A Brief History of Britain 1066-1485

by Vincent, Nicholas

  Today, the journey from London to Ipswich by car is only sixty miles, about an hour’s drive on a very dull road. From the air, however, the picture shows a ribboned and shredded coastline, one crucial to English history: many hundreds of miles of tidal mudbanks, monotonous to the eye, but dotted with havens where a boat can be landed, and with easy access to the Essex forests from which came the timber to build boats. It was within sight of these estuarial waters that much of the fate of eleventh century England was decided. It was here that the Viking fleets sought to hide, and it was here, at the battles of Maldon and Assendon, that Viking armies, themselves consisting of so many boatloads of marauders, decisively defeated English armies by land. The sea brought danger and foreign invaders, but it also brought wealth and an opportunity for nautical prowess. Even today, nearly a third of England’s overseas trade enters and leaves via the single great port of Felixstowe. The well-kept lawns and rich wine cellars of the modern University of Cambridge are to a large extent maintained from the profits of Felixstowe’s steel and concrete economy.

  In the Middle Ages, it was no coincidence that it was another eastern town, Norwich, with easy access to the profits of North Sea trade, that was perhaps the richest in the kingdom. Nor should it be forgotten that Norfolk was the county of Nelson, himself raised at Burnham Market, within strolling distance of the oozing estuarial mudbanks of Burnham Stathe. Market, harbour and the defence of the realm form a highly significant trinity. The shipping of southern and eastern England was crucial not only to trade but to England’s military reputation overseas. In the eleventh century, one of the most vivid passages in the contemporary life of Edward the Confessor describes a great warship, given to the King. It was with gifts such as this that political disputes were healed. The money to pay for ships and their crews of eighty or more oarsmen was one of the more significant tax burdens placed upon society. Galley service was perhaps even more important to the Anglo-Saxon military than service on land and, already by 1066, ports such as Hastings were obliged to supply regular quotas of ships or men to the King’s service.

  The English Diet

  From ships came trade and a navy. The sea also fed the English. As one historian has remarked, the herring served as the potato of medieval England. Vast quantities of fish supplemented a diet from which red meat, the ‘roast beef of old England’, was almost entirely absent. Visitors from France to England in the nineteenth century came to regard the English countryside as one vast meat factory for the production of beef. But beef, in the Middle Ages, was a luxury encountered more rarely than venison or herring or eel. Cattle were expensive to feed, especially in the winter months when, before the introduction of the turnip as a common winter crop, there was very little save hay upon which they could be fed. Those that were kept were as often used to pull ploughs and carts as for milk or meat. Oxen were the tractors and trucks of medieval England. There was also perhaps a sense, once again inherited from Bede, that there was something rather awful and un-Christian about the eating of beef. As early as the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great, writing to Augustine of Canterbury on the conversion of the English to Christianity, had associated the eating of the flesh of cattle with the feasts of the pagan rather than with the Christian calendar.

  Christianity was a Mediterranean religion, from a region where the diet was principally vegetarian. Meat eating was both a characteristic of the barbarian tribes and a symbol of Germanic pagan allegiance. Only in the Celtic regions of Christendom, in Wales and in Cumbria, did cattle remain a staple element of diet, albeit prized as much for their milk as for their meat. Rents in Cumberland were still paid in ‘cornage’, as so many horns of cattle. The Welsh, in the 1260s, serving alongside Englishmen in the armies of the rebel baron Simon de Montfort, were horrified by the greed of the English for grain with which to make bread, just as the English craved to escape from the endless but breadless Welsh diet of cheese, milk and meat. As with modern commercial catering, poultry represented a compromise acceptable to most. Chickens and eggs were consumed in vast numbers. Church rents were sometimes payable as so many chickens, particularly at Christmas, and hard-boiled eggs were blessed in church before the Easter Mass, for distribution amongst the village community, a practice that by the fourteenth century was being condemned in some dioceses as a pagan superstition, but which together with the Christmas fowl has perhaps bequeathed both the modern phenomenon of the Christmas turkey and the Easter egg.

  The English Myth

  This was a world lit only by fire, fuelled by wood and water, fed and clothed for the most part from the produce of a few surrounding acres of plough and pasture, protected only by the small ships of the southern and eastern coasts, sustained in times of crisis by a myth of nationhood and Christian kingship devised by Bede and exploited by Bede’s Anglo-Saxon successors. Elements of this world are still with us. In 1940, at the height of the last great crisis that threatened to overwhelm the English, Winston Churchill was able to make potent use of the myths of Englishness, of blood and soil, of the ploughman and the sailor of small ships, to conjure up a Dunkirk spirit, itself heir to the mythologizing of Alfred and of Bede. The advocates of English independence and the haters of European conformity, even today, pitch their stand on a similarly mythologized village green of Englishness, proclaiming England’s particular historic destiny. No doubt, if one looked hard enough, it might still be possible to discover, kicking their heels somewhere in the far corners of England, the direct descendants not just of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes but of the Celts, and even of the aboriginals, if not the Neanderthals, who once inhabited this land. For the most part, however, even by 1066, long before the Normans landed their ships at Roman Pevensey, England was a land of myth and make-believe, its people a race of mongrels, its language and inhabitants already an uncertain mixture of German, Scandinavian and Welsh.

  Crisis

  At the top end of this world, within the narrow but rich seam between king and commoner, a small elite of church leaders and secular aristocrats dominated Anglo-Saxon society. It is the doings of these men that form virtually the only facts recorded in works of tenth- or eleventh-century history. What emerges from such accounts is a story of political crisis in England provoked by two great threats: firstly, of foreign invasion, and, secondly, of civil war. In the late tenth century, from the 980s onwards, during the reign of King Aethelred II, these threats combined to provoke a collapse in public order. Monastic chroniclers, having one eye always focussed upon God’s dealings with mankind, and aware that the year 1000 was quite likely to mark a millennial watershed in human history, later blamed this collapse upon the King himself. What health could there be in the nation, if the King were a sinner or, in Aethelred’s case, not merely sinful but un-counselled (‘Unread’ or ‘Unready’)? In reality, Aelthelred seems not only to have been well advised but a dynamic and bold military commander, changing his coinage in such a way as to advertise the need for men and weapons, a new portrait image of the King being shown on every one of his several million silver pennies, properly helmeted and armed. The problem lay not with Aethelred but with the coalition of enemies that he faced. Potential invaders from overseas now sought the assistance of traitors nearer to home.

  St Brices’s Day Massacre

  In 1002, hoping to crush the threat from Denmark and the English Danelaw, Aethelred allowed, perhaps encouraged, a massacre of Danes within his English kingdom, timed for St Brice’s day, 13 November: a pogrom, neither the first nor the last in English history, that was intended for political effect, to draw together friends in the mutual expression of hatred towards a common enemy. Following the destruction of much of Oxford in the ensuing massacre, Aethelred himself issued a charter justifying his actions. The Danes, so he argued, had to be rooted out from England like weeds (‘cockles’) from a field of wheat. Yet ethnic cleansing has never been an effective means of dealing with dissent. Those who choose murder and expropriation over negotiation generally sign their own death warran
ts. Far from advertising their racial superiority, they often draw attention to their own inadequacy. It is certainly ironic that England’s greatest pogrom should have been timed for the feast day of St Brice, no Englishman but a Frankish archbishop from the Loire Valley, who achieved sanctity in part through his long residence in Rome. According to a much later source, it was the very attractiveness of the Danes to English women that led to the massacre of 1002. The Danes combed their hair daily and began to bathe every week to make themselves more seductive. It was the fact that 13 November 1002 fell on a Saturday, ‘Laugar-dagr’, or ‘Bath-day’, in the Danish language, that determined its choice as a day of slaughter by the unwashed and sexually frustrated English.

  Famine – and Apocalypse?

  The massacre of 1002 was followed by a great famine, in which not just the cockles but the wheat itself came close to failing as the sense of crisis and apocalypse grew sharper. Aethelred’s reign spanned the year 1000, widely believed to mark the imminent second coming of Christ. A fear of imminent apocalypse is inclined to provoke precisely the crisis which its prophets proclaim. Aethelred’s own administrators and officials were disunited, and vied with one another for a greater share of power. The Danish King, Swein Forkbeard, mounted a full-scale invasion of England, no doubt hoping to seize his own spoils from the coming millennium. In 1013, he inflicted a crushing defeat upon Aethelred’s armies, forcing the King himself to seek exile with his wife’s family in northern France. A brief return in 1014 was followed by Aethelred’s death, and the succession of his son, Edmund Ironside, himself fatally wounded at the battle of Assendon in 1016. London was handed over to the Danes.

  Aethelred’s former ministers scrambled to make their own settlements with the victors, including Godwin, a minor official from Sussex, now raised up as the greatest of English quislings under Swein and Swein’s son Cnut. Godwin was married to Cnut’s sister-in-law, and in due course gave Scandinavian names to his eldest sons: Swein, Harold and Tostig. The eldest of these claimed to be not Godwin’s son but Cnut’s, suggesting a degree of intimacy between the two families that extended beyond the council chamber to the royal bed. Cnut himself, meanwhile, had married Aethelred’s widow, an act of sexual imperialism intended to stamp his authority upon the ruling English dynasty as upon England itself, now subsumed within a North Sea empire comprising large parts of Britain and Denmark and with ambitions towards the conquest of Norway. Most of those Englishmen whose careers prospered after the 1040s, and who were to play so crucial a role in the Norman Conquest of 1066, came to maturity in this period of Cnut’s reign, in the aftermath of a Danish Conquest itself no less remarkable than that later mounted by William of Normandy.

  The Godwins

  In particular, the breaking under Cnut of the power of the old English administrative class paved the way for the emergence of an even narrower political elite, founded upon only three or four key families: Godwin and his sons, as earls of Wessex and East Anglia; the Leofricsons as rulers over Mercia and the Midland counties; and the house of Bamburgh in Northumbria, itself locked into a bloody feud with the rival house of Aelfhelm of York. Much of northern England was divided between two great regional loyalties, to Bernicia in the north, and Deira stretching southwards as far as the Humber, divisions that themselves could be traced back to the age of Bede. Any idea that England had been welded into a united nation was given the lie by this division, as late as the 1040s and 50s, into a series of local earldoms themselves tracing their roots as far back as the divided kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex, Bernicia and Deira. Moreover, and as with any Mafia-style division of authority between a few oligarchic families of rich and powerful bosses, the fewer the families the greater the storms and hatreds brewed up amongst the elite, and the more vicious the jockeying for position. From this, it was Godwin and his sons who emerged as the richest and most successful players. In a lawless environment, the more powerful the protector, the more those in need of protection will commend themselves to his authority. When the wolves are loosed, the hobbits will run for cover. This is precisely what happened in respect to personal commendations to the Godwin family, England’s greatest godfathers. Increasing numbers of lesser men, even outside the Godwin heartlands, began to commend themselves and their lands to Godwin lordship. As a result, when Cnut died and was succeeded by his son, Harold Harefoot, it was the Godwin family, in title merely earls, in reality the chief power behind the throne, who manipulated the situation to their own advantage.

  By his wife, Emma, Aethelred left two sons, Edward and Alfred. These boys, the ‘aethelings’ or ‘throne-worthy ones’, had gone into exile at the time of Cnut’s invasion, and had been brought up at the court of their mother’s family, in northern France. In England, Emma had then been married to Cnut, and had borne a son by him, Harthacnut. Harthacnut claimed to be his father’s only legitimate heir, Cnut’s other son, Harold Harefoot, having been born to an Englishwoman before Cnut’s marriage to Emma. The laws of marriage at this time were far from rigid but it was nonetheless assumed as a matter of course that only a legitimate son could succeed as king. From the time of the founding of the West Saxon dynasty, back in the dim distance of the fifth century, no declared bastard had sat upon the West Saxon throne. Harold Harefoot, so the party of Emma and Harthacnut alleged, was illegitimate and had only seized power in England whilst Harthacnut was preoccupied, in 1035, securing his father’s kingdom in Denmark. Whether this slur was true or not, into the turmoil that followed Cnut’s death stepped Alfred the Aetheling, Emma’s son by her marriage to Aethelred, clearly hoping for his own share of power. Alfred, however, was deceived. Received by Earl Godwin at Guildford, he was seized, taken captive and then blinded, the traditional means, together with castration, of rendering a potential heir unfit for royal power: a technique imported from Byzantium, and in itself yet another indication of England’s contacts with the wider world. Alfred was sent in captivity to Ely, where he soon died. The crime here was horrific, and the taint of criminality extended not just to Harold Harefoot but to Godwin and perhaps even to Emma, who had first encouraged Alfred to enter England. For Godwin to have permitted the seizure and mutilation of a guest of his own hearth was regarded as a particularly vile act. To encompass the death of a royal prince, sprung from the line of Alfred the Great and the house of Wessex, merely compounded the crime. Godwin and his sons were to be haunted by Alfred’s death for the remainder of their lives.

  Edward the Confessor

  Like most crimes, in the short term Alfred’s murder had distinct advantages for the criminals, consolidating Godwin’s authority in England. When Harold Harefoot died suddenly in 1037, followed only five years later by Harthacnut, it was Earl Godwin who brokered the next stage in this game of kings and crowns, allowing for the return to England of another of Aethelred’s sons, Alfred’s elder brother Edward. Edward has gone down in history as ‘The Confessor’, a milky-white, long fingered and semi-translucent embodiment of everything most saintly; an old man, famed for piety and chastity rather than for worldly strength. Yet this reputation comes to us only from the later years of Edward’s reign, and in particular from the period after his death, when historians were seeking an explanation for recent cataclysmic events. In his lifetime, certainly through to the 1050s, Edward was a more forceful and commanding figure, famed as much for his rages as for his piety, keen on hunting, a jealous accumulator of wealth and precious objects, a patron of the military, not merely of the Church.

  Edward’s one overriding problem was his indebtedness to Earl Godwin. Without Godwin he might never have negotiated his return to England, and yet Edward clearly resented not only Godwin’s role in the death of his brother Alfred, but the extraordinary degree to which, over a period of thirty years, Godwin had risen from virtually nothing to establish landed wealth and a military authority rivalling not just that of his fellow earls but the King himself. Like many princes who come to the throne relatively late in life (Edward was at least 38 by the time of his access
ion), a sense of resentment may have sounded as the keynote of his life. He clearly resented his mother, who had abandoned him in childhood to marry his father’s usurper, Cnut of Denmark. So great was Edward’s sense of injury here that, after 1042, Emma was immediately stripped both of power and of her very considerable wealth. Even more bitterly, Edward resented Godwin. Although he was persuaded in the short term to take Godwin’s daughter, Edith, as his queen, and although Edith and her family publicly proclaimed the marriage to be all that it should have been, Edward himself may have sought, from the moment he succeeded to the throne, to work against the Godwins and ultimately to bring about their downfall.

  His great opportunity came in 1051. The election of a new archbishop of Canterbury, Robert of Jumièges, a Frenchman from those regions of northern France where Edward himself had been exiled before 1042, and the welcome that Edward extended to Count Eustace of Boulogne, another Frenchman, married to Edward’s own sister and apparently given or claiming some sort of authority over Dover and its defences, provoked Godwin and his sons to the brink of civil war. With the support of the other English earls, Edward forced the Godwins into exile, Godwin himself to Bruges in Flanders, Harold and others of his sons to Ireland. The precise motivations here are difficult to establish, but, in all likelihood, these events were the outcome of long-fomented hatred. In particular, the involvement of Eustace of Boulogne at Dover and the promotion of a French archbishop of Canterbury suggest a deliberate attempt on Edward’s part to promote northern French allies at the expense of the Godwins. They also suggest that already, as early as 1051, there was a crisis over the future succession to the English throne. Dover and Kent were the keys to England, and it is difficult not to interpret the offer of Dover to Eustace as in some way associated with Edward’s future plans for the throne. Certainly, after 1066, Eustace was to lobby long and loud for possession of Dover castle. In 1067, he was to attempt unsuccessfully to seize Dover as a point from which to launch his own bid for power.