Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy (15 page)

Again, these self-same words and phrases echo through the succeeding centuries. In the thirteenth century Henry III was required to divest himself of his French favourites in 1234 and of his Poitevin relations in 1258; while in the seventeenth century the Civil War was ushered in with the charge against Charles I’s minister, the earl of Strafford, that he had put discord between king and people. Even in the language of opposition, it would seem, the foundations of English politics were laid in Anglo-Saxon England.

Once the great crisis of 1051–2 was over, Edward II’s reign takes on a very different character. The interesting times, apparently, were finished.
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
, which had given a breathless, blow-by-blow account of each political drama and its resolution, turns into a bare narrative of events. And there seem to have been rather few of those.

What had happened? And what was Edward’s own role in the change? Some historians see him as a broken man. Forced against his better judgement into a reconciliation with a man and a family he detested, he went into a sort of internal exile. He abandoned the affairs of the ungrateful kingdom of England for the kingdom of Heaven and devoted himself, more and more, to his great new monastic foundation of Westminster Abbey.

Edward’s Westminster Palace and the adjacent Abbey are represented in the Bayeux Tapestry – and archaeological evidence and contemporary descriptions confirm the broad accuracy of its representation. The Abbey, with a ground plan in the form of a Latin cross, was modelled on the great Norman foundations. One outstanding example is the abbey of Jumièges, which had been founded a decade before in a self-consciously Roman style of grandeur by its then abbot, Robert, Edward’s notorious archbishop of Canterbury.

Westminster, however, would outdo all its Norman rivals. Despite the French inspiration, two of the master masons were English, while a third was probably German. Under their direction, work started probably in the late 1050s and proceeded rapidly. It began at the east end, which was the nearest point to the riverside palace which Edward had built a little earlier. The choir was made up of two double bays. Each bay consisted of a pair of semicircular arches resting on plain, round columns, while the bays were divided from each other by massive piers. The crossings, where the choir met the transepts and nave, was surmounted by a lantern, in which four corner staircase turrets clustered around the massive central square tower. The nave, also made up of double bays, was half as long again as Jumièges and probably even higher. At the west end, which the Tapestry shows as work in progress, were two more square towers.

The result was by far the largest and most magnificent church in England and one of the noblest in northern Europe. But why, in the first place, should Edward have bothered to rebuild the poverty-stricken Abbey and nominate it as his burial place? The site, on Thorney Island, was surrounded by barely drained marshland, and all Edward’s dynastic connections pointed to Winchester. Contemporaries explained the king’s choice by his devotion to St Peter, the Abbey’s patron saint. This is no doubt true as far as it goes. But it was the Abbey’s proximity to London which counted for most. London had always been the commercial capital. But the events of the eleventh century show it usurping the role of the political capital as well: it had been the last place to hold out against Cnut and it was the scene of the decisive encounters between Edward and the Godwins in 1051–2.

Edward’s decision to site his abbey on Thorney Island both reflects this historical development and hastened it. And it means that, to all Edward’s other achievements, we should add this: he is the founder of Westminster as the royal and political capital of England.

Edward’s enthusiasm for Westminster is real enough. But it does not quite explain his apparent withdrawal and reconciliation with Godwin. Rather, Edward, the great survivor, decided that, if he could not get rid of the Godwins, then he would have to live with them. And, as he was no ascetic, he resolved to live with them as comfortably as possible.

Things were helped by the swift removal of Godwin himself from the political scene. For the tensions of 1051–2 seem to have been too much for the earl’s constitution. Within a few days of his triumphant vindication at the Westminster
witan
, he was taken unwell and went back home. Six months later Godwin, with his sons Harold and Tostig, was celebrating Easter with the king at Winchester. On Easter Monday, 12 April 1053, as he was sitting with Edward at table, he had a stroke: ‘he suddenly sank beneath [the table] against the foot-rail, deprived of speech and of all his strength’. He was carried into the king’s bedchamber and was expected to recover. Instead, he remained speechless and helpless, and, after lingering for three days, died on the 15th. He was buried in the Old Minster, close to his first patron, Cnut.

Godwin’s death drew the worst of the venom from Edward’s feud with his family. For the king’s inveterate dislike of the earl for his part in his brother Alfred’s death in 1036 was personal; it did not extend to his sons. On the contrary, Edward’s relations with them were correct and, in the fullness of time, even became warm.

This was especially true of Harold, who, following his brother Swein’s death on the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, which he had undertaken to atone for his sins, was now the head of the family. He succeeded to his father’s earldom of Wessex and soon to his role as
nutricius
or protector of the realm as the king’s right-hand man. His other brothers did not have to wait long for their share: Tostig became earl of Northumbria in 1055, Gyrth of East Anglia in 1057 and Leofwin of a newly created earldom of the south-eastern counties bordering the Thames estuary in the same year.

This left the one non-Godwin earldom of Mercia surrounded. Earl Leofric himself, old and perhaps schooled to patience by his wife Godgifu (Godiva), remained impassive. But his son and heir, Ælfgar, kicked against the pricks. He was twice outlawed. And twice he responded by allying himself with the aggressive and successful Welsh king Gruffudd ap Llwelyn and attacking England. Yet twice, too, Ælfgar was pardoned. He was allowed to succeed to Mercia; died in his bed and was in turn succeeded by his young son.

It was almost as though Edward – and Harold – were secure enough once the crisis of 1051–2 was over to allow the luxury of dissent. We can see this strength in the silver penny issued shortly after. The image of the king on the coin is a sharply characterized, realistic portrait – the first such on an English coin. It is also remarkable for its weight of royal symbolism: not only is the king shown with a sceptre but his crown is doubly imperial. The upper portion of the crown is crossed with two arches, like the closed crown of the German Holy Roman Emperor; the lower jewelled circlet, however, is modelled on the diadem of the
basileus
, the Byzantine emperor, and features the same
cataseistae
, or pendants. The St Stephen Crown of Hungary, where Edward the Exile took refuge from Cnut, is of similar appearance and it may perhaps be conjectured that Edward introduced his Hungarian hosts both to the form of the crown and to the formulary of the English coronation, which was also adopted in Hungary.

Should the king be properly known as Edward the Emperor rather than Edward the Confessor?

For the second half of Edward’s reign was a period of remarkable prosperity and stability. The continuing struggle for control of Cnut’s Scandinavian empire between the rulers of Denmark and Norway meant that they were too busy fighting each other to think seriously of invading England. This meant in turn that the
geld
, or land tax, which continued to be levied despite Edward’s ostentatious abolition of the
heregeld
itself, flowed directly into the king’s coffers.

A rudimentary treasury was set up at Winchester to administer the funds. It began as a chest under the royal bed in the charge of one or more of the king’s bedchamber servants or ‘chamberlains’. The chest figures in one of the legends that gathered around Edward as a proto-saint. A thief entered the royal bedchamber; made sure, as he thought, that the king was sound asleep and stole from the chest. He did the same a second night. But, as he came back a third time, he was startled when Edward, who had silently observed his earlier depredations, warned him to be gone as Hugolin the chamberlain was about to enter.

This Hugolin was a real person and, as senior
bur-thegn
or chamberlain, had charge not only of the royal treasures but of important documents as well. But was the under-the-bed chest also real? Modern historians have been sceptical. They have calculated the size of the chest needed to hold the annual yield of the
geld
, and then observed, dismissively, ‘some box, some bed’! But they may be being too clever by half. For hands-on royal management of the finances remained a feature of English government to the end of the Middle Ages and beyond. Henry VII counted and chested his own money with his treasurer of the chamber; while under Henry VIII the wealth of the monasteries was decanted into a cash hoard that was kept behind the royal bedchamber in Whitehall and administered by Sir Anthony Denny as chief gentleman of the Privy Chamber. Denny’s other duties included the custody of valuables and documents, the control of access and the wiping of the royal bottom.

Where modern historians are right, of course, is that this ‘primitive’ system of cash hoarding, whether in the eleventh or in the sixteenth century, was underpinned by an elaborate and formalized system of revenue raising. Receipts, in the form of notched sticks or tallies, were issued, and written records, including tax assessments, were kept. And, in sharp contrast with later practice, they were kept in English.

At the same time, the royal writing office developed rapidly too. It was run by the king’s priest Regenbald, who probably came from Lotharingia (Lorraine). He used the title of either
regis sigillarius
(‘keeper of the king’s seal’) or
regis cancellarius
(‘king’s chancellor’). The seal, of which he was keeper, was a metal matrix, or mould, which was used to make a wax impression. The image of the seal, which showed the king enthroned in majesty, with crown, sword and sceptre, was modelled on the seal of the Holy Roman Emperors. But, uniquely, the English seal was double-sided and hung from the document on a tag rather than being impressed on its surface. This meant that even when the document was folded and tied up, the seal could still be left hanging outside, proud and visible.

The visibility of the king’s image was important because the document, to which the seal was most frequently attached, was a peremptory royal letter of instruction. Known as a writ, it ordered a royal official that something should be done forthwith: that a case be heard in his court; that a tax be remitted; that a
burh
be punished for its misdemeanours. All this implied a highly sophisticated form of government: the person addressed was a royal official, not a feudal magnate; and the courts which would hear the case, in the shire and hundred, were royal also. But, though they were royal, they were not bureaucratic. Instead, they relied for their operations on the cooperation of the local community of free men. And a surprisingly high proportion was involved: on one Herefordshire estate, for example, it has been calculated that one free man in twenty was engaged in administration at one level or another.

Another mark of the stability of these years was the deliberate reconstitution of the royal family. As we have seen, after Cnut’s triumph the children of his supplanted Anglo-Saxon rival, Edmund Ironside, had been packed off to Germany and thence to Hungary. Cnut’s intention was that they should be murdered (at a safe distance from English eyes). Instead, they were received as honoured guests. The younger, Edmund, died in Hungary. But the elder, Edward the Exile, married the Princess Agatha and had ‘a fair offspring’. In 1054, the princely Bishop Ealdred of Worcester, who was an intrepid traveller, went ‘on the king’s errand’ to the imperial court. His mission was to persuade Edward and his family to return with him to England. The then state of relations between the Empire and Hungary frustrated Ealdred’s mission. But the message got through and Edward, Agatha and their children arrived in England in 1057. Edward himself died almost immediately, to the grief of the Anglo-Saxon chronicler. But his wife and children remained in England and his young son, Edgar the Æthling, was brought up by Edward as his own.

The most striking change, however, and the surest sign of recovery, was that England regained her tenth-century hegemony within Britain. In 1054, Earl Siward of Northumbria defeated Macbeth, the usurping king of Scots; killed many of the Scots nobility and seized immense booty. These events, imaginatively dramatized by Shakespeare, paved the way for the restoration of Malcolm III, son of Macbeth’s predecessor, Duncan, in 1057. Two years later, in 1059, Malcolm visited the English court, escorted by Earl Tostig. It was the first such visit by a Scottish king since Kenneth I had come to Edgar’s court eighty years previously, also to swear a form of fealty.

Likewise reminiscent of Edgar’s reign was the fate of Wales. Harold tried to bring Gruffudd ap Llwelyn to heel in 1056 by negotiation from a position of strength. Gruffudd, recognizing that he was temporarily outmatched, ‘swore oaths that he would be a firm and faithful viceroy to King Edward’. But, as soon as he dared, he was back to his old tricks. Finally, in 1063, Harold and his brother Tostig launched a two-pronged attack on Gruffudd: Harold by sea and Tostig by land. Their success provoked an internal rising against Gruffudd, who ‘was … slain on 5 August by his own men’. His severed head was surrendered to Harold, who sent it as a trophy to Edward, together with the gilded figurehead and prow of Gruffudd’s ship.

It is a remarkable achievement. Edward’s coronation seems to have been intended to usher in a new ‘age of Edgar’. An observer of Britain in 1063 would probably think that it had succeeded.

But he would have judged too soon.