The Norman Conquest

by Marc Morris

  Only when these terms were delivered, however, was the full extent of Edward’s wrath revealed. According to the author of the Life – a seemingly well-informed source at this point – the earl was told he could have the king’s peace ‘when he gave him back his brother alive’. On hearing these words, the same text continues, Godwine pushed away the table in front of him, mounted his horse and rode hard for his manor of Bosham on the Sussex coast. From there he took ship for Flanders (where else?), taking with him his wife, and his sons Swein and Tostig. Two other sons, Harold and Leofwine, had already fled west and sailed to exile in Ireland. That left the earl’s daughter, Queen Edith, as the only Godwine remaining in England, and Edward immediately banished her to a nunnery.

  ‘If any Englishman had been told that these events would take this turn he would have been amazed’, said the author of the D Chronicle.’Godwine had risen to such great eminence as if he ruled the king and all England.’ And now he was gone.36

  It is worth pausing at the point of Edward’s triumph to consider some of its implications. In the first place, there can be little doubt that this episode reveals the full extent of his hatred for Godwine. The Life of King Edward strives throughout to make Robert of Jumièges the villain of the piece, but it is clear even from this partisan account that it was the king himself who was for once making the running. The author’s decision to include (and, moreover, not to deny) the damaging accusation about Alfred’s murder suggests that this really did lie at the heart of the matter, and reinforces the belief that Edward had never truly forgiven the earl for his part in that terrible crime.

  Equally revealing is Edward’s treatment of his queen. The decision to send Edith to a nunnery suggests that there was little in the way of genuine affection in their marriage, at least on Edward’s part. When she later commissioned the Life, Edith tried to put the best possible gloss on these events, suggesting that she was sent her to childhood home at Wilton, merely to wait until the storm had passed. But the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, far more credibly, says that the queen was taken to the nunnery at Wherwell in Hampshire, where one of Edward’s elder half-sisters was the abbess. Edith, through the Life, also reveals in passing that there was a plan to divorce her, though she insists that it was Archbishop Robert’s idea and says that Edward himself suspended the proceedings.37

  Some modern historians have seized on the mention of a divorce as proof that the marriage itself was not celibate, arguing that it shows a king preparing to remarry in the hope of siring children.38 The problem with this, of course, is that it requires us to discount the Norman sources which assure us that Edward had promised the throne to William earlier in the same year. And the suggestion that the king did make this promise is reinforced at precisely this moment, in one of our English sources. Having described Edith’s banishment, the D Chronicle immediately adds:

  then soon came Duke William from beyond the sea with a great retinue of Frenchmen, and the king received him and as many of his companions as it pleased him, and let him go again.

  This single sentence has caused a great deal of controversy: it occurs only in the D version of the Chronicle, and in the 1950s one eminent scholar suggested that it was not part of the original text at all but a later interpolation. Aside from the obvious objection (why would a later copyist bother to introduce such a short and ambiguous statement?), there are good grounds for rejecting this conspiracy theory and accepting the testimony of this evidence at face value. The D Chronicle, once dismissed as a late source written in the faraway north of England, is now considered to have been compiled at the instance of Ealdred, bishop of Worcester, a figure often present at Edward’s court and, indeed, a player in the dramatic events of 1051. As such we can be fully confident that what it says is true: soon after the banishment of the Godwines, William of Normandy crossed the Channel to visit the king of England.39

  The reasonable supposition is that this visit was in some way connected with the claim to the throne: with Godwine gone, Edward would have finally been in a position to welcome William and perhaps to confirm in person the offer made by proxy earlier in the year. Of course, the D Chronicle says nothing about the business of the succession; all it tells us, apparently, is that the king received his kinsman and let him go again. The problem is that the meaning of the word ‘received’ has been lost in translation. The original Old English word used by the chronicler is underfeng, and a comparison of its use in other texts shows that it clearly means ‘received as a vassal’. Thus, when the Chronicle says that Edward received William ‘and as many of his companions as it pleased him’, it does not mean that certain unlucky members of the duke’s entourage were left standing outside in the autumn cold. Rather, it means that William and some of those with him did homage to the English king, swearing to serve him faithfully and acknowledging him as their lord.

  This brief statement in the D Chronicle is therefore doubly valuable. Not only does it tell us that the duke of Normandy crossed to England in the immediate aftermath of the crisis, thus reinforcing the belief that Edward had promised him the throne, it also reveals the king’s side of the bargain. Grateful as he may have been for the support of William’s family during his long years of exile, and affectionate as he clearly was towards his Norman friends and advisers, Edward is unlikely to have dropped so substantial a cherry into his kinsman’s lap without demanding something in return. What the king wanted, we may surmise, was a guarantee of the duke’s loyalty – a guarantee all the more urgent given William’s recent marriage to the daughter of England’s long-standing enemy, the count of Flanders. Edward can never have liked the idea of such an alliance, and he must have liked it even less after Godwine had fled to Flanders that autumn. Now, more than ever, it was imperative to bind William and Normandy to England. And so the duke was invited to visit the king in person, not merely to become his heir, but to kneel before him, and become his man.40

  By the end of the momentous year 1051, therefore, Edward’s plan had succeeded brilliantly. His friend Robert of Jumièges was in place as archbishop of Canterbury, his kinsman William of Normandy had been bound firmly to an alliance with England and, most importantly and dramatically, his hated father-in-law, Earl Godwine, was gone. The king was not so foolish as to suppose that the earl, whose rise had been in large part predicated on his skill in war, would take his losses lying down. Sooner or later the exile would try to fight his way back. For this reason Edward took immediate steps to safeguard his victory, rewarding others with the Godwine family’s confiscated lands and titles. It seems likely, for example, that his two principal allies, Leofric of Mercia and Siward of Northumbria, saw the extent of their domains expanded with portions of the earldoms of Godwine’s sons. Certainly Leofric’s eldest son, Ælfgar, was given the earldom of East Anglia vacated by Godwine’s son Harold. At the same time, the western half of Godwine’s own earldom of Wessex, along with the title of earl, were given to Odda, one of the king’s greatest thegns and probably also a kinsman. (‘A good man, pure and very noble’, says the D Chronicle, providing a rare character note.) In addition, Edward could count on the support of his nephew, Ralph (the son of his sister, Godgifu), who had been given the earldom left empty by the murder of Godwine’s nephew, Beorn Estrithson, in 1049. All these men had a vested interest in keeping the Godwines out.41

  But, in spite of his careful preparations against a counter-revolution, the king had made one major miscalculation. In March 1051, during the same council in which he had appointed the new archbishop of Canterbury and almost certainly announced his plan for the succession, Edward had also instituted a tax break. As the D Chronicle explains, it was at this moment that the king had done away with the geld – the tax his father, Æthelred, had introduced thirty-nine years earlier in order to pay for England’s mercenary fleet. If the move was calculated to increase the king’s popularity, it was seemingly effective. ‘This tax vexed the English nation for all the aforesaid time’, continues the D Chronicle. ‘It always had prior
ity over other taxes that were paid in various ways, and was the most generally oppressive.’ This, of course, had been especially true in the time of Edward’s immediate predecessor, Harthacnut, whose demand for a geld of almost four times the usual size appears to have cost him his kingship. It is, indeed, entirely likely that the pledge of good governance extracted from Edward on his return in 1041 could have contained a specific promise to reduce the level or incidence of geld in the future.42

  Of course, abolishing the geld also meant abolishing the mercenary fleet, but this too may have been considered a desirable outcome. Edward and others around him probably disliked the ongoing presence of a mercenary force in their midst. Historically, at least, the fleet had been crewed by men of Scandinavian extraction, and if that remained the case in 1051 they would have been viewed warily by a king who had spent the past decade banishing Scandinavian sympathizers. Moreover, there is a possible connection between the fleet and Earl Godwine, in that the earl’s nephew, Beorn Estrithson, may have been its captain. Certainly, soon after Beorn’s murder in 1049, the king paid off nine of the fleet’s fourteen ships, and gave the five remaining crews a year’s notice. By the time he abolished the geld in 1051, the entire force had been disbanded.43

  Edward and his advisers must have believed that they could manage perfectly well by relying on the established royal right to raise an army (or a navy – the sources make little distinction) on demand as the need arose. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in 1008 Æthelred the Unready had demanded a helmet and coat of mail from every eight hides of land in England – a demand which, given that the kingdom contained some 80,000 hides, suggests an army of around 10,000 men. Similarly, we know from the Domesday Book that in Edward’s own day the rule in Berkshire was for every five hides of land to supply and subsidize one soldier for a two-month period – a system which, if applied across the whole kingdom, would have produced a 16,000-man host.44 Thus when in the spring of 1052 the king and his counsellors got wind that Godwine was preparing to invade, a fleet was raised by just such conventional means and assembled at Sandwich. The C Chronicle tells us that it was formed of forty small vessels, and the E Chronicle adds that it was captained by two of Edward’s new earls, Ralph and Odda.

  When, after a lengthy wait, Godwine sailed at midsummer, it seemed as if the king’s ships might be a sufficient deterrent. Although the earl slipped past Sandwich and made a landing further along the Kent coast, he was pursued by Ralph and Odda and forced to keep moving. A storm in the Channel subsequently caused Godwine to sail back to Flanders and the king’s fleet to return to Sandwich.

  Not long afterwards, however, the disadvantages of relying on a non-professional navy became apparent. As the E Chronicle explains, the king’s ships were ordered back to London to receive new crews and captains, but long delays meant that ‘the fleet did not move, and they all went home’.

  This dispersal of the royal forces gave Godwine his chance. Again he set sail for England, this time harrying the Isle of Wight and linking arms with his sons Harold and Leofwine, who had raised a fleet of their own from Ireland. Probably towards the end of August, their combined armada sailed east along the coasts of Sussex and Kent, seizing provisions, ships and hostages, and recruiting more and more men to their banner. By the time they reached Sandwich, they had, according to the C Chronicler, ‘an overwhelming host’. ‘The sea was covered with ships’, says the Life of King Edward. ‘The sky glittered with the press of weapons.’

  Had there still been a royal navy stationed in Sandwich, the Godwines could hardly have achieved such success. But Edward, although aware of his enemies’ return, was struggling to assemble a force with which to oppose them. ‘He sent up country for reinforcements’, says the C Chronicle, ‘but they were very slow in coming.’

  And so Godwine and his sons were able to sail their fleet unopposed along the north Kent coast and up the River Thames. On Monday 14 September they reached London and stationed themselves at Southwark on the river’s southern bank. By this time the king had succeeded in assembling a fleet of fifty ships and also a large army. The Godwines sent a message to him, demanding the restoration of their lands and titles. Edward sent back an angry refusal. It was, in short, an almost exact replay of the previous autumn, with the two sides once again separated by the River Thames, each waiting for the other to blink.

  But this time round the advantage clearly lay with Godwine. During his absence public opinion seems to have swung behind him, possibly because Englishmen were against the idea of a Norman succession; certainly all versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are at this point laced with ill-disguised hostility towards the king’s Norman advisers. The Life of King Edward says that reinforcements were swelling the earl’s ranks from all directions, while the Chronicle informs us that the citizens of London were also quick to fall in with his wishes. It seems obvious that, as the Life claims, the military superiority lay with Godwine, and that no one was prepared to risk a civil war by fighting for Edward. The earl had stopped at Southwark that Monday morning at low tide, but all day long the tide had been rising in his favour. When it reached its peak his fleet raised anchor and swung across the river to encircle the king’s ships on the opposite bank. Godwine’s supporters reportedly had to be restrained from attacking the royal forces. Negotiations followed, and an exchange of hostages, but everyone realized that this was now checkmate.

  The king’s Norman friends certainly realized it, and responded by mounting their horses and fleeing. Some went north, says the Chronicle, and others rode west. Robert of Jumièges and his companions forced their way out of London’s east gate, slaying those who tried to stop them, and hastening all the way to the headland in Essex known as the Naze. There the archbishop committed himself to a boat that was barely sea-worthy and risked a dangerous voyage across the Channel to Normandy. The E version of the Chronicle, pro-Godwine in its sympathies, was pleased to note that in his haste Robert left behind his pallium, and opined that this proved that God had not wanted him to be archbishop in the first place.

  The next morning a council met outside of London, and the revolution of the previous year was formally reversed. Godwine ostentatiously begged Edward’s forgiveness, claiming he and his family were innocent of all the charges brought against them. The king, barely able to contain his fury, had no option but to grant his pardon and restore to the earl and his sons their confiscated estates. The council ratified the complete friendship between them, says the C Chronicle, and made a promise of good laws to the whole nation. Archbishop Robert was declared an outlaw, adds the E Chronicle, together with all the Frenchmen, ‘for they had mainly been responsible for the discord that had arisen between Godwine and the king’. A short time later, concludes the Life of King Edward, now that the storm had finally subsided,’the queen, the earl’s daughter, was brought back to the king’s bedchamber’.45

  It was now abundantly clear that there was not going to be a Norman succession. Robert of Jumièges, once he recovered from his perilous crossing of the Channel, was probably the first to relate to the duke of Normandy the terrible turn that events in England had taken.

  But by the time the archbishop arrived in Normandy that autumn, events in England were the least of William’s worries.

  5

  Holy Warriors

  Like Edward the Confessor, William of Normandy had begun the year 1052 with a sense of triumph, having successfully bested a fearsome opponent.

  The man in question was Geoffrey Martel, count of Anjou. Son of the notorious Fulk Nerra, whose skills as a warlord and castle-builder had transformed Anjou into one of France’s great principalities, Geoffrey was a figure cast very much in his father’s mould. His surname, which translates as ‘the Hammer’, was later said to be self-awarded, and signified his belief that he could beat anyone into submission. ‘A man of overweening pride’, confirmed the contemporary William of Poitiers, but also a man ‘remarkably skilled and experienced in the art of war’.1

&
nbsp; Even before he succeeded his father in 1040, Geoffrey had been pursuing the same policy of ruthless expansion, capturing his neighbours in battle and detaining them until they agreed to his extortionate demands: both the count of Poitou to the south and the count of Blois-Chartres to the east had suffered in this way and been forced to cede territory. But when in 1047 Geoffrey moved northwards into Maine and seized and imprisoned the bishop of Le Mans, his other neighbours eventually decided that something had to be done. Two years later, the king of France summoned a coalition army of other French rulers and led a punitive invasion of Anjou. The duke of Normandy, being heavily in the king’s debt since the battle of Val-ès-Dunes, naturally rode by his sovereign’s side.2

  But despite the invasion, and excommunication by the pope, Geoffrey continued to grow stronger. He refused to relinquish his grip on the bishop of Le Mans in the hope of extending his power northwards, and in 1051 that ambition was realized. In March that year the young count of Maine died, and the citizens of Le Mans invited Geoffrey to come and take over the whole county.3

  This was ominous news for Normandy, for Maine had been a buffer with Anjou. From March 1051 the expansion of Anjou menaced Normandy directly, and indeed it was probably soon after that date that Geoffrey invaded the duchy, seizing the town of Alencon.4 No doubt he considered this justifiable revenge for William’s participation in the earlier invasion of Anjou, but the doubly distressing fact for the duke was that here too the invader had come by invitation. The lords of Alencon, who took their name from nearby Bellême, held lands that straddled the border between Maine and Normandy, and, like border families everywhere, they tended to wear their loyalties lightly as a result. After Geoffrey had advanced into Maine they evidently decided that he, not William, was their preferred overlord, and threw open the gates of Alencon in welcome.