The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  England prospered under Cnut. By 1027 he had successfully invaded Scotland, forcing the king of the Scots, Malcolm II, to do homage to him as his vassal or under-king. Quite soon Cnut felt sure enough of his position in England to despatch home the remnants of the Danish army with which his father had seized England. Unlike the old West Saxon kings, however, he was perpetually watched over by a giant palace guard, his 3,000 Danish ‘housecarles’, and he still had a large standing navy. But though Cnut gave a good deal of English land to fellow Danes, there was no dispossession of the native aristocracy as there would be later under the Normans. He relied on English advisers to help him rule.

  Cnut was in many ways very similar to the old German kings. He loved the military life, and evenings were passed relating campaigns in his great hall. But as a simple soldier what mattered to him was the truth, and he despised the flattery that many English courtiers used to curry favour with him–as the best-known story about him illustrates.

  The king with several Englishmen was walking by the sea. ‘Your Majesty,’ said the boldest and most sycophantic Englishman, ‘we were thinking that Your Majesty is so powerful that everything in our country obeys you. Why, even the waves would obey you if you commanded them.’ At last Cnut had had enough of their absurdities. Turning on them he told them to bring a chair down to the waves and set it a little way from where the tide was coming in. ‘Now,’ he said, seating himself on the throne and watching the waves wet his feet, ‘I bid the waves retreat, but they pay no attention to me. I am not a fool, and I hope that next time you embark on silly compliments that you expect me to swallow, you will remember this and hold your tongues.’

  The diminutive Cnut gave England an important new legal code. It reinforced the position of the Church and restated many of the ancient English customs as well as innovatively requiring every freeman to be part of the hundred and the tithing (a ten-man grouping within the hundred). By making its subjects responsible for preventing criminal activities by their fellows the kingdom became more orderly. Cnut was anxious to differentiate himself from other Vikings and to join the commonwealth of Christian nations. Attracted by the splendour and ancient nature of the Church, he went on pilgrimage to Rome to attend the coronation of Conrad II as Holy Roman Emperor, and could not resist exploiting the occasion to get customs relief for English pilgrims. The Danes who had accompanied him to England were made to adopt Christianity and he sent English bishops to Norway and Denmark to convert their populations. Cnut’s insistence that Sunday be kept as a day of rest and his enforcement of Church tithes soon won him the support of the Church bureaucracy, as did his sense of his royal duty as a moral preceptor.

  The Danegeld Cnut exacted from his English subjects was enormous. Nevertheless some important Saxon families came to prominence during his reign. Cnut was often called away from England to rule his immense Nordic empire overseas, which consisted of Denmark, Sweden and Norway, as well as the Hebrides, and his English advisers had to rule in his absence. One particular Saxon family, the Godwins, who were thanes from Sussex, began a rise to power which would eventually lead to the throne. They profited from Cnut’s decision to divide England for administrative purposes into four earldoms, covering areas which followed the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms–East Anglia, Mercia, Northumbria and Wessex. Unfortunately these earldoms had the effect of undoing much of the political unity of England created by Alfred and his descendants. Regional loyalties revived around them and became a source of weakness when a national will to resist was needed against the Normans. At first the earldom of Wessex was ruled by Cnut himself, but by 1020 the energetic and crafty Godwin had flourished sufficiently to become earl of Wessex. And as a result of his friendship with Cnut he was married to a Danish lady connected to the court.

  Cnut died in 1035 aged only forty, like many a campaigner worn out by a life in the saddle, and his empire died with him. It had been held together partly by fear of his formidable personality. But its break-up was also a sign of changing times. For the previous 200 years the dominant force in Europe had been Scandinavian, whether it was the landless Vikings themselves or their kings. But for the next century European history would be shaped by those descendants of the Vikings, the Normans, who had settled in northern France after receiving a grant of land from the French king and theoretically becoming his vassals. Thirty-one years after Cnut’s death, the military genius of the Normans would conquer England, and their Duke William would become known as William the Conqueror.

  The Normans were first alerted to the possibility of England as a new fiefdom when they heard news of the struggle for the royal succession in that kingdom. Their informants were the Norman servants of Cnut’s widow Emma. Was the rightful heir to the English throne Cnut’s eldest son, the Dane Harold Harefoot, who did briefly succeed his father, or was the better claim that of Alfred and Edward, the sons of the last Saxon king of England, Ethelred? There were also in Hungary the sons of the heroic Edmund Ironside, potential heirs to the royal West Saxon throne. Matters were further complicated by Cnut’s favourite son Harthacnut, by Emma of Normandy, whom Earl Godwin had fixed on as a suitable pawn to further his own ambitions, though he claimed to be representing the interests of a fatherless son.

  Godwin now took Queen Emma and the considerable royal treasures into what he called ‘safe custody’ and began to promote Harthacnut’s cause. Thanks to the backing of the Danes and the city of London Harold Harefoot had taken the crown and he expelled Emma and Harthacnut to Bruges. Only a few years later, when Harold Harefoot died in 1040, Ethelred’s elder son Alfred ventured out of hiding in Normandy to claim the throne in London before Harthacnut could return. But the masterful Earl Godwin was having none of that. On his secret orders Alfred was arrested, blinded, incarcerated and subsequently murdered in the monastery at Ely, and Harthacnut was crowned king.

  Godwin, whom the chroniclers describe as a man ‘of ready wit’, managed to overcome the feeble Harthacnut’s protests at the death of his half-brother by paying him some of the treasure he had accumulated over years of plotting. But on the death of Harthacnut in 1042, which ended the short line of Danish kings, Godwin moved rapidly to become the mentor of Ethelred’s younger son Edward. Known to history as Edward the Confessor, he was also living in Normandy and was now the outstanding candidate for the throne.

  But Edward, whose nickname arose out of his religious disposition, as he was said to go to confession at least once a day, was not the natural material of which rulers are made. It is said that, lost in uncertainty, he threw himself on his knees before the burly Godwin and asked what he should do. Godwin promised that if Edward would place himself entirely in his hands, grant great offices of state to Godwin’s sons and marry Godwin’s daughter, he would shortly see himself acclaimed king.

  And so it proved. Controlled by Godwin, on Easter Sunday 1043 Edward the Confessor was crowned with tremendous pomp at his ancestor Alfred’s capital of Winchester, specially chosen to remind the country of his royal West Saxon blood. Edward married Edgitha or Edith, Godwin’s beautiful and cultured daughter, but he remained more like a monk than a husband, and indeed more like a monk than a king. Above all, the new monarch was a Norman first and foremost. Far from being proud that he was an Anglo-Saxon king, Edward’s passion was for everything Norman. Norman monks had brought him up when his mother decamped to live with Cnut; the Norman language and Norman customs were what he was used to and what he preferred. As soon as he came to the throne, he surrounded himself with Norman advisers, which helped protect him against the overpowering Godwin, of whom he was always afraid given the rumours about his role in the terrible death of his brother Alfred. As a celebration of Norman culture Edward soon began to build a great church in the Norman style on the north bank of the Thames which would become Westminster Abbey.

  The English royal income was prodigious by now for under the strain of the Danish wars and then of Danegeld the raising of taxes had become immensely efficient. Ethelred the Unready had cre
ated the rudiments of a civil service of clerks to raise money from the shires. These royal officials communicated with the shire reeves so frequently that a special form of letter from the king to the shire court called a writ had developed before anywhere else in Europe. It was identified by the king’s seal attached to it and had the force of law. By the eleventh century it was the shire reeve or sheriff who oversaw the shire court and was the king’s official representative (even if that meant conflict with the local earl), in charge of ensuring that the king received the taxation owed to him.

  The colossal sums which these improved fiscal methods raised should have been spent on maintaining England’s shore defences; instead they were used by Edward to buy relics, or the bones of saints, in silver caskets shaped like miniature churches. He did not keep up the small permanent navy that had become an important guarantee of England’s security. The Confessor’s days were passed at Mass in the company of the Normans he had imported. They were avaricious, disciplined men who watched the king like hawks and were always looking for ways to get rid of the over-powerful Godwin and his sons.

  Quite soon two bitterly opposed parties grew up at Edward’s court, the Normans versus the English magnates headed by Godwin. The Normans, with their almost oriental courtesy, disliked the free and frank ways of the English, who did not stand on ceremony. They also objected to the arrogance of the Godwin family, who seemed to place themselves on a level with the king. The Godwins frequently ridiculed Edward’s holy simplicity–and even did so in his hearing, as shocked observers noted. Godwin’s hold over the king enabled his sons to take huge areas of England into their fiefdoms. Thanks to Godwin’s pressure on the king, Sweyn, Godwin’s bad-penny son now had an earldom embracing shires from Mercia and Wessex, while his eldest child Harold had been made earl of Essex.

  For their part the Godwins, especially Godwin himself and his most able son Harold, resented the arrival of more foreigners at court and detested their growing influence over the king. Normans took over many of the great offices of state, though few of them could speak English, and the Norman monk Robert of Jumièges was made Archbishop of Canterbury. Norman clerks were employed in the royal secretariat, so it came to be believed that only those who spoke Norman French had their petitions heard. In one part of the palace Queen Edith’s father and brothers and their supporters spoke English and wore the Anglo-Saxon long mantle. In another part the Normans laughed openly at the Saxon earls’ beards and moustaches. The Saxons were permanently in a fever to wipe the supercilious smiles off the Normans’ clean-shaven faces. Shaving was an affectation, said the angry Saxons, which made them all look like priests anyway.

  It was a situation which could ignite at any minute, and it soon did–with the Godwins to fan the flames–when Edward’s brother-in-law Count Eustace of Boulogne paid England a visit in 1051. Like all Franks Count Eustace regarded Saxons as born slaves, despite their common Teutonic ancestry. On his way to London he spent the night at Dover. There, instead of paying for an inn, the count told his men to dress in full armour and demand accommodation from the townspeople at the point of a sword. The burghers refused point blank, and were promptly attacked by Count Eustace’s knights. Though they were mainly shopkeepers, they managed to kill nineteen of his professional soldiers.

  The incident developed into a full-scale diplomatic row. An angry Edward turned on Earl Godwin within whose domain Dover lay and asked him to visit the port with summary justice–that is, to execute the men involved without holding an inquiry. But instead Godwin the over-mighty subject raised an army from the south coast against Edward, for his lands stretched from Cornwall to Kent, and started for London. It was only when two of the other great earls, Leofric of Mercia (whose wife Godiva became famous for her charitable work) and Siward of Northumbria began moving south with superior forces to support the king that Godwin saw that he should back off. He was forced to attend a meeting of the witan at London, and was exiled with his sons Harold and Tostig and his wife, while Sweyn was condemned as an outlaw. Meanwhile Edward turned on his wife Edith, Godwin’s daughter. He renounced her, stripped her of her jewels and had her locked up in a monastery.

  At last out of Godwin’s shadow, Edward was now free to make his own decisions about the future of the English throne. He almost certainly came down in favour of his cousin William, the bastard son of the Duke of Normandy, in preference to his half-nephew Edward, the son of Edmund Ironside, whom he had never seen. The same year, 1051, most unusually William left his country to pay Edward what was probably a state visit to settle the succession in his favour. The Norman chroniclers of the period all agree on this, and William the Conqueror’s many later assertions that he planned to rule England according to the customs of the old English kings, ‘as in the days of King Edward’ himself, suggest that he saw himself as the legitimate heir. Nevertheless Duke William had no popular support in England, and those who met him in 1051 found him forbidding; he was described as a ‘stark man’. Despite the king’s own Norman leanings, the Normans were very unpopular in the shires, where they were increasingly being appointed as sheriffs. Since most of them could not speak English, they appeared to have little interest in procuring justice in the shire courts.

  Taking advantage of this a year later, Godwin was back on a high tide of anti-Norman feeling. This time he had an enormous navy at his back and numerous enthusiastic seamen recruited from coastal towns. Having obtained the support of the City of London, he surrounded the king’s ships at Southwark and dictated terms to the weary king, whose only enthusiasm now was for the building of Westminster Abbey. To the mortification of the king, whose spirit never recovered, an open-air meeting of the witan voted to restore Godwin to his previous position. Many Normans were expelled from England and the queen came back from her convent to resume her rightful place at court. The Norman Archbishop of Canterbury Robert of Jumièges left the country and much of the archepiscopal land was redistributed to the Godwins. The Anglo-Saxon Bishop Stigand, a supporter of the Godwins, was appointed to Canterbury in his stead, without papal permission. The Godwins were now in complete control of the country. With the unusual appointment of Tostig Godwin as earl of Northumbria on the death of the famous Siward, the family’s rule stretched over the length and breadth of England.

  The ambitious founder of this upstart house passed away soon after his return from exile, during a banquet. Legend has it that his death occurred just after King Edward had asked him, ‘Just tell me something, did you really put out the eyes of my brother Alfred and kill him?’ Godwin replied, ‘May God strike me dead if I did,’ whereupon he choked on a piece of meat.

  Despite the death of the master plotter, Edward the Confessor’s childlessness meant that the succession continued to be a live issue for the Godwins and those who received their patronage. They were determined that the throne should not be settled on Duke William. At their insistence, now that the Norman party had fallen from power, King Edward at last sent for his half-nephew Edward to name him heir to the throne. Mysteriously this rival to William the Conqueror died shortly after arriving in England. Although Edward left a son, Edgar the Atheling, children were almost never crowned under the Anglo-Saxon monarchy and thus once again Duke William seemed the most likely heir.

  Despite the king’s own leanings toward Normandy, Duke William’s claim was not clear cut. There was in fact no obvious natural successor to Edward the Confessor. Meanwhile the evident weakness at the heart of the English monarchy which Godwin’s rebellious behaviour had betrayed had aroused considerable interest in England from abroad. In Norway the ambitious young King Harold Hardrada now revived a claim to the throne as Cnut’s heir. Meanwhile the friendship between Tostig Godwin, the new earl of Northumbria, with Malcolm III of Scotland did not bode well for the future. It might lead to a Scottish-backed invasion of England.

  The last years of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy saw a struggle against Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, the increasingly powerful king of Gwynedd and Powys. Gruffydd had
united most of Wales under him. He had been encouraged by the disgruntled Aelfgar of Mercia, many of whose hereditary possessions had been given to Gyrth, the youngest Godwin, to invade England in alliance with a fleet from Norway. At this moment of national danger Harold Godwin began to attract attention for his daring Welsh campaign, which crushed Gruffydd and annexed his provinces to the English state in 1063.

  Three years later, on the death of Edward the Confessor, to the witan Harold as head of the Godwins seemed the best possible English candidate for the throne. Apart from what remained of Mercia the Godwin family in effect ruled most of England. Though Harold was not of royal blood he was the natural choice to defend England from the threat of foreign invaders with claims to the crown, and as an Englishman he was far more welcome to the witan. By then the Godwins’ chief rival Aelfgar, the head of the still powerful house of Mercia, was dead, so Harold Godwin’s election went through unopposed. During the tenth century so many heirs to the throne had been minors at the time of the king’s death that the old English monarchy had become far more elective. There was precedence for this in the Holy Roman emperorship, but it followed a natural tendency in a country where from its most ancient beginnings Anglo-Saxon kings had tended to have their decisions approved by a council of lords. By the time of the Conquest the witan was well used to being consulted on major national issues. The assent of its members–thanes, bishops and sheriffs from every part of the country–to new laws, new taxes, military measures and foreign alliances was sufficiently important to be recorded as part of the ruling process.

  Edward died on 5 January 1066 and was buried in the crypt of his new church, Westminster Abbey. The external situation was considered so dangerous that the very next day Harold was crowned king. Though quite contrary to precedent, since the Godwins were without a drop of royal blood in them, it indicated the family’s immense influence. But Harold’s was to be a very short reign. By Christmas of the same year William the Conqueror was being crowned in the same abbey.