Godiva

by Nerys Jones

  ‘What have you done, Tom?’ she asked. ‘Tell your story quickly.’

  ‘Everyone in town say it be me that spied on you, and carried stories about you to Cherub, who told the prior, and that’s why the king made you do the penance. They want revenge on me, but it’s not true . . .’

  ‘But you did spy. So what is not true?’

  ‘That I would go and meet Cherub. All I did was follow him, to see what he was doing in the forest.’

  ‘I think you’d better come inside,’ Godiva said, pushing Tom into the house and closing the door on him before she addressed the crowd. ‘Good people,’ she said. ‘I do not want revenge for what I was forced to do. The king has made his peace with me and all members of our family. As for Tom, he does peep and he is a nuisance. But he has done me no damage at all. Nor was Cherub involved in slandering me. The matter only concerned the prior, who has been sent away, and Beorhtric of Nottingham – Bret – who is dead. Go home now and let me talk to the boy.’

  She turned away from them and went inside. Behind her she heard a cheer go up, praising her name. Inside, the twelve-year-old boy was huddled amongst last night’s cinders in the hearth, shivering like a dog expecting the next kick.

  ‘Why did they turn on you, Tom? Even your own father?’

  ‘I know why, but I couldn’t tell them or it’d only be the worse for me.’

  ‘You can tell me, though.’

  He looked at her searchingly with eyes that had long grown used to reading people’s faces and postures.

  ‘Yes, all right. But it be a bad story, mistress. I did follow Cherub. And I seen him meet a man sometimes, over by where the woods come close to the back of the inn. It were the innkeeper, mistress. He would hurt Cherub and bugger him and make him cry. Then he would give him money.’

  ‘Why would Cherub consent?’

  ‘To save up money and run away from the prior. Everyone knows Cherub were a slave bought in Bristol and he don’t have nowhere to go. He don’t even have a name, though I hear he be Irish and called Malachy. Prior treat him cruel. Stands to reason Cherub be wanting money to go away.’

  ‘Does someone else know about this?’

  ‘Yes, and that’s my touble. Innkeeper seen me last time he had hold of Cherub. It were pure bad luck for me. I were up a tree and a woodpecker started banging right near me. Innkeeper look up and what did he see beside the woodpecker but my face, watching him finish with Cherub. After that he told my father that I’d spy on you and pass on stories for the prior. So I got a first beating for that. Then, when folks started talking of revenge, innkeeper tell them I was the one they should punish, because they could never give the king the whipping he deserved. I got kicked round the market square for that. They were going to put me in the stocks, too, but I slipped away and ran here.’

  ‘You’d better stay exactly where you are,’ Godiva said. ‘I’m going to talk to the earl about this.’

  A little later Gwen came in and examined Tom’s bruises and cuts. While she washed them carefully with warm water and smeared green balm on the worst sore spots, Agatha made him some broth. Neither talked to Tom, who avoided their rebuking eyes and stared fearfully into the flames of the fire.

  At last Godiva returned, accompanied by Odo. They stared at Tom, folded their arms and then broke the news.

  ‘Well, young man,’ said Godiva, ‘this is what the earl says. You are to leave this town at once – but as a soldier, attached to Lord Alfgar. Earl Lovric says he never has enough good spies and you obviously have the makings of a fine one. But you must be obedient, brave and hard-working.’

  ‘And no more spying on people when they are private,’ said Odo. ‘Any more of that and you’ll be back in Coventry. In the stocks. I’ll put you there myself.’

  Hope sprang up in Tom’s eyes. ‘No, sir. That be boring anyway. It always be the same old thing. Shirt up, trousers down, bang-bang like a woodpecker, then finish in a big sweat and go home.’

  ‘Off with you!’ Godiva shouted.

  Odo bundled the boy out and ordered him straight to the hall to find out what he should do next. Then he turned to thank Godiva.

  ‘So, Wulf and Agatha be all set up. And now Tom, too. I see you be back to work, mistress. Putting this place in order. Thank God for that, lady, and for this cruel summer be coming to an end, too.’

  ‘Amen to that.’

  The summer straggled on, however, as though reluctant to loosen its grip on the victims of its bad humour. The late crops were a disappointment and the weeks of hunger had left many susceptible to coughs and wheezes, irascibility and pessimism. Nevertheless everyone was glad of the dreary calm that now prevailed. Some, too, appreciated the changes that were stirring in the priory. Sundays were becoming more of an occasion for those who toiled during the week. A new prior arrived from Evesham who encouraged the parishioners of St Michael’s to walk from the old parish church and through the priory precincts to see the newly displayed feretory, within which St Augustine’s arm rested in proper dignity at last. And in the priory, for the first time, the humble and the failed were made welcome and regaled with pageantry and beauty in such abundance that they glimpsed for a moment a world in which the spirit soared and the heart was unchained.

  Godiva followed these developments with interest, but to Lovric’s eyes she did not seem to gain the satisfaction that he would have expected from the improvements in the priory. It was as though the events of the summer had left some part of her so damaged it was beyond being healed by her daily life. He probed, but to no avail. And then, since Godiva would not tell him what was oppressing her, he made a decision and took matters into his own hands.

  Four months after the penance, on a brilliant autumnal day, a wagon drew up in the yard of the manor. Godiva, who was in the manor house showing Ethel, her new maid, how to help Bertha with the clothes in storage, paid no attention to its arrival until Lovric came in and called to her from the foot of the stairs.

  As she descended the staircase, looking carefully at her feet, she heard a small cry like the mewing of a cat and looked across towards the door. A beautifully dressed young woman stood at the threshold with her back to the sunshine so that it was hard to make out who she was. Then the baby in her arms cried again, and she stepped forward.

  ‘Mother?’

  Godiva halted and swayed for a moment and then, taking Lovric’s hand, she descended the rest of the treacherous stairs, crossed the floor of the room to the door and put out her hands to take the baby.

  ‘Her name is Godiva, mother. And here is Peter Mallet, my husband.’

  Godiva heard, but had eyes only for the new face that bore her name. After she had held her for a while, Lovric took the baby in his scarred arms and kissed her downy forehead. He was about to say ‘as lovely as her grandmother’ when he stopped.

  ‘She’s as beautiful as her mother,’ he said, and congratulated himself when Milly’s face lit up with a smile as broad as Godiva’s.

  Turning, Godiva caught sight of them all in the big mirror and realized for the first time just how much she had aged during that summer, the summer in which Milly had come into her prime. It is autumn, she thought. The time of the falling of leaves. She passed the baby back into its mother’s arms and felt a contentment that surpassed anything she had known before. That grudging, painful summer, the summer of her naked ride, had yielded its fruit and come to its end.

  Postscript

  Godiva in history, legend and fiction

  A few years after the events referred to in this novel, Lovric died, peacefully it seems, at his estate in Bromley, in present-day Staffordshire. Godiva did not remarry. She survived the Norman Conquest and kept possession of most of her lands, perhaps because her sons did not oppose William of Normandy in 1066 on the battlefield at Hastings, or perhaps because she remained in favour with King Edward’s advisers until his death in that same year. It is uncertain whether she died in 1067 or in 1085, but in any case it is said that she was buried alongs
ide Lovric in adjacent chapels in her beloved St Mary’s. Eventually a great Norman cathedral was built on the site of Godiva’s old priory, and around it the city of Coventry thrived and continued to grow. This cathedral was intact until 1940, when aerial bombardment reduced it entirely to rubble. Recently, however, shards of medieval glasswork that seem to depict a fair-haired, beautiful woman have been found on the site. Some believe these are the remains of a medieval stained-glass window, installed in honour of Godiva. The descendants of Lovric and Godiva were not exterminated after 1066 as were those of Earl Godwin of Wessex, but they suffered the fate of most of the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy: they gradually fade out of the historical record. (There is a hint that Alfgar, son of Lovric, continued to ally with the Welsh after his father’s death, for his daughter Edith married Gruffydd ap Llywe-lyn, King of Gwynedd.) On the whole then, the House of Lovric, which was itself the last hurrah of the royal clan of the old tribal kingdom of the Hwicce, has left few marks on the pages of history. Nearly all that remains to recall its once-powerful grip on the English midlands is the story of Godgifu – the startling and mysterious legend of ‘Lady Godiva’. The opacity of the story provokes curiosity: who was Godiva, and did she really ride naked through Coventry?

  It is surprising, given her gender and the fact that she lived about a thousand years ago, how much is known about her. In her time she was referred to simply as Godgifu (see the note on pronunciation, p. vii), not as ‘Lady Godiva’ and certainly not as ‘Countess Godiva’ (a Norman-era embellishment). As depicted in this novel, Godgifu acquired considerable landed wealth through inheritance from her parents. She had connections with Nottingham and may have lived there as a child. She was widowed young (having borne at least one child), and made a long-lasting second marriage with Leofric (known as Lovric in this novel), Earl of Mercia, during which at least one other child was born. At some point the family lived in Hereford, but later, probably under political pressure, they settled in Coventry where Godiva became an ‘improving land-owner’, deeply involved in promoting the growth of the town as a market and as a centre of worship. She was probably born around the turn of the first millennium and was therefore in her forties at about the time when the naked ride is thought to have occurred. The date of her death is also uncertain, but she is known to have survived the Norman Conquest, and may have lived on until the 1080s. She is mentioned in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and in Domesday, as well as in the St Alban’s manuscript in which the legend of the ride first appeared.

  A great deal is also known about Godiva’s milieu. The most important circumstance affecting her life was her husband’s political eminence. Lovric was one of the three earls who kept King Edward the Confessor on his shaky throne. The other great factor shaping Godiva’s story was her position as founder of St Mary’s, a new Benedictine abbey in Coventry. Her husband’s political career, and her own status as the founder-patron of an abbey, would have drawn Godiva close to the vortex of eleventh-century rivalries, plots and conflicts.

  What kind of society existed in Britain, during the last years of Anglo-Saxon England? A contemporary time-traveller would find it both a strangely familiar and deeply alien society. Divorce, for instance, was available to women as well as men, and women with property were able to retain their possessions after divorce or widowhood. Remarriage must have produced families with stepchildren just as it does today. Continuity can also be found in the practice whereby children of well-off families were raised away from the family hearth: in the eleventh century this meant sending the child not to a boarding school, but to be ‘fostered’ in another household of equal or better status than the parents’. But the result was not dissimilar. For more than a thousand years upper-class English children have been sent away to broaden their social connections, and to dilute their attachment to close family and neighbourhood ties.

  These similarities render the differences all the more startling. Slavery was an accepted institution of Anglo-Saxon England, with Domesday recording slaves in every region of England (the percentage rising from east to west). Criminal law enshrined inequality, for those without property were subject to severe corporal punishment, while those with property could settle any offence – even murder – by paying a fine. What is more, the fines payable to victims varied according to the property-level of the victim: it was much costlier to offend a noble than a common peasant.

  The built environment of the Anglo-Saxons would have looked more backward to modern eyes than the towns and villages of the later Middle Ages. Walled towns were fewer, cathedrals were squatter and castles less imposing. Nevertheless standards of living and population levels rose gradually throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, with all branches of technology improving, and textile production (mainly women’s work) achieving memorable levels of skill, beauty and international value.

  The intellectual life of the age was dominated by piety. The Benedictine monastic reform was gathering momentum, promising to bring knowledge of the scriptures to every village and to sweep away such practices as clerical marriage, toleration of divorce and lay ownership of churches. At the same time, the aristocracy was beginning to take a greater interest in the expansion of Christian power in the Holy Land; it was during this period that attitudes and ideals emerged that led to the appearance of the crusader knights a few decades later.

  But above all, perhaps, the eleventh century was an age of great insecurity for the political elite of the British Isles. Beginning in the ninth century, Vikings had raided and colonized all parts of Britain; the terror they instilled remained fresh in people’s minds in the eleventh century. Actual raiding had ceased by Godiva’s time, but the threat from the North Sea had merely taken on a new form – the dynastic designs of the Norse/Danes on the throne of England. This threat loomed ever larger as the Duchy of Normandy (Norse-man-land) began to emerge as a strong military force across the English Channel.

  The coronation of Edward ‘the Confessor’ as King of England in 1043 crystallized this threat, for the new king was Norman on his mother’s side and by upbringing. On his accession he brought with him to England a circle of Norman supporters who were soon followed by others, all hoping for lands and favours. The Anglo-Saxon leadership pinned its hopes for survival on the birth of an heir to Edward by an English wife, an heir that they could control and bring up as English. But Edward refused to cooperate. Though he married Edith, daughter of the most powerful of the earls (Godwin of Wessex), he refused to have sexual intercourse with her. Neither would he divorce her and remarry, nor take mistresses and produce bastard sons. This situation persisted until his death in 1066 when, as feared, a Norman army attacked at Hastings, and Anglo-Saxon England came to an end.

  Godiva’s story, as I have envisaged it, is tied to the country’s deep malaise – its political paralysis and the sexual obsessions of its king. I have based my characterization of Edward as a clever, cruel joker and fantasist on Frank Barlow’s authoritative biography, Edward the Confessor (see Further Reading on p. 343), though I have elaborated on some of the conclusions that may be drawn from this study. Apart from the king, most of the major characters in this novel are known to history. These are: Godiva herself, her husband Lovric, his son Alfgar, Earl Godwin of Wessex, and his daughter Queen Edith. Other important historical characters also flit in and out of the story: Queen Emma, Siward of Northumbria, Lady Macbeth and Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, all of whom were at large in the first half of the eleventh century.

  The incidents in this novel are largely fictitious, but some important events, such as Queen Edith’s fall from grace in 1046 and the alliance between the Mercian leaders and the Welsh, have a historical basis. My depiction of the Church’s attempts to disrupt marriages where the partners were within the ‘prohibited degrees’ of kinship is likewise historically based.

  So much, then, for Godiva herself, in history and in this novel – but what about the legend? Does the old tale contain any truth? The answer to this question cannot be a simple one, for the l
ife of the legend has had an intriguing history of its own. In the words of the literary historian Daniel Donoghue (Lady Godiva: A Literary History of the Legend, Blackwell, 2003, pp. 26–7), ‘For more than a century after Godiva’s death, no written source makes even the faintest allusion to her legendary ride or to anything now commonly associated with it, such as nakedness, the horse, or taxation . . . Nothing would lead anyone to anticipate the sensational story that abruptly appears a century later, when chroniclers in the Benedictine abbey of St Albans insert a fully developed narrative into their Latin histories. The story comes under the entry for 1057, the year of Leofric’s death. After praising the couple’s piety and their generosity to religious institutions, one account continues:

  Yet this pious countess, wishing to free Coventry from an oppressive and shameful servitude, often begged her husband, the count, under the guidance of the Holy Trinity and the Mother of God, to deliver the town from this servitude . . . She persevered in her request and relentlessly exasperated her husband with it, until she finally forced an answer from him:

  ‘Mount your horse naked,’ he said, ‘and ride through the town’s marketplace from one end to the other when all the people are gathered, and when you return you will get what you demand . . .’

  Then the Countess Godiva, dear to God, mounted her horse naked on the day agreed upon and, by loosening the braids of hair on her head veiled her whole body except her brilliantly white legs. And when she had finished her journey unseen by anyone, she returned rejoicing to her husband, who considered it miraculous. And Count Leofric, releasing the city of Coventry from its servitude, confirmed its charter with the stamp of his own seal.

  (quoted by D. Donoghue

  from Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora, c. 1250)