The Normans and Their World Read online

  Through Emma we get the first intrusion of Normans into English affairs. We saw how Sweyn in 1003 began his campaign by taking Exeter; the Chronicle blames a Norman:

  In this year Exeter was destroyed through Hugh the French fellow [ceorl] whom the Lady had appointed as her reeve. The host utterly laid waste the borough and seized much plunder there. Then great levies were assembled from Wiltshire and Hampshire, firmly resolved to march against the host, and it was ealdorman Aelfric’s duty to lead the levies, but he was up to his old tricks. As soon as they were close enough for each host to see each other, he pretended to be ill and made violent efforts to vomit, saying he was taken ill, thus leaving in the lurch the men it was his duty to lead. As the saying goes: When the general grows faint-hearted, then the whole army suffers a severe check. When Sweyn saw their lack of resolution and that they were all dispersing, he led his host into Wilton and sacked and burned down the borough, then went to Salisbury and from there back to the sea where he knew his Wave-stallions (ships) were.[110]

  What were the errors or misdemeanours of Hugh is not made clear. We hear also of Matilda, a lady-in-waiting of Emma, who married Alfgar (Aelfgeard), a big man of Worcester; and there was Herluin, whom the bishop of Worcester took with him for the wedding of Emma’s daughter Gunnhild with the future Henry III of Germany; on his return he was given by the bishop land at Lapworth in Warwickshire, and he and his son gained several estates in England.[111] Emma also did much to bring about the association of Norman monastic houses with England, though she did not start the process. From the early days of its restoration Fécamp had Englishmen among its monks. The Annals of Mabillon stated that Englishmen came there from across the sea. ‘Among them was a man of the royal race named Clemens, who abandoned the pomps of the world and entered this monastery with the desire to serve God for the rest of his days. But, as his compatriots came too often to visit him and he was constantly forced to hear talk of the world’s vanities, he retired to the monastery of Dijon.’ Note that there was a continual stream of English visitors. A Life of St Aethelwold, who with Dunstan began the monastic revival in England, is found in a Fécamp manuscript, presumably reaching the monastery before the death of the author, Aelfric, in 1006. Mont St Michel was probably also a place where the two peoples met and mixed. When Aethelred in the late tenth century prepared his expedition against Normandy, he told his troops to spare the Mont: ‘not to put fire to a place of such great sanctity’.[112] Again, at Winchester in the tenth century were composed or recited many poems, both hagiographical and epic, which were direct responses to the shock of events, and which often dealt abusively with the Danes; they reached the English court and perhaps crossed the sea. Dudo, it has been suggested, in dealing with Rollo, recalled the Anglo-Saxon poem about Brunanburh.[113]

  Emma stimulated monastic developments in England as well as creating links with Normandy, and influenced Cnut in such matters. A grant of land at Brede near Winchelsea was made to Fécamp. She may have taken to Normandy in a moment of crisis the relics of St Valentine found at Winchester and not long afterwards claimed by the monks of Jumièges to be in their collection. According to William of Malmesbury, she brought back from Normandy the relics of St Ouen of Rouen. She persuaded the monk in charge of the treasury to sell them to her.[114] She may have helped to connect Winchester with Mont St Michel, where we find the monks being affected by the Winchester style of decorating manuscripts. She gave a gold cross to the new Winchester minster; sent her brother, archbishop of Rouen, an illuminated psalter; and entrusted a manuscript ‘written in letters of gold’ to the embassy despatched yearly to her cousin William of Aquitaine. In England she was patroness of Romsey nunnery and Wilton, where her first husband’s sister, St Edith, had been abbess; and she arranged that a monastery of another saint of Edmund’s family (founded by Cnut and colonized from Ely) should have a yearly gift of 4,000 eels. ‘Merrily sang the monks in Ely, as Cnut King rowed by.’ Erwin, monk of Peterborough, offered her a psalter, with a sacramentary for Cnut. Her piety influenced her husband, who is said to have walked on bare feet five miles to St Cuthbert’s tomb at Durham. She honoured the tomb of St Elphege (martyred by the Danes) whom she had known as bishop of Winchester and archbishop of Canterbury; favoured St Bertin’s monastery at St Omer, long an important point for cultural exchanges between Flanders, Lorraine, Normandy and England; and helped to rebuild St Hilaire’s at Poitiers.[115] Her exiled son Edward, wintering in Ghent in 1016, had promised to restore St Bertin’s English possessions if ever he became king; in 1044 he carried out his promise, adding some London property.[116] In 1020 Cnut on his pilgrimage to Rome for the emperor’s coronation had visited St Bertin’s and made rich gifts, perhaps to offset the effects of Edward’s visit; he clearly enjoyed making these offerings there and at Chartres, amid scenes of excited piety.[117] Through Emma, then, the English church and state gained new links with the continent. She further encouraged missionaries to go converting the Norwegians.

  *

  We may summarize by saying that in the tenth and earlier eleventh centuries both England and northern France were powerfully affected by the Norse expansion. In both areas the invasions brought about a considerable change in the population; but, largely because of the closeness in language, the Norsemen were assimilated in England and played their part finally in bringing about a relatively unified state, while in France there was an enclave of newcomers who, after a time learning to speak a new language, developed a state of their own. That state played its part as one of many in France, but at the same time modified and concentrated the feudal tendencies it absorbed. Through warfare, piracy, trade, and (near the end) church affairs, the two areas, England and Normandy, interacted on one another. The connections came to a head with the marriage of Cnut and Emma, which prefigured the way in which the fates of the two areas were to be increasingly linked.

  Chapter Four – Edward, Harold, and William

  Edward must have disliked Godwin as the betrayer of his brother Alfred; but on becoming king his mother became the object of his anger. Emma seems to have hated her first husband Aethelred; the Encomiast in his account of her twice calls her virgo in contexts which prove that he wanted to deceive his readers, and he must have been following her attitudes. William of Malmesbury states that she ‘had long mocked the needy condition of her son and never aided him, transferring her hereditary hatred of the father to the child; for she both loved Cnut more when living and commended him more when dead.’[118] Edward himself had lost his English roots without fully gaining any others. He had been dislocated from the English scene, growing up in the Norman court where European issues impinged more and more; yet, cut off from any participation in events, he had seen the busy world of action all round him as something remote. Now, as king, he could not simply settle down in the English world; but he had no coherent idea of what he wanted to do if he were to introduce changes. He had a partiality for foreigners, as long as they were not Norsemen who reminded him of his early miseries and his mother’s neglect; but his attitudes seem largely personal with little or no clear political colouring. Almost any foreigners were welcome at his court, Normans, Bretons, French, Flemish, Germans, Lotharingians. Because of the later importance of his link with Normandy, the Normans about him have been singled out; but even in his church there were more Germans than Normans. The only man to whom he gave an earldom was his nephew Ralph the Timid, son of his cousin and count of the Vexin. Lord of Hereford, Ralph built the first private or semi-private castle in England. Chronicle D, under 1052, says:

  Gruffydd the Welsh king harried Herefordshire, so that he came very near to Leominster; and men gathered against him, both the natives and the Frenchmen from the castle. And there were killed very many good Englishmen besides many from among the Frenchmen. This was the same day on which fourteen years ago Eadwin was killed with his companions.

  Eustace of Boulogne, second husband of Edward’s sister, paid him several visits. Two Bretons were granted estates
in Essex and East Anglia; they were the only foreigners at his court with big English landholdings. In 1048 Robert of Jumièges, who seems to have been a Norman partisan, was brought from Normandy to be bishop of London; Edward liked him, but later he sacrificed him without apparent qualms. In 1049 Ulf, a Norman, was made bishop of Dorchester:

  but later he was expelled, because he did nothing worthy of a bishop while he occupied the see, so that it brings shame for us to speak further of it...The pope held a synod at Vercelli, which Bishop Ulf attended, and it was said that they were very near to breaking his staff if he had not given exceptionally costly gifts, for he did not know how to perform his offices as well as he ought to have done (Chronicle).

  But Edward also had English favourites. In his later years he was much taken up with Tostig; and when he was forced to abandon him, his anxiety and grief seem to have contributed much to his death some ten weeks afterwards.

  In essentials his court remained Anglo-Danish; and oddly the Norsemen kept a favourable memory of him. An addition to the Saga of Olaf Tryggvasson (probably thirteenth century) states that it was his custom to tell this saga ‘to his great men and his bodyguard on the first day of Easter; and he chose that day above all others for the telling, saying that Olaf was as superior to other kings as Easter day was to the other days of the whole year.’ Then one day, after recounting the saga, he announced that news of Olaf’s death had come from Syria. There was also a saga about Edward himself; and his father Aethelred II was sung by the Icelandic Gunnor as a warrior king, a lord whom his men obeyed as a god.[119]

  His reputation for piety came no doubt from his chastity and his oddities; but he showed little interest in church affairs or the reform movement, and seems to have been more concerned with hunting.

  In the exaction of taxes he was sparing, and detested the insolence of the collectors. In food and drink he was free from the voluptuousness which his state allowed. On the more solemn festivals, though dressed in robes interwoven with gold, which the queen had most splendidly embroidered, yet still he had such forbearance as to be majestic enough without being haughty, considering in such matters more God’s bounty than the pomp of the world. There was one earthly enjoyment in which he chiefly delighted: hunting with fast hounds whose opening in the woods he used with pleasure to encourage, and again the pouncing of birds, whose nature it is to prey on their kindred species. In these exercises, after hearing divine service in the morning, he employed himself whole days.

  In other respects he was a man by choice devoted to God and lived the life of an angel in the administration of the kingdom. To the poor and the stranger, more especially to foreigners and men of religious orders, he was kind in invitation, munificent in presents, and constantly exciting the monks of his own country to imitate their holiness. He was of a becoming stature; his beard and hair milkwhite; his countenance florid, fair throughout his whole person; and his form of admirable proportion.

  So William of Malmesbury records the legend, which had been enhanced by Edward’s role as the last of Anglo-Saxon monarchs. His appearance, his red chubby cheeks, snowy hair, thin white hands and tapering transparent fingers, all perfectly embodied the medieval image of a saint. It has been suggested that he was in fact an albino. In character he seems to have been childish, suffering from arrested development, jesting with his courtiers, then, if crossed, exploding in a febrile fury.[120]

  He exercised little control over the church and let ambitious ecclesiastics get hold of pluralities of several dioceses. Early in his reign he was accused of simony, but he didn’t sell preferments. What he did was to give bishoprics to favoured clerics and promote a few monks. Near the end of his life he rebuilt Westminster Abbey to atone for his sins.[121] But we can find no system in his actions and views. Like many others of his age, indeed like his mother, he was a keen collector of relics; and was believed to have healing powers and prophetic gifts. Tales were told of his miraculous cures even while he was still in Normandy.[122] He could heal the blind and the scrofulous with the water in which he washed his hands. Such powers were considered signs of true Christian kingship. Robert the Pious in France also had them; and later the king’s touch as a cure for the King’s Evil was to become a hereditary royal gift.[123] But Edward’s admirers claimed that his powers came from his sanctity, not his rank. However, they were simplifying things. Far back the Frankish King Guntram had cured ague by the touch of his royal mantle.[124] When the Danish Valdemar I travelled through Germany in 1164, mothers took babies and farmers took corn to him, believing that the royal touch would make them grow.

  Edward’s prophetic powers were thought to have developed on his widow Edith. When she saw Walcher consecrated bishop at Winchester, she was impressed by his snowy hair and ruddy face, which must have reminded her of the king, and she cried out, ‘He’d make a lovely martyr!’ A prophecy that came true.[125] As the Normans later tried to build up the fiction that they were the legitimate successors of Edward and his line, the first generation of Anglo-Norman historians took up the theme of English saints and heroes; lawyers collected the so-called Laws of King Edward; and thus in time the conquerors began to revere Edward. The first attempt to get him accepted as a saint was rejected by Pope Innocent on account of disorders in England; but on 7 February 1161 Alexander III issued a bull of canonization. Henry III rebuilt Westminster Abbey and named his eldest son Edward. But the wish for continuity did not go so far as to call the latter Edward II after his accession.[126]

  One effect of the Danish invasions, the retort by Wessex and the final Danish conquest, was to break down the sharp particularism, the old tribal divisions of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex. To deal with these large areas, earls were appointed where once there had been kings. They were not yet hereditary dignitaries with a fixed role; they were great landowners with an administration and officials of their own. Cnut’s idea of the earldom as an office continued to have effect. The earls were representatives of the king, raising popular levies, not commanding hosts of private retainers; the courts where they presided were popular courts, not baronial jurisdictions; the organization over which they presided was based on the royal hundreds and the officer they used was the royal sheriff. In all these details we see the deep difference between England and the more feudalized areas of the continent. Here tribal kingship had reached its apex, creating a supra-tribal state in which many of the cohesive elements of earlier days persisted despite the enlarged form. In some ways the situation in England was archaic, driving tribal forms beyond the level at which they could effectively function, but it had aspects that looked far ahead of the more feudal systems operating in France and Normandy, towards the national state.

  Edward was an odd mixture of strength and weakness, of sloth and energy, of dilatoriness and capacity to act with decision. He let things drift, but not too far. In the first years of his reign Earl Godwin quickly built himself up as the greatest magnate. He seems to have been the son of the thegn Wulfnoth who did well out of piracy in the Channel and who thus showed that not all the pirates were Norsemen. He attracted Cnut’s notice and became earl of Wessex in 1018. Marrying Gytha, sister of Ulf of Denmark (Cnut’s brother-in-law), he was a power in the land for some fifty years. He seems to have swung his crucial support behind Edward, who in 1045 agreed to marry his daughter Edith. The marriage was unconsummated; no grandson of Godwin was to take the crown as legitimate heir. But the union swelled the family’s prestige; Edith got large estates as dowry and used her influence at court to advance her relations. Godwin and the two other earls, Leofric of Mercia and Siward of Northumbria, were with Edward when he rode to Winchester where Emma was living in luxurious retirement, in the summer of 1043. Edward took away all her property and confiscated her lands. One Chronicle text says that he was annoyed at being barred from a fair share of her wealth; another that she had done less than he wanted, before and after his accession. But Stigand, her chief confidant, recently made bishop of Elmham, lost his see at this point; and th
e author of the Encomium, who was in a position to know the facts, stated that she was intriguing with Magnus of Norway, inviting him to invade England and putting her treasure at his disposal. Caught out, she retired to Flanders.[127]

  Sweyn, Godwin’s eldest son, was made earl over the Severn valley; Harold ruled East Anglia; Beorn, nephew of Godwin’s wife and brother of Sweyn of Denmark, held a region north of London. The family of Godwin dominated a great stretch of land which reached from the Wash to the south coast and along it, and which ran north to Hereford. But their prestige was damaged by Sweyn, who acted as wildly and recklessly as any Norseman. He ravished an abbess and murdered his cousin Beorn. And Edward either resented the extension of Godwin’s power or clashed with him on a key-point of policy. Perhaps he was nursing his anger at Alfred’s death and biding his time. Their disagreement came about over the empty see of Canterbury. Godwin put forward a kinsman and won over the monks of Christ’s Church, who had the formal right of choice. But Edward for once asserted himself and appointed Robert of Jumièges, the Norman, who went off to Rome for papal confirmation. Then Robert and Edward put another Norman into the see of London, blocking out the bishop-elect, a friend of Godwin.