Dragon Lords

by Eleanor Parker

  Siward himself died the following year, more peacefully than most of his predecessors (it has been said that Siward is the only one of the 14 men who ruled in Northumbria between 993 and 1076 to have died from natural causes).11 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says that he was buried in a church in York, which he had founded and dedicated to the Norwegian king St Olaf Haraldsson.12 This is a particularly interesting dedication, since at the time of Siward’s death in 1055 Olaf was a very recent saint. Olaf fought against Cnut for rule over Norway and was killed by his own people in 1030. Soon after his death he was venerated as a martyr and his cult was swiftly encouraged by his former rival, in a shrewd tactical move which was doubtless an attempt to prevent Olaf being used as a figurehead for Norwegian rebellion against Danish rule.13 Of the pre-Conquest churches in England dedicated to St Olaf, a number are linked to Anglo-Scandinavian aristocratic families, including Earl Godwine and his Danish wife Gytha, and Siward’s dedication of a church to St Olaf may, therefore, be a marker of his Danish identity, or at least his continuing interest in contemporary Scandinavian politics. The church still stands in York, adjoining the probable former location of the earls’ palace in the Bootham area of the city. A site on Heslington Hill, outside York, was later known as ‘Siward’s Howe’, suggesting that it was believed in popular tradition to be the earl’s burial-mound; it may perhaps have been a location for meetings presided over by Siward in his time as earl.14

  Siward seems to have employed men of Scandinavian descent among his followers: the account of his 1054 expedition to Scotland records that many English and Danish soldiers were killed there, and these Danes were probably among Siward’s men.15 He was known to his contemporaries under the byname digri, an Old Norse word meaning ‘big, stout’.16 The author of the Vita Ædwardi Regis, writing around ten years after Siward’s death, not only records this nickname but also identifies it as a Danish term: he refers to ‘Siward, earl of the Northumbrians, called in the Danish tongue “digri”, that is “strong”.’17 This Norse byname, taken together with Siward’s patronage of the cult of St Olaf, suggests that Siward retained – at least in the eyes of his contemporaries – a noticeable Scandinavian identity, even after settling in England. This does not explain, however, how his colourful genealogy and daring adventures came to be recorded by the monks of thirteenth-century Crowland. That was the result of a strange sequence of events which led to the son of this Danish warrior being venerated as a saint – a martyr of the Norman Conquest.

  Waltheof, traitor and martyr

  After the death of his elder son Osbeorn in 1054, Siward appears to have had only one surviving child, his son Waltheof. Waltheof was born late in his father’s life, the product of Siward’s marriage to Ælfflæd, the descendant of the earls of Bamburgh, and he was named for one of his mother’s distinguished ancestors.18 He was apparently too young to succeed to the rule of Northumbria on his father’s death, and Edward the Confessor instead gave the earldom to Tostig Godwineson, a decision with far-reaching consequences: Tostig’s harsh rule of Northumbria sparked uprisings and revolts, caused conflict with his brother Harold after the latter became king in 1066, and ultimately resulted in Tostig joining the Norwegian invasion attempt against Harold.19 At the time of the Norman Conquest, young Waltheof was earl of Northampton and Huntingdon, the southern part of his father’s earldom. It is not recorded whether he fought at the Battle of Hastings, but in the immediate aftermath of the Conquest he swore allegiance to William.20

  Over the turbulent decade which followed, however, Waltheof twice took part in rebellions against the Norman king. In 1069 he participated in the northern uprising against William and, joining forces with a fleet sent by the Danish king Svein Estrithson, was in the army which captured York from the Normans. When the rebellion failed, Waltheof made peace with the king, married William’s niece Judith, and was given his father’s earldom of Northumbria.21 But in 1075 he rebelled again: he became involved in the Revolt of the Earls and this time, although he once more submitted to William and apparently repented of his crime, he was sentenced to death. Waltheof was beheaded as a traitor on St Giles’ Hill in Winchester on 31 May 1076, in the only recorded political execution of William’s reign. His body was at first thrown into a ditch, but was later retrieved by the monks of Crowland Abbey and taken there for burial – Crowland lay within Waltheof ’s southern earldom, and the earl had been a generous patron of the abbey. There, in 1092, 16 years after his death, his body was translated and found to be incorrupt, miracles were reported at his tomb, and he began to be regarded by the monks of Crowland as a martyr.22

  25. The ruined west front of Crowland Abbey, Lincolnshire

  In Old Norse literature, Waltheof was commemorated as a warrior. Like his father, Waltheof had Scandinavian men among his retainers, including a skald named Thorkell Skallason who, after Waltheof ’s execution, composed memorial poetry for the earl in Old Norse. This indicates that Siward and his family not only retained some kind of Scandinavian identity but that they also continued to value and practise Norse cultural and literary traditions: as Judith Jesch comments, Thorkell’s poem reveals the existence of ‘an audience conversant with that language, attuned to the cultural values of skaldic poetry, imbued with Norse concepts of loyalty and treachery, and politically in opposition to the new regime, somewhere in England in the late 1070s.’23 Two verses survive of Thorkell’s poem in memory of Waltheof. One celebrates his victory at York in 1069, proclaiming in bloodthirsty triumph that Waltheof caused 100 of William’s soldiers to be burned to death in the city, leaving the Normans to become carrion for the wolf. The second verse mourns Waltheof ’s death: ‘William, who reddened weapons, the one who cut the rime-flecked sea from the south, has indeed betrayed the bold Waltheof,’ Thorkell laments. ‘Killings will be slow to cease in England, but my lord was brave; a more splendid munificent prince will not die.’24 From these verses, later Scandinavian historians spun a compelling story about Waltheof ’s relationship with William the Conqueror: in these accounts Waltheof is represented as a son of Godwine, an honourable brother of the doomed English king and the traitor Tostig, unjustly murdered by the Normans. This made for a more dramatic story, but it means that Norse sources have nothing to say about Waltheof ’s real father, Siward.25

  In England, however, Waltheof was remembered as a traitor or as a martyr, and the manner of his death made him a controversial saint. The monks of Crowland engaged in the production of texts in support of his claim to sanctity, but his cult remained a predominantly local one and never became popular outside Crowland’s sphere of influence. In the first half of the twelfth century the abbot of Crowland commissioned the historian Orderic Vitalis (who stayed at the abbey some time between 1109 and 1124) to write an account of Waltheof ’s life and death, as well as of the abbey’s early history and its other saint, Guthlac.26 Orderic incorporated these works into his Ecclesiastical History, but copies also remained at Crowland and formed the basis of later accounts of the earl’s life. Orderic, presumably following what the monks had told him during his visit to the abbey, lays heavy stress on the idea that Waltheof was an innocent victim of Norman malice: they had executed him because they were envious of him, and feared him for his integrity.27 He also records the story of a Norman monk named Ouen who denied Waltheof ’s sanctity on the grounds that the earl was a traitor who had deserved to be executed for his crime. The monk died a few days later, a punishment from God for doubting Waltheof ’s holiness.28

  Around the same time, William of Malmesbury comments in his Gesta Regum that there were two versions of Waltheof ’s story: while the Normans considered Waltheof a traitor, the English said he had been forced to join the plot against the Conqueror and repented of it before his death.29 In his Gesta Pontificum, William further records that when he visited Crowland the prior tried to persuade him of Waltheof ’s sanctity, and he remarks ‘God, it seems, signifies his assent to the English version, for He manifests many extraordinary miracles at the tomb.’
30

  This emphasis on Norman hatred of Waltheof ’s cult is almost certainly an exaggeration. Unlike some of the Fenland abbeys – such as Ely, which actively supported rebellions against the Normans – Crowland does not seem to have been hostile to Norman influence. Geoffrey, the abbot who commissioned Orderic and challenged the Norman monk’s scepticism, was himself of Norman origin.31 However, the accusation of Norman prejudice must have served a useful purpose for the promoters of the cult, helping to exonerate Waltheof from the charge of treachery attached to his ignominious death, and the presentation of the debate in these terms, in this early period when the first literary records of the cult were being produced, must reflect the narrative which was accepted at Crowland in the first half of the twelfth century. In this narrative, Norman-English rivalries were central to the proof of Waltheof ’s innocence and therefore of his sanctity; these texts display a readiness to frame Waltheof as an English saint, a victim of Norman prejudice.

  But Waltheof ’s identity was a more complicated matter than this, as the monks of Crowland seem to have been well aware. Although born in England, he was the son of a Danish warrior, and in building up the materials of Waltheof ’s cult the monks also found space to explore their saint’s Scandinavian lineage. At the beginning of the thirteenth century, a manuscript was compiled which preserves a cycle of texts related to Waltheof, his cult, and his family, together with works on two other Crowland saints, Guthlac and Neot. It is in a variety of twelfth- and thirteenth-century hands, and may have been compiled to mark the second translation of Waltheof ’s relics in 1219.32 The texts about Waltheof include the Gesta antecessorum comitis Waldevi, which opens with the genealogy quoted at the beginning of this chapter. In this text, Waltheof ’s Danish heritage is foregrounded: Waltheof ’s grandfather Beorn is ‘Danish by race’ and his ancestors bear the distinctly Norse names Ulf and Spratling (we will return to these names in a moment). Not only this, but the importance of ancestry is highlighted by the detail of the bear’s ears, a genetic marker of paternal identity which ensures that Beorn is recognisable as his father’s son. This suggests an interest in ancestry and inheritance for their own sake, and particularly in the Scandinavian side of Waltheof ’s ancestry, a story the monks of Crowland seem to have been eager to tell.

  26. A medieval statue of Earl Waltheof, with hunting-dog, on the west front of Crowland Abbey

  The ‘Saga of Siward’

  The monks of Crowland were not the only people with an interest in Waltheof ’s ancestry; his descendants, too, may have taken some part in creating or preserving stories about Siward and his Danish forebears. The Gesta antecessorum is followed in the manuscript by a text entitled De Comitissa, which continues the story of Waltheof ’s widow Judith and their daughters, tracing the descent of their lands, especially the honour of Huntingdon, through three generations.33 By the marriages of Waltheof ’s eldest daughter Maud – first to the Norman earl Simon de Senlis and then to David, king of Scotland from 1124 to 1153 – the honour of Huntingdon passed to the Senlis earls and then to the Scottish royal house. The narrative about Siward is, therefore, part of the history of this important Anglo-Norman family. The Crowland text is not the only witness to the narrative about Siward: a version of the text in Anglo-Norman survives from Delapré Abbey, near Northampton, and seems to have been written by a nun of Delapré around 1237.34 The first part of this narrative deals with Siward and Waltheof and is very closely related to the Latin version in the Crowland manuscript, but there is an additional section dealing with the Senlis and Scottish earls of Huntingdon, Waltheof ’s descendants, which is unique. This text also makes reference to stories about Siward in ‘books of the English’ belonging to ‘Richard le Chauntour de Notyngham’, and it has been suggested this may have been an English version of the Siward narrative in the Gesta antecessorum; if so, it no longer survives.35 Like the Crowland Gesta antecessorum, the text from Delapré was produced for a particular purpose: to demonstrate that the earldom of Huntingdon was held by right of the king of Scotland, not the king of England, an issue which affected the abbey’s own land rights.36 In both versions of the text, therefore, the history of Siward’s acquisition of the earldom of Huntingdon occurs in a context where ancestral rights and inheritance are not simply matters of antiquarian curiosity, but are directly relevant to contemporary interests. As we shall see, this affects how we should read this narrative’s approach to Siward’s adventures and Waltheof ’s heredity.

  The structure of the Gesta antecessorum falls into two parts: the first is a tightly structured and internally consistent account of Siward’s youthful adventures, and the second is a summary of his years as earl of Northumbria which contains two distinct, unconnected narrative episodes. It will be helpful to provide a brief overview of these two parts of the narrative, before discussing them separately.37 After the opening genealogy which introduces Siward, the narrative tells how the young warrior sets out from his father’s house with 50 companions and a well-stocked ship. He sails from Denmark to the Orkneys, where he lands on an island and is told that its inhabitants are being terrorised by a dragon. Siward fights the dragon and puts it to flight from the island. Triumphant, he sets sail again, this time to Northumbria, where he has heard tell of another dragon to fight.

  But when he lands in Northumbria, instead of finding a dragon, he finds his destiny. He meets an old man sitting on a steep hill, who greets him by name. The old man tells Siward that he knows he has come to test his strength against the dragon, but his fate lies elsewhere: he must go instead to London, where the king will welcome him and grant him land. Siward is understandably sceptical, and says that his companions will not believe him if he tells them what the old man has said. To prove that the encounter has taken place, the mysterious old man gives him a banner named Ravenlandeye (the narrator notes that the name means corvus terre terror, ‘raven, terror of the land’).

  Siward accordingly sails to London. He meets King Edward (that is, Edward the Confessor), who has heard of his coming, and the king accepts Siward into his service. Siward distinguishes himself so much that the king promises that the first high honour which becomes available in the land will be given to him, and soon his opportunity arrives. One day it happens that Siward is travelling from Westminster to London when he encounters an enemy of the king, a Danish man named Tostig, earl of Huntingdon. It is said that the king hates Tostig because he is married to the queen’s sister, a daughter of Earl Godwine. Siward and Tostig meet at a bridge over the river, which is so narrow that as haughty Tostig passes he splashes Siward’s cloak with mud. (In those days, the Crowland narrator adds, the fashion was for men to wear long fur cloaks.) Siward takes Tostig’s behaviour as an insult, and decides to get revenge. He lies in wait for Tostig, and as the earl returns across the bridge Siward draws his sword and cuts off his head. Concealing the head beneath his cloak, he goes to the court and asks the king to make him earl of Huntingdon, because that earldom is vacant. The king assumes this must be a joke – the earldom cannot be vacant, as the earl has only just left his presence. Siward produces Tostig’s head from beneath his cloak and throws it at the king’s feet, and the king, remembering his promise, has no choice but to grant the vacant earldom to Siward. Siward leaves the court and seeks out his companions, and finds them fighting against Tostig’s men. They kill them all and bury them near London, at a place which becomes known as the ‘Danes’ Church’ – ‘as it is still called to this day’, the Crowland narrator adds, presumably referring to St Clement Danes in London. Siward, who is now earl of Huntingdon, is shortly afterwards made earl of Northumbria, Cumberland and Westmoreland too.

  It is clear even from this summary that the first part of the narrative has little basis in the historical facts of Siward’s life – apart from the statement that Siward was of Danish origin, which there seems no reason to doubt. It is just possible, as has been suggested in the past, that his murder of Tostig recalls the murder by which he may have obtained the rule of
northern Northumbria in 1041;38 however, the story surrounding the murder, with the insult on the bridge and the folkloric ‘rash promise’ which the king is forced to fulfil, is pure fiction.39 The name Tostig suggests some knowledge of Siward’s historical career, but the role attributed to him is extremely confused: Tostig was Siward’s successor, not his predecessor, as earl (and of Northumbria, not Huntingdon); he was the brother of the king’s wife, not the husband of the queen’s sister; and in a reversal of the order given in the Gesta, Siward had probably been earl of Northumbria for more than 20 years before he gained the earldom of Huntingdon in the early 1050s.

  So far, then, the Gesta antecessorum is almost entirely fiction, but from the point when Siward is granted his earldom the narrative agrees more closely with what can be verified about his career. The break in the story is marked in the Delapré text with the statement that more of Siward’s deeds are recorded in the English book belonging to ‘Richard le Chauntourde Notyngham’, and the Gesta acknowledges the change with a general observation that Siward maintained peace in Northumbria for many years, in accordance with a prophecy recorded by some unnamed ‘ancient histories of the English’ that a man born of a union between a rational and an irrational being – that is, the woman and the bear – should defend England from its enemies. It then recounts how Siward leads an army to Scotland in support of its deposed king, named as ‘Duneval’. During his absence his son Osbeorn ‘Bulax’ is killed, and on hearing of his death, Siward reacts so violently that he smashes a stone sphere with his axe. Many years later (in fact he died the year after his expedition to Scotland), Siward feels his own death approaching and chooses to die in his armour rather than in bed ‘like a cow’ (more vaccino). He is buried at York, having given his banner Ravenlandeye to the church he founded there.