by Simon Schama
By 1051 he must have thought he was strong enough to make a move and was spoiling for a trial of strength with the earl and his family. Edward’s Norman brother-in-law, Eustace of Boulogne, travelled to England, arriving at Dover with a retinue of knights. A fight broke out over the worthiness or unworthiness of their lodgings, and it ended with one of the knights being wounded and his assailant being stabbed to death by the Normans. By the time the fracas was over the body count reached twenty. Furious at the affront to his kinsmen, Edward demanded that the whole city of Dover be punitively ‘harried’ – the legal term for being sacked and pillaged. The royal servant assigned to do the job was Godwine, within whose territory the outrage had occurred. But Godwine was no idiot. He knew that he had been neatly trapped into a lose-lose dilemma. His choice was either inflicting pain on his own dependants, thereby alienating his power base, or being accused of disobedience by the king. He chose the latter. At Gloucester, where he had been summoned to give an account of his refusal to do the king’s bidding, Godwine found himself confronted by a small army consisting of the royal troops strengthened by reinforcements from Earl Siward of Northumbria. Godwine was prepared to clear himself in a ritual ceremony of oath-swearing, but Edward was no longer interested in these arcane rites. Refusing Godwine a safe-conduct, the king went so far as to call out the fyrd. Godwine was removed from his earldom and offices along with his sons. He was also obliged to surrender his property and estates to the king and given just five days to clear out of the kingdom. The Godwines left in two parties. The earl himself, together with his sons Sweyn and Gyrd, sailed to Flanders, where a third son, Tostig, had married the daughter of the count, while his other sons Harold and Leofwine exited through the West Country to Ireland. Edith, the queen and their sister, was left virtually hostage to Edward’s triumph and, more or less repudiated by the king, was shut up in a convent.
It was the high point of Edward’s reign, still only eight years old. He must have thought himself worthy of his Norman education and a master of the political game. He seemed free of his Godwine custodians and, perhaps, almost revenged on his brother’s murderers.
But how far did he go to press his advantage? Norman chronicles of the Conquest insist that what happened next was the cornerstone of William’s claim to the throne. For it was at this point that Edward made Robert of Jumièges Archbishop of Canterbury, and sent him to Rome to have the promotion confirmed by the pope. En route, according to those same sources, Robert was instructed to make a detour to Rouen, where he was said to have informed William that Edward intended to make him his heir. The Norman chronicles are, of course, retrospective propaganda, and if succession was assumed through proximity of kinship, William’s claim was implausibly remote – no better than second cousin of Edward, once removed! But closeness of family ties was certainly not the only criterion determining the succession in the absence of immediate heirs. And the childless Edward – who did not wish to see the throne revert to the Viking dynasties from which he had wrested it, still less to the Godwines – might at least have toyed with the idea, in the brief euphoria of his victory in 1051–2. But if he was making so radical, even subversive a move just to spite his rivals, Edward must have known that he was creating terrible mischief for the future. For in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the succession was not in the gift of kings unless they had the consent of their high council, the witan.
Whether or not he was brooding on a Norman succession, Edward had barely begun to enjoy his ascendancy when it went sour on him. By being reputed to favour ‘foreigners’ he had alienated the critical support of the earls of Mercia and Northumbria, who began to make discreet noises to the Godwines about a return. (In fact, virtually the entire crisis of Anglo-Saxon England was to turn on the difficult relationship between the north and south of the country.) Godwine, of course, needed only the slightest prompting to launch a comeback. With the help of his son’s Flemish in-laws, he mustered a formidable fleet, united with the separate fleet commanded by Harold and Leofwine, at the Isle of Wight, and ravaged the island to make the point that King Edward was no protector. With recruits drawn from his old Wessex domains (who might well have appreciated his earlier refusal to sack Dover), Godwine sailed all the way to London, past London Bridge – a good sign that the citizens were on his side – anchoring at Southwark on 14 September 1052. The royal fleet sent to meet him refused to fight. Edward’s coup had rebounded on him as a disastrous humiliation.
Godwine was restored to his earldom and, together with his family, declared innocent of all the crimes of which he had stood accused. The Normans and French who ‘had lately come into the kingdom’ were expelled, and the property of the Norman archbishops of Canterbury and Dorchester and the baronial enclaves on the Welsh borders were confiscated and divided among old Godwine, his son Harold and Queen Edith. ‘Good Law’, meaning law that was something other than the arbitrary will of the king, was promised to the people.
Who now ruled England? King Edward, mortified by his climb-down, had authority but little power. The Godwines had power but dubious authority. Duke William of Normandy might have already had irresponsible but beguiling promises whispered in his ear, but the debacle of the Normans in England must have made his chances seem extremely remote. The earls of Mercia and Northumbria must have supposed the king a broken reed, but they had no intention of grovelling to the Godwines. Further off still, the new king of Norway, Harald Hardrada, variously known as ‘the thunderbolt of the North’ and the ‘greatest warrior under Heaven’, certainly thought of himself as having a strong claim and aimed at restoring the Anglo-Scandinavian empire of Cnut. Still further off, in remote Hungary, lived yet another, not entirely improbable, contender for the throne: the grandson of Aethelred, the son of Edmund Ironside, Edward’s nephew, known as ‘the Atheling’. Every so often, emissaries would arrive on the grassy Danubian plains from remote England enquiring whether he wouldn’t, after all, care to return to ‘his’ kingdom. In 1056, with his two small boys, he did just that – and died a long way from Lake Balaton, in the hall of some Saxon thegn, the very next year.
The Godwines emerged from the crisis of 1051–2 stronger than ever. King Edward, on the other hand, must have been bitterly aware of the limitations of his power. Unable to exercise his will as secular commander, he increasingly concentrated on the realm spiritual. This did not mean any kind of retreat from the world. Although his hagiographers paint a portrait of the confessor-king spending days in prayer and fasting, poring over sacred literature and devoting himself to acts of healing and charity, Edward was also taking advantage of the movement that placed abbeys and monasteries under direct royal (rather than aristocratic) patronage. When he planned to build a great Benedictine house on Thorney island, upstream from London, and name it West Minster after St Peter – in complement to the East Minster of St Paul – there was little doubt that it would be as much a centre of royal power as of piety. And it would, of course, be built as a Norman Romanesque basilica, with columns enclosing arched aisles very much in the manner of the great abbeys at Jumièges and Fécamp. For that matter, if you pray hard enough, of course, God will take care of your enemies, or so Edward might have thought when his old antagonist Godwine suddenly expired in 1053, barely a year after his triumph in the contest of their wills. The story told by the Norman chroniclers was that, at a feast, the king had confronted Godwine with the murder of his brother Alfred, and the old earl had choked on a morsel of bread, caught in his throat as he attempted to defend himself. More probably it was a stroke, as the Abingdon manuscript of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells that while Godwine was at dinner with the king at Winchester, ‘he suddenly sank down against the footstool, deprived of speech’ and that he remained helpless and mute for some days before dying.
Politically, however, the king had little cause to rejoice. The godfather of the clan gone, the Godwineson band of brothers now controlled England virtually unchallenged. Not all of them had survived unscathed. Sweyn, the eldest, seem
s to have been a dissolute psychopath, whose career makes King Lear’s Edmund look positively monkish by comparison. Having had to run for his life after abducting and raping the abbess of Leominster, he compromised his comeback by murdering his own cousin while he had been under safe-conduct. Although he had been pardoned by the king, Sweyn went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and died on the way back. His death meant that the core territory of the Godwine empire, the earldom ofWessex, now passed to the next oldest, Harold. During the mid-1050s and early 1060s history turned dramatically the Godwinesons’ way. In 1055 the Earl of Northumbria died, allowing the next brother, Tostig, to succeed him. An abortive rising in East Anglia dropped another earldom into the hands of Gyrd, and when there were no more earldoms to go round, a new one in the strategically crucial territory from Buckinghamshire to Kent was created for Leofwine. But it was as the commander of an army sent to crush a revolt in north Wales – a country believed geographically impossible to pacify – that Harold’s reputation for Caesar-like force was made. In 1063 the prince of Gwynedd and Powys, Gruffydd ap Llewellyn, whose territories had expanded east of Hereford, was rash enough to form an insurrectionary alliance with the Earl of Mercia. Together with a second army commanded by Tostig and encouraging the huscarls (armed retainers) to fight, unarmoured, partisan-style in the hills, the Godwine armies waged a ferocious war of attrition against the Welsh. Villages and farms were devastated, leaving, as Gerald of Wales would put it in the twelfth century, ‘not one that pisseth against a wall’. The response of Harold’s counter-insurgency campaign, when his soldiers were decapitated by the Welsh, was the summary execution of civilians. When Gruffydd’s own men had had enough, they sliced off his head and sent it to Harold as a token of capitulation.
The British Isles and Normandy, c. 1065–6.
Harold now presided over an empire of patronage and military power. He was at the height of his powers: tall and charismatically good-looking, he was as politically shrewd as his father but with the gangsterish rough surface buffed up into aristocratic polish. Evidently an efficient administrator and someone who understood the machinery of Anglo-Saxon government, Harold was also, when the need arose, a formidable general, adapting his tactics to the very different terrains of the wet, low country of East Anglia or the mountains of Snowdonia. Those campaigns, ostensibly fought for King Edward, also suggest that Harold, well before he was king, was intensely concerned with hacking out some sort of territorial cohesion for the kingdom of England, and especially with pre-empting alliances between disgruntled earls and the wide range of potential allies available for trouble within the British isles:Welsh princes, Scots kings, Norse kings of Dublin, Norse earls of Orkney and Caithness. There could be no question of any kind of unitary kingdom just yet – the earldoms would stay – but by keeping them in the family, Harold was trying to ensure that they would not act like independent powers.
In the aftermath of his victory in Wales in 1063, Harold Godwineson seemed to have everything: land, riches, a dynamic band of brothers. He had married his vanquished enemy Gruffydd’s widow Ealdgyth. He was Edward’s indispensable man, keeping enemies from his borders. Was it possible for him, now, to dream royal dreams? Was it possible for him not to? It would have meant a change in dynasty in England, but with Edward unlikely to bear children, this would happen anyway. And if Harold looked north of the border to the history of King Macbeth of Scotland, he might have found as much encouragement as discouragement for his ambitions. For there was a curious parallelism about the fate of the two kingdoms. The mac Ailpin dynasty of kings of Alba (called Scotland by the mid-tenth century) had made itself dominant in the same way as the kings of Wessex – by becoming the paramount force to hold off the Vikings. By the early eleventh century the kingdom of Strathclyde in the southwest of Scotland was virtually absorbed into its power, and the Scottish kings, like their English counterparts, had developed a rite of solemn inauguration at the Abbey of Scone, and through Church patronage they had developed the same Solomonic sense of themselves as the descendants of Alfred and Edgar. Like the Wessex kings, too, they had to contend with regions of unconquerable Viking settlement, Norwegian rather than Danish, and concentrated on the earldom of Orkney, which had made a crucial crossing over the Pentland Firth to Caithness. Like Edward the Confessor, the last of the mac Ailpin kings, Malcolm II, was childless. His successor, Duncan, claimed the throne in 1034 through the female line, but his grip was always shaky and contested. As if to compensate for his insecurity, Duncan thrashed around looking for military victories – first against the Northumbrian English at Durham, then in the north against the Earl of Orkney – and failed. When he attempted to force his will on the northern mormaer of Moray (mormaer was the name given to a local magnate who possessed what was, in effect, a private army), Duncan was killed in battle.
The mormaer of Moray was Macbeth, and he came to the throne in 1040 not by murder but through the decision of the battlefield. He also lasted a lot longer than the panicky, guilt-ridden usurper of Shakespeare’s play – seventeen years, in fact – holding on to power with the help of an alliance with Thorfinn, the Earl of Orkney. In the end, in 1057, Macbeth was defeated and killed in battle by Duncan’s son, Malcolm III Canmore. But if Harold was looking to learn lessons from the true history of Macbeth, the prospect of a seventeen-year reign, a prudent alliance with helpful northern allies and periodic trials by arms might not have seemed such a cautionary tale. And if Harold was making judicious cross-border comparisons, he would have been heartened by the fact that Duncan, unlike Edward the Confessor, had two surviving sons to take up his cause.
All the signs must have seemed auspicious. But then, in 1064, Harold’s ambitions seem to have been blown off course. The precise point of Harold’s fateful journey, which ended up in William’s court, remains tantalizingly uncertain. The Bayeux Tapestry, the incomparable work of Norman propaganda history, commissioned for William’s half-brother Bishop Odo, makes the voyage the beginning of its story, apparently in keeping with the official claim of Norman historians that Harold had been sent by Edward on a mission to confirm the king’s promise to award the succession to Duke William. But in all probability, by 1066, the year of his death, Edward had, with good or ill grace, abandoned whatever dreams he might have had during his brief ascendancy fifteen years before of a Norman succession. Almost all of the other contenders – Viking, Atheling or Godwine – were more plausible than William. And why should Harold have gone out of his way (literally) to expedite an arrangement so obviously contrary to his own interests? Even the tapestry, created in all likelihood by English women embroiderers, is enigmatic, even non-committal about the reasons for Harold’s sea journey. Its opening images of the earl are conspicuously heroic – the dashingly moustachioed rider, hawk at the wrist, feasting in his beautiful Saxon abbey church at Bosham near Chichester; the salt-of-the-earth noble, bare-legged in the water, helping his men pole the ship away from its mooring, then taking the helm as it sails into the Channel.
What happened thereafter, though, is less disputed and is faithfully recorded in the tapestry. Whether or not his boat was forced to make an unplanned landing by a storm at sea, Harold was captured by Guy of Ponthieu, on whose territory he had arrived, and handed over to Guy’s liege lord, Duke William. For Guy, taking wrecks and hostages was akin to a cottage industry, but he had fallen foul of the duke before for over-abusing his power, and once William was informed of Harold’s presence little time was lost before he was taken to the duke. The embroiderers now make it plain that Harold and his followers found themselves in an alien world. The Saxons sport their characteristic moustaches and, despite their predicament, carry themselves with a certain sense of bravura. The Normans ride enormous horses (which in actuality were a lot smaller than modern mounts) and shave the backs of their heads. For a while the duke and the earl seem to act like comrades in arms, William taking Harold with him on campaign in Brittany, offering his daughter to Harold in marriage and making a Norman match for Haro
ld’s sister. But comrades were not equals. In the embroidery, William makes Harold one of his knights and bestows armour on him. This would have required an act of feudal homage, the Saxon placing his hands inside those of the Norman duke and agreeing to put his life and loyalty at William’s command.
It seems possible that, subsequently, Harold did swear some sort of oath to Duke William. Oaths were taken with deadly seriousness in medieval Europe, so exactly what form the oath took would matter immensely in the coming conflict. The sources closest to the Godwine view maintained that Harold had sworn merely to be William’s man in Normandy, with no bearing on anything connected to the English succession. The Norman chronicles, on the other hand, insist that Harold had taken a solemn vow to defend and advance William’s right to the throne of England and even to create garrisons for the duke in advance of his taking lawful possession of the realm! And since the essence of the Norman case against Harold would be that he had perjured himself, the most imaginative of their propagandists, such as the twelfth-century writer Wace, had him swearing unwittingly on a chest full of holy relics that the duke had covered with a cloth. ‘When Harold placed his hand upon it, the hand trembled and the flesh quivered but he swore and promised . . . to deliver up England to the duke.’ Once again the embroiderers become wonderfully devious at this critical moment of their story, for by lining up the boat taking Harold back to England immediately after the scene of oath-taking, they give the unmistakable impression that the vow was the price of his freedom: that it had been extracted under duress.