The Norman Conquest (13 page)

What
is
clear from the English sources is the mounting tension between Godwine and the king in the months that followed the March council. Towards the end of June Robert of Jumièges returned from the Continent and immediately caused fresh controversy by refusing to consecrate the Godwinist candidate who had been elected to succeed him as bishop of London. He also clashed with Godwine himself, claiming that the earl had invaded certain lands belonging to Canterbury (‘a cause in which right was on the bishop’s side’, says the author of the
Life of King Edward
, with remarkable candour). In general the
Life
identifies the new archbishop as the source of
all the trouble, accusing him of poisoning Edward’s mind against the blameless Godwine, and causing the king to believe that the earl was planning to attack him, ‘just as he had once attacked his brother’.
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At the end of the summer the situation exploded. The last days of August saw the arrival in England of Eustace, count of Boulogne, Edward’s brother-in-law (at some point after 1035, Eustace had married Edward’s sister, Godgifu). The reason for his visit is unknown. Some historians have suggested, on fairly flimsy evidence, that he and Godgifu might have had a daughter, and have inferred from the timing of the visit that its purpose was to discuss her right to the English throne. Less speculativelyas count of Boulogne, sandwiched between Normandy and Flanders, Eustace may well have wished to discuss with Edward the implications of the recent Norman-Flemish alliance. All we can say for certain is what the E Chronicle tells us: that the count came to see the king, ‘talked over with him what he wished’, and on his return journey got into a fight with the citizens of Dover. The D Chronicle presents it as an accident: Eustace’s men ‘behaved foolishly when looking for lodgings’ and an argument ensued. The E version says that before they entered Dover Eustace’s men donned their mail shirts, which makes it sound as if they came with hostile intent, and raises the possibility that they may have been put up to it. Whatever the case, by all accounts a large number of men on both sides ended up wounded or dead, and Eustace returned to the king, by then in Gloucester, to give a one-sided account of what had happened. Edward, incensed on his brother-in-law’s behalf, determined to punish the people of Dover, and gave orders that the town be harried, much as his predecessor, Harthacnut, had done in the case of Worcester a decade earlier. The orders, however, were given to the earl responsible for Dover – Godwine – who refused to carry them out. ‘It was abhorrent to him to injure the people of his own province’, says the E Chronicle.
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And so, at last, the argument between the two men burst into the open. At the start of September the defiant earl raised the men of Wessex, while his sons rallied their men from the shires of East Anglia and the south-west Midlands. At Beverstone, fifteen miles south of Gloucester, they assembled what the D Chronicle calls ‘a great army, without number, all ready for war against the king’. But Edward was finally ready to confront his father-in-law, and responded in kind, summoning England’s other great earls – Leofric of Mercia and Siward of Northumbria – who in turn raised the men of their
earldoms and rode to his aid, ‘ready to attack Godwine’s levies if the king had wished it’.

On the very brink of civil war, England’s great men hesitated. ‘Some of them considered that it would be great folly if they joined battle’, explains the D Chronicle, ‘because almost all the noblest in England were present in those two companies, and they were convinced they would be leaving the country open to the invasion of her enemies, and be bringing utter ruin upon ourselves.’ Clearly, the lessons of Æthelred’s reign had been well learned. Both sides agreed to stand down, and it was also agreed that Godwine would come to London in two weeks’ time in order to stand trial. Unfortunately for the earl, during that fortnight the balance of power shifted; his host, says the D Chronicle, ‘decreased in number more and more as time went on’, while the E Chronicle admits that the king’s own army seemed ‘quite the best force there ever was’. By the time the two sides reached London – their camps separated by the River Thames – it must have been obvious that Godwine was going to have to accept fairly humiliating terms.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 priority 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.
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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.
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