Great Tales From English History (10 page)

He achieved it. Realising he could not hope to control the whole of Engla-lond, Canute delegated his powers to trusted local governors,
jarls
in Danish, the origin of our word ‘earl’. His reign saw the consolidation of England’s counties and shires, with their own courts and administrators - the shire-reeves, or sheriffs. He produced a law code embodying the idea behind the contract to which Ethelred had agreed in the last moments of his reign: that a sort of bargain should exist between the King and his subjects. He wrote newsletters to the people of his adopted country, describing his personal impressions and feelings, for example, after a long trip when he had met the Pope in Rome.

‘I have never spared,’ he wrote, ‘nor will I in the future spare, to devote myself to the well-being of my people.’

Canute was especially keen to discourage superstition, and anxious to educate those of his people who had not seen the light. For the sake of their souls he urged them to forsake their surviving pagan habits - the worship of trees, wizards and weather prophets, together with the magic charms that people offered up when they were trying to track down stolen cattle. Some of his laws sound barbaric today: ‘If a woman during her husband’s life commits adultery with another man,’ read law 53, ‘her legal husband is to have all her property, and she is to lose her nose and her ears.’ But one hundred years later the comprehensive law code of Canute, with its respect for both Anglo-Saxon and Dane, was still regarded as an authority.

After the chaos of Ethelred’s reign, this rough, tough Dane proved to be England’s best king since Alfred - both wise and realistic. Realism was one of the lessons he was aiming to teach when he had tried to turn back the waves, and it is one of history’s injustices that the monarch who took his throne down to the beach in order to spread wisdom has ended up looking an idiot.

AD 1042-66

E
DWARD THE CONFESSOR IS THE ONLY
English king to have been declared a saint by the Pope. When people ‘confess’ anything nowadays, it is to actions they are ashamed of - their mistakes, their sins and, perhaps even, their crimes. If you hear someone say, ‘I must confess’, you know there is some sort of an apology coming up. But in Old English the word had an altogether more positive meaning. Confessors were a particular category of saint who had not been martyred but who had demonstrated their saintliness by testifying actively to their faith - in the case of King Edward, to the spiritual happiness that Christianity had brought to his not-always happy life. He was Edward the Testifier.

King Edward’s testifying took the form of the immense abbey that he constructed in the fields a mile or so to the west of the walled city of London - the west minster (or monastery church), as opposed to the east minster of St Paul’s that was London’s cathedral. The soaring grandeur of the Westminster Abbey that we know today reflects the reshaping of the building in later centuries. But Edward’s original abbey was grand enough. Built of stone, nearly 100 metres long and towering above the banks of the Thames, it was the largest church - in fact, the largest building of any sort - in Anglo-Saxon England. Edward modelled his great minster on the impressive new Romanesque architecture of Normandy where he had spent most of his youth.

He had had a lonely childhood. He saw little of his parents, Ethelred the Unready and Emma, the Norman noblewoman whom Ethelred married in 1002 (see p. 66). Through most of his boyhood Edward’s distracted father was busy with the losing battle that he was fighting against the Danes, and after Ethelred’s death in 1016 and Canute’s Danish conquest of England, the boy took refuge with his mother’s relatives in Normandy.

Emma, however, did not join her eleven-year-old son in exile. Following the custom of conquerors, Canute secured his hold on his new kingdom by marrying the widow of his defeated enemy, and Emma seemed to enjoy the experience. In the eighteen years that she was married to Canute, she became so Danish it was as if she had never been married to Ethelred. When Canute died and Edward finally returned to England, his mother scarcely welcomed him. She had had a son by Canute, Hartha Canute, whom she preferred. So after Hartha Canute died in 1042, clearing Edward’s path to the throne, it was hardly surprising that once he had established his power the new king rounded up his earls, rode to Winchester where his mother was living, and confiscated all her treasure.

By now Edward was thirty-seven. He was a tall, skinny man with blond or prematurely white hair. Some later accounts suggest that he may have been lacking in normal pigmentation in skin, hair and eyes - an albino. One description hints at a pale, almost translucent complexion, so that the blood vessels in his cheeks would show bright pink beneath his skin. Looking otherworldly, speaking Norman French and spending much of his time at prayer, the Confessor was something of an outsider among the hard men of Anglo-Saxon England - a choirboy in a den of gangsters.

Edward owed his throne to the consent of the three great earls who controlled the country - Siward of Northumbria, Leofric of Mercia and Godwin of Wessex. Their landholdings were such that they could dictate terms to someone like Edward who was, in many ways, a foreigner. Of the three powerbrokers Godwin was the wealthiest and most powerful. In gangster terms, he was the boss of bosses, and in 1045 he received the pay-off for his role as kingmaker: Edward married Godwin’s daughter Edith, and gave her brother Harold the earldom of East Anglia.

Six years later, Edward rebelled against his minders. He ordered old Godwin, Harold and the rest of the Godwins into exile, and packed Edith off to a nunnery. But his independence was short-lived. While Earls Siward and Leofric had been happy to see the back of the scheming Godwins, they were rapidly antagonised by the pro-Norman policies that the King now adopted. Edward had spent most of his life among Normans. They were the people he really understood and trusted. So to his Norman nephew Ralf the Timid he gave large estates in Herefordshire, where Ralf started building a mini-Normandy, complete with castles.

Edward also worried the English with the favour he showed to his forceful and ambitious relative, William the Bastard. William was the son of Emma’s nephew, Duke Robert of Normandy, and was known as ‘the Bastard’ because his father never married his mother Herlève, a tanner’s daughter, whose beauty, according to later legend, was said to have caught Robert’s eye while she was washing clothes, bare legged, in a stream. After his father’s death, William built Normandy into a dynamic military power, displaying ambitions that many English found disturbing. It was rumoured that, out of gratitude for Norman hospitality during his days of exile, Edward had even promised this distant kinsman that he could inherit the English throne after his death.

When old Godwin and his son Harold sailed defiantly up the Thames the following summer, the fleet that Edward raised against them refused to fight. The confessor king was humiliated. He had no choice but to accept the restoration of Godwin power, which Harold wielded after his father’s death in 1053. Harold now took his father’s title as Earl of Wessex. Edward was also compelled to bring his wife Edith back to court from the nunnery, though it was rumoured that he refused to have sexual relations with her. The loveless marriage certainly proved to be childless, and Edith’s family was denied the satisfaction of welcoming into the world an heir who was both royal
and
half Godwin.

With the return of the Godwins, Edward scaled down his bid to be an effective king. Delegating his military power to Harold, he took consolation in his beloved minster, to which he devoted a tenth of his royal income.

On the riverbank nearby he built himself a home, the Palace of Westminster - the site of today’s Houses of Parliament; and he spent his days there, praying with his monks and reading the Bible.

Edward’s saintliness was confirmed when he started laying his hands on sufferers from scrofula, a form of tuberculosis that causes swellings in the lymph glands of the neck. Victims believed that their swellings decreased after the king had touched them, and it became a tradition for English monarchs to lay their hands on sufferers from this disease, later known as the ‘King’s Evil’. The ceremony of kings and queens ‘touching for the King’s Evil’ continued into the eighteenth century and the reign of Queen Anne, who touched the infant Dr Johnson in 1712, without effecting a cure.

Edward’s great Abbey of Westminster became the spot where the English monarchy did its business with God, the place where every monarch would be crowned except the twentieth-century king, Edward VIII - Edward the Abdicator, as he would have been called in the Middle Ages. Many kings and queens were also buried there, to be joined over the centuries by the nation’s non-royal headline-makers. In Poets’ Corner lie the writers, beside a historic cavalcade of statesmen, soldiers, scientists and other heroes - with just a few heroines - in a marble forest of statues and tombs. The Confessor’s abbey has become England’s hall of fame.

Edward himself was too ill to attend the dedication of his minster when it was finally completed in December 1065, and a week later he was dead, leaving England up for grabs. Since the saintly Confessor had failed to produce any children, the succession came down to a contest between Godwin’s son Harold and the Duke of Normandy, William the Bastard. Harold had no blood connection at all, and William had only a distant claim. But both men knew how to fight a good battle.

C.AD 1043

T
HE IDEA OF A BEAUTIFUL NAKED LADY
riding her horse through the streets in broad daylight has an appeal that extends far beyond history. Today the name ‘Godiva’ is used as a trademark all over the world for striptease clubs and skimpy underwear, advertised by smiling young women with long, rippling hair. Yet these modern Godivas do not deploy their long hair to conceal their nakedness. On the contrary, they seem rather keen to reveal it - and they would certainly shock the pious Anglo-Saxon lady to whom they offer their naughty tribute.

The original Godiva was generous, kind-hearted and, by all accounts, highly respectable. In Anglo-Saxon her name was Godgifu, or ‘God’s gift’. She was a prominent figure in Edward the Confessor’s England, owning large estates in her own right in the Midlands and East Anglia, and she was married to Leofric of Mercia, one of the three powerful earls who had placed Edward on the throne in 1042. Leofric effectively controlled most of central England, and he was selected by Edward to join the posse that raided the property of the King’s mother Emma (see p. 79).

Godgifu and Leofric followed Edward’s example of giving generously to the Church. Nowadays ambitious bigwigs buy the local football team and spend their money trying to help it to success. In the Middle Ages they showered their riches on the local church - or churches, in the case of Godgifu. In Coventry she devoted a great deal of her wealth to making its humble abbey the pride of the county of Warwickshire and beyond. ‘There was not found in all England a monastery with such an abundance of gold and silver, gems, and costly garments,’ wrote the chronicler Roger of Wendover in the early thirteenth century. And it was Roger who first wrote down the tale:

Longing to free the town of Coventry from the oppression of a heavy tax, Lady Godiva begged her husband with urgent prayers, for the sake of Jesus and his mother Mary, that he would free the town from the toll, and from all other heavy burdens. The earl rebuked her sharply. She was asking for something that would cost him much money, and he forbade her to raise the subject with him again. But, with a woman’s persistence, she would not stop pestering her husband, until he finally gave her this reply. ‘Mount your horse, and ride naked before all the people, through the market of the town, from one end to the other, and on your return you shall have your request.’ To which Godiva replied, ‘But will you give me permission if I am ready to do it?’ ‘I will,’ her husband replied. Whereupon the countess, beloved of God, loosed her hair and let down her tresses, which covered the whole of her body like a veil. And then, mounting her horse, and attended by two knights, she rode through the market place, without being seen, except her fair legs. And having completed the journey, she returned with gladness to her astonished husband, and obtained of him what she had asked. Earl Leofric freed the town of Coventry and its inhabitants from the taxes.