2 Ibid., p. 166.
3 Ibid., pp. 167–8.
4 For above see Swanton, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 1996, p. 135, note.
5 Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, 1997, p. 224.
6 Based on Swanton, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 1996, p. 135 (‘E’, sub anno 1010).
7 Attwater, Penguin Dictionary of Saints, 1979, p. 41.
8 Fletcher, Bloodfeud, 2003, p. 74.
9 Campbell, Anglo-Saxon State, 2000, p. 181.
10 Swanton, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, 1996, p. 144, notes.
11 Fletcher, Bloodfeud, 2003, p. 1.
12 Lawson, Cnut, 2004, p. 134.
13 Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, 1997, p. 225.
14 Ibid., pp. 226–7.
15 Campbell, Anglo-Saxon State, 2000, p. 8.
16 Gillingham, ‘Britain, Ireland and the South’, 2003, p. 215.
17 Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, 1997, p. 247.
18 Damico, Beowulf’s Wealtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition, 1984.
19 Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers, 1983, p. 29.
Chapter 12 – Edward the Confessor, the Conquest and the Aftermath
Frank Barlow’s Edward the Confessor (1970) is still the classic work on the king and the last years of Anglo-Saxon England. With The Battle of Hastings, 1066 (2002), M. K. Lawson produced the definitive work on the battle. Mason’s and Barlow’s books on the Godwin(e)s (see previous chapter) are of course important in this chapter too. Ian Walker’s Harold: The Last Anglo-Saxon King (1997) is a major and exhaustive study, while Ann Williams’s The English and the Norman Conquest (1995) is basic in its field. In the post-Conquest age ‘the Laws of Edward the Confessor’ were of recurrent interest, and behind this and all studies of Anglo-Saxon law looms Patrick Wormald’s monumental and sometimes controversial The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, I: Legislation and its Limits (1999). Pauline Stafford’s Queen Emma and Queen Edith (1997) gives body to the shadowy figure of Edith and her entourage.
1 Robin Fleming, ‘Harold II’, ODNB, 2004.
2 Gillingham, ‘Britain, Ireland and the South’, 2003, pp. 206–7.
3 Campbell, ‘The United Kingdom of England’, 1995, p. 36.
4 Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers, 1983, pp. 82 and 76.
5 Lawson, Battle of Hastings, 2002, p. 136.
6 Barlow, The Godwins, 2003, p. 67.
7 Ibid., p. 75.
8 Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers, 1983, pp. 97, 134.
9 Lawson, Battle of Hastings, 2002, p. 36.
10 Barlow, The Godwins, 2003, p. 98.
11 Ibid., p. 99.
12 Lawson, Battle of Hastings, 2002, p. 45.
13 Mason, The House of Godwine, 2004, p. 161.
14 See Lawson, Battle of Hastings, 2002, p. 160.
15 Walker, Harold:The Last Anglo-Saxon King, pp. 188–9.
16 Mason, The House of Godwine, 2004, p. 194.
17 Barlow, The Godwins, 2003, pp. 251–2.
18 Mason, The House of Godwine, 2004, p. xi.
19 Davis, From Alfred the Great to Stephen, 1991, p. 56.
20 Gillingham, ‘Britain, Ireland and the South’, 2003, p. 215.
21 Prescott, Andrew, The Benedictional of St Æthelwold, 2002.
22 Davis, From Alfred the Great to Stephen, 1991, p. 62.
23 Campbell, ‘The United Kingdom of England’, 1995, p. 37.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
In a ‘Brief History’ an exhaustive bibliography of the subject is neither possible, given the constraints of space, nor appropriate. What follows aims to give an idea of the range of works available as well as details of the works I have consulted.
Selected Primary Sources
The starting point must be the two volumes of English Historical Documents: I: c. 500–1042, ed. Dorothy Whitelock, 2nd edn, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1979, and, covering the last generation of Anglo-Saxon England, ii: 1042–1189, ed. D. C. Douglas and G. W. Greenaway, 2nd edn, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1981. Together they constitute the most extensive selection available of documents of every kind, all in translation.
There are various editions of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The English language edition by Leo Sherley-Price, Penguin Classics, 1955, has been reissued in a revised edition by R. E. Latham and D. H. Farmer (1990). For the Latin text, annotated and with an English translation on the facing page, the standard edition is by Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, OUP, 1969.
In the case of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, probably the most accessible is the edition by G. N. Garmonsway, Everyman’s Library, 1953, revised 1972. The most recent annotated edition is that translated and edited by Michael Swanton, Routledge, 1996, revised 2000.
The best recent translation of Asser’s ‘Life of King Alfred’ was published by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge in Alfred the Great:Asser’s ‘Life of King Alfred’ and Other Contemporary Sources, Penguin Classics, 1983. Other contemporary biographies include the text and translation of the life of Queen Emma, edited by Alistair Campbell as The Encomium Emmae Reginae, CUP, 1949, reprinted with a new introduction by Simon Keynes, CUP, 1998; and Frank Barlow’s Edward the Confessor, Eyre & Spottiswood, 1970, 2nd edn OUP, 1992. The Life of St Wilfrid by Eddius Stephanus and other basic texts by Bede may be found in The Age of Bede, translated and edited by J. F. Webb and D. H. Farmer, Penguin Classics, 1965, revised 1983. For the Anglo-Saxon missions in Germany, a wide selection of Boniface’s letters as well as biographies of St Willibald and St Lioba and others appear in C. H. Talbot’s The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany, Sheed and Ward, 1954, revised 1981. The standard edition of the Boniface letters in English translation is by Ephraim Emerton in The Letters of St Boniface, Columbia UP, 1940, reprinted with introduction by Thomas F. X. Noble, 2000). For Alcuin the most accessible text is probably the selection from the letters and ‘The Bishops, Kings and Saints of York’ in Stephen Allott’s Alcuin of York: His Life and Letters, William Sessions, 1974, reprinted 1987.
There can be a temptation to regard 1066 as a cut-off point – before, everything was Anglo-Saxon; after, everything was Norman. Of course, we know this is not so. Domesday Book, the culminating achievement of Anglo-Saxon government, was produced twenty years after the defeat. The great visual primary source, the Bayeux Tapestry, is superbly reproduced in full and with an authoritative commentary in David M. Wilson’s The Bayeux Tapestry, Thames & Hudson, 1985, revised 2004, while the Domesday book has been the subject of a magisterial facsimile edition.
Then there is what one might almost call a school of Anglo-Norman historiography. It is led by four writers, all writing in Latin, who it has been said ‘brought to the study of the past a professionalism hardly equalled in England since the days of . . . Bede.’ John of Worcester, whose chronicle was formerly attributed as by Florence of Worcester, and who may have been born as early as 1095 and died no later than 1143, based his work on various sources, including versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and made numerous, sometimes extensive, additions to it. In addition we owe to him bishop lists for all the Anglo-Saxon sees, which are of great importance to the historians of the English church, and royal genealogies for the various kingdoms. He was probably at his most productive between about 1120 and 1132/3 and born (a contemporary tells us) of English parents. He was a clear partisan of King Harold and proud of his Anglo-Saxon past. William of Malmesbury (d. c. 1143), son of a French father and an English mother, and who considered Hastings a fateful day for England, ‘our sweet country’, was also a considerable Latin stylist and scholar during what is known as Europe’s ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’ of classical learning. He was also a notable historian in the modern sense, using administrative documents as well as many narrative sources and boasting that his Gesta Regum Anglorum (‘The Doings [i.e. History] of the Kings of the English’) was the first Latin history of the English since the days of Bede. William also wrote the Gesta Pontificum, a history of the English church. Henry of Huntingdon, t
he son of the archdeacon of Huntingdon and an English mother, began his Historia Anglorum (‘History of the English’) at the suggestion of Alexander, bishop of Lincoln. By the standards of the day Henry’s book, in ten fairly short books and in straightforward Latin, with a number of battle scenes in verse, was light reading. It was certainly very popular. Bishop Alexander also commissioned the Oxford-based Welsh clerk Geoffrey of Monmouth to write a book on the prophesies of Merlin, which, with its diverting tales of King Arthur and under the sober-sounding title Historia Regum Britanniae (‘History of the Kings of Britain’), was to become one of the most influential works of fiction in the history of Europe and Hollywood. Orderic Vitalis (1075–c. 1142), born near Shrewsbury, was the son of a French priest by his English ‘hearth companion’. He wrote a Historia Ecclesiastica (‘History of the Church’) in which features his description of the Battle of Hastings. Despite its title, the Historia Novarum in Anglia (‘A History of the Recent Events in England’) by Eadmer (c. 1060–c. 1128) is largely an account of Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury’s role in those events and carries anecdotes about the recent past as they touched on his subject. It seems that Eadmer, the son of a rich English family impoverished by the outcome of the battle, had spoken with veterans of Hastings.
Wace (b. c. 1110), a native of Jersey, then part of the duchy of Normandy, is known for his Roman de Rou (‘The Story of Rollo’, the first duke of Normandy), and the Roman de Brut, an unfinished verse history of Britain. Important French historians for the later period include William of Poitiers, writing before 1077, whose Gesta Guillelmi (‘The Deeds of William’[the Conqueror]) was a considerable work of classical Latin, and William of Jumièges, author of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum (‘Deeds of the Dukes of the Normans’), written about 1070.
Books and Articles
Anonymous, ‘New Saxon Horse Burial in Suffolk’, British Archaeology, L/5 (1999)
—, ‘The Origin of a London Dock’, Medieval Life, V, PP. 14–25
Abels, Richard P., Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England, British Museum Publications, 1988
—, Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England, Longman, 1998
—, ‘Alfred the Great, the micel hæthen here and the Viking Threat’, in Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conferences, ed. Timothy Reuter, Ashgate, 2003
Adam, A. J., A Conquest of England:The Coming of the Normans, Hodder & Stoughton, 1965
Ahrens, C., ed., Sachsen und Angelsachsen, exh. cat., Helms-Museum, Hamburg, Nov. 1978–Feb. 1979
Alexander, Michael, Old English Riddles from the Exeter Book, Anvil Press, 1980
Allott, Stephen, Alcuin of York: His Life and Letters, William Sessions, 1974, reprinted 1987
Attwater, Donald, The Penguin Dictionary of Saints, Penguin Books, 1979
Audouy, M., ‘Excavations at the Church of All Saints, Brixworth, Northamptonshire, 1981–2’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, CXXXVII, pp. 1–44
Ayerst, David, and A. S. T. Fisher, Records of Christianity, II, Basil Blackwell, 1977
Backhouse, Janet, The Sherborne Missal, British Library, 1999
Backhouse, Janet, D. H. Turner and Leslie Webster, eds, The Golden Age of Anglo-Saxon Art, 966–1066, exh. cat., British Museum, London, 1984 [published on the 1000th anniversary of St Æthelwold’s death]
Barbaro, Alessandro, Charlemagne: Father of a Continent, U. California Press, 2004
Barlow, Frank, Edward the Confessor, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1970
—, The Godwins:The Rise and Fall of a Noble Dynasty, Longman, 2003
Bassett, S. R., ed., The Origins of the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms, Leicester UP, 1989
Bately, Janet, ‘The Alfredian Canon Revisited: One Hundred Years on’, in Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conferences, ed. Timothy Reuter, Ashgate, 2003, pp. 107–20
Bates, David, William the Conqueror, George Phillip, 1989
Battles, Paul, ‘Genesis A and the Anglo-Saxon “Migration Myth”’, Anglo-Saxon England, 29, 2000, pp. 43–66
Beckett, Katharine Scarfe, Anglo-Saxon Perceptions of the Islamic World, CUP, 2004
Bede the Venerable, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, OUP, 1979
Beech, George, Was the Bayeux Tapestry Made in France? The Case for St. Florent of Saumur, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005
Blackburn, Mark, ‘Mints, Burhs and the Grately Code’, in The Defence of Wessex:The Burghal Hidage and Anglo-Saxon Fortifications, ed. David Hill and A. R. Rumble, Manchester UP, 1996
—, ‘Alfred’s Coinage Reforms in Context’, in Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conferences, ed. Timothy Reuter, Ashgate, 2003, pp. 199–218
Blackburn, Mark A. S., and David N. Dumville, eds, Kings, Currency and Alliances: History and Coinage in Southern England in the Ninth Century, Boydell Press, 1998
Blair, John, Anglo-Saxon Oxfordshire, Sutton Publishing, 1994
—, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, OUP, 2005
Bolton, Whitney French, Alcuin and Beowulf: An Eighth-century View, Rutgers UP, 1979
Bonner, Gerald, David Rollason and Clare Stancliffe, eds, St Cuthbert, his Cult and his Community to AD 1200, Boydell Press, 1989
Bouet, Pierre, Brian Levy and François Neveux, The Bayeux Tapestry: Embroidering the Facts of History, Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2004
Bradley, S. A. J., Anglo-Saxon Poetry, Everyman’s Library, 1982, reprinted 1995
Brooke, Christopher, The Saxon and Norman Kings, Batsford, 1963, 3rd edn, Blackwell 2001
Brooks, Nicholas, ‘The Administrative Background’, in The Defence of Wessex:The Burghal Hidage and Anglo-Saxon Fortifications, ed. David Hill and A. R. Rumble, Manchester UP, 1996
—, ‘Alfredian Government: The West Saxon Inheritance’, in Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conferences, ed. Timothy Reuter, Ashgate, 2003, pp. 153–74
—, Church, State and Access to Resources in Early Anglo-Saxon England, Brixworth Lectures, 2nd series, no. 2, Friends of All Saints’ Church, Brixworth, 2003
Brooks, Nicholas, and Catherine Cubitt, eds, St Oswald of Worcester: Life and Influence, Leicester UP, 1996
Brown, Michelle P., Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts, British Library, 1991
—, Introduction, The British Library Diary 2004: The Lindisfarne Gospels, Frances Lincoln Publishers, 2003
Brown, Michelle P., and Carol A. Farr, eds, Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe, Leicester UP, 2001
Bullough, D. A., ‘What has Ingeld to do with Lindisfarne?’, Anglo-Saxon England, 22, 1993, pp. 93–125
Cameron, A., and others, eds, Dictionary of Old English (Toronto, 1986–)
Campbell, A., ed. and trans., Chronicon Æthelweardi, or The Chronicle of Æthelweard, Thomas Nelson, 1962
Campbell, James, general ed., The Anglo-Saxons, Penguin, 1991
—, ‘The Late Anglo-Saxon State: A Maximum View’, Proceedings of the British Academy, LXXXVII (1994)
—, ‘The United Kingdom of England: The Anglo-Saxon Achievement’, in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, ed. Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer, Routledge, 1995
—, The Anglo-Saxon State, Hambledon & London, 2000
—, ‘Placing King Alfred’, in Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh-Centenary Conferences, ed. Timothy Reuter, Ashgate, 2003, pp. 3–26
Cannon, Christopher, The Making of Chaucer’s English, CUP, 2004
Chambers, R.W., Beowulf:An Introduction to the Study of the Poem, CUP, 1931, 3/1967
Chaney, William A., The Cult of Kingship in Anglo-Saxon England, Manchester UP, 1970
Charles-Edwards, T. M., ‘Wales and Mercia, 613–918’, in Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe, ed. Michelle P. Brown and Carol A.Farr, Leicester UP, 2001
Charles-Edwards, Thomas, ed., After Rome, Short Oxford History of the British Isles, OUP, 2003
Clayton, Mary, The Cult of the Virgin Mary
in Anglo-Saxon England, CUP, 1990
Cochrane, Louise, Adelard of Bath: The first English Scientist, British Museum Press, 1994
Cooper, Nicholas J., The Archaeology of Rutland Water, Leicester Archaeology Monographs, 6, 2000
Cowie, Robert, ‘Mercian London’, in Mercia:An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe, ed. Michelle P. Brown and Carol A. Farr, Leicester UP, 2001
Crawford, Barbara, ‘The Vikings’, in From the Vikings to the Normans, Short Oxford History of the British Isles, ed. Wendy Davies, OUP, 2003, pp. 41–65
Crossley-Holland, Kevin, The Exeter Book Riddles, Penguin, 1980, 2/1993
Damico, Helen, Beowulf’s Wealtheow and the Valkyrie Tradition, U. Wisconsin Press, 1984
Davies, Wendy, ed., From the Vikings to the Normans, Short Oxford History of the British Isles, OUP, 2003
Davis, R. H. C., ‘The Norman Conquest’, History, LI, 1966
—, From Alfred the Great to Stephen, Hambledon & London, 1991
Dillon, Myles, and Nora K. Chadwick, The Celtic Realms, Sphere Books, 1973
Dolley, R. H. M., Anglo-Saxon Coins: Studies Presented to F. M. Stenton, Methuen, 1961
Dornier, Ann, ed., Mercian Studies, Leicester UP, 1977
Duggan, Anne J. (ed.), Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe, King’s College London Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 1993.
Dumville, David N., ‘The Anglian Collection of Royal Genealogies and Regnal Lists’, Anglo-Saxon England, 5, 1976, pp. 23–50
—, Wessex and England from Alfred to Edgar, Boydell Press, 1992
—, Britons and Anglo-Saxons in the Early Middle Ages, Ashgate, 1993
Eaton, Tim, Plundering the Past: Roman Stonework in Medieval Britain, Tempus Publishing, 2000
Elton, Geoffrey, The English, Blackwell, 1994
Farmer, D. H., ed., The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, OUP, 1978
Farrel, R. T., ed., The Vikings, Phillimore, 1982
Featherstone, Peter, ‘The Tribal Hidage and the Ealdormen of Mercia’, in Mercia: An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe, ed. Michelle P. Brown and Carol A. Farr, Leicester UP, 2001
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