Harold (25 page)

In Chapter Four we touched on how Harold lavished immense gifts of land and wealth on his foundation of Holy Cross at Waltham. He rebuilt the church there in 1060, on land granted him by King Edward. He donated some 70 hides of land to the church, which supported twelve regular canons, under a dean named Wulfwine and a schoolmaster named Adelard. In addition, he donated gifts of costly gold and silver church furnishings and vestments, including some of Byzantine workmanship. He also gathered a large collection of fifty-nine religious relics from a wide area of England and the Continent, including Rome, for his foundation. Indeed, so grateful were the canons of Waltham that they would preserve Harold’s memory in their records and later compose a life of their illustrious founder and benefactor. In this respect, Harold was very much a man of his time; King Edward had demonstrated a similar focus in devotion towards Westminster, Earl Leofric to Coventry and Earl Odda to Deerhurst.
¹²

However, in contrast to these expressions of piety, Harold is also accused of acting against God by taking lands from several religious houses, principally in the text of Domesday Book. Indeed, examples of this have already been examined in Chapter Four during consideration of Harold’s landholding. It is important to place these actions in context and in this respect Harold was no different from every other layman of the time. King Cnut, Earl Leofric and his family, William of Normandy, many other leading Normans, and even King Edward himself are all known to have faced similar accusations at one time or another. In the cases raised against Harold the lands are small, and the background to Harold’s possession of them is often unclear. It should also be remembered that by the time most of these accusations were made in Domesday Book Harold was long dead. He had no surviving relatives or supporters to plead his case and was therefore an easy target.
¹³

There have been a number of criticisms of the condition of the English Church during this period; what can we say about Harold’s attitude to this? It should be remembered that King Edward was actually the man in a position to reform the faults in the Church. He chose not to do so to any significant extent largely for political reasons. Whether Harold was in the same mould we cannot establish, as his reign was too brief to provide any real indication of his attitude to this problem. The only Church appointments that Harold made as king were neither controversial nor particularly notable. William himself, despite his widely supposed intentions to cleanse the English Church, only began to do this in 1070 under Papal pressure. There is nothing in all this to indicate that Harold was any more or less religious than his contemporaries.
¹⁴

In this respect, Harold is also condemned in Norman sources for his association with Archbishop Stigand. It is by no means clear that Stigand was a close associate of Harold and their relationship was at best equivocal. He was sufficiently powerful in terms of independent landholding not to require Harold’s support, unlike other clerics such as Ealdred and Wulfstan. In religious terms, Stigand was considered unsuitable due to his uncanonical election to the archbishopric in 1052. Harold had probably known Stigand since the time when he was Earl of East Anglia, and Stigand was bishop there. The two men must have worked together in the administration of that province and its courts. They are jointly addressed in royal writs concerning the lands of Bury St Edmunds and both are bequeathed property in the will of Ketel, son of Wulfgyth. At this point in time Stigand’s position was not controversial. It was only later, as a result of King Edward’s need for political stability and good administrative ability in the archbishopric of Canterbury, that Stigand found himself in the position of an uncanonical archbishop holding 2 sees in plurality. Stigand’s mediating position in the 1051–2 crisis makes it seem most likely that he was linked to both King Edward and the Godwine family and so acceptable to both, rather than a partisan of one or the other. Thereafter, Stigand remained associated not just with Harold but with the king and the rest of the English establishment. He was neither removed nor even spurned by the Papal legates who visited England in 1062. Even William, who was later said to have made Stigand’s deposition part of his case to the Pope in favour of his invasion, would retain him as archbishop until 1070. Harold’s retention of Archbishop Stigand during his own brief reign does not appear in the least out of place in this setting
¹⁵

A similar conclusion can be reached about what has been seen as Harold’s unusual family life. For some twenty years Harold was married
more Danico
, or in the Danish manner, to a certain Edith,
Swanneshals
or ‘Swan-neck’, and had at least six children by her. In England in the next century such a marriage would be considered unlawful and its offspring illegitimate, but in the eleventh century it was still relatively common, particularly among those of Scandinavian descent. Indeed, King Cnut and Aelfgifu of Northampton had just such a marriage and their children were regarded as legitimate by the laity. In the absence of a Church blessing, such a liaison was frowned on by the clergy, and Edith is always described by clerical authors as Harold’s mistress or concubine, but the marriage was widely accepted by the laity. It should be remembered that Harold’s mother, Gytha, was Danish, and it is perhaps not surprising that he should follow this Scandinavian custom. Such marriages were contracted by the two parties in the knowledge they could later be repudiated without the need for complex Church divorce, should the needs of family or state require. In contrast, the contemporary position on the Continent was different as William of Normandy, the illegitimate offspring of Robert of Normandy and his mistress, Herleve, had learned. These stricter Continental views on illegitimacy meant that William had been fortunate to inherit the duchy in 1035 and thereafter hold on to it.
¹⁶

Relatively little information is recorded about Edith ‘Swanneck’, and we have already touched on some of it in Chapter Four. Harold must have married her fairly early in his career, for three of the sons born to the couple were old enough to campaign in 1068. This implies the eldest of them, Godwine, was perhaps about twenty, dating his birth to the mid-1040s. This places Harold’s marriage to Edith around the same time as the former became Earl of East Anglia in 1044, and this circumstance probably provides us with a clue to the identity of his wife. As the newly appointed earl, and a stranger to the area, Harold needed local supporters and, as previously suggested, one way to secure these quickly was by marriage. There exist many examples of such marriage alliances: Cnut to Aelfgifu of Northampton; Edmund ‘Ironside’ to Ealdgyth, widow of Sigeferth of the Five Boroughs; Earl Leofric and his son, Earl Aelfgar, to, respectively, Godgifu and Aelfgifu of the East Midlands. Therefore, Harold probably sought a wife with local connections and found her in that Edith variously described in Domesday Book as ‘the Fair’, ‘the Beautiful’ or ‘the Rich’. As we have already seen in Chapter Four, this woman held wide lands in Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Essex, Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire. In the mid-1040s she may already have been heiress to these lands, and, as such, represented a very good catch for young Harold. He in turn provided Edith with protection for herself and for her property.
¹⁷

Doubt has been expressed that Edith ‘Swan-neck’, wife of Harold, is the same woman as the Edith of Domesday Book. Although the neat proximity of her lands to Harold’s new earldom, as indicated in the account of Harold’s lands, is insufficient proof that the two women are the same, other evidence does indeed suggest it. Edith’s nick-name, ‘Swanneck’, probably represents a later elaboration of the earlier ‘Fair’ or ‘Beautiful’ of Domesday record, arising from the white swan-like skin of her neck which was considered a sign of beauty among English noblewomen. The poetic term
blachleor
, literally ‘white cheeked’ and meaning ‘fair’, is found extensively in Old English poetry, representing an ideal of noble feminine beauty in contrast to the countrywoman’s sunburnt skin resulting from fieldwork. In one Domesday Book reference an Edith is termed ‘countess’, perhaps indicating the wife of Earl Harold. However, this woman’s name, ‘Aedgeva’, is not in the usual spelling ‘Ediva’, found elsewhere for Edith ‘the Fair’. It is also unlikely to refer either to the wife of Earl Aelfgar, who is otherwise found as ‘Aelveva’, or to Harold’s later queen, who is found as ‘Aldgid’. It may therefore refer to some unknown woman. The crucial factor in the identification of Edith ‘Swan-neck’ with Edith ‘the Fair’ is the later abduction by Count Alan of Richmond, of Harold’s daughter, Gunnhild, from the nunnery at Wilton in 1093. This episode only really makes sense if it is seen as an attempt by Alan to secure his lands, which had formerly belonged to Edith ‘the Fair’, by an association with her surviving heiress, Gunnhild.
¹⁸

If we accept the two women are one and the same, what can we say about Harold’s first wife? Apart from her beauty, which appears to have been particularly notable judging from the many references to it, she was also undoubtedly rich in terms of her alternative nick-name,
Dives
. In 1066 she held, directly or through men commended to her, nearly 280 hides and 450 acres of land mostly in eastern England worth over £520. She was a power in the land with some twenty-nine men and three women commended to her directly. One of these men was Grimbald, Edith’s own personal goldsmith; a gospel book of Thorney Abbey, which was decorated by a certain Wulfwine, also described as Edith’s goldsmith, may perhaps once have belonged to Harold’s wife. She held four dwellings in Canterbury, and one of her children who died in infancy was buried in Canterbury Cathedral, near St Dunstan’s tomb. In addition, she is recorded as a benefactress of the abbey of St Benet of Holme. Later, Gunnhild, her daughter by Harold, was educated at the royal convent of Wilton, an expensive privilege reserved for noble ladies. All this indicates that Edith was a woman of status and prestige, like Aelfgifu of Northampton, Cnut’s first wife, rather than simply a mistress or concubine, as clerical sources imply.
¹⁹

The marriage of Edith and Harold was to prove long and fruitful, and apart from its obvious material benefits, there are suggestions that it may have been based on love. Thus the
Vita Haroldi
, though late, portrays her as one who ‘had known him well and loved him much’. It was said that it was she who identified Harold’s body on the field at Hastings, so that the clerks of Waltham might remove it for burial in their church. In spite of this, Harold was faced with the need, for reasons of state, to marry Alditha, sister of the northern earls, early in 1066. Such political marriages were common at that time, as witnessed by Cnut’s parallel marriage to Emma in 1017. The knowledge that an arranged marriage might later be required may explain Harold’s failure to seek the blessing of the Church for his earlier marriage to Edith. The Church would of course refuse to permit a second wedding while the first wife still lived. However, if the first ‘marriage’ had not been recognized by the Church, then a ‘second’ marriage could proceed. Whether Harold actually repudiated Edith following his sanctified marriage to Alditha is unknown. It would appear that Cnut did not repudiate his first wife, Aelfgifu, even after his second marriage, to Emma, and in fact Harold ‘Harefoot’, his son by Aelfgifu, was able to make good his claim to the kingdom after Cnut’s death. Perhaps Harold followed this example, since after his death in 1066 his sons by Edith also made an attempt to secure the throne. The similarity between the marriage arrangements of Cnut and Harold is close and probably reflects the influence of their Danish background. As far as we can tell, Harold and Edith seem to have accepted the necessity of his subsequent political marriage to Alditha, though whether their sons were content with the arrangement is another matter. Indeed, if Harold had been victorious at Hastings and had died at a later date, there may well have been a dispute over the succession, similar to that between Cnut’s sons Harold and Hardecnut, between Harold’s sons by Edith and his son by Alditha.
²⁰

Harold’s second marriage was blessed by the Church, and his second wife, Alditha, found herself, for reasons of state, married to the man responsible for the downfall of her previous husband, Gruffydd of Wales. Whether this mattered to her is unknown but perhaps it may not have done because that marriage too was a political one, arranged by her father, Earl Aelfgar, to cement his alliance with the Welsh king. It would probably have been part of the new marriage agreement that Alditha would be recognized as Harold’s queen, and her brothers no doubt intended that her offspring by Harold would have prior rights of succession to the throne. Doubts have been expressed about whether Harold ever actually married Alditha on the basis of her lack of any significant landholding as recorded in Domesday Book. This fails to account for the clear reference to ‘Queen’ Alditha in John of Worcester, or to a son later born to Harold by her. The marriage probably took place in early 1066 and there was therefore little time for any endowments for Alditha to be recorded in local memory before the Conquest. There are many discrepancies in the text of Domesday Book concerning much earlier changes in landholding and these alone should not be allowed to cast doubt on the marriage. Although cut short by Harold’s death, this marriage alliance would seem to have been fruitful both in drawing the two families closer together and in providing an heir in the form of young Harold, who was born probably early in 1067, in Chester.
²¹

Both of Harold’s marriages, different as they were, equally served their purpose in his life and career. The first to Edith initially provided him with allies and a local power base in East Anglia, and later with heirs and perhaps with love. At the same time, it still allowed for the possibility of a future political marriage later in his career. This second marriage provided Harold with important allies to secure his new kingship and with an heir both he and the northern earls had a vested interest in supporting. In this context, Harold’s marriages, although not entirely conventional, were by no means unusual for the time, particularly in an England influenced by Scandinavian tradition. As we have seen, Cnut was able to rule England while in effect married to two women, although, like Harold, only one of his marriages was recognized by the Church.
²²