by Ed West
But Edward could not rule without the Godwin family, who were vastly rich, in fact probably richer than the king. Crucially the Earls Leofric and Siward, the largest landowners in the midlands and north respectively, refused to fight against Godwin, so the following year he returned, arriving on the Isle of Wight, and Edward’s Norman friends left the county. Robert of Jumieges fled from London to Essex where he ‘lighted on a crazy ship’, as a chronicler enigmatically called it; with the Godwins restored, Stigand was made archbishop despite Robert of Jumieges already being alive, and Stigand still being bishop of Winchester. Crucially, however, Robert of Jumieges may have taken Godwin’s youngest son Wulfnoth with him to Normandy as hostage.
But just as the Godwins were winning, eldest son Sweyn, in a final twist, decided he was going to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem to seek penance for all the terrible things he had done. The trip to the Holy Land was an extremely hazardous one, not just because of pirates and robbers, but also the various diseases that westerners caught there; and Sweyn died on the way back, of a cold of all things.
Meanwhile Edward’s mother had finally passed away,9 and to mark the occasion he had a new portrait done of himself on coins. Instead of ‘a debased classical image, appeared the head and shoulders of a bearded warrior wearing a conical helmet and holding a sceptre before his face … it was an unusually virile design’.10 It seemed to be some sort of midlife crisis for the king.
The feud ended in 1053 when Godwin gave himself a stroke while sitting on a bar stool at Edward’s palace; by one obviously biased account later put about by supporters of William the Conqueror, the old man choked on a piece of bread as he explained to the king: ‘If that is true [that I killed your brother] then may God let this piece of bread choke me. [Choke].’
But the Godwin clan continued to grow in strength. In 1054, Edward’s military commander Siward of Northumbria invaded Scotland and overthrew the king who, were it not for a sixteenth-century playwright, would have remained an obscure character locked in the history departments of university libraries. The real Macbeth was nothing like the tortured Shakespearean murderer and won the crown reasonably fairly, if violently, after Duncan ‘the Diseased’ invaded his fiefdom. Although the English won, Siward’s son Osbeorn and his nephew, another Siward, were killed and in 1055 Siward died, leaving a surviving son Waltheof who was only a boy. This presented a new opportunity for the Godwins and so Tostig was made Earl of Northumbria, which turned out to be a not-very-wise decision.
After his father’s death Harold became the ‘under king’ who effectively ruled the country, led armies and even undertook trips to the continent; by now Edward had basically given up on life anyway. However in 1056, while Harold was on the continent, there was trouble in Wales and unfortunately the English response was led by Leofgar, bishop of Hereford, who as can be guessed by his job title wasn’t a skilled military tactician. Leofgar had been Harold’s clerk and supporter, and even wore his hair long and with a moustache, the Godwin fashion and seen as very racy and not appropriate for a churchman. The bishop decided to lead a group of priests in battle against the Welsh leader Gruffydd and they all got killed at Glasbury-on-Wye—a lesson in why bishops shouldn’t really lead armies. The militia of England was called, and an ‘unwieldy force, wholly unfitted to mountain warfare’ led an expedition that a contemporary remembered fondly by ‘the misery and the marching and the hosting and the toil and the loss of men and horses’.
The Anglo-Saxons and Britons, as the Welsh were still called, had been almost at continuous war since the former had arrived from Germany; in the eighth century Offa of Mercia resolved the issue by building a great dyke to keep the Welsh out, which now survives as a walking route, but from time to time there were raids. What especially annoyed the Saxons was the Welsh bardic tradition, which ‘surrounded their mayhem and rapine with an aura of legend, so that cattle-thieves, rapists and murderers were presented in Welsh bardic tradition as mythical heroes’.11 This has been a continuing theme of Celtic resistance down the centuries, where often the most charismatic and effective leaders were also bandits and murderers; the modern equivalent might be the glorified accounts of romantic figures like Che Guevara that conveniently don’t mention all the murders they carried out.
In 1063 there was another uprising in Wales, and Harold and Tostig led an army west. The conflict had began in what is now Newport because English merchants refused to pay a fee to the Welsh, and so Harold’s assembled army ravaged the area and violated the Welsh church of St Gwynllyw, but stopped when some cheese started to bleed and they got scared.
Harold’s invasion of Wales left ‘not one that pisseth against a wall’, a chronicler said; he was also the first to instigate those laws stating that any Welshman found on this side of Offa’s Dyke with a weapon should have his right hand cut off, some of which are still technically the law in England.12 It was the Welsh tradition to behead their enemies but Harold made such an impression on them that the Welsh chose to decapitate their own leader, Gruffydd, and send it to him rather than face the consequences; Harold gave it to King Edward as a gift.
Although the Confessor had vaguely promised the crown to a number of people there was an obvious choice of successor. One of Edmund Ironside’s young sons, another Edward, had survived childhood in faraway Hungary, and so in 1055 King Edward sent Bishop Ealdred of Worcester to Germany to ask the emperor’s permission for Edward ‘the Exile’ to come to England. The bishop spent an entire year at the court in Cologne waiting for an answer from the emperor; finally however in 1057 civil war in Hungary meant the Exile was willing to return. Edward, who had grown up in Hungary and had a Hungarian wife and three Hungarian-born children, had returned out of a sense of duty and wasn’t particularly keen on the idea.
However after travelling all the way back to England, he died a week after arriving, having not even met the king yet. The death was naturally suspicious, and while the Godwins could have been behind it, he might also have been poisoned by Normans, too, since that was more their style. Edward had left a son, Edgar, but he was just a child of five.
Things were made more complicated because of Harold’s brother Tostig, who had become wildly unpopular as Earl of Northumbria, largely on account of his over-enthusiastic law and order policy. Northumbria was an alien place to most southerners, there were few passable roads between north and south, and the region was also far more heavily Danish, especially around York, which retained large elements of Norse dialect until fairly recently.13
Edward had never once been up north in his entire reign—in fact like many upper-class southern English people he knew France much better than anything beyond the Trent—and Harold barely went north if he could avoid it. The region was dangerous, so unsafe this it could not be traversed except in a large group, and the earl, already unpopular for being a southerner, had apparently been too enthusiastic in trying to restore law and order. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle said of Tostig: ‘Not a few charged that glorious earl with being too cruel; and he was accused of punishing disturbers more for the desire of their confiscated property than for love of justice.’ One of the Chronicles also said that Tostig was ‘occasionally a little too enthusiastic in attacking evil’, which sounds like a delicate way of describing an absolute psychopath.
From late 1064 a number of Northumbrian aristocrats were murdered, which everyone attributed to Tostig; over Christmas 1064 Gamel, son of Orm, and Ulf, son of Dolin, the two leading northern leaders, were killed. On December 28 another earl, Gospatric, was slain. It was also rumoured that Tostig had earlier tried to have Gospatric murdered on pilgrimage to Rome when they were attacked by bandits.
Although the Normans exaggerated Tostig’s crimes, there was certainly an air of general seediness about the English court of this time. William of Malmesbury, who was half-Norman and half-English, made a list of all the sins the aristocracy committed, which had brought divine disaster in the form of invasion. Among these, he said, they ‘Give up to luxury a
nd wantonness’ and ‘they did not go to church in the morning as Christians should, but merely, in a careless manner, heard matins and masses from a hurrying priest in their chambers, among the blandishments of their wives.’ On top of this ‘they used to eat till they were surfeited and drink till they were sick’ and ‘one of their customs, repugnant to nature, was to sell their female servants, when pregnant by them and after they had satisfied their lust, either to public prostitution or slavery. They wore gold bracelets, and short garments down to the knee, shaved their beards and had their skin tattooed.’ Well, they weren’t a genteel crowd, certainly.
In October that year discontent with Tostig, probably provoked by a tax, finally led to an uprising in the north, led by two brothers from the old ruling house of Northumbria, Edwin and Morcar, who were barely even teenagers. The two were the grandsons of Leofric and Godgifu (of naked horse-riding fame), and after the death of their father Elfgar felt they were deprived of status. The revolt began with the murder of Tostig’s men in York, and spread south as far as the Thames, threatening the country with yet another war.
Harold acted as mediator, and probably agreed to exile Tostig and make the two brothers Earls of Northumbria and Mercia, while marrying their sister (even though he had a long-term handfast, Edith Swan-Neck, with whom he had a number of children). His new wife, another Edith, happened to be the widow of Gruffydd, whose head was last seen carried out around by Harold—small world!
Presumably the quid pro quo was that they would support his claim to the throne, and so Harold discarded his mistress and brother, who now accused him of engineering the whole thing. Some accounts suggest that Harold and Tostig were rivals from early on, and a later story has the young brothers fighting at the royal court as youngsters.14 The embittered Tostig fled with his wife to Flanders.
By now Edward was dying, and the country was filled with foreboding. The year 1065 began with a sense of impending doom, for it was considered bad luck when the Feast of the Annunciation coincided with Good Friday. As the ditty went: ‘When Our Lord falls on Our Lady’s lap, England shall have a dire mishap’. (It sounds like the sort of thing where they came up with the ditty first and the superstition later.) Now the final days of that year were marked by terrible storms. The noblemen of England came from all around the country to feast together at Thorney Island, where Edward’s grand abbey dedicated to St Peter was being built. Although the church was not ready, it was consecrated anyway on December 28 because Edward was not long for this world, although he was still too sick to attend.
Edward had been dying for some time, all the while mumbling and babbling in his sleep, when everyone just wanted him to name a successor. The king retired to bed where he saw an apocalyptic vision, in which England was consumed with fire and abandoned to the devil, all because of its peoples’ wickedness, especially of its churchmen. Edward in his delirium said the leading bishops of the country ‘were not the servants of God; they were in league with the devil.’ Archbishop Stigand, irritated at this babble, suggested that the ‘king was broken with disease and knew not what he said’.
In Edward’s derangement he said two monks warned him that England was cursed by God and would suffer evil spirits for a year and a day. No prayers would prevent this, the monks told him, and the curse would only be lifted if a tree was felled halfway down its trunk, and then came together by itself and bore fresh fruit: ‘Only then would the sins of the people be forgiven and England find respite from its suffering.’ Not the sort of straight answer you want in a time of national crisis.
As expected, no tree put itself together and there followed twelve months that would be remembered as the year of three kings, the year when the Anglo-Saxon world was destroyed and England changed forever, a date so familiar that people are advised to not use it as their PIN number. Edward’s great church became known as the West Minster, giving its name to the area which is now Britain’s government; despite the effort and cost involved, Westminster Abbey was knocked down in the thirteenth century anyway and rebuilt.
Edward had told Harold: ‘I commend [Edith] and all the kingdom to your protection.’ It was in effect a nomination and after the Confessor died on January 5 the Witan chose Harold as king; he was crowned on the same day as Edward’s funeral.
Godfrey of Cambrai also wrote an epigram for King Edward, stating: ‘He confronted his enemies not with war but with peace. And no one thought to violate his peace.’ Which wasn’t quite true.
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘A Savage, Barbarous and Horrible Race of Inhuman Disposition’
Duke William of Normandy was out hunting when the news was gently broken to him that Harold was king. The duke had long maintained that his cousin Edward had promised him the throne, and that Harold had sworn to support him; now, whether or not he believed his own rather tenuous argument, the duke would embark on an invasion of epic proportions.
The Normans were not the sort of enemies anyone would wish for. Although exposed to classical Latin culture and Christianity, these French speakers were even more aggressive than their Norse ancestors, and the cultural influences of the civilized south only clothed their barbaric tendencies like a nightclub doorman wearing an ill-fitting dinner jacket.
However it did make them more sophisticated in their violence, to which their entire way of life was geared: they cut their hair short in the more military Roman style, they bred a special battle-ready war horse from Arab stallions, and developed archery in a way that would be decisive in 1066. Even their favourite (and only) cerebral activity, chess, brought back from Arabia and subsequently introduced into England, reflected their main interest—conquest.1 Originally from Persia—check comes from the Farsi for king, shah—it was not the effete game it is today, and matches would regularly end in fights with the pieces, heavy and up to four inches tall, being used to solve disputes. One later medieval English king almost killed an opponent after throwing a chess piece at him.
Even before their conquest of England, the Normans had gathered a reputation for violence, turning up all over Europe for fights that they seemed to hugely enjoy. Hervey de Glanville, who led an attack on Lisbon, asked of them: ‘Who does not know that the Norman race refuses no effort in the continual exercise of its power? Its warlikeness is ever hardened by adversity, it is not easily upset by difficulties nor, when difficulties have been overcome, does it allow itself to be conquered by slothful inactivity, for it has learned always to shake off the vice of sloth with activity.’2
Others were not so keen on the ‘ferocious Normans’, as William of Apulia called them. One Lombard prince, facing Norman warlords in southern Italy, described ‘a savage, barbarous and horrible race of inhuman disposition’.3 Another Italian called them a ‘cunning and vengeful people’. Even Henry of Huntingdon, half-Norman himself, said they ‘surpassed all other people in their unparalleled savagery’.
The militaristic nature of Norman society was a product of geography; in a highly disputed part of western Europe where various tribes fought for control, only the most aggressive tended to survive (a similar thing happened much later with the goose-stepping army-state Prussia uniting Germany).
Norman society, like all of northern France, was also directed by a new concept: chivalry. From the French word for knight or horseman, chivalry had probably started in Germany in the tenth century, and later it became ‘an international brotherhood with peculiar religious rites and esoteric morality’. But at this point it was essentially a cult of violence which encouraged young men to look down on reading and writing as something that only priests did; instead men of noble breeding learned to train from a young age in order to do one thing in life—fight. As with many male subcultures, it saw education as being effeminate, while trade was viewed as low-status and beneath them.
Obviously this worldview would end up having a destructive influence and cause countless deaths, but the warlikeness of the northern French helped them to expand across the West, so that by 1350 twelve of Cath
olic Europe’s fifteen monarchs were Frankish in origin.4 During this period the entire region became Frankified, which is why you probably know someone called William, Charles, Henry, Robert or Richard but not many Eadrics or Hardicnuts, and also why Europeans today are known generically in various Asian languages as ‘firang’ (in the Vietnam War this is what the locals called the Americans).
And the Franks were not only the prime movers in the Crusades but in places like Spain and today’s Poland they led military campaigns against Muslims and pagans, and were ruthless colonists in Ireland and elsewhere. The Normans were very much part of this scene, and some historians say the takeover of 1066 would be better described as the ‘Frankish Conquest’.
Driving this expansion was the cult of the knight, so that as one historian put it, ‘Chivalry in later ages may have had merits, but in the eleventh century it was a social disaster. It produced a superfluity of conceited illiterate young men who had no ideals except to rise and hunt and fight, whose only interest in life was violence and the glory they saw in it … they were no good at anything else, and despised any peaceful occupation’.5 These young men ‘just by existing … created wars’. On top of this there was the Norman system of primogenitor, which gave all the inheritance to the eldest son, and this drove the relentless Norman expansion, first to England and later Wales and Ireland, led by landless aristocratic younger brothers.
Normandy was not only externally aggressive to its neighbours, but internally very violent too. Private war was so common that the Church managed to get everyone to agree to a compromise where war was banned between Wednesday evening and Monday morning, the so-called ‘Truce of God’ that was the best they could manage.
Norman boys would start their careers as pages, then become squires, and eventually knights in their early twenties. It was a violent life and lots of young Normans died during their apprenticeships; one lord named Giroie lost both his sons to violent horseplay, one struck by a lance and another with a rock while wrestling, but Normans seemed to consider this a reasonable price to pay.