by Justin Hill
When Godwin arrived, he was brought into a small chamber where the king was holding a private feast.
It was a small gathering of no more than twenty and Godwin did not know why he had been included in this group. He took the seat farthest from the king and said little, yet listened well.
‘What say you, Godwin?’ Knut called across the chamber at one point, and Godwin stammered because he had not heard what they were talking about.
‘We were talking of Norman, Leofric’s son. He was plotting against me.’
Godwin knew the lad. A pleasant fellow, but no conspirator.
‘Did you know of Norman’s plot?’ Knut asked.
Godwin saw the look in Knut’s eye, as if he knew the answer again.
‘I did not, lord, and if I had I would have knocked some sense into the lad.’
‘You would not have told me?’
Godwin paused for a moment. ‘You know, lord, if I heard of another plot that meant harm to you, I would come and tell you.’
There were some murmurings from around the room, but Knut seemed pleased.
That night Godwin got quite drunk, and he found himself being given a bolster to sleep on when the feast was over. They’ll kill you in your sleep, Godwin thought, and he wished that it had been done before, more cleanly, when he could face it like the Dane warrior who took the executioner’s blade-strike full in the face.
But Knut kept Godwin around. Friends close, and enemies closer. A year after the battle at Assandune Knut was looking around for men to help him rule.
‘I like you, Godwin,’ Knut said. It was a simple and straightforward sentence. ‘I want to make you alderman.’
Godwin choked on his ale.
‘I need men like you.’
‘Thank you, lord.’ But inside Godwin groaned. He was sick of cajoling men into battle, and now he had to cajole them to pay up their taxes instead.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘You are not married, are you?’
‘No,’ Godwin said.
‘I have a cousin who is not married. Her name is Gytha. She is the daughter of a warrior named Thorgil Sprakling, whose mother was daughter of Harald Bluetooth.’
Knut went on for some time and Godwin did not quite understand what was being offered.
‘You would like me to marry her?’ Godwin said at last.
Knut looked at him as if he were stupid. ‘Yes.’
‘Is she very ugly?’
Knut’s cheeks coloured. ‘No,’ he said. ‘She is a very pretty woman, tall and broad and strong, who will give you good children.’
Godwin’s mouth opened. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘thank you!’
Godwin was away from Contone for a long time, and when he came home he avoided Kendra. She waited for him in her room, but he did not come.
When Godwin did appear, he had been at the beer. He wandered down to the brew house and found Agnes and Kendra, and did not feel as if he was the lord of the manor any more, felt he was somehow a visitor.
‘All well?’ he said and the women’s expressions did not change.
‘All’s well,’ Agnes told him, and Godwin came in and warmed his hands on the fire, but he wasn’t exactly sure why he had come or what he had meant to achieve, and when Kendra turned round she saw that Godwin had gone.
In time Knut’s brother Harald died and Knut became king of England and Danemark and Norway. He favoured England over his other kingdoms, became more English than the English, and Archbishop Wulfstan found him a willing pupil. He lectured Knut on England and the English – their laws, their Church and their many and confusing saints – and Godwin, amongst others, introduced him to the legends and the feuds, the wells with the sweetest water and the best places for hunting hare or hind or hart.
One of Knut’s first actions was to reorganise the government under jarls. The old kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex, Northymbria, Cantware and East Anglia were all made jarldoms. His father’s warlords were the first jarls, a word which the English found difficult to pronounce and changed to ‘earl’.
But Thorkel and Eric knew Knut when he was a pimply boy, and Knut never really forgave them for that. Eric remained earl of Northymbria till his ship sank somewhere between Norway and Orkney, and as the Northymbrians, when they were a kingdom, had a tradition of taking their kings from the Norwegian royal line, Knut made another Norwegian, named Siward, earl.
Thorkel managed to keep his tongue for a few years, before smarting too much under a young man’s rule, and he rebelled in the end, and died in exile.
In 1018 Knut spoke to Godwin. ‘I want you to be earl of Wessex.’
‘No,’ Godwin told him.
Knut seemed surprised.
‘I am no earl,’ Godwin said.
‘Why not?’
‘I am only a thegn’s son.’
Knut didn’t give a toss if he was a thegn’s son or not. ‘You will be earl. I have decided.’
Godwin protested, but Knut was firm.
‘You keep your oaths,’ Knut said simply, as if that was the only reason he needed.
All summer of 1026 Knut was abroad putting down a rebellion in Norway. When he left he asked Godwin to be regent. Godwin accepted, but it was all the work without the crown. He trudged through the duties and wondered why God had let the whole country fight so hard to such little end.
Was it for this? he wondered as he stared at the hall of Danes and English singing Danish songs. For wealth and prestige and power?
No, he thought. It was not. Edmund and Godwin fought for England and Bede’s Angelkyn – the English people – Dane, Saxon, Jute and Angle. Sadness came back to him that evening at hall, as an Icelandic poet hammered out his skaldic verses, and Godwin looked about at the men who were his age when he took Contone back from Ulf, and they seemed spoilt and callow and strangely foreign.
Many of them were foreign, he thought, for they were Dane’s sons, or lads of pure Danish blood who spoke English with their fathers’ accents. But even the English boys were different. England was different. The England Godwin had grown up in was lost and gone, and lingered only in memory.
For three days there was feasting and then a week of law courts, and Godwin sat in judgement on them and gave out doom like a king of old. He listened to their cases and their oaths in the law courts, watched men grip hot irons or submit themselves to ordeals of water and flame and combat, and he was Justice, lifting his steady scales, and judged them fairly.
On the twelfth day Godwin tired of listening to the cases and the babble of evening poets and decided they would go hunting. His men had found boars rooting in the next valley, and Godwin had some young hounds that needed blooding.
*
Godwin sat in his private chamber in Contone and watched the flames curl on each other. In Mykelhal the men were already gathering. He could hear their excited and hungry voices, could feel the slow drag of the feast tug at him, as the tide tugs at the safely moored boat.
Kendra had been watching Godwin from the doorway, and when it was ready she brought him a horn of spiced ale.
‘Are you well, my lord?’ she said.
Godwin looked up and forced a smile.
‘Ah, Kendra,’ he said, and took the proffered horn. ‘Thank you.’
Kendra lingered for a moment.
Godwin was in a strange mood, and as she walked away, he called her back.
‘Kendra.’ He pulled a stool across for her. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘sit.’ Godwin took in a long deep breath and let it out again. ‘You know,’ he said at last, ‘do you think my sons will understand why it was that we had to fight? Will they care about our stories? The battles we fought, the friends we lost?’
‘Of course,’ Kendra said.
‘I don’t think they will,’ Godwin said. ‘They will look at us as old fools who messed up at every step.’
‘You were no fools. You, Edmund, Beorn, Caerl, you were the tallest of the tall, the bravest and most courageous men in England.’
‘And they’r
e dead.’
‘But the cause you fought for is not dead. The hills and rivers and people remain. There are many athelings in exile. One day one of them might return. It might be that the real battle has not yet been fought.’
Godwin looked up. Her speech had snagged his attention but he did not feel her confidence. ‘This morning my son said, “Father, why did you fight against the king?” I replied that there were two kings then and that I fought for the one who was murdered.’
‘Who murdered him?’ the conversation had run.
‘An alderman named Eadric.’
‘Why did he murder him?’
‘Because he wanted favour with Knut.’
‘And did he win favour?’
‘Yes,’ Godwin said. ‘Knut raised him higher than all the other men. By his neck!’
‘And did you know this Eadric?’
‘I did,’ Godwin said. ‘He drove my father into exile. Murdered good men.’
And he killed my beloved lord.
‘I think your father must have been a coward,’ his son had said.
‘Your father was no coward,’ Kendra said.
The look in her eyes was clear and sharp.
Godwin looked away. ‘No, he was not,’ he said. There was a long pause. ‘I cannot even remember his face. Cannot picture him or hear him speak.’
Kendra kept her own counsel and Godwin fell quiet for a while.
‘I will raise my sons differently,’ Godwin said. ‘I will never swear wrongful oaths, never abandon them as my father abandoned me.’ Kendra took the ale-jug from the hearth stone and poured more steaming beer into his horn. ‘Listen to them. They want their bellyfull tonight. Damned Danes.’ Godwin let out a sigh. ‘I am in foul spirits tonight, Kendra. And I know not why. Sing to me,’ he said at last, but there was a moment’s pause.
‘What should I sing?’
Godwin asked for the song he had first heard her sing: a sad tune that matched his mood.
‘Yes, that one,’ he said and she sat straight and tall and as the Danes in the hall burst into their first drinking songs, Kendra began. Her voice was quiet at first, and very beautiful, like a balm to Godwin, and even the mice in the roof-thatch stopped scrabbling to listen.
Those years with Edmund were like a strange and melancholy dream.
Godwin sat in the feast hall that night and stared at the close-pressed warriors on the benches. I was there and this is how it happened and we should have beaten the Danes without Eadric. We would have beaten them, Godwin thought, and only God’s will had made it otherwise, and he felt old and weary and nostalgic for the lost days of England, when he was Edmund Ironside’s man.
But Kendra’s words had found a crack, as the thorn bush that falls on rocks and finds a crevice where roots can grow. Emma’s sons were in Normandig, but Godwin did not hold high opinions of either. Edmund had two sons, and Godwin wondered where they were now, and whether they took after their father.
Kendra watched Godwin as he sat and stared into the hall fire. His gaze was drawn deep into the flames, and his face softened for a moment.
Silent and empty, Kendra hummed to herself, former hall of laughter,
The once-lord wanders
Sorrow and longing as companions
The solitary man awaiting God’s mercy.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
When starting to tell the events of 1066, I found it almost impossible to understand the whole tale without recounting that other (and much less famous) conquest of England which took place fifty years earlier: for what fell on the 14 October 1066, at the Battle of Hastings, was an Anglo-Danish state, established by Knut, and with it fell King Harold who was himself half-Danish, and a member of the Danish not English royal family.
King Ethelred is sadly famous, mainly because of the nickname he has since acquired: Ethelred the Unready. Although his unreadiness is legendary, the name actually comes from an Old English pun on the name Ethelred, which means ‘Noble-Council’: so Ethelred Unread means ‘Noble-Council No-Council’.
For the men and women that lived through Ethelred’s reign it was an unmitigated disaster. The struggles of Edmund Ironside, fierce and bright and spectacular, are sadly much more neglected. But the battle summer of 1016, and the defeats inflicted upon the Danes, gives the lie to the contemporary trend amongst some to say that Ethelred was not such a bad king after all.
When trying to make sense of these years the gaps in information are more prominent than the stepping-stones of facts. But, with knowledge of the society and the culture, it is possible to make educated guesses at what and why and how.
Godwin Wulfnothson was the topic of much posthumous slander from Norman chroniclers, who were keen on embroidering history, and there is little sure information about his early years. Later Norman chroniclers have him variously as an oath breaker, thief of church land and as farm-boy, who curries favour with Knut by happening to help one of the Danes out after battle. This last tale is as fanciful as many of those that sprang up about the Saints of the times, who were cared for by otters, gulls and considerate housekeeping foxes. What we do know was that Godwin rose rapidly to be the most powerful man apart from the king. He was first made Earl of Wessex and then regent of England, and no doubt contributed in a large part to the period of peace and prosperity in England, that were in complete contrast to the long decline of Ethelred’s reign, and which lasted until 1065.
So what do we know about young Godwin? It is assumed by most historians that the Wulfnoth Cild who the Anglo Saxon Chronicle lists as being exiled was the father of the Godwin who emerges from the fighting. Godwin’s name appears again when the manor of Contone is returned to him in the will of Athelstan Atheling. Then he slips from the records, to return a few years later married to Knut’s cousin, and then on to become King Knut’s most trusted servant. Bringing what we know about the society and times and people he was living amongst, it is possible to make sensible guesses at what might have filled these gaps.
It is often asked which are real characters and which are invented. Beyond Godwin and the royal family and noblemen, most other characters are inventions. Some exist because I wanted to depict Anglo Saxon society, in a manner that shows how the common people were affected by the actions of the great. Others lend their existence because of known facts. For example, Godwin’s daughter Edith was known to be fluent in Irish, and there seems to have been a connection between the family and Dublin, as the next book will show. So the novel started in Dublin, and then Kendra appeared, and once she appeared I liked her too much to leave her behind in Viking Dublin.
As for fact and fiction: I have been guided by the facts wherever possible, even when some events, such as Queen Emma’s marriage to Knut, seem too strange to be credible. But fact is sometimes stranger than fiction, and in the few accounts many of the participants had an eye to their reputations in future years: and Queen Emma’s Encomium is a brave attempt to paper over the decisions she made through this and later years.
Of the places mentioned within this book, a surprising number are still standing and you can put your feet, quite literally, in the place of the men who lived at this time. Some of the more interesting ones include the tiny Saxon stone church, now isolated in a field outside Contone, which was probably built by Godwin. The chapel at Deerhurst, where Knut and Edmund exchanged oaths still stands, although the abbey is gone, and the chapel is now the village church. And another is the church at Assandune, which Knut had built to mark his victory, and which was ready to be consecrated just four years later, in 1020. Others, such as Wayland’s Smithy, retain the ancient aura they must have had in Anglo-Saxon times.
The shires, the Anglo-Saxon system of government, remained functioning units of government into the twentieth century, and in some parts of the country hundreds, ridings and parts were still the basic form of government until the local government reforms of 1974.
Positions such as Shire Reeve are still found in the USA, in its modern derivation of Sherri
ff. The many meeting places, where each month the men of the hundred met to hear and witness the court proceedings lie all around us: mounds, prominent oaks, crossroads and places where the parishes meet – although most of us drive past them each day blithely unaware. But look at any village map, or medieval street pattern of our towns and cities, and the geography of rods, strip fields and smallholdings still define many of the boundaries we live within.
A note on battle. Some people may be surprised at the amount and severity of physical injury men suffered, succumbed to, and survived in battle but from mass graves discovered at Towton and at Fishergate, we have graphic evidence of medieval warfare, and by using modern forensic methods, can piece together even the order in which they were received, and which blow it was did for each numbered skeleton. Many Norse sagas speak of the slash under the shield edge, and evidence from the Fishergate burials show a large number of femur injuries.
A final note should be made on places where I have modernised spellings: chiefly in the case of personal names.
Old English parents liked to alliterate the names of their children with the names of their parents. This leads to families full of names that (with no thought at all towards twenty first century writers or readers) start with the same prefix. A good example of this is the ninth-century King Æthelwulf of Wessex who named his successive offspring Æthelstan, Æthelswith, Æthelbald, Æthelburt, Æthelred and Ælfred (in this case, Alfred the Great). While I personally savour the look and ‘feel’ of these names and letters, ‘Æthel’ to take just one example, is so common that reading the histories of the periods many readers can quickly become overwhelmed with the number of various Æthel-men running various bishoprics, abbeys, shires and countries.
In deference to readers who find this overwhelming, I have chosen to simplify most names to their modern counterparts. This leads inevitably to anachronisms, as the letter ‘æ’ is written either as an ‘a’ or an ‘e’ in modern English (Æthelred is written as Ethelred, while Æthelstan is written Athelstan though in fact the beginning prefix, meaning ‘Noble’ is identical).