1066 (26 page)

At the tail-end of the tenth century successive waves of Danish attack and pillage had brought the country almost to its knees. King Æthelred was proving himself an ineffectual ruler, helpless to resist the Vikings. His attempts to buy them off only encouraged them to return; and in the north and east they had long settled in large numbers. It was into this violent world that Ælfgifu of Northampton was born. Her family were important landholders in Northamptonshire, coming from English or Anglo-Danish stock. In these dark and lawless days suspicion and treason were rife and violence was never far away. In 1006 Ælfgifu's father, Ælthelm, was tricked and murdered while hunting and around the same time her brothers Ufegeat and Wulfheah were blinded, apparently on King Æthelred's orders. The situation for the native dynasty worsened until at last it became untenable. In 1013 Swein Fork-Beard, the King of Denmark, invaded at the head of his own army and within a year he had conquered the whole of England. Æthelred and most of his family were forced to flee to exile in Normandy, the land of his wife Emma. Swein's sudden death on 3 February 1014 provided only a temporary respite from the Danish onslaught. Both Æthelred and Edmund Ironside, his son and heir, died in short succession of each other in 1016. Swein's son Canute, already in possession of much of the country and now without any serious rival in England, was accepted as undisputed king. Edmund's own sons narrowly escaped death by fleeing to the Hungarian exile from which one of them, Edward the Exile, was to return reluctantly with his young family in 1057.

At some time before 1016, and perhaps as early as 1013, Canute must have been introduced to Ælfgifu of Northampton and they became lovers. What we know of Ælfgifu indicates that she was probably a beautiful and certainly a manipulative young woman. One story, which may be fanciful, tells us that she was also a lover of Olaf, afterwards the king and saint of Norway, during one of his reputed stints as a fighter in England. The story goes on to say that Ælfgifu's affair with Canute was the main cause of the enmity that subsequently arose between Canute and Olaf. What is known with greater certainty is that during her affair with Canute two sons were born, Harold, nicknamed Harefoot, and Swein. Canute and Ælfgifu of Northampton never married; contemporaries euphemistically referred to their union as 'Danish' in style
[more danico).
JEMgiiu
may have hoped that Canute would one day marry her but she must have been aware that this sort of arrangement was far from uncommon. It held out the advantage to Canute of allowing him to satisfy his amorous appetites with a prominent English beauty, whilst leaving open the option of negotiating a diplomatic marriage for reasons of state later.

The opportunity for such a marriage soon arose. In July 1017 Emma coldly abandoned her exiled sons in Normandy and crossed the Channel to accept Canute's hand in marriage. The union had advantages for both sides. For Emma, the marriage to the Danish conqueror of her late husband's land meant that she could regain her high position as queen of England, and all the wealth, power and pomp that went with it. She had, moreover, grown to despise Æthelred and she no doubt hoped that the children she had borne him would with the new turn of events fade into insignificance. In a work of tendentious history which was written at her request in the early 1040s the
Encomium Emmae Reginae -
the marriage to Æthelred is never mentioned; indeed it is implied that Edward and Alfred were the sons of Canute. For Canute the marriage was particularly useful in securing the goodwill of Emma's brother, Duke Richard II of Normandy, at a time when the exiles might have been championed by the Normans and thereby posed a threat to the new Danish rule.

A more immediate threat to Emma's position was the existence in England of the two bastard sons of Ælfgifu of North ampton. As part of her agreement to marry Canute, Emma insisted on an undertaking by him that the throne of England should pass to their progeny alone. By this requirement she sought to exclude Ælfgifu's bastards as well as her own children by Æthelred. In due course, Emma and Canute did have a son, Harthacanute by name, who was born in 1018. The chances of Ælfgifu of Northampton's boys ever inheriting the throne seemed to diminish still further when in succeeding years rumours were spread that they were not Canute's children at all - or even Ælfgifu of Northampton's. This sounds rather suspiciously like malicious gossip put about by a jealous wife in order to undermine the position of her husband's former lover and that of his bastards; but we are hardly in a position to judge the truth of the matter today. Whether true or not, these rumours about Ælfgifu of Northampton and her sons were widely reported and are of the highest interest in our investigation.

In the
Encomium Emmae Reginae
the allegation is made that Harold Harefoot, rather than being Ælfgifu of North ampton's child, was actually the son of a servant girl who, as a newborn baby, had been smuggled into Ælfgifu's bedchamber so that he could be passed off as a child of her union with Canute. The rumour about Harold Harefoot's lowly parentage was evidently widespread; it also found its way into three versions of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
compiled in different parts of the country, for the year 1035. In the next century the rumours were repeated in more detail by the apparently well-informed chronicler John of Worcester. Here, most interestingly, is what John of Worcester says of the other bastard, Swein: 'Several asserted that Swein was not the son of the king and that same Ælfgifu, but that Ælfgifu wanted to have a son by the king, and could not, and therefore ordered the new-born child of some priest's concubine to be brought to her, and made the King believe that she had borne him a son.'

And of Harold Harefoot he wrote this: 'Harold claimed to be the son of King Canute by Ælfgifu of Northampton, but that is quite untrue, for some say that he was the son of a certain
sutor
[a "cobbler" or "workman"], but that Ælfgifu acted in the same way as she had done with Swein. But because the matter is open to doubt, we have been unable to make a firm statement of the parentage of either.'
¹²

Swein, then, is supposed to have been the son of a fornicating priest; Harefoot the offspring of a cobbler or other workman. It was only in 1980 that the American historian J. Bard McNulty drew full attention to the relevance of these stories to the Bayeux Tapestry, arguing that the Ælfgyva in the tapestry was Ælfgifu of Northampton.
¹³

It was not alleged, it is true, that Ælfgifu of Northampton had actually had an affair with a priest. Rather it was said that, desperate to produce a child for Canute, she had connived with a fornicating priest so as to smuggle his child by an unknown mistress into her bedchamber and to pass him (Swein) off as a son of her relations with Canute. It appears, however, that the face-touching gesture did not necessarily imply sexual intercourse between the persons shown; it could merely imply connivance in a plot in which sex played an important part.
¹⁴
The case for Ælfgifu of Northampton as the tapestry's eponymous lady appears to be becoming strong. Certainly the coincidence of the name and the hint of sexual scandal involving some priestly interest are suggestive. Some sort of workman was alleged to be the father of Harold Harefoot, and the depiction of a workman in the preceding lower compartment in the tapestry is again intriguing. It may not be irrelevant either that the rumour about Harefoot is specifically found in the E version of the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,
which was being written at the time at St Augustine's Abbey in Canterbury, where the tapestry's artist appears from art historical evidence to have been connected. Moreover, the rumour about Harefoot is also found in the
Encomium Emmae Reginae,
a work written by a monk from St-Omer, which survives in a single manuscript copy that is itself first heard of in the possession of St Augustine's Abbey in the later Middle Ages, but which may well have belonged to St Augustine's from the mid-eleventh century.
¹⁵

What we lack at this juncture is a plausible reason why this fifty-year-old scandal should have been referred to, seemingly in quite another context, in the Bayeux Tapestry. There is no obvious solution to this difficult question. To attempt an answer we must trace the subsequent course of events, as the jealous rivalry between Emma and Ælfgifu of Northampton grew yet more bitter in emotion and tragic in its consequences.

If Canute ever heard any of the rumours concerning Swein and Harold Harefoot, there is no evidence that he believed them. His continuing attachment to Ælfgifu of Northampton and the two boys is evident from the positions he sought to give them within his empire. The death of Canute's brother in 1018/19 meant that Denmark fell under Canute's control and it seems that in the early 1020s he appointed the young Swein as his lieutenant in the Wendish region of Denmark. Because of the lad's youth - he cannot have been more than about ten years old - the ambitious Ælfgifu of Northampton accompanied her son to Denmark as his regent and protector. Herself of Anglo-Danish stock, and coming from a region of England where there had been substantial Danish settlement, she would have had little difficulty in passing from one part of Canute's empire to another.

By 1028 Canute was seeking to expand that empire by bringing Norway under his control. He sought to defeat the Norwegian King Olaf - Olaf apparently being, it will be recalled, himself a former lover of Ælfgifu of Northampton. Olaf was a Christian convert and he had sought to rule a still largely pagan Norway with a zealous bias towards his own religion. In the process he had become very unpopular and Canute realised that he could exploit this situation to his advantage. He travelled along the coast with a sizeable Anglo-Danish fleet, putting in here and there, offering bribes and promises of greater freedom to the disgruntled locals. It was enough. Powerful nobles submitted to Canute and Olaf was forced to flee. In 1030 Olaf was killed in battle attempting a comeback. Canute was now able to appoint the young bastard Swein as king of Norway; and once again, because of Swein's youth, his mother Ælfgifu of Northampton ruled as regent. At around the same time, in the delicate balancing act that was needed to keep the two women of his life contented, Canute placated Emma by naming her young son Harthacanute as King of Denmark.

As effective ruler of Norway, the lady from Northampton had reached what should have been the pinnacle of power, but her rule turned out to be an abysmal failure. She increased taxation, demanded greater services and made the Norwegians follow unpopular Danish laws. Those guilty of acts of violence - violence that, as one historian puts it, was 'characteristic of the fierce northern people'
¹⁶
- were subjected to severe and unexpected penalties. The Norwegians did not care for this new, brash foreign ruler, and she was a woman to boot; they found themselves longing for the days of Olaf. What is more, a succession of poor harvests, which spread hunger throughout the land, and bad luck were attributed to the Northampton­shire lady. Ælfgifu's rule of Norway was short-lived but long remembered. The expression 'Ælfgifu's time' was subsequently to become a synonym in Norway for any period of great poverty and repression. Norwegian resentment inevitably erupted into violence. The revolt was underpinned by a Christian cult which now began to develop around the memory of the late King Olaf. Realising the danger in this, Ælfgifu and her Danish bishop - Christians, of course, themselves - urgently sought to dispel any suggestion that Olaf had been a martyr for the Christian faith. But tales of miracles concerning the slain Norwegian king continued to proliferate. The Christian religion was taking firmer root in the land of Odin and Thor; and politically, as a by-product, Ælfgifu of Northampton was losing out.

She and Olaf may once have embraced as lovers. As bitter enemies, he had been defeated and killed by her allies. Now in death Olaf returned to haunt Ælfgifu of Northampton and would ultimately bring about her downfall in Norway. In 1031 Bishop Grimkell, a Norwegian, located Olaf's grave at Nidaros and exhumed the body. It was reported that the corpse was miraculously as fresh as it had been on the day that Olaf was living. To the Norwegians, this was truly proof of his saintliness; and he was popularly canonised as a saint. It was later said that Ælfgifu of Northampton was herself at the graveside as the body was exhumed and that she frantically tried to explain away the state of the corpse on the basis of unusual soil conditions. Few would believe her. The revolt gathered fresh momentum when in 1035 Magnus, the young son of Olaf, returned to Norway. After an ineffectual period of struggle, Ælfgifu and Swein accepted the inevitable. Mother and son fled to Denmark, where Swein's half-brother Harthacanute ruled. With Magnus proclaimed king, Norway ceased to be part of the vast empire belonging to Canute and his complicated family. 'Ælfgifu's time' had ended with a humiliating retreat.

During all this period Canute, perhaps hampered by illness, had remained in England. On 12 November 1035 he died at Shaftesbury. With the passing of the great Danish monarch, who had entered into legend even in his own lifetime, the question of succession arose. His legitimate son by Emma, Harthacanute, was already ensconced as King of Denmark but the English succession remained outstanding. The death of the bastard Swein not long after his reputed father removed one of the potential claimants from the scene. Swein's mother Ælfgifu of Northampton now returned to England to make what she could of the new situation. The main contestants for Canute's crown were Emma's son, Harthacanute of Denmark, and Ælfgifu's younger son, Harold Harefoot. The conflict between the two women to win for their sons the crown of England and for themselves the position of queen mother now entered its most bitter and tragic phase.

Emma could rightly point out that Canute had promised that only a son she bore him would succeed to England; but Harthacanute was now faced with an invasion in Denmark from a confident Magnus of Norway and he was unable to cross the North Sea to take up the English part of his inheritance. Two factions then emerged in England. Concentrated largely to the north of the Thames were the supporters of Harold Harefoot, energetically orchestrated by Ælfgifu of Northampton. In the south, supported by Emma and the powerful Earl Godwin of Wessex, were the advocates of the absent Harthacanute. From the beginning Harthacanute's case was hampered by his absence in Denmark. A compromise was reached. It was decided by the Witan, the assembly of the great and good of the nation, that Harold Harefoot should rule, but only temporarily as regent until the arrival of Harthacanute.