement is quite uncommon in eleventh-century representations, usually reserved for Christ or other heavenly figures and only just beginning to be used for kings. Emma proved herself adept at managing the new status that the illustrations accord her, succeeding in placing both Harthacnut and Edward on the English throne.
When Cnut died in 1035, Emma suffered a blow to her ambitions when Harold Harefoot was chosen as regent while Harthacnut was absent in Denmark. Emma was able to maintain control for a time in the old capital of Winchester, where she retained Cnut’s treasure and was supported by Godwin, Earl of Wessex, who had become Cnut’s most trusted adviser. Her sons by Aethelred, Edward and Alfred, chose this moment to sail from Normandy, where they had remained in exile following their father’s death. Harold Harefoot did not even pretend to believe their claim that this was an innocent visit to their mother. Edward was prevented from landing at Southampton, but Alfred managed to get to Dover. At this point Earl Godwin switched his allegiance from Emma to Harold Harefoot and Alfred, ‘the blameless Aetheling’*, was murdered at Ely.12 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports what happened next: ‘Here Harold was everywhere chosen as king and Harthacnut forsaken because he was too long in Denmark, and his mother … was driven out without any mercy to face the raging winter; and she then came beyond the sea to Bruges, and there Earl Baldwin received her well.’13
The Encomium Emmae gives a fuller description of Emma’s presence at Bruges, which suggests something of the city Matilda knew as a child: ‘The latter town is inhabited by Flemish settlers and enjoys very great fame for the number of its merchants and for its affluence in all things upon which mankind places the greatest value. Here indeed [Emma] was … honourably received by Baldwin, the marquis [sic] of that same province and by his wife.’
Emma was active in Bruges, working to establish Harthacnut’s right to the throne. In 1039 he finally arrived, with a large fleet, to join her and they spent the winter as Count Baldwin’s guests. When Harold Harefoot conveniently died in the spring of 1040, Emma and Harthacnut returned triumphantly to England. For two years, she once again enjoyed power as Mater Regis (queen mother), until Harthacnut died after a drinking session at a wedding celebration in Lambeth in 1042. Emma had always championed him above her other sons, but now she was obliged to negotiate a relationship with Edward, who had joined his younger brother in dual kingship a year earlier, and now became sole ruler of England. According to The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Edward had a low opinion of his mother’s wavering loyalties, and deprived her of most of her wealth. Emma died at Winchester in 1052, just after Matilda of Flanders became Duchess of Normandy.
Matilda was perhaps no more than a tiny child when Emma visited Bruges, and there is no evidence that the Queen of England saw her, though, given the length of Emma’s stay and the ‘honourable’ reception she received from Count Baldwin and Countess Adela, it is perfectly plausible that she was presented to their children. The triangular political relationships between Normandy, Flanders and England continued in the next decades, and Emma set a powerful example of what a politically astute and determined woman could achieve. She had effectively governed as regent in
Wessex during Harthacnut’s absence in Denmark, she had obtained wealth and position as a patron, and though her life ended rather flatly, she did live to see two of her sons crowned king.
Very little is known of Matilda’s childhood in Flanders, but Queen Emma was not the only influential woman from whom she might have drawn an example. The last centuries of the first millennium witnessed an extraordinary concentration of women’s power as part of the emerging dominance of the Christian church. Royal abbesses were at the forefront of the new monastic movement, both as a trans-European phenomenon and in the country of which Matilda would eventually be queen, where it is estimated that fifty religious houses appointed their first abbess from a royal family. Royal blood was an ‘essential prerequisite’ for sanctity.14 Bede’s eighth-century Ecclesiastical History observes the vital role played by Saxon women in the conversion of their male kin to Christianity enumerating royal missionaries such as Bertha, wife of the Kentish King Aethelred; her daughter Aethelburh, who married and converted King Edwin of Northumbria; Eanflaed, Edwin’s daughter, and Hilda, his great-niece. The foundation and patronage of abbeys was a potent symbol of royal authority, and far from being a retreat from the world, the religious life offered women an active role in dignifying the lineage of their houses. ‘The holiness of such women redounded to the honour of their male kin and the lineage they shared … a daughter or a sister in a convent was not a woman “disposed of”, but a woman put to work to add sanctity and legitimacy to newly, often nefariously acquired lordships.’15
