by Nerys Jones
The ‘abruptness’ of the appearance of the legend in writing, and the subsequent addition of further details, such as the nature of Coventry’s ‘servitude’ and the role of Peeping Tom, have caused many commentators (including the above-quoted scholar) to reject the possibility that there is even a kernel of literal truth to the legend. On this point I would only say that the exclusion from the written record of a story about important figures from a conquered native aristocracy is not at all surprising. It is not evidence, per se, that the story was fabricated. Nor is it surprising that when the story emerged in ink after some time on the tongues of monks, it had acquired such a sickly hue of conjoined piety and lubricity that incredulity would be the most likely response of modern critics.
A couple of other points can also be made in defence of the actuality of the naked ride. One concerns the nature of the ride itself, which reeks of the Middle Ages. Shameful ritual punishments that somehow fitted the crime were characteristic of the period. Several are described in the texts of the laws of medieval Wales, and one of these was even ‘international’, having a close parallel in Swedish law of the same period (see Nerys Patterson [now Jones], ‘Honour and Shame in Medieval Welsh Society: The role of burlesque in the Welsh laws’, Studia Celtica, 1981–2). Such punishments, like more recent tarring-and-feathering, were often inflicted outside the arena of formal institutions and therefore few detailed accounts of their enactment survive. But where they exist they can be just as shocking as the Godiva legend. The popolo of Viterbo, for example, when they rioted in 1387 seized the city prefect and dragged him to the town square, ‘where they ritually humiliated him, pressing his mouth up the anus of his prized steed and that night sent him naked out of the city in a casket’ (Sam Cohn, ‘Popular Revolt and the rise of early modern states’, The Historian, Spring 2006).
Another matter on which there has been hyper-scepticism is the nature of the ‘servitude’ of the people of Coventry, from which, so says the legend, they were released by Godiva’s penance. There can be little doubt that ‘servitude’ refers to taxation, just as later versions of the legend maintain, for the essence of free status in the Middle Ages was freedom from the many kinds of taxation imposed on communities and individuals. The taxes in question, however, could not have been imposed on Godiva by her husband, for she was the title-holder to her considerable estates. But there was one tax to which all land-owners were liable, namely the war tax, heregeld, used by the Danish kings to support their mercenary armies. Barlow comments that, ‘Ethelred had instituted this tax in 1012 and Edward abolished it thirty-nine years later. It is uncertain, however, whether its collection was suspended for long. Geld was certainly unpopular. Not only was it associated with Viking raids and foreign rule, it was also “a tax which had to be paid before all other taxes and it oppressed the English people in many ways”.’ (Frank Barlow, Edward the Confessor, Yale University Press, 1970, p. 155). While Godiva would never have owed taxes to her husband, as a noble land-owner she would have had to pay the king if he demanded heregeld. His demands for this payment were, it seems, subject to his own private agreements with individuals, some of whom escaped liability when they made special arrangements with him (ibid., p. 156). This is the situation which, in this novel, I have taken to lie behind Godiva’s vulnerability to Edward’s demands.
It is futile, however, to press on with arguments about whether Godiva’s ride ‘really’ happened. In my view, far more important than the literal truth of the legend is the fact that the historical Godiva lived at a moment in time when the history of women was about to take a sharp turn for the worse. Up until the age of the Norman Conquest women throughout Britain, whether in England, Wales or Ireland, could inherit and bequeath substantial property, including land. Women could also instigate divorce (where there were grounds that were legally acceptable), and retain access to their children and to their share of the marital property. Widows and divorced women could also remarry. During marriage, women were protected by law against violence and neglect and were not, in general, prohibited from practising specific crafts or skills, or from riding, bearing arms or travelling. The basic social model for the pre-Conquest adult woman was that of partner in a marital relationship: sometimes a lesser partner, often equal and occasionally superior.
Over the centuries following the Norman Conquest, under the influence of Church lawyers, all these advantages that women in Britain had hitherto possessed withered away and passed into history, leaving women of all social ranks subject to vastly increased male authority in the family, dispossessed of property in everything but name, and in general degraded to a state of inferiority – disarmed in an age of ‘chivalry’, unemployed in an age of guilds, and uneducated in an age of growing literacy. Men and women were set on routes of social change that split the age-old customs of partnership and introduced the enmity of the genders. The overwhelming responsibility for this unhappy change is borne by the Catholic Church, which obtained jurisdiction in all matters to do with the family and pushed forward an agenda for the dispossession of women – especially powerful, landowning women – which found keen support in ruling military circles in Norman England.
The question for modern readers of the St Albans legend, cited above, is whether its writer was consciously reflecting on the changes that the Conquest had brought about. Donoghue writes that ‘the story . . . emerged sometime before 1220 as a fiction posing as a historical fact’ (op. cit., p. 45). Something about the story resonated with matters that were affecting St Albans in the years leading up to 1220. What this might be is not hard to guess: in 1215 Magna Carta was ratified, forming the basis of a new agreement between King Stephen, the Pope and the English barons. One of the bitter disputes between the barons, the princes of the Church and the king concerned his unbridled raising of taxes through scutage, a tax imposed as a substitute for direct military service. In essence, scutage was similar to the heregeld of Godiva’s era. Both taxes were resented as ‘servitude’ by English land-owners. In reworking Godiva’s story the monks of St Albans found the ingredients for framing an allegory of their oppression under King Stephen: the tax was unjust, it was imposed by someone who, though claiming the right to impose it, actually exceeded his authority (Godiva’s husband, symbolizing the king). Lovric became the villain, forcing Godiva into a sexually humiliating display, and Godiva herself, being female, served as a symbol of the subject community, constrained but morally powerful. Perhaps it was Godiva’s pre-Norman, Anglo-Saxon female identity, and the monks’ awareness of the extent to which post-Conquest English women were losing power, that made her an ideal icon for a story about oppression and about the dishonour imposed on women in a subject society – an allegory, really, not of the Norman Conquest per se, but of any conquest, at any time.
With this interpretation in mind, it seems less surprising to discover that the chroniclers of British legendary history thought that Godiva was a kinswoman of that other sexy icon of English popular resistance – Robin of Loxley, or Robin Hood. She was also said to be related to another, less famous guerrilla of the Fens, Hereward the Wake. In different ways, these three figures of medieval legend defied authority and evaded conquest. All three paid a huge price for resistance – exile in a wilderness of forests or fens, and the social exile incurred by degradation – but notwithstanding hardship and injustice, legend has it that all three survived, eluding their enemies to the end and evading any definitive understanding of who they really were and exactly what they did.
February 8th, 2007
Caernarfon, Gwynedd
Further Reading
Anglo-Saxon studies at university level are enjoying a surge in popularity – in part, it is said, because of the immense popularity of Seamus Heaney’s translation into modern English of the Anglo-Saxon horror classic, Beowulf. Many current course syllabi and reading lists are now available online. Another resource for those who want to know more about this period is the historical re-enactment society, Regia Anglorum, and its
wonderful website (www.regia.org).
For a sense of the personality of Edward the Confessor, this novel drew extensively on the work of Frank Barlow (including, inter alia, Edward the Confessor, Yale University Press, 1970). A readable outline of the history of the whole Anglo-Saxon period is to be found in the work of H. R. Loyn and is still to be recommended (Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest, Longmans, 2nd revised edn, 1991). James Campbell, et al. (eds, The Anglo-Saxons, Penguin, 1982) discuss and illustrate the culture as well as the history of the Anglo-Saxons. For an exhaustive, fully illustrated account of Anglo-Saxon clothing, Gale Owen-Crocker’s Dress in Anglo-Saxon England (revised edn, Boydell and Brewer, 2004) is unsurpassable. Godiva’s Coventry receives detailed attention in G. Demidowicz, Coventry’s First Cathedral (Paul Watkins, 1994) and in the first chapter of Richard Goddard, Lordship and Medieval Urbanisation: Coventry, 1043–1355 (Boydell and Brewer, 2004). Though not bearing directly on Godiva’s story, the following accounts of the lives of royal women of the period are enjoyable and illuminating: Harriet O’Brien, Queen Emma and the Vikings (Bloomsbury, 2005); Pauline Stafford, Queen Emma
and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh-Century England (Blackwell, 1997).
Relatively few novelists have ventured into the Anglo-Saxon world, in part because the Arthurian mystique casts a long shadow over adjacent centuries, dinting their glamour and their interest. An exception is Bernard Cornwell, with his stories of Viking England, and recently of King Alfred.
The field of Anglo-Saxon studies, including the archaeology of the period, and the related fields of Irish and Welsh medieval studies are unfolding rapidly. New findings and new perspectives are likely to reward those who pursue their interest in this, one of the most formative phases of British history.
Nerys Jones held a joint PhD in Celtic languages and literatures, and sociology. She lectured for several years in the Harvard Celtic department and published on Irish and Welsh medieval topics. She was Welsh and spoke fluent Welsh. In 2004 she began to write fiction. She died in 2007 while Godiva, her first novel, was being published.
Glossary
Burgh: a walled, defended town.
Churl (Ango-Saxon ceorl): a member of the lowest class of the free population.
Fyrd: the army recruited from the regions.
Godweb: best-quality fabric, whether of linen, wool or silk.
Heregeld (sometimes known as geld): literally, the ‘army tax,’ imposed by Danish kings in England.
Housecarl (house-churl): a member of the armed entourage of a lord who lived under his own roof and travelled with him.
Reeve: the steward of an estate.
Scopman: a storyteller and entertainer, often in the service of a lord.
Thegn: a land-owner who also held political office at a regional level.
Wergeld: blood-money, a fine paid as compensation to the relatives of a victim of homicide.
Pronunciation
Godiva’s name was pronounced ‘Good-eva’ and written as Godgifu in early English. Godgifu meant ‘the good gift’. The name of her husband, Leofric, was pronounced ‘Lovric’ and appears as such in this novel. Leofric meant ‘beloved leader’.
First published 2008 by Macmillan
First published in paperback 2008 by Pan Books
This electronic edition published 2010 by Pan Books
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Copyright © Nerys Jones 2008
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