Conquered: The Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England 9781788314503, 9781350287082, 9781350287075

Citation preview

Conquered

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Conquered The Last Children of Anglo-Saxon England Eleanor Parker

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Eleanor Parker, 2022 Eleanor Parker has asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. Cover image: Granger Historical Picture Archive / Alamy Stock Photo. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders and obtain permission to reproduce the copyright material. Please do get in touch with any enquiries or any information relating to such material or the rights holder. We would be pleased to rectify any omissions in subsequent editions of this publication should they be drawn to our attention. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7883-1450-3 ePDF: 978-1-3502-8707-5 eBook: 978-1-3502-8706-8 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of illustrations  vi Acknowledgements  viii Genealogical tables  ix

Introduction 1 1 Hero of the English: Hereward 15 2 A sparrow in the snare: Margaret of Scotland 59 3 A lost generation: The grandchildren of Gytha and Godwine 97 4 Warrior, traitor and martyr: Waltheof 127 5 Child of memory: Eadmer of Canterbury 155 Epilogue: New Englands 197 Notes 203 Bibliography 235 Index 248

Illustrations   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

‘Then King Harold was slain . . . ’  8 A surviving area of the Fens near Ely  20 Peterborough Cathedral  23 Bourne, Lincolnshire  30 The comet of 1066 on the Bayeux Tapestry  34 Ely Cathedral  44 Peterborough Cathedral  51 A nineteenth-century image of Hereward  56 Edmund Ironside and his descendants in a fourteenth-century manuscript  62 ‘Edgar clito’  64 St Margaret depicted in a fourteenth-century manuscript  69 The marriage of Margaret and Malcolm, in a modern window in St John’s church, Busbridge, Surrey  73 St Margaret of Scotland, from Busbridge, Surrey  79 St Margaret’s chapel in Edinburgh Castle  83 Edith/Matilda and Henry I in a fourteenth-century manuscript  85 Romsey Abbey  95 The coronation of Harold Godwineson on the Bayeux Tapestry  98 A church dedicated to St Olaf in Chichester, probably reflecting the influence of the Godwine family  107 Prayers to St Olaf in a manuscript from eleventh-century Exeter  109 The siege of Exeter in one version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle  113 St Giles’s Hill, Winchester  131 Crowland Abbey, the place of Waltheof ’s burial  137 A medieval statue of Waltheof at Crowland Abbey  147 Eadmer depicted in a twelfth-century manuscript  158 An example of Eadmer’s scribal work  159 Osbern depicted in a manuscript from Christ Church  162 Canterbury Cathedral  173 St Ælfheah in the twelfth-century Passionale produced at Christ Church, a set of manuscripts probably made under Eadmer’s supervision  180

Illustrations

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Canterbury annals for 1066–76, noting the death of Edward the Confessor, the destruction and rebuilding of Christ Church and the execution of Waltheof  189 A reconstruction of the Anglo-Saxon cathedral at Canterbury, based on Eadmer’s description  194

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Acknowledgements

I

am grateful to everyone who has helped in the preparation of this book, but I want to acknowledge one group of people in particular. The generation of

children and adolescents whose lives were disrupted by the Norman Conquest has been an interest of mine for several years. However, the last stages of this book were written in 2020–1, during the pandemic and a course of successive lockdowns. Throughout this time I was teaching undergraduate students, most of them around the same age as many of the subjects of this book were at the time of the Norman Conquest. These young people, too, were coping with upheaval, loss and a sudden change in the expected course of their lives. They faced it all with courage and determination, but it is no doubt an experience that will remain with them. This book is dedicated to them, and to my nieces, Francesca and Lucia.

Genealogical tables Table 1. The Families of Margaret and Waltheof x Table 2. The Family of Gytha and Godwine xi

Ealdgyth

=

Edmund

Edgar Ætheling

Æthelred king of England 978-1016

=

Edmund Ironside king of England 1016

Edward the Exile (d. 1057)

Christina

=

Richard II duke of Normandy 996-1026

Emma (d.1052)

Robert I duke of Normandy 1027-1035

Edward the Confessor king of England 1042-1066

Agatha

Margaret (d.1093)

=

William the Conqueror duke of Normandy 1035-1087 king of England 1066-1087

=

Edward (d.1093) Edmund Æthelred Edgar, king of Scotland 1097-1107 Alexander I, king of Scotland 1107-1124 Mary

Malcolm king of Scotland 1058-1093

=

Matilda

Adelaide

Robert II, duke of Normandy 1087-1106 William Rufus, king of England 1087-1100

Edith/Matilda (d.1118)

David king of Scotland 1124-1153

Table 1 The families of Margaret and Waltheof

=

=

Judith

Siward (d.1055)

=

=

Ælfgifu

x

Richard I duke of Normandy 942-996

Edgar king of England 959-975

Ælfflæd

Waltheof (d.1076)

Henry I king of England 1100-1135

Maud (d.1131)

=

Simon de Senlis (d. before 1113)

Alice

Ælfgifu of Northampton

=

Cnut king of England 1016-1035 Denmark 1018-1035 Norway 1028-1035

Svein (d.1035) Harold Harefoot, king of England 1035-1040

=

Emma of Normandy (d.1052)

Edith ‘Swan-neck’

=

Estrith

Harold king of England (d.1066)

=

Ealdgyth

Harold Godwine Edmund Magnus Gunnhild Gytha Ulf Unnamed child buried in Canterbury

Hakon Tostig Reinald (mother unknown)

Table 2 The family of Gytha and Godwine

=

Ulf (d.1026)

Gytha

Wulfnoth

=

Godwine (d.1053)

Svein, king of Denmark 1047-1076 Beorn (d.1049) Osbeorn

Harthacnut king of Denmark 1035-1042 England 1040-1042 Gunnhild (d.1038)

Edward the = Confessor king of England 1042-1066

Svein (d.1052)

Thorgils

Gyrth Leofwine Gunnhild Wulfnoth Ælfgifu (d.1066) (d.1066) (d.1087) (d.1094) (d.1065?)

Edith (d.1075)

Tostig (d.1066)

=

Skuli Ketill? (mother unknown)

Judith of Flanders

 xi

Svein Forkbeard king of Denmark 986-1014 England 1013-1014

xii

Introduction

Sometimes events occur which are so sudden and so life-changing in their implications that they alter an entire society. They cleave time in two: life before and life after. They define generations, dividing society into those who remember the world before the new reality and those who have never known anything else. The Norman Conquest of England was one of those events. For almost a thousand years, it has been seen as a defining moment in English history – the end of one age and the beginning of another, sometimes even (despite all evidence to the contrary) the starting point of English history itself. The single date 1066 is deeply embedded in British culture; almost from the first it was interpreted as a pivotal moment, a watershed, after which nothing would be the same ever again.1 In recent decades, historians of this period have increasingly tried to push back against some of the ways in which the Norman Conquest has been employed by national myth-making. They have been careful to emphasize what did not change with the conquest, as well as what did, and also to stress that change did not happen overnight: the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066 marked only the beginning of a long process of conquest, rather than a single decisive moment. But no one would disagree that this process resulted in profound and lasting changes to English culture and society, to the English language and to relationships with England’s neighbours in the British Isles and further afield. This book explores the lives of those who had a unique perspective on this moment in history: the generation born on the eve of the conquest, between the late 1040s and early 1060s, who were in their childhood or teens in 1066 and grew up in its aftermath. In most cases too young to have a direct role in the events of that year but old enough to perceive what was happening, they would

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find their adult lives shaped by the influence of new forces rapidly altering the world into which they had been born. At the time of the conquest, those in their teens were entering adulthood – old enough to marry, hold lands or fight in battle – but were unlikely to have yet had much experience of leadership or political life and were still to a large degree dependent on the decisions of their elders or those in authority over them.2 Others were young children, made vulnerable by the loss of parents or home and affected by the conquest in ways that would influence them for the rest of their lives. In the years after 1066, as the effects of the conquest took hold, some members of this generation began to play an active part in rebellion against Norman rule, while others chose or were forced into submission; some left the country; some did little but watch and observe the changes they were witnessing. The effect of the conquest on the lives of this generation of English children was not by any means wholly negative. While some struggled to find a place for themselves in the post-conquest world, others flourished, benefitting from new encounters and opportunities for cultural exchange. But whatever their individual experiences, they all faced lives which turned out very differently from the ones they might have expected to live. In this book, we will explore both change and continuity across the conquest from a variety of different perspectives through the lives of members of this generation, as they grew up into men and women, nuns and queens, warriors and monks. We will consider what these individual life stories can tell us about English society and culture in the decades after the Norman Conquest, as well as how this crucial period was remembered in later centuries. This generation were the last children of Anglo-Saxon England, but they were also the fathers and mothers of the country England was to become.

English, Normans, Anglo-Normans Though in the past the Norman Conquest was often seen as the starting point of English history and identity, few historians would now subscribe to that view. Such a starting point (in so far as it is helpful to look for one at all) must be sought at least two or three centuries earlier; by the eleventh century,

Introduction

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‘English’ (englisc) was well established as the term for a single people, who shared a common language, history and religion.3 It is worth emphasizing this point, because one of the most significant features of the decades after the Norman Conquest was the survival, in an evolving and adapting form, of that identity and the narrative of English history which was bound up with it. Partly for reasons of convenience, historians speak of a transition from ‘AngloSaxon’ to ‘Anglo-Norman’ England, but contemporary terminology was more fluid and flexible than either of those formulations: the designation ‘English’ survived, but its meaning underwent important change. This was an identity which had in part been forged in reaction to the arrival of an earlier wave of conquerors, the Viking rulers and settlers of the ninth and tenth centuries. It was in response to this influx of Scandinavian migrants that the kings of Anglo-Saxon Wessex, Alfred the Great and his descendants, began to promote the idea of a single community of the English, drawing on the influential model of a gens Anglorum, ‘people of the English’, which had been promulgated centuries earlier by Bede in his history of the English church.4 The Vikings who settled in northern and eastern England were in time absorbed into this community of the English too, though their descendants in these regions long retained some sense of their own distinctively AngloScandinavian history.5 In the early eleventh century, England was conquered by the Danish king Svein Forkbeard and his son Cnut, and became part of Cnut’s Anglo-Danish empire. A conquest which had the potential to pose a serious challenge to the by now dominant narrative of English history and identity seemed, at first, not to have done so. Cnut was adept at fashioning himself in the mould of previous kings of the English, making use of their language and laws, and choosing to seem as functionally English as any Anglo-Saxon king. But if that was how he appeared to an English audience, to his Scandinavian followers he spoke in another language.6 While he presented himself as the successor to Anglo-Saxon kings, he also wished it to be remembered that he and his Viking ancestors had fought against those kings time and again, with great success.7 He gave some of the most powerful positions in the country to his Danish and Norwegian supporters, who married into English families and forged an Anglo-Scandinavian elite; several of the young people whose stories

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we will look at in this book were the offspring of such marriages, the children more truly of Anglo-Danish than of Anglo-Saxon England. Cnut’s success in taking the place of previous kings of the English fatally destabilized the royal line he had ruthlessly displaced, and in doing so helped to set the stage for the Norman Conquest, exactly fifty years after he seized the English throne. Furthermore, though the period of Anglo-Danish rule proved short-lived, Cnut’s successors in Denmark long retained an interest in English affairs and were to play a significant role in the turmoil of the years after 1066. By 1066, then, the idea of a single English identity promoted by the tradition of Bede and Alfred had already undergone substantial change, but it had proved able to expand and adapt in response to shifting political circumstances. In popular usage, the inhabitants of England in 1066 are today still often called ‘the Anglo-Saxons’, but it is unlikely that many people at the time thought of themselves in that way. Whether of Anglo-Danish or Anglo-Saxon descent, they were more likely to call themselves English, and much of what they would have known as the English language, church, governance and law survived the arrival of the Normans. That is a testament, in part, to how firmly rooted these elements of English society were by 1066. They might nonetheless have been uprooted after the conquest, if not for the attitude taken by the conquerors to the country they had come to rule. Instead of an outright rejection or refutation of the English past, the new Norman elite engaged in a complex process of negotiation with all things English, adopting and assimilating some aspects of English culture, eliding or suppressing others. Central to their legitimization of the conquest was the claim that the Norman kings were lawful inheritors of the English throne.8 This meant they were heirs, too, to all of England’s history – at least, all the parts that were of interest or use to them. For a few decades after 1066, there continued to be a relatively clear distinction between Normans and English, but over time – and much more quickly than might have been expected – what emerged was, again, a mixed society, in which these distinctions became increasingly blurred.9 Like the people today popularly called ‘Anglo-Saxons’, those we call ‘Anglo-Normans’ were in fact more likely to describe themselves simply as English.10 The Norman elite, while continuing to speak French and retaining links to the

Introduction

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continent, began to evolve their own version of English identity: by virtue of living in England, they were English as much as those whose ancestors had lived there before the conquest. Views differ on how long this process took, but some historians have seen it as substantially complete by the 1130s or 1140s, within a century of the conquest. In this period, French-speaking audiences living in England could enjoy a text such as Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis (History of the English), which forms its narrative of English history out of stories of Anglo-Saxon, Danish and Norman kings ruling in England; whatever their origins, all are incorporated into this expansive version of the history of ‘the English’.11 The speed of this process does not mean it was easy or painless, or that it would have been accepted by all of the population living under Norman rule. In this period, it is generally easier to access what the Normans were saying and thinking about English history and identity than it is to hear the voices of the English themselves.12 At the highest level of society, the Normans effectively wiped out the English elite, systematically dispossessing them of their lands: by the time of Domesday Book in 1086, according to the estimation of Hugh Thomas, only around 6 per cent of the land in England was in English hands.13 In the church hierarchy, too, English leaders were either forcibly removed or replaced, as vacancies arose, by foreign churchmen; by the 1080s there was only one English-born bishop in England, Wulfstan of Worcester (of whom we shall hear again).14 This strategy of elite replacement produced resentment among the English, as we shall see, intensified by the marked language barrier between the French-speaking elites and the people they governed. Visible tokens of Norman power, such as the construction of well-defended castles across the country and the comprehensive survey of Domesday Book, marked the presence of a new ruling class who from the English perspective must have seemed determined to enforce their dominance over the conquered people. However, though many of the leading figures of pre-conquest England died or otherwise disappeared from the stage in 1066 and the years afterwards, others did survive and succeed in the post-conquest world. Even in the first decades after the conquest, those among the English who were prepared to support the new regime were allowed to keep their lands, and the further down the social scale we look, the greater English presence we find. As the twelfth

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century progressed, English and Normans became increasingly assimilated and difficult to distinguish.15 Within narrative accounts – both medieval and modern – of the development of this Anglo-Norman society, the generation who are the focus of this book have often held an uncertain place. They do not fit in. Both in the Middle Ages and in the modern era, there has been a fascination with one particular kind of post-conquest ‘survivor’, the rebels who fought against Norman rule in the years after 1066. The victory at Hastings was only the beginning of several years of conflict, as Norman power was enforced and consolidated across England. In different areas of the country, the remnants of families who had been powerful before the conquest tried to mount a military opposition to the new regime. These rebellions had some short-lived success, but of course they ultimately ended in failure. Perhaps the doomed nature of the enterprise has retrospectively coloured it with all the more romantic glamour, and novelists as well as historians have long been attracted to the stories of such men. This is exemplified above all by the popularity of the legend of Hereward ‘the Wake’, the subject of our first chapter, who ever since the twelfth century has been the subject of myths about a heroic but futile English resistance. Modern historians have not always been kind to those who led these failed rebellions (as we shall see, medieval historians were not particularly kind to them either). But even worse, in the eyes of some, are those among the English who reached an accommodation with the new regime. In the words of Ann Williams, summarizing the views of many nineteenth- and twentieth-century historians: ‘Those who co-operated with the invaders have been regarded as quislings and traitors; those who resisted as foolish and incompetent.’16 These are easy judgements for historians to make with the benefit of centuries of hindsight; whether they fought or not, the conquered English cannot win. And, of course, not everyone could fight, even if they wanted to. The leaders of these rebellions were almost all young, aristocratic men, who had the option and the resources to take direct action if they wished. That option was not open to everyone: not to most women, or children, or those committed to religious life. The position of English women in the years after the conquest has been extensively studied, and historians have attempted to understand the different ways in which women found a path through the Anglo-Norman world.17 As

Introduction

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we shall see, some women did in fact involve themselves in the rebellions, but that was far from common. A more indicative sign of how women might have experienced these turbulent post-conquest years is found in the sources which speak of women seeking refuge in religious houses out of fear of sexual violence from the Normans.18 As time went on, the female members of families which had been powerful before 1066 had to deal with a strange new status: if they had been left vulnerable by the loss of fathers and brothers to the conquest, they had also become the chief surviving representatives of lines of inheritance which held both tangible and intangible value for the conquerors. One factor in the formation of a mixed Anglo-Norman society in the decades after the conquest was a degree of intermarriage, by which Norman men married English women as a means of legitimizing claims to the possession of lands.19 In time this produced a generation of children who could trace their lineage to both Norman and English parents, and it has often been suggested that such women must have played a significant role in the transmission of pre-conquest culture and the English language to their children. These women were one means by which Norman-ruled England became Anglo-Norman England; but as some of their stories will show, it is not always clear how much choice they had in that process. A war-torn country is a dangerous place for women. The image on the cover of this book is taken from the Bayeux Tapestry and occurs as part of the tapestry’s narrative of preparations for the Battle of Hastings. After the Norman army are shown landing on the coast of Sussex, we see them gathering provisions and making fortifications, while hearing news of Harold Godwineson’s activities. Among these military scenes, there is this unexplained image: a woman and child fleeing a burning house, as it is set alight by Norman soldiers. Their diminutive size, compared to the men, emphasizes their vulnerability. We do not know if this depicts a real incident, and if so, what might have happened. The caption which accompanies the image only notes Hic domus incenditur, ‘here a house is burned’ – no mention of the woman and child. It has been suggested that these figures may represent specific people, perhaps members of King Harold’s family, who have been targeted by Norman soldiers as a provocation to the English king. The fate of that family, for whom the world really did change overnight on 14 October 1066, will be the subject of one of

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Figure 1  ‘Then King Harold was slain . . . ’: the Battle of Hastings in one version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (British Library, Cotton MS. Tiberius B IV, f. 80). © The British Library (public domain).

our chapters. But it is also possible, perhaps more likely, that in the eyes of the designer of the tapestry – and the English women who probably embroidered it – this woman and child stood for other victims of the war, the anonymous casualties so easily forgotten in histories of battles and conquests.20 The child fleeing the burning house in Hastings would have been a contemporary of the people whose stories form the subject of this book. 

Writing lives: The nature of the sources This book will explore not only what happened to some members of this generation of children but also, just as importantly, the ways in which their stories were recorded, retold and remembered – or forgotten. By the nature of the sources, the stories we have are those of people who belonged to, or were in close contact with, political and cultural elites; they were usually (though not always) the children of prominent families, which means that in some important ways they cannot be fully representative of the wider experience of their generation. However, by considering how their lives were remembered,

Introduction

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we can gain an insight into the perspectives of a much larger group of people, those who wrote and heard and read of their lives, and so explore what these stories might have meant to their contemporaries and to later generations. As it receded into history, the pre-conquest world was reimagined in ways which reflected and served later interests and concerns.21 The lives of those who had lived through the conquest were not only recorded but appropriated, reinterpreted by others and reshaped according to the needs of the present. This means that they sometimes tell us as much about twelfth- and thirteenthcentury perceptions of the Norman Conquest as they do about the experiences of those who lived through it. Whether these narratives reject, embrace or reinvent the Anglo-Saxon past, they offer reflections on the impact of the conquest and its consequences for the English. By approaching these narratives both through the stories of individual lives and through close study of the texts in which those lives are recorded, we will see how the conquest became the subject of legend as well as history, in ways which still profoundly influence our view of this period today. Before we begin, it may be helpful to give a brief overview of the kinds of sources we will be dealing with – the forms of evidence we have available for understanding the narratives of early medieval lives. It has been said that the Norman Conquest is one exception to the rule that history is written by the winners,22 because a key source to which we shall frequently turn is the different versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the vernacular annals whose accounts of the years after 1066 provide what can be generally seen as an English perspective on events (Figure 1). From its origins in the time of Alfred the Great, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle played an important role in the construction of a narrative of English history and identity, closely tied to the cultural power of the royal line of Wessex.23 Through the upheavals of the eleventh century’s two conquests, with the stability of that royal line increasingly undermined, the different versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reflect instead an ever more fragmented picture of local, anonymous perspectives and preoccupations. Some seem consciously to be making a valiant attempt to keep alive a particular tradition of English history-writing which was, nonetheless, dwindling away: in the second half of the eleventh century several versions of the Chronicle cease altogether to record new events and only one continues substantially into the

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twelfth century. The monastic houses which preserved these annals continued to read, translate and copy them, but they were no longer the primary mode through which contemporary events might be committed to history. These annals provide an invaluable source for the period they do record – but if they show that history is not always written by the winners, they also suggest how difficult it can be to go on writing from the losing side. And the winners were doing plenty of history-writing. With the exception of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Norman historians predominate in the first accounts of the conquest and its aftermath. Within a decade or so of 1066, the Norman writers William of Jumièges and William of Poitiers had produced narratives recording the Norman version of events, doing important political work in justifying and legitimizing the Norman claim.24 By the twelfth century, the first generation of Anglo-Norman historians were attempting selfconsciously to blur the line between ‘English’ and ‘Norman’ perspectives – and yet in effect they often end up replicating the dominant Norman narrative, to the exclusion of other interpretations.25 Among the offspring of marriages between English women and Norman men were a number of twelfth-century historians, most notably William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon and Orderic Vitalis. They were all children of mixed marriages, born some years after the conquest (Orderic, the eldest, was born in 1075). When they wrote about the 1060s and 1070s they were describing events not within their own memory, though not far removed from it. William of Malmesbury boasts that his mixed heritage gave him an advantage as a historian of the conquest: because, as he puts it, he has ‘the blood of both nations in my veins’, he is able to steer a middle course on questions such as the character of William the Conqueror.26 Norman and English historians were too partisan, he asserts; his blood gives him the power to balance these extremes. But blood is no guarantee of impartiality: in his consistently dismissive attitude towards the generation of Anglo-Saxon ‘survivors’ whose stories we will be looking at, William, like his contemporaries, helped to sideline their experiences and perspectives, writing them out of the prevailing narrative of Anglo-Norman history. Though his Gesta Regum Anglorum, for instance, records the turmoil of the post-conquest years, it is a version of English history which foregrounds continuity across the gulf of the conquest, telling an unbroken story which

Introduction

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stretches from the first arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain up to the twelfth century.27 This is the version of history which the Normans, the most recent of the ‘kings of the English’, sought to adopt as their own. Historians like William of Malmesbury were not, however, the only people who wrote about the past. The decades following the conquest saw a great increase in new kinds of writing in England – especially forms of writing which turned lives into literature. In the Middle Ages, there were several different genres which offered ways of writing about the lives of individuals, narratives in which the shape of a single person’s life provides the structure and primary focus of the text. None of these genres overlap exactly with what we would today recognize as biography, although in some cases their aims can be similar. It is not straightforward, therefore, to use any of these texts to tell the life story of a medieval subject. But these were important modes through which medieval writers and readers might approach the structure and significance of an individual life story, and they will form the bulk of our source material. The most widespread and popular form of life-writing in early medieval Europe was hagiography, the lives of saints, a genre which in itself encompasses a wide range of approaches to writing about an individual life. In some ways, medieval saints’ lives (vitae) can look a lot like biographies: they often follow the life of a single individual from birth to death, providing detailed information about their family origins, childhood, education and activities in adult life. Importantly, they may also explore the interior life of the saint, offering insight into their motivations and decisions, their opinions, emotions, memories, hopes, regrets and so on – a picture of their experiences and feelings which goes beyond a simple record of their actions. In many cases, such narratives are highly valuable historical evidence for the lives of their subjects, especially when the hagiographer has close personal knowledge of the saint or access to reliable sources of information about them. Not all hagiographical narratives provide this level of detailed information, but those which do can be of great use in understanding the lives of their subjects. At the same time, it would be misleading to regard these texts as biographies in anything like the modern sense of the word. Hagiographical narratives, by purpose and design, follow established patterns. They generally aim not merely to record the life and deeds

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of their subject, or even to commemorate and celebrate their holiness, but also to demonstrate that the saint conforms to a recognized pattern of sanctity – a pattern which is given authority and weight by parallels between their life and the lives of other saints, and most of all with the life of Christ. This means that the narrative purpose of recording any incident in the saint’s life – or even their thoughts, memories or feelings – may be to point beyond the individual saint to a larger ideal of sanctity. Hagiography was a popular and adaptable genre, which offered many possibilities for writing about the lives of prominent individuals and the times in which they lived. If not history-writing in the modern sense, it was an influential way of writing and thinking about the past – perhaps the most accessible and widespread form in which post-conquest readers and writers might encounter stories from Anglo-Saxon history. It thus played an important role in how perceptions of that history developed and spread. Since this genre was so prevalent, we might also expect that familiarity with such texts shaped how their readers understood their own lives and experiences. One of the subjects of this book was the author of numerous saints’ lives: for him the genre was central to his understanding of Anglo-Saxon history, but also a place for personal reflection on his memories of the pre-conquest world. He records details of his own experiences and recollections in the margins, as it were, of the narratives he wrote about other people’s lives. Another of the characters in our story was the subject of a vita, and that text is our best source for information about her life; but as a devout and educated woman she must also have been a reader of saints’ lives, and her actions may have been influenced by her knowledge of this form of literature, just as her hagiographer’s account of her life was shaped by his awareness of the conventions of the genre. Saints’ lives were written and read in England before the conquest, and continued to be written and read after the conquest; subjects, styles and approaches changed but not the basic principles of the genre. To some degree, this influential literary mode remained unaffected by the process of cultural change which is the focus of this book. However, the post-conquest period was also a time of growing popularity for a new genre which offered different ways of exploring the narrative of an individual life and its place within a wider historical context. This was the genre of romance, which became a

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hugely capacious and popular literature of entertainment. It has its origins in the tastes of the Norman elite in this period, including their interest in English and British history.28 In the multicultural and multilingual environment of post-conquest England, romance blossomed into a creative and diverse genre which reflected the preoccupations of the Anglo-Norman aristocracy while also providing new ways of interpreting pre-conquest history which spread beyond this initial context. By the second half of the twelfth century, AngloNorman patrons and audiences were enjoying romances set in pre-conquest England, narratives which reflect the Norman interest in earlier English history and their understanding of their own place within its development. But these texts, drawing in part on Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Scandinavian narrative material, helped to preserve and perpetuate stories which would soon find a wider audience, feeding a new tradition of Middle English romance which developed in the thirteenth century.29 Romance, then, was a genre closely bound up with the cultural shifts taking place in England as a result of the conquest, but it swiftly became a context within which many different kinds of stories could be told. Romance has a voracious appetite for story: in the Middle Ages, just about any narrative material was liable to be reworked into romance or inflected by the genre’s characteristic interest in individual experience, personal feeling and family and love relationships. One of the texts we will look at in the first chapter is among the earliest examples of romance from England, but its subject is the quintessential anti-Norman rebel, Hereward. It is a narrative which tells the life story of a hero presented as defiantly and aggressively English, yet its cultural affiliations are in fact much more complex than at first appear. In the fertile literary climate of post-conquest England, these genres influenced and nurtured each other: romance could borrow from hagiography or historical writing from romance, and in some cases they are so closely entwined that a particular text is best understood as belonging to multiple genres or modes. Though they have different histories, the boundaries between these genres are surprisingly fluid, especially since what they often have in common is their focus on the story of an individual life. They place a human subject at the centre of the narrative, and narrate their experiences and actions within the context of a particular historical moment.

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One last point worth noting is how few of the texts we will look at were written in English. Anglo-Saxon England had a highly sophisticated vernacular literary culture, in which the English language could be used for all kinds of purposes: history-writing, law, scientific treatises, poetry, hagiography, homilies and interventions in political debate. After the conquest, the status of the English language changed rapidly. Though new writing in English did not entirely cease, and older texts continued to be copied, new works of the kind we will be looking at were almost all written in Latin or French in the twelfth century. With the exception of one version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and a scattering of saints’ lives, the writing of English history was detached from the English language for at least a century after the conquest.30 This did not prevent such texts from engaging in depth with pre-conquest history or with questions of what it meant to be an English hero, an English queen or an English historian in a period when these terms were rapidly taking on new meanings. Such questions could be as readily explored in French and Latin as in English – but the fact that they had to be was itself an important marker of cultural change. The people whose lives will be explored in this book are either the authors or the subjects of these diverse kinds of texts. As the sophisticated, high-status Old English literature of Anglo-Saxon England was increasingly displaced by French and Latin as a medium for the writing of history, poetry and hagiography, these texts negotiate a complex interplay of languages and genres as well as of identities and cultures: English, Scottish, Scandinavian, Norman and more. They reflect the complexities of the lives they record, those of a generation who grew up in a period when the question of identity in England was more contested than it had been for centuries. What it meant to be English was changing; so was English literature.

1 Hero of the English Hereward

Hastings was only the first battle of the Norman Conquest. In the years after 1066, the Normans faced outbreaks of military opposition in different parts of the country: first at Exeter and in the west of England in 1067–8, then in 1069 in the north, where English rebels, assisted by forces sent by the kings of Denmark and Scotland, succeeded in capturing York from the Normans. The city was recaptured in the winter of 1069–70, and William punished the region for supporting the resistance by laying waste to the countryside – the notorious ‘Harrying of the North’.1 In the spring of 1070, some of the rebels regathered with their Danish allies at the Isle of Ely, making their base there for some months, until the besieged Isle finally submitted to the Normans and the Danes returned to Denmark. Though there was a further uprising in 1075, the end of the siege of Ely was the point at which many of the rebels made peace with William. At different times, the English leaders of these rebellions included young men from families who had been prominent before the conquest, including surviving members of the family of Harold Godwineson, Edgar Ætheling, the only remaining male representative of the Anglo-Saxon royal line, Edwin and Morcar, sons of the former earl of Mercia, and Waltheof, whose father had been earl of Northumbria. In later chapters we will look at the lives of some of these men and their sisters – young people born into wealth and power, whose fates were dramatically affected by the conquest. In this

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chapter, we begin with a man who in birth and influence was among the least significant of the rebels, but whose posthumous reputation outshone them all. This was Hereward, famous in medieval legend for leading a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the Normans in the Fens around Ely. The historical evidence for Hereward’s life is very scanty, and he is scarcely mentioned in the contemporary sources which document the rebellions of 1068–71. However, the legendary tradition that developed around his life story provides an important insight into one strand of English reaction to the Norman Conquest, not just in the immediate aftermath of 1066 but through the centuries that followed. We will explore how Hereward was remembered in different medieval sources, especially a detailed account of his life known as the Gesta Herwardi (Deeds of Hereward), which was probably composed in the first half of the twelfth century.2 This text tells how Hereward, exiled from England as a teenager for riotous behaviour, has a series of adventures around the British Isles and beyond in the 1060s. While he is absent he hears that England has been conquered, and he returns home to find himself displaced from his lands – no less an outlaw at home than he had been abroad. The rest of the narrative concerns his struggles against the new rulers in the area, set around the time of the siege of Ely, as he triumphs over Norman soldiers both through physical prowess and clever schemes of trickery and disguise. Much of this text is clearly fictional, and though it may be partly based on first-hand accounts of Hereward’s life, it also draws inspiration from Anglo-Norman romance and Anglo-Scandinavian tales of exiles and outlaws. Like many medieval romances, the Gesta Herwardi is a coming-of-age story, about a young person finding their place in the world. It is the story of a teenager becoming alienated from, then reconciled to, his family and home; of an untried warrior proving his strength for the first time; of a young man’s experience of falling in love. We do not actually know how old Hereward was at the time of the conquest, and he may have been somewhat older than the young men who fought beside him, whose stories we will look at later. But his youth is important in the Gesta, which sets out to tell how, in the turmoil of the post-conquest years, a wild and rebellious teenager became one of England’s greatest heroes.

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The people of the Fenland To explore the legendary tradition which grew up around Hereward, we have to travel first into the Fenland, the region in eastern England which provides the setting for Hereward’s adventures with the Normans. In the Middle Ages, this large expanse of low-lying land extended across southern Lincolnshire, eastern Norfolk and what is now Cambridgeshire. The environment of the Fens was changed forever by drainage schemes in the seventeenth century, so it can be difficult for a modern audience to picture quite how unusual and distinctive this landscape was in the medieval period, and how powerfully its environment shaped the imagination and identity of the people who lived there.3 The romance of Hereward’s story has been, from the beginning, closely linked with the specific landscape which the outlaw was imagined to inhabit: a world of reeds and rivers, wetlands, fens, and water-meadows, interspersed with islands of higher ground. On several of those islands were communities of monks, and it is from these abbeys that our best evidence for Hereward’s legend survives. In the Middle Ages the abbeys of Ely, Peterborough, Crowland and Ramsey formed a network of influential communities, important not only as powerful spiritual centres and prominent local landowners but also as guardians of the Fenland’s history and heritage. These monasteries had a great deal in common with each other, yet proudly maintained the independence of their individual identities and traditions; at times they were fierce rivals, at other times allies in the face of greater external threats. They were often in close communication with each other and with the world beyond, while at the same time extolling the glorious isolation of their Fenland setting. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries they were all centres of literature, engaged in producing chronicles, saints’ lives and other kinds of texts in Latin and (unusually, at this date) in English. These works of local and institutional history record and reflect on each abbey’s own story, placing it within the context of national events, and they often include some discussion of the monks’ relationship to the distinctive character of their environment.4 The wealth and influence of these monasteries derived in part from their skilful management of the natural resources which surrounded them, and their chroniclers make much of the great richness and

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fertility of the Fenland world. A twelfth-century chronicler from Ely begins the Liber Eliensis with a panegyric to the Fens, especially his own island: Ely, which we begin by declaring undoubtedly worthy of renown, is the largest of the islands of the Fens. It is magnificent in its wealth and its towns; equally praiseworthy for its woods, vineyards and waters; exceedingly rich in all fruit, livestock-breeding and crops. We call it in English ‘Elge’, that is, it has taken its name ‘from the abundance of eels which are caught in these same Fens’, as Bede, the most eloquent of Englishmen, tells us.5 The allusion to Bede establishes the great antiquity of the abbey, which traced its history to its foundation by St Æthelthryth in the seventh century, and for this author the wealth of Ely, even the abundance of its eels, is a sign of divine favour in the situation of this holy island. The Ely author might have liked to think his island especially blessed, but similarly rapturous descriptions of the Fenland’s fertility can be found in the chronicles of Ramsey and Peterborough.6 At Crowland, tradition kept alive the uncanny environment in which that abbey’s chief saint, Guthlac, had made his hermitage in the eighth century: in the hagiography of Guthlac, the Fens are full of devils and the saint’s retreat at Crowland is imagined as the sole spot of light and fertile land in a dangerous wilderness.7 All four of these Fenland abbeys have a role to play in the development of the Hereward legend, and many of his adventures take place on their islands and across the spaces in between. In the stories about Hereward, the Fens’ strange and unearthly world of waters, reeds and rivers is a character in its own right. It is a landscape Hereward and his men know intimately, and their enemies do not: Hereward is familiar with the hidden paths and rivers of the Fens, and uses them to elude pursuit or travel unseen by those who are trying to track him down. He is familiar, too, with the people who inhabit this world, the fishermen and tradesmen who ply their wares by boat between its islands; when need demands, he can play the part of a fisherman or a seller of pots, or hide himself under a cargo of reeds in a flat-bottomed marshland punt. Part of his tactical advantage in eluding the invaders comes from this useful local knowledge, but it is not merely a strategic benefit. For a Fenland audience, his power as a hero comes from the fact that he is a part

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of this world, a product of it, and prepared to act as its defender. There is a striking moment in the Gesta Herwardi when a Norman soldier, approaching a group of men who are (though he does not know it) the outlaw and his followers, cries out in angry contempt not only against Hereward but against the Fenland itself: Are you from the company of that rascal Hereward, who has ruined so many by trickery and drawn so many to him to help in his wicked deeds? If you agree to reveal the villain’s whereabouts now to our lord the earl, you’ll deserve to get rewards and honours! For truly that hostile band of enemies may force us in the end to live in this hateful swamp, and to pursue them helplessly through muddy marsh, surging waters and sharp reeds.8 Hatred for Hereward and contempt for the Fenland landscape seem to go together, and when Hereward reveals his identity to his enemy and shoots him with a near-fatal blow, his action avenges the insult to his marshes as well as to himself. Just as the Hereward story was shaped by this environment, so the legend of this local hero helped to reinforce the idea of the Fenland as a defined region with its own particular history and identity. The opening description of the Fens in the Liber Eliensis, quoted earlier, is partly indebted to a passage in the Gesta Herwardi in which the wealth of Ely’s natural resources is credited with helping Hereward and his allies resist the Norman siege of the Isle. Significantly, the Liber Eliensis later returns to descriptions of the Fenland landscape when it tells the story of Hereward’s defence of the Isle; the arrival of a Norman army is presented as an attempt to conquer Ely’s island independence, forcibly bridging the waters which divide it from the outside world. At Peterborough, meanwhile, it is in an account of Hereward’s rebellion that we find one of the earliest instances of the word ‘Fenland’ being used to refer to this region: when Hereward joins forces with a fleet from Denmark at Ely, a Peterborough chronicler records that ‘þet englisce folc of eall þa feonlandes comen to heom’ (‘the English people from all the Fenlands came to them’) in support.9 At this time the feonland did not correspond precisely with any contemporary political boundaries, but there is a clear sense here that it is an area in its own right. We will see this again as we examine the development of the Hereward

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Figure 2  A surviving area of the Fens near Ely. © Author’s own.

legend: in this story of English rebellion and resistance, local and regional identities intersect with national ones in important ways (Figure 2). 

The earliest sources: ‘Hereward and his gang’ The firm historical evidence for Hereward’s life is extremely limited.10 In the earliest sources, he comes into view for a brief period in 1070–1, taking part in resistance to the Normans at Peterborough and Ely, but most details of his life before and after this remain obscure, and many of the statements made by later writers about his family and deeds are open to question. It is probable that his origins were in Lincolnshire, close to the region where he was active in 1070–1: a man named Hereward appears in Domesday Book as a minor landowner in southern Lincolnshire, holding lands as a tenant of the abbeys of Peterborough and Crowland.11 These landholdings all lie fairly close together in a small area around Bourne and Stamford, on the south-west edges of Lincolnshire. In

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Domesday Book there are references to the fact that this Hereward ‘fled the country’, which indicates we are dealing with the same figure as the outlaw of later legend. In the romance tradition, Hereward’s ancestral lands are said to be at Bourne, and though Domesday Book does not provide any contemporary evidence which would support this link, the general area seems right. The Gesta Herwardi names Hereward’s father as Leofric of Bourne and his mother as Aedina, a Latinized form of an English name such as Eadgifu, but nothing more is known of them. Later medieval historians attempted to link Hereward to more distinguished ancestors, including Leofric, earl of Mercia, and his wife Godgifu (‘Lady Godiva’), but such claims are implausible. These supposed family connections will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter; although inaccurate, they tell us something interesting about the people later writers wanted Hereward to be related to.12 The first evidence for Hereward’s activities in the years after the conquest comes from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, describing a violent sequence of events which played out at Peterborough and Ely in 1070 and 1071. In these years both abbeys were actively involved in the struggle for dominance between Norman, Danish and English forces. While Ely offered open support to those fighting against the Normans and was besieged in consequence, Peterborough was raided by an English army acting in league with the Danes – an army led by Hereward. The fullest account of these events is provided by the Peterborough Chronicle, the E manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was written at Peterborough c. 1121; it makes use of an earlier, near-contemporary account of the events of 1070–1, but with additions which give more details from a Peterborough perspective.13 Perhaps unsurprisingly, that perspective is not very favourable to Hereward. In the late Anglo-Saxon period Peterborough was a rich and powerful monastery, so wealthy that it was known (in a play on its Old English name, Burh, ‘town, city’) as ‘Golden Burh’. According to the Peterborough Chronicle, its troubles began in 1066. In the autumn of that year Abbot Leofric, who had ruled the monastery for nearly fifteen years, was with Harold’s army at Hastings and died a few weeks later. He was a well-connected man, who had enriched the abbey with lands and many treasures. But his death in the aftermath of the

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conquest marked an abrupt and painful change for the monastery: ‘Þa wearð Gildene Burh to Wrecce Burh’, the chronicler laments, ‘then Golden Burh became Wretched Burh’.14 The monks chose Brand, the provost, to succeed Leofric as abbot. Brand is mentioned favourably in the Gesta Herwardi as the man who conferred knighthood on Hereward, and he is described in the Chronicle as ‘a very good and very wise man’. But at this crucial moment in November 1066, by bad luck or bad judgement, the abbey made a politically disastrous choice. They sent Brand to Edgar Ætheling to get his consent to the appointment, because (according to the chronicler) it was widely believed Edgar was going to become king. William was furious: he thought the monks had purposely slighted him, and Brand had to placate the king with a payment of gold. Whether this was deliberate defiance or a misreading of the situation, it was not an auspicious beginning to Brand’s tenure, and things only got worse. This source well depicts the confusion of the weeks after Hastings, when the outcome of events was still unclear, and the end of the entry for 1066 is a poignant conclusion: ‘After this came all tribulation and all ill upon the monastery. God have mercy!’15 Brand died three years later in November 1069, by which time tribulation had indeed descended on the country. In the summer of that year the fleet from Denmark, led by the brother and sons of the Danish king Svein Estrithson, had arrived in the Humber and joined forces with Edgar Ætheling and Waltheof and their men. The Danish fleet spent the winter in England, and in the spring of 1070 they were joined by further reinforcements and took their ships south to Ely, an arrival which the local people apparently took to be the beginning of another conquest: it was at this point that ‘the English people from all the Fenlands came to them’, the Peterborough Chronicle says, ‘and thought that they would win all that country’.16 Here Hereward appears in the narrative for the first time. As successor to Brand the king had appointed a Norman abbot, Turold, and some tenants of the monastery objected strongly to the decision. They had heard (the chronicler reports, keeping the opinion diplomatically at second hand) that Turold was a harsh man and had brought a force of Norman men to Stamford, so they decided to sack Peterborough. These tenants were Hereward and his followers – or as the chronicler calls them, ‘Hereward and his genge’, which might best

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be translated ‘Hereward and his gang’. This is an interesting choice of word, which only appears twice in the Peterborough Chronicle. Though there is a related form in Old English, genge is probably a borrowing from Old Norse, and it first appears in English around the middle of the eleventh century. Given the context, the chronicler may have thought of it as a Scandinavian word: as we are about to learn, Hereward is acting in collaboration with the Danes. This entry in the Chronicle, with its references to the englisce folc of the Fenlands and Turold’s Frencisce menn, is particularly attuned to markers of cultural difference, and Hereward with his genge seems to be closely aligned, in language as well as in his actions, with the Danes (Figure 3).  Hereward’s gang launched an assault on Peterborough, setting fire to the town and monastery and breaking into the abbey church, where they took everything of value they could find. They even climbed up to the figure of the crucified Christ which hung high above the church and stole the gold crown from Christ’s head. It was a terrible act of sacrilege, which by the time the Peterborough Chronicle was written clearly still rankled at the abbey. ‘They took

Figure 3  Peterborough Cathedral. © Author’s own.

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there so much gold and silver, and so many treasures in money and vestments and books, that no man can tally it up’, says the chronicler, adding bitterly, ‘they said they did it out of loyalty to the monastery’.17 Turold arrived in Peterborough to find the monastery a burned-out wreck, the monks scattered and the church stripped of its treasures. Meanwhile Hereward and his men sailed away with their spoils to Ely, where the Danish army were encamped. The siege of Ely, which is described in great detail in the Gesta Herwardi and Liber Eliensis, is recounted in the Chronicle in an entry brief enough to quote: Then Earl Morcar went by ship to Ely . . . and Bishop Æthelwine and Siward Bearn and many hundreds of men with them came to Ely. When King William heard of this, he ordered out the ship-army and land-army, and surrounded that place and made a bridge and got in, and the ship-army was on the seaward side. Then the outlaws all surrendered – that was Bishop Æthelwine and Earl Morcar and all those who were with them, with the one exception of Hereward and all who wanted to go with him, and he worthily led them out. 18 This is an entry taken over from the Peterborough Chronicle’s source, so here we are seeing Hereward through different eyes – not the perspective of an understandably embittered Peterborough monk of the 1120s but of someone writing closer to the time of the events described.19 Unlike the other men referred to in this entry, Hereward is given no title or descriptor, or any details which might help the reader identify him. What he does have is one word of authorial commentary, ahtlice, used to characterize his escape from the siege. In a narrative so terse and sparing of detail, this single word draws attention. It is a rare word, and its sole other appearance in the Chronicle, a few entries before this one, occurs when it is used to describe Harold Godwineson’s victory at Stamford Bridge in 1066. It appears, therefore, to be associated with victorious warriors, and its connotations here are clearly positive: it means ‘worthily’ or ‘valiantly’, and in translations of this entry medieval writers render it in Latin with a word such as uiriliter, ‘manfully’.20 This single word is the only indicator we have of a near-contemporary opinion on Hereward’s actions in 1070–1.

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No further information is provided here on what Hereward did after leaving Ely, and he is never mentioned again in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Peterborough sources are more concerned with what happened to the treasures Hereward had stolen: William and Svein came to an agreement and the Danes sailed back to Denmark, taking with them the spoils from Peterborough, which Hereward had given or sold to them. It was believed at Peterborough that many of these objects were subsequently lost in a storm at sea or destroyed in a fire in the church in Denmark where they were kept; the ‘Golden Burh’ never recovered its treasures.21 If these early sources were all the evidence we had for Hereward’s life, it would be difficult to see why he assumed such a prominent place in later myth-making about the Norman Conquest. He would be a footnote: a minor landowner of uncertain parentage, who took part in an unsuccessful revolt and disappeared into obscurity. Far from a hero of the English resistance, he would be remembered as the despoiler of Peterborough and a collaborator with the Danes. But that one approving word, ahtlice, suggests other possibilities, other ways of telling his story – narrative potential which, from the twelfth century onwards, many writers would be drawn to explore.

‘The great Hereward of the English’ Since the sparse evidence for Hereward’s activities in these late eleventh- and early twelfth-century sources does little to account for his later importance, it seems likely that there was something else going on in oral tradition, which we can only glimpse from its subsequent results. In local storytelling, Hereward was perhaps already becoming the subject of anecdote and legend, the narrative of his life beginning to mean much more than the bare facts of his deeds would seem to warrant. It appears that this storytelling tradition was centred, as we might expect, in Ely and Peterborough – the communities which had such very different experiences of Hereward’s behaviour in 1070–1 – and the surrounding area, where his memory was preserved for a long time. Stories about Hereward are recorded in three important twelfth-century texts from this region: Geffrei Gaimar’s Anglo-Norman Estoire des Engleis,

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written for a patron in Lincolnshire c. 1136–7; the Liber Eliensis, a Latin history of Ely Abbey, compiled in stages between 1131 and 1174; and the Gesta Herwardi. It is the Gesta Herwardi which provides the longest and most developed narrative about Hereward, and it is probably the earliest of the three twelfth-century texts. Though it survives in a thirteenth-century manuscript from Peterborough Abbey, it was probably first written before the compilation of the Liber Eliensis, which makes use of a version of the Gesta in its own narrative about Hereward; the most likely date for the original composition of the Gesta may therefore be between 1109 and 1131.22 Though the sole surviving version of the Gesta Herwardi is anonymous, in the Liber Eliensis it is attributed to a monk of Ely named Richard, and a connection with Ely is very plausible. In contrast to the brief references to Hereward in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Gesta Herwardi offers a full and exciting account of Hereward’s life from his youth to his death, many years after the siege of Ely. A brief summary will show how eventful and varied the narrative is. It begins a few years before the conquest, when the teenage Hereward, a young tearaway, is exiled from England because his bad behaviour has grown so tiresome that his own father petitions the king to outlaw him. On leaving his home at Bourne, he travels to northern Britain, Cornwall and Ireland, where he distinguishes himself and wins fame through various adventures, including fighting a savage parthuman bear, killing the strongest man in Cornwall and rescuing a princess from an unwanted marriage. He then spends time in Flanders, where he fights as a mercenary and marries a woman named Turfrida. At this point, now a successful warrior, he hears that his homeland has been conquered by the Normans, so decides to return to England. Back home, he learns his younger brother has been killed and his lands seized. He avenges his brother, then begins a campaign against the Normans with a number of supporters, many of them similarly displaced Englishmen. When the Norman army besieges Ely, Hereward joins the monks as their defender, playing various tricks against Norman soldiers, sometimes disguising himself as a potter or a fisherman. After the end of the siege, Hereward and his supporters spend some time living as outlaws, but eventually he is reconciled to the king, receives his father’s estates and ends his life peacefully.

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The Gesta Herwardi is a complex and multilayered text, whose origins and genre are not easy to define. It is a hybrid, put together from a combination of many kinds of sources, including but not limited to first-hand accounts of Hereward’s life, Anglo-Norman romance, Scandinavian saga tradition, hagiographical narratives, local oral tales and outlaw legend.23 This hybridity applies not only to its genre but also to the different cultural worlds to which the text affiliates itself: as Joanna Huntington puts it, ‘The Gesta is situated at the intersection of several traditional historiographical binaries in addition to history/fiction. It also sits in the grey areas between Anglo-Saxon/Norman, Scandinavian/English, vernacular/Latin, [ . . . ] clerical/lay and religious/ secular.’24 It is a highly self-aware text, conscious of its indebtedness to a variety of narrative traditions and its deliberate blending of fiction and history. It has no real precedents in Anglo-Saxon literature, yet it speaks explicitly about English culture and identity, and seems to be an attempt to use the story of Hereward to explore what Englishness meant within the context of the early twelfth century. Its very first sentence emphasizes Hereward’s English identity: the subject of the narrative, we are told, is ‘the deeds of the great Hereward of the English’.25 The text proper begins with the grand claim that ‘From among the English people many very mighty men are remembered, and Hereward the outlaw is held to be the most famous of the famous, a distinguished warrior among the distinguished’.26 Hereward’s greatness is seen to be closely linked to his English identity. The Gesta’s focus on Englishness has attracted considerable attention from scholars, in part because the subject matter of the narrative results in a particularly direct examination of ethnic and national conflict; questions of culture and identity are explored not only in the context of the struggle between English and Normans but also in Hereward’s encounters with different cultures in Ireland, Cornwall and Flanders. Hugh Thomas has argued, for instance, that the Gesta’s purpose is to put forward a positive view of the English, in the hope of encouraging a Norman audience to respect them as brave and honourable warriors. The author’s aim is not to inspire imitation of Hereward’s rebellion but ‘to depict the English as a people worthy of living in peace and on terms of cultural equality with the invaders’ – promoting not resistance but coexistence.27 Rolf Bremmer agrees that the Gesta invokes Hereward’s English

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identity in order to encourage mediation between Norman and English cultures: Hereward’s final peaceful acceptance of the Norman regime, he suggests, ‘invites his audience to accept the new order: Anglo-Saxon England is dead, long live the new England!’.28 One particularly interesting aspect of the Gesta’s attitude to English identity is how it relates to the question of what kind of text this is or wants to be. If Hereward himself is explicitly presented as an English hero, is the Gesta a selfconsciously English text? By this period in the twelfth century, the Fenland monastic world from which this text emerged was almost the only place in England where a distinctively pre-conquest tradition of English literature – the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – was still being kept up; it seems unlikely to be a coincidence that the Gesta, too, is fascinated by the idea of an Anglo-Saxon literary inheritance which needs to be preserved. At several points, the author displays an interest in linking national and regional identity to certain forms of storytelling, song and performance. At the wedding of an Irish prince, a harp is played as the cup goes round, ‘a particular and distinctive kind of entertainment in those parts’;29 a Norman minstrel at a feast uses his song to mock the English style of dancing;30 the tale of the part-human bear is specifically attributed to Danish storytelling.31 Hereward himself sings ‘in a trio with his companions in the style of the Fenland people’.32 All these comments suggest a perception of and interest in the differences between Irish, Scandinavian, Norman and English cultures as they are expressed through such customs and practices, publicly performed in the context of communal entertainment and feasting – as a political statement, as appropriate for a particular occasion or as a form of friendly cultural exchange. The Gesta’s emphasis on Englishness suggests that this association between storytelling and identity also applies to the text within which these songs and performances are being described. The prologue to the Gesta, which presents Hereward as an English hero, also engages directly with the question of the text’s own Englishness. It provides a fascinatingly complicated account of the process of its composition, which purports to explain the genesis of its narrative. The author (perhaps the Richard of Ely named in the Liber Eliensis) describes his fellow monks deciding to seek out information about Hereward and managing to locate a short account of Hereward’s life in English. He says that this text

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had been written by Hereward’s chaplain Leofric, a priest at Bourne, and that it survived in a very fragmentary state, so that he was only able to extract information from it with great difficulty: it consisted of ‘a few loose pages, partly rotted by water-damage and decayed and partly injured by tearing’.33 He gleaned from it, he says, nothing more than a few details about Hereward’s parentage, as well as the story of his return to his ancestral home and discovery of the death of his brother. Besides this, he and his assistants attempted to supplement their work with a large book about Hereward’s exploits which they had heard existed in a certain unnamed place, but they were unable to locate it. Instead, they chose to augment the information provided by Leofric’s text with some oral accounts from people who had known Hereward.34 The author says he had met men who fought alongside Hereward, warriors ‘tall in stature, large, and of immense courage’.35 He names and describes two, Leofric the Black and Siward, who had become a monk of Bury St Edmunds. Despite its apparent transparency in describing the history of the narrative, this prologue actually complicates matters, because it obscures much of the source material with which the author must have been working; a few loose pages and some old soldiers’ stories would not account for the lengthy and complex narrative which follows. What is interesting, though, is the author’s decision to foreground the text’s composite nature and tortuous relationship to its English origins. Part of the difficulty described here may be real, in that the author may have been combining oral testimony with written sources he found it difficult to understand; it is possible he was not a native or fluent speaker of English, given the problems he occasionally has with reproducing English names in the Gesta.36 It was also not uncommon in the twelfth century for writers translating an Old English work into Latin to comment disparagingly on the language of their English source, and to apologise for its rough and simple style.37 But there is more going on here than simple difficulty with the English language. The English author is named (as the Latin author is not) and Leofric’s narrative too is presented as a work of compilation and synthesis: the prologue says ‘it was the work of this well-remembered priest to gather together all deeds of giants and warriors from ancient stories as well as from true narratives, for the edification of his audience, and to commit them to writing in English so

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that they might be remembered’.38 The idea that someone like Leofric might deliberately gather together stories of giants and warriors into one collection is not far-fetched; in fact, as Douglas Gray has observed, this description of Leofric’s endeavour would actually be a very good characterization of the Beowulf manuscript, compiled c. 1000, with its assembled tales of giants, monsters and heroic warriors.39 In this context, however, the praise of this English author and his wide-ranging knowledge of different genres of literature seems less likely to reflect what Leofric might really have written than to be a claim intended to imbue the text with authority. It fits with the comment on the many mighty English heroes to whom Hereward is compared: the text situates itself within a vast and estimable literary tradition which is specifically English. Yet Leofric’s work is fragmentary, damaged, and almost unrecoverable, and the reference to these other heroes is notably vague. If this English literary tradition was once of great worth, it is now seen as almost out of reach, under threat, in danger of being lost and in need of rescue. To follow in Leofric’s footsteps, as this text claims to do, means not just translating his text but also

Figure 4  Bourne, Lincolnshire. © Author’s own.

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following his example, in an act of deliberate remembering and reconstruction. In a text which is very much concerned with the loss and recovery of a paternal inheritance, and in which father and fatherland, pater et patria, repeatedly go together,40 it seems significant that the author Leofric shares his name with Hereward’s own father. The name means ‘beloved kingdom’. Both father and author belong to a pre-conquest England whose wealth has passed into other hands; it can only be restored to its proper heirs through considerable struggle and labour. As the Gesta presents it, Leofric’s stories are the literary equivalent of the lands Hereward fights to regain: an English inheritance to be reclaimed and saved from destruction (Figure 4). 

Hereward the Exile In the Gesta that act of literary reclamation is, however, much more like an act of new creation. The narrative which presents itself as an inheritance from pre-conquest English literature owes just as much to the multicultural and multilingual environment of the twelfth-century present. But the Gesta aspires to make all this part of its story of an English hero, attempting to draw together strands from disparate traditions into one unified whole. The result is different in significant ways from any product of pre-conquest English writing, and yet it is still proudly, self-consciously English – a new kind of English story for the post-conquest world. Though in some ways very much a product of the post-conquest period, the Gesta does have one essential feature in common with Anglo-Saxon literature: an interest in exile. Hereward’s status as exile is heavily stressed in the first chapter, which opens by calling him ‘Herewardus exul’, explains how he came to be banished from England and closes with the statement that thus ‘he gained the name “Exile”, being driven away from his father and fatherland when he was eighteen years old’.41 It is treated as the hero’s distinguishing byname, which suggests that long before he became known as ‘Hereward the Wake’, his title was ‘Hereward the Exile’. Exile is fundamental to Hereward’s story: all his adventures as a young man take place while he is in exile from England, and after returning to the country

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he is still an outlaw, an exile in his own land. Unlike other versions of the story, which end with Hereward’s death in battle, the ending of the Gesta – the happy resolution of its narrative arc – is the recovery of his father’s lands and peaceful enjoyment of his patrimony. This is what the opening chapter of the Gesta is setting up: the story of an exile which ends with the restoration of his home. This exile-and-return narrative pattern, in which a young hero loses and regains his patrimony, is a recurrent pattern in Anglo-Norman romance of the twelfth century, and in its narrative of Hereward’s life the Gesta may be partly modelling itself on that tradition.42 However, Laura Ashe has argued that this feature of Anglo-Norman romance should in fact be seen as an inheritance from pre-conquest English literature: exile had long been a popular theme in Old English poetry, and during the turbulent eleventh century, when wars, invasions and conquests caused more than one king to face exile from England, it took on a particular political charge.43 The Gesta Herwardi, in emphasizing Hereward’s status as exile, seems to agree that it is an inheritance from Hereward’s pre-conquest ancestors, because the first chapter underlines this point by looking back not only to eleventhcentury politics but to the more distant English past too. In the first chapter, when Hereward’s parents are named, they are each linked to one distinguished ancestor: his father Leofric is said to be the nephew of Ralph the Staller, while his mother is identified as the great-great-niece of Oslac ‘the duke’. Both these supposed family connections are interesting and fit with the opening chapter’s focus on rebellion and exile. Ralph was an English-born magnate of Breton descent, who owned lands in East Anglia and Lincolnshire in the time of Edward the Confessor; after the conquest, William granted him the earldom of East Anglia.44 It seems unlikely that Hereward could be related to him in the way stated in the Gesta, but some kind of link is not impossible: Ralph, whose mother was English, was part of a family with established links to the region where Hereward lived.45 His son, also named Ralph, inherited the earldom and at different times fought for and rebelled against William, including as one of the leaders of the 1075 Revolt of the Earls. Later in the Gesta Herwardi, the younger Ralph is criticized for drawing defectors away from the siege of Ely to join his own rebellion, leaving Hereward to guard the Isle alone.46 The supposed family link between Hereward and Ralph might, nonetheless,

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be meant to align Hereward with another notable rebel and exile of his own generation, one of higher social status. A still stronger association is made by the invocation of his mother’s ancestor, Oslac. This allusion looks back decades before the conquest, to the second half of the tenth century: Oslac was ealdorman of southern Northumbria between c. 963 and 975, in the time of King Edgar.47 Although most details of his career are obscure, he seems to have had connections with the area where Hereward was active a century later; he had a son, Thorth, who is mentioned in the Liber Eliensis as living in the Fenland region in the late tenth century.48 This makes the connection suggested by the Gesta between Oslac and Hereward’s mother seem at least possible. Perhaps more significant than the authenticity of the link, however, is the one key fact for which Oslac seems to have been remembered by later medieval writers: he was an exile. He was banished from England in 975, for reasons which are unknown, though it must have had something to do with the political turmoil which followed the death of King Edgar in that year. Edgar’s death led to a succession crisis and a backlash against the leaders of monastic reform who had been in the ascendancy during his reign, and it is possible Oslac’s exile was a consequence of his support for Edgar and the monastic reform movement.49 Whatever the details, and whether or not Oslac was indeed an ancestor of Hereward’s, the fact of his exile might well have been known to the author of the Gesta. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle manuscript kept at Peterborough, the entry for 975 records Edgar’s death with a short poem in praise of the king and then describes a series of troubling events which followed his death: the appearance of an ominous comet, famine and ‘swyðe mænigfealde styrunga geond Angelcyn’ (‘very many kinds of disturbance throughout the English people’). The entry closes by saying ‘7 on þam timan wæs eac Oslac se mæra eorl geutod of Angelcynne’ (‘and at this time also Oslac, the famous earl, was banished from the English people’).50 This entry sets Oslac’s exile in the context of serious troubles for the whole English nation, following immediately after the death of a king, and portended by the appearance of a comet. It might have seemed a clear parallel to the events of 1066: in that year, too, a comet which appeared after the death of Edward the Confessor heralded upheavals for the English nation. As we will see later, English writers looking back from the post-conquest period sometimes perceived the death of Edgar as a turning

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Figure 5  The comet of 1066 on the Bayeux Tapestry. © Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

point in English history, comparable to, and in some ways contributing to, the Norman Conquest. In the eyes of medieval historians, the years 975 and 1066 had significant links (Figure 5).  In other versions of the Chronicle, Oslac’s banishment is given a poetic treatment which provides some insight into how this supposed ancestor of Hereward’s was remembered. In several Chronicle manuscripts, the poem about Edgar’s death also includes five lines commemorating Oslac:51 7 þa wearð eac adræfed, deormod hæleð, Oslac of earde ofer yða gewealc, ofer ganotes bæð, gamolfeax hæleð, wis 7 wordsnotor, ofer wætera geðring, ofer hwæles eðel, hama bereafod.52 [And then, too, the bold-hearted hero Oslac was driven from the land across the tumult of the waves, across the gannet’s bath, the grey-haired hero, wise and eloquent in words, across the turbulent waters, across the whale’s country, deprived of a home.]

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These lines are soaked in the traditional Old English language and imagery of exile, immediately familiar to a reader of Anglo-Saxon literature from such poems as The Wanderer.53 In these poems, the situation of an exile is explored through a focus on the experience of loss, solitude and separation, with phrases which evoke the distance between the exile and the home where he longs to be: the waves of the sea echo the restless state of his mind, and the kennings used for the sea – the ‘gannet’s bath’ and the ‘whale’s country’ – draw a painful contrast between the friends he has lost and the sea-creatures who are now his only companions. The sea may be the whale’s homeland, but it is not the exile’s own. These are all conventional images and phrases, as the poem consciously draws on the formulaic language of exile, building up the brief description of Oslac’s banishment out of familiar, yet still powerful tropes.54 Since we do not know why Oslac was exiled, his situation remains a mystery. Who was this wise, white-haired hero, and what had he done to be driven from his homeland? We do not know, and it is possible a twelfth-century reader of the Chronicle or the Gesta would not have known either – though if Oslac did indeed have family connections with the Fenland his story may have been remembered in the area. But even if they knew few details about Oslac, they may well have known that he was an exile, since it seems to have been the chief thing he was remembered for. In particular, if he was believed to have been driven out of England because he was a supporter of the monastic reform movement, this would have earned him an honoured reputation at Ely and Peterborough, which were proud to count themselves among the houses refounded in Edgar’s reign. We can only speculate what associations the name Oslac might have conjured up for the first readers of the Gesta, but it is plausible that the details of his exile might have been less obscure to a twelfth-century Fenland audience than they are today. It seems possible, then, that when the Gesta links Hereward’s father and mother with Ralph and Oslac the intention is to allude to other families and famous men associated with rebellion and exile. Modern historians have tended to focus on trying to ascertain whether these genealogical links are accurate, but it is perhaps more important to consider what the invocation of these names might have meant for a contemporary audience and what

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expectations they set up for the text that follows. In the Gesta, this brief genealogy is immediately followed by Hereward’s own first act of rebellion. As a teenager, he causes so much trouble in the area around his home that his father, tired of settling his disputes with the neighbours, petitions the king to banish him from the country. None of this is exactly heroic or sympathetic behaviour, but the Gesta presents it in a positive light: the reader is encouraged to see it as a token of Hereward’s independence and strength of character. His tendency to rebellion seems to be an innate part of him, and the references to his family connections might even suggest it is hereditary. If Hereward had lived a hundred years earlier, his exile might have been remembered in poetic language similar to that in which Oslac’s banishment was memorialized. By the time Hereward’s story was written, however, this kind of Old English verse belonged to a tradition which was passing away – or being remade into something new. Instead, Hereward the Exile was commemorated by a very different kind of text.

Creating a hero: Saga and romance After the opening chapter which establishes him as an exiled hero, the narrative of Hereward’s life in the Gesta is episodic: it moves swiftly between different settings as Hereward travels from Lincolnshire to northern Britain, Ireland and Cornwall, to Flanders and then back to England. Studies of the Gesta have tended to split the text in two, distinguishing between the narrative of Hereward’s life in exile and his adventures back in Norman-ruled England. Many of the episodes which take place in England, set in specific locations in and around the Fens and involving named members of the Norman aristocracy, seem closer to the political situation of Hereward’s time, and these have attracted the most attention from historians. Since Elisabeth van Houts’s work on the Flanders section of the narrative established that at least some of Hereward’s adventures there may also be based on fact, this section has been taken more seriously too.55 By contrast, the episodes set in the north, Cornwall and Ireland seem unlikely to have any historical basis and have often been treated dismissively

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by historians wanting to use the Gesta as a source for Hereward’s life. David Roffe remarks, for instance, that ‘In common with its genre, the [Gesta] is not without its stereotypes. Much of the account of Hereward’s early life is phantastical, rigorously conforming to what was expected of a hero’.56 But the early section of the text is more complex than this. It is actually not at all easy to know what a contemporary audience in eastern England might have expected of a hero’s early career: except for his exile status, Hereward’s youthful adventures have little in common with the heroes of Anglo-Saxon literature, and in the twelfth century the Anglo-Norman romance hero was still a figure in process of development.57 Although the Gesta draws on established situations to tell its narrative of Hereward’s early life, it does so to create – not simply to imitate – the figure of an English romance hero. Its choice to borrow from other narrative traditions is not a lack of originality but a deliberate act of literary appropriation, to which the text itself draws attention. This is particularly evident in Hereward’s first two adventures, which draw respectively from Scandinavian and Anglo-Norman literary traditions. They both mark stages in the maturation of the young protagonist as he grows from a rebellious teenager into a tested warrior. The first story tells how after leaving Bourne, Hereward heads for somewhere in the north ‘beyond Northumbria’, where he stays with his godfather. It is not clear where this is supposed to be – perhaps somewhere like Norse-ruled Orkney – but the general idea is that it is the Scandinavian world. His godfather keeps wild animals against which to test the strength of his young knights. Among them is a caged bear said to be the offspring of a famous Norwegian bear, which had the head and feet of a man and human intelligence, and according to ‘the stories of the Danes’ (fabula Danorum), had fathered Beorn, king of Norway, with a human woman. Hereward wants to try his might against it but is not permitted to; when it breaks loose, however, he fights and kills it, saving the lives of his host’s wife and daughters. As the Gesta itself points out, this is a borrowing from Scandinavian legend. The story of a human warrior descended from a bear appears in various forms in Old Norse literature, but the version the author had in mind may have been specifically an ancestry legend associated with the dynasty of the Danish Thorgils Sprakalegg, grandfather of both Harold Godwineson and

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Svein Estrithson, king of Denmark. According to medieval Scandinavian writers, Thorgils’s father Beorn (Björn, which means ‘bear’) was the son of a human woman and a bear, and this story was apparently known in some form in medieval England.58 It does not seem likely to be a coincidence that members of the family to which this legend was attached led the Danish army with whom Hereward collaborated in 1070–1, including Svein’s brother Osbeorn, whose name (meaning ‘god-like bear’) suggests a link to his family’s origin legend. Significantly, the Gesta Herwardi entirely ignores this aspect of Hereward’s story; it never mentions Hereward’s cooperation with the Danes, and the plundering of Peterborough is explained in a way which gives no role to Hereward’s allies.59 The text’s desire to present Hereward as an English hero seems to necessitate ignoring the uncomfortable fact of his collaboration with the Danes. If the author knew of the association between this ancestry legend and Hereward’s Danish allies, there may be a political point being made here which is decidedly unfavourable to the Danes: the savage bear Hereward kills is not exactly an admirable family connection. But in any case, the author is explicitly borrowing a Danish legend to create an exploit for his young hero. The story emphasizes Hereward’s youth: he is eighteen years old and still thought too young to undertake this challenge until he proves himself by his courage in the moment of danger. As well as the allusion to the Scandinavian legend of bear–human ancestry, this choice of exploit seems to display a more general awareness of how such stories tend to be employed in Scandinavian literature: it is a common trope in Old Norse sagas for a young man to fight a bear, a berserkr, or a man named Björn as his first trial, as a kind of initiation into manhood.60 The Norse affiliations of this part of the narrative are clear and self-conscious; the author wants us to notice them and to show us Hereward succeeding in the Scandinavian world. This is the most markedly Scandinavian episode in Hereward’s story, but the author’s familiarity with this literary tradition is also suggested by similarities between some of Hereward’s later adventures and Old Norse sagas, which both seem to draw on closely related models of outlaw narrative.61 In medieval Lincolnshire and the Fenland, there is good evidence for traditions of Anglo-Scandinavian storytelling continuing to circulate and develop throughout the medieval period.62 The author of the Gesta clearly had such traditions readily available

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to him, and he seems to have deliberately borrowed from literary modes he recognized as distinctly Scandinavian in character. A similar impulse can be seen in the next episode in Hereward’s story, which has also been directly borrowed from another narrative known to the author. It is a longer episode about Hereward’s adventures in Ireland and Cornwall, culminating in his rescue of a princess who is being forced to marry against her will. In this case the debt is to Anglo-Norman romance, specifically the story of the hero Horn.63 The Horn story features a very similar rescue of a bride at a wedding: in each case the hero disguises himself to appear at the feast unnoticed, there is a tense moment of secret recognition as drink is served to the guests, and a ring passes between the hero and the bride as a token of his identity. There are other close parallels which suggest that these similarities are more than coincidence. Each story is linked to Ireland: the Horn episode is set there, while Hereward journeys from Ireland to Cornwall to rescue the princess, acting on behalf of the Irish prince she really wishes to marry. In the Gesta the bride’s father is named Aalof, which is the name of Horn’s father in the other romance. The Horn story survives in the Anglo-Norman Roman de Horn, which dates from some decades later than the Gesta Herwardi, but it seems clear that the author of the Gesta borrowed this episode from an earlier, now lost version of the Horn story. The wedding episode is central to the story of Horn (he goes on to marry the rescued bride), but for Hereward it is only one of many adventures on his journey to manhood, inserted into the narrative by the author to give Hereward another opportunity to prove himself. Though a minor episode in Hereward’s story, however, the setting at the feast echoes an interest displayed elsewhere in the Gesta in the idea that different cultures have differing customs of social and literary behaviour which function as important markers of identity. In the wedding scene, Hereward draws attention to himself by refusing to follow the custom of the region, which is to offer a drink to anyone who will play the harp. His refusal causes him to be mocked by the other guests for his ignorance of their customs. However, Hereward promptly takes the harp and plays and sings so skilfully that they are all struck with amazement. He and his friends sing songs in a way identified as characteristic of the Fenland, which meet an enthusiastic response. Once again, the point of

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the story is to demonstrate the young hero’s abilities, but here his prowess is shown not by his physical strength, as in the bear episode, but by his skill at harping and at negotiating an awkward social situation – the skills of a hero of romance. Just as the first episode is set in the Scandinavian world and displays Hereward’s ability to succeed in that cultural sphere, so this episode seems designed to place him in a different environment where he can again triumph – in this case, a loosely evoked Irish or Celtic world, as filtered through AngloNorman romance. In each case the author borrows not only a (rather vague) geographical setting but also a distinct kind of literary mode which he associates with these particular places and cultures. There is a competitive edge to this: the English Hereward, product of a culture which the author apparently sees as unfairly derided and scorned by its conquerors, proves himself to be equal to or better than the heroes of these foreign literary traditions.64 For the author of the Gesta, the process of creating Hereward as a hero is a matter not simply of borrowing from other traditions but of emulation and competition, measuring his English hero against other figures from legend, saga and romance. An insight into how the author may have understood this process appears when the Gesta is describing some of Hereward’s companions, many of whom have nicknames and stories of their own to explain their outlaw heroics. Of one of them, Godwine Gille, the author says he got his name ‘because he was not inferior to the Godwine, son of Guthlac, who was greatly celebrated in the tales of the ancients’.65 This heroic Godwine is otherwise unrecorded, though the brevity of the allusion suggests the audience were expected to understand it. There may be a connection to an Anglo-Saxon kin-group called the Guthlacingas (‘descendants of Guthlac’), who are recorded in sources associated with St Guthlac of Crowland (d. 714). The hagiographer of St Guthlac says it was stories of the valiant deeds of the Guthlacingas, the saint’s ancestors, which inspired the young Guthlac to become a warrior, before later choosing the life of a hermit.66 This suggests that Crowland’s saint was thought to have belonged to a kin-group named for an earlier ancestor, also called Guthlac – perhaps the father of the celebrated Godwine mentioned in the Gesta Herwardi. Almost four centuries separate St Guthlac from Hereward’s Godwine Gille, so if stories about the Guthlacingas

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were still known to the author of the Gesta, they would indeed be ‘tales of the ancients’. But it is a plausible connection, given the well-attested link between Hereward and Crowland Abbey. This allusion is a reminder of how many stories and legends from the AngloSaxon period are now lost to us, and these must have formed part of what the inheritance of pre-conquest English literature meant to the author of the Gesta. But it also indicates how the Gesta imagines the connection between the stories of different hero-figures. There is a desire to measure Hereward and his men against the heroes of legend, and this is the approach the Gesta takes in constructing its narrative of Hereward’s life. Men such as Godwine and Oslac the exile may have been heroes in a local tradition of storytelling which is now almost invisible – pre-conquest English heroes from whose stories the Gesta takes inspiration. But as a product of the twelfth-century Fenland, a mixed society combining English, Scandinavian and Norman influences, the author had a wealth of literary models available to him. From these he could select to construct a narrative of Hereward’s life and deeds, to produce an English hero worthy to compete with the greatest men of any other literary culture.

An outlaw at home The Gesta’s competitive approach to proving the value of its hero in these different contexts is born not of a confident sense of English identity but of insecurity and a profound fear of loss. As presented by the Gesta, the Norman conquerors of England are hostile to many aspects of the country they have invaded: they show nothing but disdain for its people, its landscape and its customs – even its forms of dancing. They have seized the inheritance of men like Hereward, but their contempt for English culture seems to present a still more dangerous threat: that nothing of pre-conquest England will be allowed to survive the imposition of Norman ways. So, at least, it appears at the beginning of the post-conquest section of the Gesta. But though the Normans are repeatedly shown as scornful of England and the English, the second half of the Gesta stages multiple encounters between Norman characters and Hereward in which the Normans begin to change their minds. The narrative

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of this part of the Gesta is less about the hero’s continuing development than about the changes he is able to work in other people, as he gradually teaches the Normans – including King William himself – to appreciate that English culture may have value after all. The conquest takes place while Hereward is absent from England, and it first intrudes in the narrative in a remarkably oblique way. After leaving Ireland, Hereward is on his way home when he is shipwrecked in Flanders, where he stays, assuming the name Harold (surely a significant choice, linking him to Harold Godwineson). While there he meets his first wife, Turfrida, and fights on behalf of the count of Flanders, distinguishing himself in various exploits.67 He is sent to put down a rebellion among the Frisians, and it is in this context that the narrator first mentions the Norman Conquest, commenting that the Frisians were afraid that ‘they should perhaps be driven out or become subject to foreigners, as the English people were to the French’.68 They have apparently heard reports of the invasion of England, and this seems to be how it reaches Hereward’s ears – a strangely indirect, parenthetical way of introducing a major theme of the narrative. The irony is that in this case Hereward is acting on behalf of foreign invaders and advancing his career very successfully by doing so. The fear of subjection by a foreign power seems a real one, but the author’s view of the situation is nuanced: he identifies that fear in the very people Hereward is seeking to suppress, and he does not treat English subjection by the Normans as in any way unique. Hereward’s thoughts, naturally enough, now turn back to England, and he decides to return home, ‘wishing to visit his father’s house and his homeland, now subject to the rule of foreigners and almost ruined by the exactions of many, wanting to help any friends or neighbours who might perhaps still be alive there’.69 This sense of ruin and desolation is evoked by the scene of his arrival at Bourne, where he finds his father’s house occupied by the conquerors and his friends full of grief and fear. His younger brother has just been murdered by the Normans, killed while protecting their mother from insult; he has been decapitated, and his head stuck above the gate of the house. Hereward’s first action is to disguise himself and enter the house, rescuing his brother’s head and ambushing the Normans as they feast and celebrate their humiliation of the reviled English. It is notable that Hereward’s first exploit in England is a

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revenge attack staged within a hall, since this kind of scene is very popular in Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry; as he plans the attack, Hereward employs a grimly ironic metaphor – comparing the fight within the hall to serving his enemies a bitter drink – which has resonances, for instance, in Beowulf.70 If any part of the Gesta’s narrative is based on eleventh-century oral tradition, it might be this episode; the story of the hero’s return to his home and vengeance for his brother might easily have been the seed from which the whole legend grew. The rest of the narrative stages further encounters between Hereward and the Normans, during and after the siege of Ely. Though Hereward frequently triumphs over his enemies through his physical strength, his cunning and facility for disguise are also important elements of his success: he is able to elude pursuit, even get inside the Norman camp, by skilfully disguising himself as a fisherman or a seller of pots. As in his adventures abroad, he is shown to be a figure who can move easily between different worlds, adaptable and creative as he takes on a variety of social roles and fully inhabiting the characters he plays. In this he is the prototype for later medieval outlaw characters, such as Robin Hood, who share his love of playful disguise; some of these stories too may have arisen from local oral tradition, since they have a concise, comic and anecdotal quality which makes each a successful little story.71 However, this ability to adapt is also central to how the Gesta sees Hereward, and in the end it is this which allows him to reach an accommodation with the Normans. As William and his men try everything they can think of to defeat the quick-witted Hereward – even employing a witch to curse the English army – Hereward outsmarts them again and again, but each side grows increasingly willing to come to terms. The Normans’ respect for Hereward – and through him, for the skill and valour of the English soldiers they had despised – increases, until William comes to admire him so much that he restores to Hereward his father’s lands. The Gesta ends with Hereward living on peacefully, reconciled to the king and to his neighbours, for many years (and if this is true, he would have died not long before the likely date of the Gesta.) His final act of adaptation is to accommodate himself to Norman-ruled England, but only on his own terms and once he is in possession of his rightful inheritance. As we will see, this was not the only end to Hereward’s story which medieval writers could imagine, but it seems fitting for the Gesta: the young man who begins by rebelling against his

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Figure 6  Ely Cathedral. © Author’s own.

home and father ends his story reintegrated into his homeland, restoring the paternal inheritance to the direct pre-conquest line. It is a kind of victory, but it is one of mutual accommodation and cultural adaptation rather than military triumph. Hereward’s achievement is not driving the Normans out of England nor dying heroically in battle resisting them, but teaching them to respect the English and value the culture of the people they now rule. It seems likely that the author of the Gesta hoped his narrative of Hereward would have a similar effect: by telling the story of a great Englishman, he attempts to persuade Norman audiences that it is possible for an Englishman to be great. 

The freedom of the Fens: Hereward in the Liber Eliensis Some of these elements are replicated in the narrative of Hereward’s story which appears in the Liber Eliensis.72 Though drawing directly on a version of the Gesta,

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however, the Liber Eliensis brings to the story a wider perspective on the political context of Hereward’s adventures (Figure 6). The chronicler’s interpretation of the Norman Conquest and its effects on England is a very negative one. Full of praise for Harold Godwineson and sharp criticism for William’s cruelty towards the English, the chronicler laments after recording the events of 1066: And now, what am I to say about England? What am I to say to future generations? Woe to you, England, you who in former times were sanctified by your angelic progeny, but are now utterly distraught with groans for your sins! You lost your native king and in war, with great shedding of your people’s blood, became subject to a foreigner. Your sons were miserably slain within your bounds, and your councillors and leaders were overwhelmed, or put to death or deprived of their inheritance!73 In the view of the Liber Eliensis, both England as a whole and Ely in particular experienced tangible losses as a result of the conquest. The chronicler presents Ely’s pre-conquest past as a time of great prosperity, when the abbey enjoyed royal favour and the support of generous patrons, and he laments the freedoms, privileges and possessions which the monks believed they had lost because of the conquest.74 Its version of Hereward’s story, then, is coloured by this sense of lost prosperity and curtailed freedom. This is played out through the narrative of the siege of Ely, which is here presented as a story about the Normans’ attempts to control the natural landscape of the Isle – a Fenland environment which they struggle to master or even to understand. In this narrative the siege is extended over several years, and there are multiple incidents where not only Hereward and his allies but the land itself proves resistant to Norman incursion.75 The chronicler describes how the Normans’ efforts to build a causeway to the island repeatedly fail, as the unstable ground gives way beneath their feet, the rivers surge around them and the rain beats in their faces. More than once men and horses plunge into the marsh and are drowned. All this time, Hereward and his men are travelling freely back and forth to the island, completely at home in this landscape. The Fenland environment, so hostile to the Normans, is full of bounty for the monks and their friends: in an episode carried over from the Gesta, a soldier held captive on the island reports back to the Normans about the plentiful

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fertility of its land and waters and the lavish feasts the besieged English are enjoying. The Fenland is presented as full of life, an active participant in the fight against the conquerors. Indeed, the powers at work seem to be more than natural: in both the Gesta and the Liber Eliensis, the witch employed by the Normans is overheard by Hereward consulting a ‘guardian of the spring’, asking for its help to overcome the Isle.76 All this reflects a view of the Norman Conquest as an unwelcome attempt to tame and master the Fenland landscape and with it the freedom and prosperity which Ely formerly enjoyed. It is tempting to read the Isle of Ely here as a metonym for England itself, the conquered island under subjection to foreigners who do not understand or value it. However, this is also an interest specific to Ely. The Ely of Hereward’s day was accessible only by boat, but this was no longer the case by the time the Liber Eliensis was written (a more permanent causeway had been built), so this fascination with the abbey’s former inaccessibility recognizes a marked difference between past and present. It is a theme which emerges in discussions of the pre-conquest history of the abbey elsewhere in the chronicle.77 For the author of the Liber Eliensis the change in the landscape of the Isle, from past isolation to present connection, symbolizes a more profound shift from liberty to subjection, prosperity to poverty. The Liber Eliensis shares the Gesta’s narrative of the Normans’ growing respect for Hereward and the English, as they come to admire the resistance the landscape and the rebels put up against them, and in time it has to tell how the monks submitted to the Normans. Unlike the Gesta, however, it does not show Hereward himself doing so. He leaves Ely before the Normans finally arrive on the Isle and simply disappears from the narrative. While the Gesta is prepared to show Hereward making peace with the Normans, the Liber Eliensis allows him to remain free and uncompromising: we are left to imagine him living out his life somewhere in the Fens, as ungovernable as the landscape, one last unconquered man.

A valiant death: Gaimar’s Hereward Stories about Hereward survive in a number of sources besides the Gesta Herwardi and the Liber Eliensis, and indicate the existence of a lively local

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narrative tradition centring on this hero. Of these the most significant is Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, a chronicle of English history written in AngloNorman verse.78 Gaimar was probably writing in Lincolnshire in the 1130s, exactly the time and place where stories about Hereward would have been most popular, and his account provides a useful comparison to the Gesta and the Liber Eliensis. Gaimar’s version of Hereward’s story begins with his appearance at the siege of Ely in 1071, and he gives no details about Hereward’s early life as described in the Gesta. He characterizes Hereward on his first appearance as a ‘nobleman’ (gentilz hom) who ‘was one of the most important figures in the region and had been expelled from his rightful inheritance by the Normans’.79 Hereward joins forces with other rebels and they assemble at Ely after plundering the local area; like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Gaimar briefly describes William’s construction of a causeway across the fen to break the siege and Hereward’s escape from the town with his followers. At this point Gaimar’s narrative diverges from the Chronicle and records other stories about Hereward not found elsewhere. He tells, for instance, how the rebels escape Ely with the help of a fisherman, who rows them across the river by night hidden in his boat under reeds and rushes (a nicely authentic touch recalling the Fenland landscape). They set upon a camp of Norman soldiers unawares, steal their horses and head off towards Bourne. After this they spend several years as outlaws, years summarized as follows: Pars plusurs anz tint Hereward contre Normans. Il e Winter son compaignon, e dan Geri, un gentil hom, Alvriz Grugan, Saiswold, Azecier, icil e li altre guerreier guerreierent issi Franceis: si [li] un d’els encontrout treis, ne s’en alasent sanz asalt. Ço pert uncore en Bruneswald la u [O]gier se combati

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ki mult fu fort, fier e hardi: lui setme asailli Hereward sul par son cors; n’i out reguard: les quatre oscist, les treis fuïrent, naffrez, sanglant, cil s’en partirent. En plusurs lius issi avint k’encontre seit tresbien se tint; de seit homes aveit vertu, unc plus hardi ne fu veü. [For several years Hereward held out against the Normans. He and his companion Winter, and the noble lord Geri, Ælfric Grugan, Saiswald, and Azier, these and his other fighters waged war against the French in this way: if one of them alone attacked three of the enemy, these would not get away without taking a beating. The memory of this still persists today in the Forest of Bourne. It was here that Ogier, strong, fierce, and brave, took up arms and, with six other companions, set on Hereward when he was alone and unaccompanied. Hereward, undaunted, killed four of them, while the three others, wounded and bleeding, took flight and made off. The same thing happened in several different places: Hereward, having the strength of seven men, would easily stand his ground against seven assailants. A braver fighter than he was never seen.]80 Some of Hereward’s companions named here appear in the Gesta, as does the story about Ogier, though there are enough differences to suggest Gaimar was not simply relying on the Gesta as a source; more likely he was, as he says, drawing on local Lincolnshire tradition.81 There are notable contrasts too in the way Gaimar presents a character who appears in both his text and the Gesta, Hereward’s second lover, for whom he leaves his first wife Turfrida. Gaimar names this woman as Alftrued.82 In both versions she seeks out Hereward to woo him after hearing of his fame, offering him generous inducements to consent to her proposals of marriage. This characterization of their relationship is another aspect of Hereward’s story notably indebted to Anglo-Norman romance.83 However,

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these inducements are exactly opposite in these two versions: Gaimar says she offered him possession of her father’s lands, which would give him the resources to continue to fight against the Normans, while in the Gesta her offer is instead the promise of a truce with William, which she has managed to negotiate because of her great wealth. In both stories, Hereward’s acceptance of her proposal brings him trouble, marking a new and more dangerous stage in his life. In the Estoire it begins a chain of events which will lead to his death, while in the Gesta it causes him to lose the valuable counsel of his first wife, who goes to live as a nun at Crowland. The most significant difference between Gaimar’s account and the Gesta is that Gaimar gives a detailed narrative of Hereward’s death, which takes up almost half of the space he devotes to Hereward’s story. As he tells it, Hereward is on the point of making peace with William when he is attacked by a group of Norman knights, who fall upon him and his men when they are at dinner. Hereward, outnumbered and unarmed, has no chance of resisting but fights bravely to the last. Gaimar extravagantly praises Hereward’s courage and daring, especially in this final battle. ‘Had Hereward been forewarned and prepared’, he says, ‘the bravest of his assailants would have looked like a coward’;84 he ‘acted as a true noble should, defending himself with the ferocity of a lion’.85 Even his killers admire him, and the man who strikes the final blow, named by Gaimar as Halsalin, swears that no braver man could ever be found. This heroic death is an ending more in keeping with Hereward’s previous adventures than the rather tame conclusion to the Gesta, but it also raises questions about how Gaimar and his audience understood this story. In the passage quoted earlier, Hereward’s fight is explicitly framed as warfare against the Normans and les Franceis; in the death scene Gaimar’s final comment is that if he had not been killed, Hereward would have succeeded in expelling the Normans from the country.86 And yet of course Gaimar is writing in French, for French-speaking patrons. How does he manage to balance this with such admiration for Hereward? One answer is that when the prospect of the Normans being driven from England can only be contemplated as a long past, hypothetical possibility – only what would have happened, half a century ago, if Hereward had survived – it is drained of real political force, as far as that conflict is concerned. It can stand as a tale of more general application

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championing a fighter against royal injustice and political corruption, a type of rebel story in which Gaimar had a particular interest.87 By the time Gaimar wrote, Norman dominance must have seemed so secure that Hereward’s story posed no political threat, despite the keenly felt sense of injustice with which the Gesta and the author of the Liber Eliensis continued to regret the losses of the conquest. Local concerns are also at play here, which may take priority over national ones. Gaimar’s patrons were, like Hereward, Lincolnshire landowners, and it seems likely that this story is invoking some local rivalries: Ian Short notes that in naming Hereward’s killer as Halsalin, Gaimar may be taking aim at a family of that name who lived near his patrons in Lincolnshire.88 While the Gesta is anxious to define, defend and celebrate Hereward’s English identity, the most important aspect of Hereward’s story for Gaimar and his audience may have been his role as a local hero, a man of Lincolnshire.

Hereward the villain Alongside these positive twelfth-century interpretations of Hereward as a rebel hero, he was remembered more critically in other sources. A chronicle associated with the Warenne family, written perhaps soon after 1157, gives a brief account of Hereward.89 Since Hereward is said to have murdered William of Warenne’s brother-in-law, his reputation here is unsurprisingly negative. He is mentioned alongside other men who rebelled against William, sandwiched between Waltheof and Ralph de Gael; all are presented as stubborn rebels who rejected the king’s magnanimous attempts at peace. Hereward is described as ‘humble in lineage but noble in mind and strength’, but he succeeds through trickery and deceit, and it is said that ‘hiding away in the central areas of England, he filled them with killing and pillaging by day and night’. This text tells a story not mentioned in the other sources, in which Hereward, to gain entry to a Norman castle, disguises himself as a corpse being carried in for burial.90 This is a popular ruse attributed to various warriors in medieval historical writing, and here it casts Hereward as unscrupulous and deceitful. The author notes, with apparent satisfaction,

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that ‘after many killings and insurrections, after many treaties made with the king and then violated rashly, one day he died wretchedly with all his allies, surrounded by enemies’.91 There are similarities with Gaimar’s account of Hereward’s death, but none of Gaimar’s admiration for the rebel’s heroic last stand.  At Peterborough, too, Hereward was not remembered in a positive light (Figure 7). When the Peterborough Chronicle was written Hereward’s attack on the abbey evidently still stung, and further evidence of how he was remembered at Peterborough around the middle of the twelfth century is provided by the chronicler Hugh Candidus, subprior of the monastery.92 Hugh, writing probably

Figure 7  Peterborough Cathedral. © Author’s own.

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between c. 1155 and c. 1160, describes Hereward’s attack in his history of the monastery, in an account related to the Peterborough Chronicle but containing some additional stories. Hugh includes a tale of a prophetic vision foretelling Peterborough’s post-conquest travails, set during Abbot Leofric’s last illness in the autumn of 1066. The devil appears and vows he will cause Peterborough to suffer on three separate occasions – the first of which will be Hereward’s sacking of the monastery. This devil-inspired attack on the city of course casts Hereward in a very negative role, and Hugh incorporates a number of details which blacken Hereward’s name still further: it was Hereward, he says, who deliberately incited the Danes to attack Peterborough. Significantly, in Hugh’s version the other English leaders of the anti-Norman rebellion have vanished, and the Danes are presented as an invading army, operating for their own gain rather than in support of English rebels. Hereward’s actions in aiding them become correspondingly more suspect. Where the Gesta Herwardi excises the role of the Danes in Hereward’s activities in order to present a clear opposition between the English and the Normans, Hugh’s account instead erases any distinction between English and Norman interests, presenting them as united against the Danes. However, Hugh also adds some comments on the motivations of Hereward and his men, which suggest an awareness that Hereward’s reputation was a contested subject. He says that in after times Hereward swore he had acted in good faith, out of loyalty to the church, in the belief that the Danes were about to drive out the Normans: he gave the abbey’s treasures to them because ‘the Danes would guard these things better than the Frenchmen for the use of the church’.93 This comment may be simply invention or may reflect the much more positive reputation Hereward enjoyed in the Fenland by the mid-twelfth century; it is perhaps an attempt to reconcile the crimes attributed to Hereward in Peterborough tradition with the fame of a man elsewhere believed to be a local hero. The complexities of Hereward’s reputation are encapsulated by the fact that the Gesta Herwardi survives in a thirteenth-century manuscript from Peterborough, the ‘Book of Robert of Swaffham’, which also contains a continuation of Hugh’s chronicle.94 These two interpretations of Hereward’s actions could hardly be more different, but they were preserved alongside each other in the library of medieval Peterborough.

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Hereward and Crowland The last significant version of the Hereward legend which remains to be discussed occurs in a chronicle from another of the Fenland abbeys, Crowland. The connection between Hereward and Crowland is well attested, since Domesday Book records that he was a tenant of the abbey, and Crowland is named in the Gesta as the place to which Turfrida retreated after the end of her marriage to Hereward. An account of Hereward’s life appears in a chronicle written at Crowland in the late fifteenth century.95 While too late to be a reliable source for Hereward’s life, it is testimony to an enduring interest in Hereward in the Middle Ages and provides important evidence to show how his story helped to shape later interpretations of the Norman Conquest and its aftermath. This version of Hereward’s life roughly follows the Gesta, but omits its romantic stories about Hereward’s adventures abroad, and adds dates and details intended to situate Hereward more precisely in a historical context on the eve of the conquest. One of its priorities is to present Hereward as a more straightforwardly virtuous Christian hero than in the Gesta, suggesting (as the Gesta never does) that it was God who brought him back to England to defend his country.96 The reason for this rather sanitized version of Hereward’s story becomes clear as the Historia Croylandensis tries to demonstrate that Crowland had its own connection to Hereward, noting not only that Turfrida lived there as a nun but also that Hereward himself chose to be buried at Crowland, and that they had a daughter who married a patron of Crowland, Hugh de Envermeu.97 This information about Hereward’s daughter – not mentioned in the Gesta – reflects a genealogical claim relating to the lordship of Bourne, which by this time was said to have passed through the descendants of this daughter into the Wake family. The same claim is found in a fifteenth-century genealogy of the Wakes, which traces the ancestry of the lords of Bourne back to Hereward and his father Leofric.98 In that text, Hereward’s father is identified with Leofric, earl of Mercia – thus pushing Hereward further up the social scale – and his mother with Godiva, Leofric’s wife. The marriage of Hereward’s daughter, also named Godiva, to Hugh de Envermeu is supposed to connect the family with the pre-conquest owners of Bourne. These sources indicate that by the

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fifteenth century Hereward had been appropriated by a local family wishing to demonstrate their ancient rights to Bourne. This extended to retrospectively giving Hereward the epithet ‘the Wake’, which is not attached to him in earlier sources but has stuck with him in post-medieval tradition. Further references to Hereward in the Historia Croylandensis show the fifteenth-century author focusing on anti-Norman rebellion and celebrating Hereward’s refusal to submit to William.99 The compiler is primarily interested in seeing the Norman Conquest as a violent struggle between conquerors and conquered, and he displays an overt hostility to the Normans and their influence on England. Writing centuries after the conquest, he uses Hereward’s story to comment on what he perceives to be a number of unwelcome cultural changes imposed by the Normans. The Normans hated the English, the author says, and so they instituted their own customs in matters such as the dedication of knights, confirmation of charters and transfer of property.100 Several of these supposed cultural changes suggest a particular interest in textual culture, as if the author has been looking over old documents and observing varieties of practice. He comments on the Normans’ use of seals to confirm documents, interpreting this as having replaced what he takes to be the ‘English’ custom of confirmation with witness-lists and gold crosses, and he remarks on the use of French and Latin in law-codes in place of the English used by the AngloSaxon kings. As a fifteenth-century perception of the cultural changes brought by the Normans, this is a fascinating description. The chronicler is commenting on observable changes of legal and documentary practice which did indeed take place in the centuries after the conquest, though not for the reasons he asserts. As M. T. Clanchy puts it, this description ‘marks a stage in the growth of the myth of the noble but primitive Anglo-Saxon’, a process by which the preconquest past came to be idealized as a simpler and more honest time.101 It is significant that this perception is closely linked with the story of Hereward and the valiant but doomed fight by which he ‘upheld the falling condition of his ruined country as long as he could’.102 The chronicler’s digression is prompted by recounting the episode in the Gesta in which Hereward is knighted by Brand, abbot of Peterborough, according to ‘the English custom’ – one of many customs which the Normans supposedly wished to destroy.

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His analysis of the situation is influenced by the Gesta, which claims that in doing this Hereward was defiantly following an English custom which had attracted Norman disapproval, but he is extrapolating from that story to construct a larger narrative about an idyllic pre-conquest England lost to violent foreign invasion. This interest in Hereward’s story and in Norman-English relations seems to be very much a late-medieval phenomenon at Crowland. It is notable that, despite the attested connection between Hereward and Crowland, earlier sources from the abbey show little interest in him. He does not feature, for instance, in Orderic Vitalis’s account of 1069–71, even though Orderic stayed at Crowland and worked on the abbey’s history around the time in the twelfth century when Hereward’s fame was at its height.103 At that time Crowland seems to have been indifferent to Hereward and much more interested in their own anti-Norman rebel Waltheof, whose story we will consider later. It appears that the monks of Crowland found more of interest in Hereward’s story in the fifteenth century than they had done three hundred years previously, perhaps because his legend could provide inspiration for myth-making and speculation about the effects of the Norman Conquest on England.

Conclusions The monks of late-medieval Crowland have not been alone in finding Hereward’s life story a fruitful means of thinking about the cultural changes brought by the Norman Conquest and celebrating the virtues of a romantic – but essentially imaginary – version of Anglo-Saxon England. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Hereward’s legend experienced a great revival of interest, driven in large part by Charles Kingsley’s novel Hereward the Wake, ‘Last of the English’ (1866). Drawing on the medieval sources for Hereward’s story and his knowledge of the Fenland, Kingsley provided Victorian Britain with a Hereward who stood for liberty and independence.104 As its subtitle suggests, the novel is interested in Hereward as the symbol of a kind of doomed Englishness, fated to be subjugated by the cultural dominance of the Normans. Kingsley’s patriotic retelling of the story was popular and influential, and

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Hereward has since featured as the hero of numerous other historical novels, reawakening the medieval tendency to fictionalize and romanticize his life (Figure 8).  Such narratives of Hereward’s story are often founded on a series of binary oppositions, which present his rebellion as a struggle between two distinct and clearly defined sides, separated by nationality, language and even (anachronistically) religion: for some Victorian writers, Hereward’s defiance stood for a kind of English, proto-Protestant independence from European Catholic culture.105 These oppositions of course reflect more about the perspectives of the authors than they do about the medieval situation. Since

Figure 8  A nineteenth-century image of Hereward. © Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

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we have so little firm evidence for Hereward’s life, even in the medieval sources all we can access are interpretations of his story; the impulse to turn Hereward into an emblematic figure and his life into a parable about England’s fate under Norman rule goes back a very long way. In the twelfth century, as in the nineteenth or the twenty-first century, retellings of his life have shaped and been shaped by deeply held cultural narratives about the Norman Conquest and its effect on England. In such narratives, Hereward – like the Fens – is often imagined to represent something wild and pure, untameable and untainted by outside influence. But this discourse of cultural purity has little in common with the complexities of the eleventh-century situation: as we have seen, Hereward’s allegiances do not divide neatly down ethnic lines. Nor is it reflected in the most important medieval account of his life, the Gesta Herwardi, despite that text’s hostility to the Normans and its desire to recover and celebrate pre-conquest English culture. The Gesta is at pains to show Hereward’s ability to interact successfully with different cultures – whether Scandinavian, Irish, Flemish or Norman – and does not always imagine those interactions taking place in hostile ways. Perhaps this is one reason why the author of the Gesta chose to perpetuate his version of English culture by telling the story of someone who had lived through the conquest, rather than championing a long-dead Anglo-Saxon hero or the doomed warriors of Hastings. The Gesta is a story about growth and change: the narrative of a young man’s development into manhood, as he learns to adapt and flourish in a variety of cultural settings. That experience, painless enough in his early adventures, is more fraught after his return to Norman-ruled England, but it is still ultimately a process of adaptation and acceptance – adaptation, crucially, on both sides. The England where Hereward eventually settles down under Norman rule is not the England into which he was born, but he has reached an accommodation with it and won the respect of its new rulers. For the author of the Gesta, Hereward’s actions may not have driven the Normans out of England, but they helped to ensure that English culture would be not entirely scorned or forgotten and allowed to have a place in the new Norman world. The Gesta Herwardi is not a story of what was lost at the Norman Conquest, but of what survived.

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2 A sparrow in the snare Margaret of Scotland

The story of exile and return to the homeland, which became part of the fictional career attached to Hereward and other heroes of twelfth-century romance, was the real experience of some of Hereward’s contemporaries among the young people who lived through the Norman Conquest. In this chapter, we will look at the life of St Margaret of Scotland and her family, whose remarkable story features not one but two experiences of exile and displacement as a result of conquest. Margaret was a descendant of the royal family of Wessex and the sister of Edgar Ætheling, the teenage boy who in 1066 was the last surviving direct heir to the English throne. In the years after the conquest, Margaret and her siblings sought refuge in Scotland, where she went on to marry Malcolm III and enjoyed a successful and influential period as his queen. After her death in 1093, she was venerated as a saint, and this English exile became one of Scotland’s most popular saintly patrons. In 1100, Margaret’s daughter Edith married Henry I of England, uniting the new Norman dynasty with the line of the kings of Wessex. At Edith’s request, a biography of Margaret was written by Turgot, prior of Durham, but there are also briefer accounts of Margaret’s life from the late eleventh and early twelfth century which reflect on the political and spiritual significance of her life story, and try to understand what it might suggest about God’s plans for the English. In this chapter, we will explore how

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Margaret’s life became a focus for interpretations of pre-conquest history – sometimes as a form of lament for the Anglo-Saxon past, sometimes as a narrative of imagined Anglo-Norman cultural harmony.

A family of exiles Although Margaret was descended from the English royal family on her father’s side, she was born in Hungary, daughter of a man who had spent almost all his life in exile from England. Her father Edward was one of the two sons of Edmund Ironside, whose death at the end of November 1016 left Cnut in control of England. Edmund’s young children were sent away from the country, probably within a few months of their father’s death, as part of Cnut’s attempt in the first year of his reign to eliminate potential challengers from the surviving English royal family. If, as seems likely, Edward and his brother Edmund were the children of Edmund Ironside’s wife Ealdgyth, whom he had married only in the summer of 1015, the boys would have been very young at the time of their exile – much too young to retain any memory of the country of their birth. Nonetheless, Cnut must have seen them as a future threat, worth getting out of the way as he established his power in England. It is not clear exactly what happened to Edward and Edmund over the next few years, nor do we know the fate of their mother. Later medieval historians tell various stories about how Cnut had the boys sent away to be killed – tales of greater or lesser degrees of plausibility, which as time went on were increasingly coloured by romance tropes of innocent children victimized by wicked kings and queens. The medieval historians tend to agree, however, that the boys travelled through a number of different foreign courts before eventually ending up in Hungary. John of Worcester, for instance, claims that Cnut sent the children first to the king of Sweden to be put to death, but the king refused to kill them and sent them to Hungary instead.1 Other writers suggest they also spent time in Russia, apparently with Jaroslav, ruler of Kiev, whose court was a place of refuge for several royal exiles from Scandinavia.2 The most elaborate version of the story is told by Gaimar,

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who says the children were put in the care of a Danish nobleman named Walgar and taken to Denmark, where they stayed until Cnut’s wife Emma, jealous for her own son’s claim to the throne, persuaded Cnut to have them murdered. Walgar swiftly carried them off to Hungary, where the elder of the two in time won the love of the king’s daughter and the favour of the king, who wanted to make the boy his heir.3 As Gaimar tells it, this tale is very much in the mode of the exile-and-return narratives of twelfth-century romance, as also seen in the Gesta Herwardi. In the absence of much firm information about what had really happened to Edward during his exile, his story had clearly begun to be understood in the light of these popular narrative tropes: he is a young prince unjustly forced to flee his home, who finds love and adventure in exile but eventually returns to claim his proper place in his country of birth. However much truth there may be in the more romantic details of these stories, it appears that Edward and Edmund did end up in Hungary, and Edward did find a wife there.4 He married a woman named Agatha, with whom he had three children. Agatha’s background is not certain, though it has been the subject of much discussion. The most generally accepted theory is that she was a relative of the German emperor Henry III (1039–56), perhaps the daughter of his half-brother Liudolf,  margrave of West Friesland; alternatively, it has been argued that she may have been related to the royal family of Hungary or of Kiev.5 From the perspective of Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman historians, there was evidently considerable uncertainty about Agatha’s family origins, as there was about the details of Edward’s time in exile. This perhaps reflects the limited amount of information on the subject available in England, but also indicates that these historians’ interest lay much more with Edward’s royal lineage than with his wife’s. Though they give various explanations of Agatha’s family connections, they are most concerned to establish that she was of high birth and from a distinguished family, not to trace the particulars of her ancestry.  Edward and Agatha’s three children, Margaret, Edgar and Christina, were all probably born in the late 1040s or early 1050s (Figure 9). We cannot ascertain their precise dates of birth, except by speculating about how old they seem to have been when they first began to be politically active in 1066. At that

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Figure 9  Edmund Ironside and his descendants in a fourteenth-century manuscript (British Library, Royal MS. 14 B VI). © The British Library (public domain).

time Edgar seems unlikely to have been older than his mid-teens, which would indicate a birth-date of c. 1051. Margaret may have been the oldest of the three and Christina the youngest, but we cannot be sure by how much. They were still young children, in any case, when their father’s fortunes changed. In the 1050s, when it must have been increasingly clear that the marriage between Edward the Confessor and Edith, daughter of Godwine and Gytha, would not produce any children, the king began to take an interest in what had happened to the family of Edmund Ironside, his half-brother. There were serious questions to solve about the succession, and Edward, who had himself unexpectedly returned to England after many years in exile during Cnut’s reign, must have hoped to find an heir in his namesake and nephew. Arrangements for the younger Edward’s return took some time, perhaps because it was not known where he was to be found. In 1054, Ealdred, bishop of Worcester, was sent on a mission from the king to Germany, where he spent almost a year, and the purpose of his embassy seems to have been to trace what had happened to Edmund’s children and

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arrange for their return.6 It was not until 1057, however, that Edward returned to England, and it is not clear whether his brother Edmund ever did so; he may have died in exile while still a child. When Edward and his family arrived in England in the spring of 1057, he can have remembered nothing of the country of his birth. The fact that he had named his son Edgar suggests some desire to align himself with his English ancestry, but it is possible that he did not speak English and knew little of what had been happening there in the years of his exile. Soon after his arrival, apparently before he had even met with his uncle the king, Edward was dead. No reason for his death is provided by the contemporary sources, and it does not seem to have provoked much speculation, despite what might be seen as suspicious timing. He was buried in London, at St Paul’s, where his grandfather King Æthelred was also buried. We do not know where Agatha and her children spent the next few years. Margaret and Christina are likely to have been educated at a religious house in Wessex, and the most probable location is Wilton Abbey, which had close links to the royal family.7 If they were at Wilton, they might well have encountered the daughters and granddaughters of Gytha and Godwine, whose stories we will look at in the next chapter. After the death of Edward the Exile, Edward the Confessor continued to take an interest in his nephew’s children, who were his closest living relatives. Although Edward may have entertained different possibilities regarding his intentions about the succession to the throne, young Edgar seems to have been treated as a serious candidate to inherit from his great-uncle. His status as potential heir is suggested by the use in contemporary sources of the term ætheling, or its Latin equivalent clito, ‘prince’, a title reserved for those male members of the royal family who were eligible to become king (Figure 10).8 If Edward had lived a few more years, Edgar – a little older and with more time to gather support among the English nobility – might have been an almost unchallenged successor to the king. In terms of ancestry, and precedent in the customs of Anglo-Saxon inheritance, his claim was by far the strongest of those who aspired to take the throne in 1066. But as things turned out, he was no more than fourteen or so when his great-uncle died, and his attempts to assert his rights were crowded out by the actions of older and more powerful men. 

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Figure 10  ‘Edgar clito’: an entry in the New Minster Liber Vitae in which Edgar Ætheling’s name is listed together with the king and queen, suggesting Edward’s public acknowledgement of Edgar as his potential heir (British Library, Stowe MS. 944, f. 29). © The British Library (public domain).

‘A faithful and noble kindred’: Margaret and her family in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle To explore what happened to Margaret and her siblings after the conquest, and to understand the ways in which their story was interpreted, we can begin with the special attention paid to their family in one manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, MS. D (British Library, Cotton MS. Tiberius B IV). This version of the Chronicle displays a particular interest in Margaret and her family, commenting on their lives at notably greater length than comparable entries in other Chronicle manuscripts.9 The death of Edward the Exile, Margaret’s marriage to Malcolm and some details of Edgar’s later career all receive marked attention. Though included in the annals for the years 1057, 1067 and 1075, these entries also cast an eye backwards and forwards from these years across the longer story of the family, setting their fates in context and offering narrative links of causation and motivation, all written in a distinctly poetic style which reveals a strong emotional investment in what the chronicler calls ‘a faithful and noble kindred’.

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These passages on Margaret and her family were clearly written some years after the events described, not contemporaneously with the dates they are assigned in the Chronicle. Exactly how long after is difficult to ascertain; they may have been written in the 1070s, but dates up to the early 1100s have also been suggested.10 Either way, they seem to represent the perspective of someone writing some decades after the conquest, with a particular interest in English history and the Anglo-Saxon royal line, looking back on the period around 1066 with a desire to understand what had happened to England and why. Since the composition history of the Chronicle is a complex question, it is not easy to say where such a writer might have been located; Worcester, York, Durham and Scotland have all been proposed.11 It has often been argued that some of the knowledge of Margaret and her family in these entries may reflect the influence of Ealdred (d. 1069), bishop of Worcester between 1046 and 1062 and, as archbishop of York from 1060, one of the most senior churchmen in England at the time of the conquest.12 Ealdred, a member of the diplomatic mission sent to Cologne in 1054 to arrange for Edward the Exile’s return to England, must have been one of the few Englishmen to have ever met the ætheling in person, and at the end of 1066 he was among those who initially supported the claim of Edward’s young son to be king. Ealdred’s connection with the family may help to explain the interest in them shown by this section of the Chronicle; the writer may have been, for instance, a former member of the bishop’s household. Alternatively, some historians have instead seen in these entries the influence of Ealdred’s successor at Worcester, St Wulfstan (d. 1095). Wulfstan too had direct personal contact with Margaret’s family, and his demonstrable interest in preserving pre-conquest literary and historical traditions at Worcester may provide another possible context for these entries.13 It may be partly because of Ealdred’s involvement in the long preparations for Edward’s return to England that the disappointment of his sudden death, so soon after his arrival in 1057, is narrated in some detail. The entry explains Edward’s history and pays tribute to him, showing a keen interest in his story: In this year came to England Edward Ætheling, who was the son of King Edward’s brother, King Edmund, who was called ‘Ironside’ because of his military prowess. King Cnut had sent this ætheling away to Hungary, in

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order to betray him, but he thrived there and became a good man, as God granted him and was well fitting for him, such that he obtained as his wife a kinswoman of the Emperor, and by her begot a fine family of children. She was called Agatha. We do not know for what cause it was ordained that he was not permitted to see the [face] of his kinsman King Edward.14 Alas, that was a pitiable fate and harmful to all this nation, that he so swiftly lost his life after he came to England, to the misery of this poor nation!15 Only this version of the Chronicle names Agatha or identifies (however vaguely) her family connections; only this gives the reason for Edward’s banishment and the place of his exile. As with the other entries we will look at, this passage uses language which is both emotive and markedly poetic. The chronicler writes with nostalgic admiration for the long-dead King Edmund, as well as grief for his son: Edmund is praised for his snellscipe, a word which connotes courage and swift, decisive military skill. This is also the first source to record Edmund’s complimentary byname ‘Ironside’ (Old English irensid). The death of Edmund’s son is described with the resonant phrase ‘hreowlice siþ’, which can mean both ‘a sorrowful arrival’, referring literally to Edward’s landing in England, and ‘a pitiable fate’, lamenting the cruel and poignant irony of his death at such a critical moment. The chronicler implies that it is a turn of events much to be lamented, not only for Edward’s own sake but for its lasting consequences for the political stability of England. Across the entries in the Chronicle which describe this family’s experience, certain themes recur. There is a particular interest in tracing the lineage of the Anglo-Saxon royal family, carefully recording their descent and genealogical connections, and emphasizing the importance of inherited rights and characteristics. The writer’s approach to these issues is both political and overtly theological: these entries display a sense that events have not turned out as they should, and suggest that it is necessary to try and understand why God should have permitted the course of history to unfold in a way which appears unjust. Whoever wrote these entries was deeply personally and politically invested in the fate of this particular family, but also seems to have wanted to explore how their fates were connected to the larger forces affecting England in these years. Probably writing after the conquest, the chronicler

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laments Edward’s death as a national tragedy, tracing its consequences in the ill fortune and misery, ungesælðe, which have subsequently followed for the English. The implication is that if Edward had lived, he would have provided a stable foundation of continuity for the English royal line and for England itself. We see these features here as the chronicler contemplates the end of Edward’s life and the hopes which died with him, and will see them again when he comes to record the lives of Edward’s children. It was not only this chronicler who honoured Edward’s memory in the years after the conquest, perhaps with a sense of regret for how things might have turned out differently if he had lived. The only record of the precise date of Edward’s death is provided by a calendar entry noted in a Psalter manuscript which formerly belonged to Crowland Abbey (now Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Douce 296). At some point in the second half of the eleventh century, several obituary notices were added to the calendar of the Psalter, indicating that these dates were to be kept as memorials by the monks of Crowland. On 19 April is noted in gold lettering the death of Edwardus clitus anglorum, ‘Edward, prince of the English’, and on 10 January the name Eadmundus clitus. As Simon Keynes has argued, this may be Edward’s brother, who went with him into exile as a child but seems never to have returned to England.16 If so, the date of his death must have been provided by Edward or those who had accompanied him. Someone at Crowland in the late eleventh century thought the memories of these princes worth preserving with honour, even once it had become clear that their line would not be directly restored to the English throne. The D version of the Chronicle returns to Edward’s family at the end of the entry for 1066. In the weeks after the defeat at Hastings, there was some attempt to organize further military opposition to William by rallying around Edgar, though the part Edgar himself played in these efforts is not clear; he may have been still largely a figurehead at this stage. It was during this period of uncertainty, as we saw in the last chapter, that the monks of Peterborough angered William by acting in a way that showed they believed Edgar would soon become king. The D chronicler records that Ealdred threw his support behind Edgar – ‘as was his natural right’ (‘eallswa him wel gecynde wæs’), the chronicler says emphatically, directly echoing a phrase used of Edward the

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Confessor in an earlier entry when he was chosen as king.17 But these efforts came to nothing, and the frustrated hopes of Ealdred’s faction are succinctly described: ‘Edwin and Morcar promised [Edgar] that they would fight with him, but whenever it should have gone ahead, it grew more delayed and worse day by day, just as it all did in the end.’18 The brothers Edwin and Morcar, earls of Mercia and Northumbria respectively, had far more military experience and resources than young Edgar, and are openly blamed for the failure here. After their expected support did not materialize, Ealdred joined other English leaders, and Edgar, in submitting to William at Berkhamsted in December. It was Ealdred who crowned William as king at Westminster on Christmas Day 1066, making him promise – according to the Chronicle – ‘that he would rule this people as well as any king before him did at the best, if they were loyal to him’.19 In the spring William returned to Normandy, taking with him Edgar, Edwin, Morcar, Waltheof and other leading Englishmen, and remaining there until the following December. The intention was presumably to prevent them from organizing opposition to William in his absence; though not technically held hostage, they were effectively so.20 The entry for 1066 in this version of the Chronicle ends on a famously despondent note, with the comment that the Norman leaders oppressed the wretched people, ‘and afterwards it grew always very much worse. May the end be good, if God wills’.21 This phrasing too seems a conscious echo of an earlier entry, in this case for 975, when the death of King Edgar – young Edgar’s ancestor and namesake – also initiated a period when things ‘grew always very much worse’ for England.22 As we have seen, medieval historians observed some parallels between 975 and 1066, both years when a comet and the death of a king came as harbingers of trouble, and the chronicler is perhaps trying to find some comfort, in writing about this difficult year, in taking a long view of English history and discerning links between past and present. If things had eventually improved after the decline of 975 – though only after decades of warfare and foreign rule, once the return of Edward the Confessor from exile restored the English royal line – the chronicler might have hoped the same might one day be said of the losses of 1066. As in the entry which records the death of Edward the Exile, the chronicler strives to identify the role of God in these patterns of history. What has happened in England reveals an inexorable divine power controlling the

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Figure 11  St Margaret depicted in a fourteenth-century manuscript (British Library, Royal MS. 14 B VI). © The British Library (public domain).

unfolding of events. Unlike in that entry, however, where the chronicler laments the inability to understand why Edward’s death was permitted, causation in 1066 is all too evident: the Normans were victorious at Hastings ‘just as God granted them because of the sins of the people’.23 The conquest is a divine punishment, and its consequences must now be endured (Figure 11). 

Exile and the ‘royal race’ This is the mood in which the chronicler then goes on to tell of the events of the next few years, including a summary of Margaret’s life in the entry which follows. He describes at length how Edgar and his mother and sisters journeyed to Scotland in 1068 and how Margaret’s marriage to Malcolm was arranged. This is the earliest surviving account of Margaret’s life, and it deserves detailed attention.

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This summer young Prince Edgar left the country with his mother Agatha and his two sisters, Margaret and Christina, and Mærleswein and many good men with them, and came to Scotland under the protection of King Malcolm, and he received them all. Then King Malcolm began to desire Edgar’s sister Margaret for his wife, but he and his men all argued against it for a long time, and she herself also refused, and said that she would not have him or anyone, if the divine mercy would grant that she should please the mighty Lord in virginity, with a bodily heart in pure continence in this brief life. The king urged her brother pressingly until he said yes – and indeed he dared not do otherwise, because they had come into the king’s power. Then it came to pass as God had previously ordained, and it could not be otherwise, just as he himself says in his Gospel that even one sparrow may not fall into a snare without his providence. The foreknowing Creator knew beforehand what he wanted to accomplish through her, that she would increase the glory of God in that land, and guide the king from the path of error and bring him and his people together to the better way, and lay aside the sinful customs which that nation previously followed – just as she afterwards did. Then the king married her, although it was against her will. Her ways pleased him, and he thanked God who in his might had given him such a wife. He reflected thoughtfully, as he was a very wise man, and turned himself to God and scorned every sin. Of this the Apostle Paul, teacher of all nations, said, ‘Saluabitur uir infidelis per mulierem fidelem, sic et mulier infidelis per uirum fidelem et reliqua’; that is in our language: ‘Very often the unbelieving husband is hallowed and saved through the righteous wife, and likewise the wife through the faithful husband’. This aforesaid queen afterwards performed many useful deeds in that country, to the glory of God, and also prospered well in kingly ways, as was in her nature. She sprang from a faithful and noble kindred: her father was Edward Ætheling, son of King Edmund, son of Æthelred, son of Edgar, son of Eadred, and so forth in that royal race; and her mother’s family goes back to Emperor Henry, who had dominion over Rome.24 This passage stands out amid the usual narrative style of the Chronicle in multiple ways. It is among the longest entries found in any version of the Anglo-

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Saxon Chronicle and very unusual in focusing on a single individual, especially a woman.25 In place of the Chronicle’s well-established mode of terse, elliptical prose, interrupted at times by stretches of rhetorically heightened poetic language, this entry is in another mode altogether: hagiographical and homiletic in tone, style and content. As a result, it may not be an entirely reliable guide to the circumstances which led to Margaret marrying Malcolm. The chronicler presents the marriage as a spontaneous arrangement, urged by Malcolm against the wishes of Margaret and her brother, to which they only consent because they are helpless exiles caught in the king’s power. It has been suggested, however, that the marriage had in fact been planned long before this, perhaps arranged by Edward the Confessor himself, with the intention of forging an alliance between his dynasty and the king of Scotland and providing Edgar, once he inherited the throne, with a powerful supporter.26 When they arrived in Scotland in 1068, Edgar and Margaret were not as destitute as this chronicler makes them look: Edgar clearly still planned to return to England and regain his kingdom, and an alliance between him and Malcolm was of political value to both. The marriage was a tactical arrangement, not an act of tyranny. But that is not how the chronicler chooses to present it. There is a palpable sense of melancholy and resignation in this entry – of making the best of a bad situation, or at most, turning earthly loss and oppression into a spiritual victory. When describing how little choice Margaret and her brother had in agreeing to the marriage, the chronicler’s language is direct and very strong: Edgar ‘elles ne dorste’ (‘dared not do otherwise’), and Malcolm married her ‘þeah hit hire unþances wære’ (‘though it was against her will’). The implicit parallel between Margaret and the sparrow caught in the snare, as well as the reference early in the entry to Edgar’s youth, presents them as vulnerable and helpless victims of circumstance. Whether or not we are to believe that Margaret had really decided never to marry, the emphasis on her frustrated wishes conveys the idea that her life, and that of her brother, has been forcibly and irreversibly pushed off course; whatever direction they thought or hoped their lives might take, they now have to adjust to very different conditions. The purpose seems to be to enhance the pathos of the situation, to stir compassion for these young people who, through no fault of their own, have lost the power to control their lives.

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This is partly because this entry represents the first attempt to interpret Margaret as a saint – a very early attempt, perhaps even written while she was still alive. The chronicler’s emphasis on Margaret’s unwillingness to marry Malcolm because of her desire to preserve her virginity (and presumably enter religious life as a nun) employs a common hagiographic trope; the intention is surely to link her with the many female saints whose legends told of their determination to remain unmarried for the sake of their faith despite violence and coercion. A particularly important model might have been her namesake, the virgin martyr Margaret of Antioch, whose legend was well known in late Anglo-Saxon England. The biblical allusion in this entry which implicitly compares Margaret to a sparrow caught in a snare is also an image used in the hagiography of Margaret of Antioch: in the Old English Life of St Margaret, the fifteen-year-old saint, seized by soldiers on the orders of a pagan ruler who wishes to marry her, cries out for help to God and compares herself to a ‘spærwe on nette’, a sparrow caught in a net.27 Though the Margaret of the Chronicle does not face martyrdom, this emphasis on her reluctance to marry is presumably designed to make the subsequent success of her marriage appear more glorious by comparison. But it may not only be a hagiographer’s imagination. It is not impossible that the chronicler derived his impression of the circumstances from someone close to the family, who felt that Margaret and Edgar had been under pressure they were unable to resist. Whether it was Edward the Confessor, Malcolm or Edgar who decided on the marriage, we cannot know how Margaret herself felt about it or how much choice she had in the question. She had been brought up in a nunnery and probably knew the story of St Margaret of Antioch; to her Malcolm, a king twice her age, might well have seemed a figure in the mould of the men who threatened her namesake saint and other virgin martyrs. Perhaps she would indeed have preferred not to marry and to spend her adult life – as her sister Christina was to do – in the safety of a religious community. But whatever she might have wished, the chronicler implies, Providence – or the men of her family – had chosen differently for her, ‘and it could not be otherwise’ (Figure 12).  Biblical quotations like the two which appear in this entry are rare in the Chronicle and are another clear sign of the hagiographical mode in which the chronicler is writing. The choice of allusions may be influenced by a desire to

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Figure 12  The marriage of Margaret and Malcolm, in a modern window in St John’s church, Busbridge, Surrey. © Author’s own.

link Margaret’s life with another marriage, a story from the earliest days of the Anglo-Saxon church: Bede’s narrative of the marriage of Æthelburh of Kent to Edwin, king of Northumbria, in c. 624. Æthelburh, daughter of the first AngloSaxon king to convert to Christianity, was married to Edwin in the hope that this marriage alliance would assist the spread of Christianity in Northumbria. In his Historia Ecclesiastica, Bede includes a letter written to Æthelburh by Pope Boniface V in which he quotes the same verse from St Paul about the influence of the believing wife over the unbelieving husband, to encourage Æthelburh to convert her pagan husband by her good example.28 A few chapters later occurs one of the most famous episodes in Bede’s Historia, which also finds a resonance in this entry: a parable told by one of Edwin’s counsellors, as the king debates whether to convert to Christianity, which compares the brevity of human life on earth to the flight of a sparrow through a mead-hall. Bede’s story draws on a number of biblical passages which use the sparrow as an image for the human soul, usually in the context of a contrast between the limitations of

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frail human knowledge and God’s all-knowing Providence and protection.29 The author of the Chronicle entry too must have been familiar with more than one example of this biblical tradition: the primary reference in the entry is to Matthew 10:29-31, but it seems also to be influenced, in its mention of the snare, by Psalm 124: ‘Our soul has been delivered like a sparrow out of the snare of hunters.’ In the Chronicle entry, as in Bede’s story, the image of the little bird evokes a fragile, hunted creature, unable to know or control the future but overseen by God’s Providence and guarded by his care. In this context, it is a poignant metaphor for Margaret’s vulnerable position in Malcolm’s court. However, it also recalls the concern in the 1057 entry about her father’s death to understand why God has permitted these events to take place – an attempt to discern the workings of Providence in English history. The quotation from St Paul and the story of the sparrow both feature within almost consecutive chapters in Bede’s Historia, in a text which would have been well known to most learned Anglo-Saxons in the eleventh century. Either biblical allusion might have been chosen by the chronicler independently of Bede, but the occurrence of both together is suggestive. Since it was clear that Margaret had not shared the fate of her martyr namesake, perhaps the chronicler, seeking to interpret her life, saw a stronger parallel between Margaret and Æthelburh: two royal daughters and queens, who by their Christian example would convert the hearts – and with them the northern kingdoms – of their unbelieving husbands. This parallel fits with the chronicler’s wider interest in taking a long view of English history and attempting to understand God’s hand at work in the story of this royal family, the cynecynn. If the chronicler is seeking to align Margaret with one of the foundational narratives of Anglo-Saxon Christianity, he is also concerned to stress her long and distinguished lineage among the ‘royal race’ of English kings. Along with the hagiographical elements of this passage, there are also stylistic echoes which deliberately imitate earlier Chronicle entries dealing with members of the West Saxon royal line. For instance, the chronicler uses the phrase ‘eallswa hire gecynde wæs’ (‘as was in her nature’), when describing how Margaret’s virtues are hers by the natural right of her royal birth – the same phrase used of Edward the Confessor and her brother Edgar at their accessions (or hoped-for accessions) to the throne. However, the

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chronicler also looks further back, to a tradition of tenth- and early eleventhcentury chronicle-writing which was used to perpetuate a certain set of assumptions about royal legitimacy, English identity and the rights of the West Saxon dynasty: the presumption in this tradition is that the descendants of the kings of Wessex were the rightful rulers of a single kingdom of England, with a claim superior to that of any other line introduced by marriage or conquest. This is a view promoted by a number of earlier entries in the Chronicle, such as the tenth-century poems commemorating the coronation and death of Margaret’s great-great-grandfather Edgar. As Thomas A. Bredehoft argues, these poems are frequently ‘centred on justifying the political legitimacy of the West Saxon dynasty in its rule over a more or less united Anglo-Saxon England’; by invoking the style and concerns of these earlier poems, the writer of this entry ‘pulls out all of the rhetorical stops in order to identify Margaret as carrying on the West Saxon dynasty itself ’.30 It is a feature of some of the eleventh-century examples of these poems that they emphasize how the West Saxon line had managed to survive the rupture of the Danish Conquest, returning from exile and hardship to resume their position after the two-decade rule of Cnut and his sons. It may be that at the time of writing the chronicler still hoped this dynasty might once again be restored, and that the Norman Conquest would prove no more lasting than Danish rule had been. If such a hope existed, however, the chronicler’s focus on Margaret, rather than her brother, seems to imply that it will only be fulfilled through the female line, not through the last male descendant of the West Saxon kings. It is this which has led some historians to suggest that this entry may have been composed as late as 1100, when the marriage of Margaret’s daughter to Henry I might be felt to have indeed restored some of the past status of the family.31 Yet there is no reference to political triumph here, nor is the tone of the entry optimistic – quite the reverse. The chronicler describes how Margaret flourished in her husband’s country but does not even gesture at the idea that she or her descendants might return to their former position in England. God is in control of Margaret’s destiny, but he has ordained that her fate is to ‘increase the glory of God in that land’, not to restore the glory of her family in England. If power remains for her, it is to be exercised in Scotland through her position as a holy wife and queen.

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The tone of the entry, its emphasis on the helplessness of Margaret and her brother, and its shift into the hagiographical mode also make it difficult to read this writer as celebrating or hoping for a restoration of the West Saxon line. Rather than longing for political power to be restored, the chronicler seeks to frame Margaret’s marriage as a different kind of triumph. What matters now, in the interpretation of England’s past and future, is to understand how God has brought good out of evil – for Margaret no less than for a virgin martyr. The English royal line has had a long and noble history, and though its political power may be extinct, that potency seems to have been transmuted into a different form: a spiritual power which will bring glory to God, to England and to Margaret herself.

Scotland and beyond Although the chronicler in this entry writes as if the exclusion of the West Saxon dynasty from the English throne was a settled thing, for the immediate future at least, that was not the case at the time of Margaret’s marriage nor for some years afterwards. The alliance with Malcolm of Scotland, whether unwelcome or not in the beginning, proved to be a useful one for Edgar and shaped the course of his life as well as his sister’s. After receiving Margaret and her family at his court, Malcolm was at first prepared to support Edgar and other English rebels in their fight against Norman rule. In the course of 1069, Edgar twice travelled from Scotland into England in an attempt to combine forces with potential allies against the Normans. In the first attempt, he joined with the Northumbrians and won the support of the city of York, but they were swiftly defeated in battle by a Norman army and Edgar had to flee back to Scotland. In the summer of 1069 he tried again, this time uniting his forces with Waltheof and other English rebels, as well as the Danish fleet led by the brother and sons of Svein Estrithson. They fought another battle at York, and this time won a victory over the Norman army. The D version of the Chronicle delightedly celebrates their triumph and gives us a vivid picture of the arrival of Edgar and his allies at York, supported by all the local people, ‘riding and marching with an enormous army, greatly

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rejoicing’.32 It may be significant that for at least some of the time all this was taking place at York, Archbishop Ealdred was in the city; the Chronicle records that he died there in September 1069, just before the army arrived. He may have intended to provide spiritual and material support to Edgar’s cause, as he had tried to do at the end of 1066. Though the Chronicle presents the capture of York as a triumph, it was once again short-lived. William came north with his army, recaptured the city and punished the surrounding region for its support for the rebellion. Some of the rebels gathered at Ely the following year, but Edgar seems to have taken no part in this stage of the revolt, and his whereabouts at this point are unclear. Edgar’s actual role in events is not always easy to discern: his own hope may have been to defeat the Normans and make himself king, but his allies probably did not all see this as their desired goal. In the Fenland, as we have seen, it was believed that Svein of Denmark wanted England for himself, and there is little sign that even the English rebels intended to unite behind Edgar as king. In 1070–1, before and after the siege of Ely, the alliance of rebels gradually fell apart: Waltheof made peace with the king and was rewarded with an earldom, Morcar submitted and was punished with imprisonment, and the Danish fleet took a large payment and retreated to Denmark. Even Malcolm, though by now married to Margaret, seems to have reconsidered his support for Edgar. In 1070 Malcolm had been raiding in Northumbria, most likely in furtherance of his own interests rather than Edgar’s, and William apparently took this – and probably the marriage too – as a hostile act which required a response. In 1072, William led an army and fleet into Scotland, and Malcolm was forced to come to meet the king and submit to him. He gave William hostages and, in the words of the Chronicle, ‘became his man’. Part of their agreement was probably that Malcolm would provide no more aid to English rebels, and at this point Edgar seems to have left Scotland for Flanders. But Malcolm and Margaret were still willing to support Edgar, if not to help him fight against the Normans. A few years later, the D version of the Chronicle records Edgar’s return to Scotland from Flanders in July 1074, providing our final example of this chronicler’s sympathetic treatment of this family’s story. The chronicler describes Edgar’s return in detail, telling how Margaret and Malcolm ‘received him with great honour’.33 He had been invited

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by the king of France to come to Montreuil and use its castle as a base to ‘do harm to those who were not his friends’, presumably the Normans, and his sister and brother-in-law equipped him to set out on this expedition. The most notable feature of the chronicler’s style here is the list of the lavish gifts which the king and queen gave Edgar: the entry names various kinds of furs, expensive textiles and vessels of gold and silver.34 It seems an excessive level of detail, but the point appears to be that Edgar is outfitted in royal style, appropriate for his status, even though it is clear by this time that he is a marginal figure reliant on the support of more powerful friends. Once again, as in the chronicler’s earlier reflections on this family, things turn out badly for this distinguished but illfated royal line. Edgar and his men are shipwrecked on their way to France and arrive back in Scotland in a pitiable state. Malcolm advises Edgar to sue for peace with William, and Edgar finally agrees to do so. The entry concludes with him being taken into William’s court, once again supposedly ‘received with great honour’ – but submitting entirely to the Norman king and accepting the loss of his former hopes of regaining England. The chronicler again tries to make the best of it, but the impression is once more of hopes frustrated, plans gone astray and a rather pathetic end to Edgar’s story. (As we shall see, it was in fact far from the end of his story – he was not yet twenty-five and would live at least another fifty years – but the D chronicler leaves him here.) Unlike the other entries we have looked at, the chronicler does not here make explicit reference to Edgar and Margaret’s ancestors, but the importance of their royal status is implicit in the list of expensive gifts with which Edgar is presented and in the honours supposedly paid to Edgar, within the space of one entry, by the kings of France, Scotland and England. It is notable that the chronicler twice emphasizes that it was not only Malcolm but Margaret too who gave Edgar these gifts; each time he notes the relationship between Edgar and his sister, though it would have been easy to elide the role of the queen. The intention is perhaps to show Margaret playing a prominent role at Malcolm’s court and displaying the ‘civilizing’ influence which the earlier entry on her marriage, as well as her later hagiography, insist she exerted over Scottish society.35 In acting as a gift-giving queen, she is displaying the kinds of þeawas which the earlier entry suggests she brought to Scotland: þeawas is an Old English word which means ‘customs’, but it has strong positive overtones,

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more like ‘virtuous habits, good actions’. Once the political ambitions of Edgar and this royal line had ended in failure, English writers seeking to praise them began to see Margaret as the means by which these English þeawas could survive. As Margaret began to be thought of as a saint, the virtues for which she was celebrated were not just her own but those of her royal ancestors – and though by this point her family seemed to have no political future, this entry hints at the cultural power which the author hoped would keep their influence alive (Figure 13). 

Figure 13  St Margaret of Scotland, from Busbridge, Surrey. © Author’s own.

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An Anglo-Norman Margaret The value of the cultural power which Margaret brought to her marriage is exemplified by the names she and Malcolm gave to their eight children, several of whom were named in reference to their mother’s English ancestry. Their first four sons were named in turn for Margaret’s father, grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather (Edward, Edmund, Æthelred and Edgar), and their elder daughter Edith was given a name borne by several women from the royal family of Wessex, including her great-grandfather’s half-sister, St Edith of Wilton. If Margaret was educated at Wilton Abbey, she would have been very familiar with the story of St Edith, and Edith was also, of course, the name of Edward the Confessor’s queen, whom Margaret must have known as a child. All these choices suggest that Margaret had a strong sense of her English lineage – as good a knowledge of her ancestry in that ‘royal race’ as the writer of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle – and that she and Malcolm saw the advantages of perpetuating it. They may have envisioned that these sons might one day assert a claim, through their mother, to the English throne. But in fact it was through Edith – not through Edgar or any of Margaret’s sons – that the royal line they represented would return to England. It was for Edith, too, that the first full account of Margaret’s life was written, and it is to this text that we will now turn. By the time it was written, both Malcolm and Margaret were dead. Malcolm died in battle at Alnwick in 1093, along with his eldest son by Margaret, killed as a result of his ongoing struggle with the Norman rulers of England for control of northern Northumbria. Within three days Margaret too was dead, supposedly of grief for her husband and son. Seven years later, in November 1100, Edith married Henry I, who had taken the throne earlier that year after the death of William Rufus. Henry saw the political benefits of allying himself to the former royal family of England and clearly hoped to capitalize on his wife’s English ancestry, and yet as queen Edith took the Norman name Matilda (the name of Henry’s mother, William the Conqueror’s queen). There were apparently limits to how far she and her husband wished to deploy her English heritage. As we have seen, interest in Margaret as a saintly queen developed quickly, perhaps even within her lifetime. Only a decade or so after her death, her first

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Vita was written by Turgot, prior of Durham.36 In the preface, Turgot says that he wrote the Vita at the request of Edith, who had asked him to produce a record of her mother’s life, ‘so that, although you were but slightly acquainted with her face, you may at least obtain a more perfect knowledge of her virtues’.37 Edith, who was brought up in England, may indeed have wished to know more about the mother she might not often have seen in her youth, but the more pressing context for the writing of the Vita is, of course, her own recent marriage to Henry, which made her mother’s ancestry a matter of considerable political relevance. Turgot’s presentation of Margaret’s life, which was to form the basis of her veneration as a saint, must therefore be seen within this particular Anglo-Norman context.38 Turgot knew Margaret personally, as he mentions on several occasions in his Vita. Margaret and Malcolm had been patrons of Durham, where Turgot was prior between 1087 and 1107, and Turgot represents himself as ‘greatly familiar’ with the queen, telling how he had heard her confessions and witnessed her behaviour at court. In his Vita he provides a brief account of her early life and ancestry, but the chief focus is on her life after her marriage to Malcolm. Turgot describes her holy conduct in each of the different aspects of her life as wife, mother and queen: there are stories about her private devotions and acts of charity, the guidance she exerted over her husband and her attention to the education of her children, as well as her role at court. Her influence on the culture of the Scottish church and court is described in some detail, and Turgot’s general approach is to present her as working to bring Scotland into harmony with wider European culture; for instance, he describes a council at which she advocated conforming to the normative practice of the church in the observance of Sunday and the Lenten fast.39 The Vita closes with an account of Turgot’s last meeting with the queen before her death, in which she urged him to act as spiritual father to her children. Margaret, who had been ill for a while, seemed to have knowledge of the deaths of Malcolm and Edward before the news could reach her, and when her son Edgar arrived to bring her the tidings, she was already on her deathbed. She died soon afterwards and was buried at Dunfermline.  The emphasis of the Vita is on the holiness of Margaret’s life, and there is only one actual miracle-story. This tells how Margaret’s favourite book, accidentally

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dropped in a river, was preserved from water damage and returned to the queen unharmed. The book Turgot describes, an illuminated Gospel-book decorated in gold and with portraits of the four Evangelists, fits the description of a manuscript now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.40 This manuscript contains a poem telling the story of its rescue from the water, in a hand which suggests it was written towards the end of the eleventh century, not long after the event took place. In style and decoration the book is a characteristic product of English manuscript art of the second quarter of the eleventh century, indicating that Margaret may have acquired it while living in England before her marriage; it is the kind of lavish item which might have been an appropriate possession for a young Anglo-Saxon royal woman.41 Margaret’s interest in books is also indicated by a story Turgot tells about Malcolm, who – although he could not read – would examine and kiss his wife’s favourite books out of love for her, and sometimes arranged to have them decorated with gold and jewels as a present to the queen.42 As the miracle-story of the Gospel-book demonstrates, Margaret was increasingly seen not only as a devout queen but as a saint, and Turgot’s Vita helped to encourage her growing cult; over the next few centuries, this way of viewing her would be fostered by her descendants and by the churches of which she had been a patron (Figure 14). What is striking about the Vita as a narrative of Margaret’s life, however, is how little it tells us about her life before her marriage – her childhood in Hungary, her adolescence in England and the flight which led to her union with the Scottish king. The first chapter of the text ostensibly deals with this period in her life but in fact provides very scanty details; if you did not know, it would not be possible to discern from the text where Margaret was born or brought up. Her parents are not named, no details of her mother’s family are given and there is no reference to her brother and sister. These are remarkable omissions and a significant contrast to the aspects of Margaret’s identity which are emphasized in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s account of her marriage. We cannot be sure who was the moving force behind these omissions – whether Turgot is silent about Margaret’s early life because he chose to say nothing or because he felt his patron Edith would prefer him to say nothing – but either way they are a clue to the aspects of Margaret’s story which by the first decade of the twelfth century were beginning to be smoothed away.

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Figure 14  St Margaret’s chapel in Edinburgh Castle. © Author’s own.

All that Turgot does tell us in the section dealing with Margaret’s life before marriage is the origin of her name – that ‘in the sight of God she was esteemed a goodly pearl by reason of her faith and works’ – and a selective account of her ancestry, intended to show that her nobility of mind echoed her noble descent. This genealogy begins with her grandfather, Edmund Ironside, who is praised for his military success and the fact that he was ‘invincible by his enemies’ – an emphasis which is only made possible by failing to mention that (since he was not in fact invincible) his sons had to flee England after his kingdom was conquered by the Danes. Edmund’s son, Margaret’s father, is not mentioned at all, here or anywhere else in the text, and nothing is said about his time away from England. Even Edmund Ironside is most important not as an ancestor himself but for the link he provides between Margaret and the most significant of her ancestors from a Norman point of view: Edward the Confessor, the figure so crucial to legitimizing the Norman claim to the English throne. The remainder of the genealogy belongs, in fact, to Edward the Confessor and not to Margaret, since it concentrates on two further relatives, only one of whom was actually related to Margaret.

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On the Anglo-Saxon side of Edward’s ancestry, he is said to have derived his virtues as a devout and peaceable king from his grandfather, King Edgar. To confer further saintly authority on this royal ancestor, Turgot mentions a prophecy by St Dunstan which foretold Edgar’s virtues and the joy England would experience while he lived.43 As we have seen, twelfth-century historians often perceived Edgar’s reign as an idealized Anglo-Saxon Golden Age, a period of peace and prosperity before the disruptions of the eleventh century, and saw his death in 975 as the beginning of decline: a time which brought the renewal of Viking invasions, the misgovernment of Æthelred’s reign and the dynastic upheavals of the Danish and Norman conquests. All this turbulence shaped the course of Margaret’s life, but none of it is mentioned in her Vita; there is no reference to her father’s escape from Cnut or her own flight from England in 1068. The impression is created of a fairly peaceful and untroubled line of descent from Edgar to Edward the Confessor, then to Margaret.44 Edgar, at least, was an ancestor of Margaret’s, but Turgot next goes on to praise Richard I, duke of Normandy, Edward’s maternal grandfather. Since Edward and Edmund Ironside had different mothers, Richard was not a blood relative of Margaret, so his relevance to her genealogy is questionable. Like Edward, Richard provides another example of royal saintly conduct: Turgot recounts Richard’s Christian humility, generosity to the poor, founding of the monastery of Fécamp and desire to live as a monk. In this way, he provides another model for the kind of royal sanctity Margaret’s Vita will go on to exemplify. But the real reason for his inclusion is, of course, that he was an ancestor of the Norman kings of England, the family into which Edith had married. Margaret’s ancestry is linked closely to these two men, her great-uncle and his grandfather, while closer relationships – particularly on her mother’s side – are completely elided from the text. We are told that Margaret ‘by the splendour of her merits completes the glory of this illustrious family’, in which noble ancestry and a noble life are seen to go together – but here, unlike in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, that is an Anglo-Norman dynasty rather than a purely Anglo-Saxon one.45 Margaret has been adopted into an Anglo-Norman ancestral network by the most tenuous of links, evidently to serve Turgot’s perception of the needs of his patron, Edith, whose marriage is supposed to unite these two royal lines (Figure 15). 

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Figure 15  Edith/Matilda and Henry I in a fourteenth-century manuscript (British Library, Royal MS. 14 B VI). © The British Library (public domain).

The aspects of Margaret’s early life which do not fit this presentation of her are silently glossed over. Even while the Vita emphasizes the link between Margaret and Edward, that link is made to rest solely on a genealogical connection, rather than any interaction they might have had in life. In another hagiographical text, it might have been an opportunity to tell stories about the saint’s childhood, showing how Margaret’s piety was manifested at a young age under the influence of her great-uncle’s example – perhaps to mention Edward’s role in bringing Margaret’s family to England or to suggest he took an interest in her education. But none of this is even hinted at, and there is no sense from the Vita that Margaret’s life overlapped with Edward’s any more directly than it did with that of Richard of Normandy, who died half a century before her birth. To draw more attention to any personal contact between Edward and Margaret would require an explanation for Edward’s interest in his nephew’s family – such as discussion of the prospect that Margaret’s father and brother might inherit the throne – and that would raise some awkward issues regarding the grounds of the Norman claim about Edward’s intentions for his heir. In this light, the absence of reference to Margaret’s father and brother is perhaps not too surprising, but it is disappointing that the Vita has no

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information to offer about her mother, since it might have solved the mystery about her background. Motherhood plays a significant role in the Vita, which carefully evokes Margaret’s relationship with her own children in order to present the queen as an ideal educator and guide, and she is also shown acting in a motherly role towards orphaned children. Yet the saint’s own mother is not mentioned, even in passing.46 These omissions are partly the result of the Vita’s silence about Margaret’s life before her marriage to Malcolm, a subject on which this is the total sum of its information: While therefore Margaret was still in the flower of her youth, she began to lead a life of great strictness, to love God above all things. . . . While therefore she meditated in the law of the Lord day and night, and, like another Mary sitting at His feet, she delighted to hear His word, by the desire of her friends rather than by her own, yea, rather by the appointment of God, she was married to Malcolm, son of Duncan, the most powerful king of the Scots. But though compelled to do the things which are of the world, she deemed it beneath her to set her affections upon them; for she delighted more in good works than in abundance of riches.47 There is a brief, rather muted reference here to the idea that in marrying Malcolm, Margaret was following the will of God and her family rather than her own wishes, but there is no trace of the pathos with which the same story is told in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Since there is no mention of the Norman Conquest, there can be no discussion of the circumstances which influenced or constrained Margaret’s choice. Although the Vita never presents Margaret as a political exile or indicates that she or her family experienced separation, loss or displacement, it does introduce the imagery and language of exile in another context: when speaking of earth and heaven. As Turgot emphasizes that Margaret has set her mind on the joy of heaven rather than the things of this world, he presents her as an exile on earth longing for her true home – a conventional image enough in medieval hagiography but a potent one in the context of the life of this particular saint. For instance, in his opening address to Edith, he says:

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I congratulate you, that, having been appointed by the King of the Angels, Queen of the English, you desire . . . to hear about the life of the Queen, your mother, who ever longed for the Kingdom of the Angels.48 This is an echo of a very famous pun, one foundational to the narrative of early medieval English Christianity: ‘Non angli sed angeli’, the words of Gregory the Great on encountering Anglo-Saxon slave-boys in Rome, the meeting which supposedly inspired him to send missionaries to convert the English. With those words, the story of Anglo-Saxon Christianity began and with it the very idea of a gens Anglorum, ‘people of the English’ – or at least, so many medieval English writers believed.49 The angli/angeli pun plays a crucial role in this preconquest tradition of English Christian identity, fundamental to the very word English itself, and here Margaret and Edith – and Henry – are absorbed into that tradition. The flattering overtones of the parallel drawn between the lands of the angeli and angli are clear: Henry, as king of the English, is equated with God himself, and the royal couple are both complimented by the comparison. But the reference to Margaret complicates this neat parallel between heaven and England. If the land of the Angles is to be equated with the land of the angels, is Margaret’s longing for heaven also to be understood as an exile’s longing for England? In this context, the implications of the wordplay are suggestive but tantalisingly unrealized. The allusion invokes the discourse of exile and the desire for return to the homeland, in a context where heaven and England are explicitly aligned – and yet these elements are never brought alive in the Vita itself, though it is the story of a saint whose life-course was twice shaped by the experience of exile. We can only speculate on the reasons for the Vita’s total silence regarding Margaret’s history of exile. Does it reflect Margaret’s own desire not to speak of her early life, her wish to write that out of her story? Turgot says that Margaret, as her death approached, told him ‘the story of her life’ (presumably in confession), so it may be that the story he tells at least partly reflects the queen’s own narration. It is possible that Turgot was following her example in his selection and rejection of narrative material, reproducing her wishes in the elements he chooses to emphasize or to play down. More likely, however, he was responding to the perceived wishes of his patron Edith, and his narrative

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works to create an image of cultural harmony and undisturbed continuity between England’s pre-conquest history and the present king of the English – just the kind of continuity the marriage between Edith and Henry was supposed to embody and perpetuate. It is a truly Anglo-Norman picture. This is a particularly interesting omission, however, because we know from other sources that St Margaret and her biographer had this experience in common: Turgot’s own life too had been radically disrupted by the Norman Conquest. He and Margaret were of a similar age; he was born around 1050, in northern Lincolnshire, and his name suggests he came from an Anglo-Danish background.50 Born into a ‘not undistinguished’ English family, he seems to have been educated as a cleric and intended for a career in the church. But around 1069, during the violent post-conquest years, he was taken captive by the Normans – perhaps because of involvement in some rebellion around the time Lincolnshire was forced to submit to Norman rule.51 Held prisoner in Lincoln Castle, he bribed his captors and escaped to Grimsby, where he hid on a merchant ship bound for Norway. Unluckily, the ship happened to be one in which some Norman ambassadors on a mission to the Norwegian king had already embarked, but the Norwegian sailors kept Turgot concealed until the ship was safely out at sea. Once in Norway, Turgot came to the attention of King Olaf, who apparently selected Turgot as his private tutor to teach him about the liturgy. (We will hear more of Olaf in the next chapter, because Turgot was not the only Englishman to take refuge in Norway at this time.) Eventually Turgot set out to return to England, laden with gifts from the Norwegian king, but was caught in a storm and shipwrecked, escaping with only his life. He became a monk at Wearmouth around 1075, and in 1083 he was part of a group of Wearmouth monks who went to found the monastic community at Durham. As prior of Durham from 1087, he helped lay the foundation stone of the new Norman cathedral in 1093; in 1107 he became bishop of St Andrews, at the request of Malcolm and Margaret’s son Alexander I, and died in 1115. It would be very interesting to know whether Turgot and Margaret ever discussed the parallels between their experiences, including their enforced flights from England in 1068–9. Despite these turbulent beginnings, Turgot, like Margaret, forged a distinguished career in the interrelated political and ecclesiastical spheres of northern Northumbria and Scotland. Turgot must

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have spoken about his early life to his fellow monks at Durham, where this story is recorded, so he cannot have been averse to recalling this period in his life; but there is no sign of it in the way he tells Margaret’s story. In fact, there is only one place in the Vita where we might be able to trace Margaret – or Turgot – responding to their own histories of displacement and exile. At one point, Turgot observes that Margaret had a particular interest in English people who had been forced to leave the country because of political upheaval, and she extended support and sympathy to them: Who can tell the number of English of all ranks, carried away in captivity from their own land by the violence of war and reduced to slavery, whom she restored to freedom by paying their ransom? She employed spies to travel secretly through all the provinces of Scotland and find out what captives were oppressed with the most cruel bondage, and treated with the greatest inhumanity. When she had privately ascertained where these prisoners were detained, and by whom ill-treated, commiserating them from the bottom of her heart, she took care to send them speedy help, paid their ransom and set them at liberty forthwith.52 If this is indeed a truthful description of Margaret’s behaviour, we might see it as motivated by a personal identification with English exiles because of her memory of her father’s, her brother’s and her own experience of such forced displacement. But Turgot does not say so and does not encourage us to make the link.

‘After many turns of Fortune’s wheel’: Edgar and Christina In the centuries after her death Margaret’s cult flourished, and she was officially canonized in 1250. Turgot’s Vita was rewritten and adapted, surviving in versions from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and Margaret’s story was often invoked by her descendants on both sides of the border to bolster political claims about the rights and relationships of the kings of Scotland and England.53 Instead of following her story further, however, we will close

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this chapter by looking at what happened to her siblings, who were greatly overshadowed in the later historical record by the fame of their saintly sister: Edgar and Christina. As we saw earlier, twelfth-century historians had some interest in recording the Hungarian adventures of Edward the Exile, though they had little firm information about his life abroad. Anglo-Norman historians display some sympathy for this royal exile and a willingness to accept Queen Margaret as a saint; she is presented as such by most twelfth-century historians who mention her, though they do not have much to say about the aspects of her story which meant so much to the writer of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.54 But there is not much sympathy to be found for the rest of her family, especially Edgar. In fact, while Margaret’s virtues are universally praised, the fates of the rest of her family seem to be an uncomfortable subject for some twelfth-century Anglo-Norman writers. William of Malmesbury, in particular, is startlingly hostile in his judgement on both Edward the Exile and Edgar. He can have known nothing about Edward, but in writing of his death criticizes him, for no apparent reason, as ‘a man of no energy in action and no personal integrity’.55 At the time William was writing, c. 1125, Edgar was still alive, and William speaks of him too with contempt, observing that he ‘after many turns of Fortune’s wheel is now almost decrepit and lives ingloriously in the country’.56 This harsh judgement, too, seems strangely unmotivated. We last saw Edgar in 1074, submitting to William and joining his court, but his career after this date – if not perhaps exactly glorious – was certainly varied and active, and showed an ability to adapt to the expectations of the new Anglo-Norman world.57 Edgar remained part of the court until 1086, at which point he left England. The E version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which does retain considerable sympathy for Edgar, says that he left because ‘he did not get great honour from [William]’, and the writer prayed that God would grant him more honours in the future.58 Edgar, now in his thirties, perhaps thought he could do better for himself, and over the next few years he travelled widely and frequently. As Nicholas Hooper comments, ‘The change worked on his attitudes by ten years at the Norman court is apparent from his next actions. He did not retire to the court of his sister in Scotland or to his former refuge in Flanders. . . . He went instead to another Norman land, Apulia, with a

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retinue of warriors’, though what precisely he did there is uncertain.59 By 1091, he was in Normandy; he had become close friends with Robert Curthose, eldest son of William the Conqueror, who had been duke of Normandy since William’s death in 1087, and Robert had apparently given Edgar lands. But Edgar became caught up in conflict between Robert and his brother William Rufus, and when the brothers were reconciled, Edgar was deprived of his lands and forced to leave Normandy for Scotland.60 We next hear of him there helping to make peace between Malcolm and William Rufus. His actions in negotiating between his brother-in-law and the king indicate that he did have some political value, though his position seems always to have been precarious, whether he was in Normandy, England or Scotland. After the deaths of Malcolm and Margaret in 1093, he helped to establish his nephew Edgar as king in Scotland, defending his claim against the sons of Malcolm’s first marriage. It would have been natural for the elder Edgar to act as his nephews’ protector, and in this he and William Rufus could work together: in 1097 Edgar led an army into Scotland, with William’s backing, ‘won that land with a valiant fight’ (the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says admiringly) and set his sister’s son securely on the throne.61 After this he left Scotland and set out on a journey once again – this time to the Holy Land, in the wake of the First Crusade. According to Orderic Vitalis, he joined a group from England and distinguished himself in battle at Antioch, delivering the city into the hands of Robert Curthose. The details are, once again, frustratingly unclear, but Orderic at least thought Edgar showed he could act with decision and win honours for himself.62 Even William of Malmesbury concedes that as Edgar travelled back to England via the courts of the Greek and German emperors, they tried to keep him with them because of his distinguished lineage; but Edgar, foolishly in William’s eyes, spurned all their offers in his longing for his native land; for some people are simply misled by the love of their country, so that they can enjoy nothing unless they can breathe familiar air. Thus it was that Edgar, deceived by this foolish longing, returned to England where, as I have said above, he suffered a turn of Fortune’s wheel, and now, in solitude and silence, wears out his grey hairs in the depths of the country.63

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But his activities were in fact still not over. In 1106 he once again joined Robert Curthose in Normandy and fought alongside his friend against Henry I. Robert and Edgar were both captured in battle at Tinchebray; Robert spent the rest of his life in captivity, but Edgar was allowed to live out his days peacefully somewhere in England. The date of his death is unrecorded, and he is not known ever to have married or had children. After such a long and eventful career, he had perhaps earned the quiet retirement of which William of Malmesbury was so scornful. William is not the only twelfth-century historian to pass critical judgement on Edgar; Orderic Vitalis calls him handsome, eloquent but indolent – a particularly strange comment, because as even this brief account of his life indicates, he was very active indeed.64 Edgar’s problem was that with no base of his own and dependant on the help of his allies to provide him with lands and resources, he was always in an unstable position. He lived a restless, peripatetic life, hunted from place to place as his presence became politically awkward, caught up in struggles for dominance between more powerful men. Though William of Malmesbury considered his longing for home foolish, it is – if not merely the product of William’s own imagination – actually rather sad; Edgar never had a home anywhere for very long, in England or on any of his travels. It was different for his sister Christina, whom we last saw accompanying her family to Scotland in 1068. Margaret and Edgar attracted much more attention from later writers than their sister, but we do have some information on what happened to Christina – and even a vivid (if third-hand) picture of her character. Christina was probably the youngest of the three siblings, and it is not clear what happened to her after Margaret married Malcolm. She is not mentioned in Turgot’s Vita, but it is possible nonetheless that she remained in Scotland; alternatively, she and her mother may have returned to England at some point, perhaps accompanying Edgar on one of his journeys south. Agatha’s fate is unknown, but Christina’s eventual destiny is recorded in the E version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in the same entry which comments sympathetically on Edgar’s departure from the Norman court in 1086. The chronicler adds that at the same time ‘Christina, the ætheling’s sister, entered the abbey at Romsey and received holy rest’.65 She had perhaps been living with her brother until this point, but on his departure she chose not to rejoin Margaret in Scotland

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and went instead to Romsey Abbey. She may have become abbess of Romsey and perhaps also spent some time at Wilton Abbey, the likely place of her early education; Domesday Book further records that she possessed lands in Oxfordshire and Warwickshire.66 Romsey Abbey, like Wilton, was a religious house long associated with the royal and aristocratic women of Wessex, and it claimed as its distinguished founders and patrons several of Christina’s royal ancestors, including King Edgar.67 It must have been a natural place for her to seek a home. As Christina’s lineage would have presented the same advantage to potential suitors which attracted Malcolm to her sister and Henry to her niece, it is surprising that she never married, and we might speculate why. Is it possible that she, as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle suggests of her sister, actively preferred life in a religious community to the prospect of marriage and – unlike Margaret – had the opportunity to fulfil her wish? In any case, Romsey would have provided her with a relatively comfortable and dignified environment, where her royal connections would have been highly valued. We know very little about Christina’s life after she entered Romsey Abbey, but she seems to have been entrusted with the education of her sister’s daughters, Edith and Mary. It is through her connection with Edith that Christina makes her final appearance in the historical record. In 1100, when Edith’s marriage to Henry was under discussion, it became necessary to determine whether she was free to marry or whether by having her educated in a nunnery her parents had intended to commit her to the religious life. Archbishop Anselm was charged with deciding the question, and Edith gave evidence about her childhood – in the process, describing Christina as her niece remembered her: When I was quite a young girl and went in fear of the rod of my Aunt Christina . . . she to preserve me from the lust of the Normans which was rampant and at that time ready to assault any woman’s honour, used to put a little black hood on my head and, when I threw it off, she would often make me smart with a good slapping and most horrible scolding, as well as treating me as being in disgrace. That hood I did indeed wear in her presence, chafing at it and fearful; but as soon as I was able to escape out of her sight, I tore it off and threw it on the ground, trampled on it and in that way, though foolishly, I used to vent my rage and hatred of it which boiled

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up in me. . . . My father, when by chance he saw me veiled, snatched the veil off and tearing it in pieces invoked the hatred of God upon the person who had put it on me, declaring that he had rather have chosen to marry me to Count Alan than consign me to a house of nuns.68 From this evidence, Anselm decided that Edith’s parents had not intended her to be a nun, and she was able to marry Henry. Edith’s words are reported by the Canterbury historian Eadmer, Anselm’s biographer (to whom we will return in our final chapter). His record of her story is supported by another slightly later source, Hermann of Tournai, who purports to give the abbess’ own testimony. Here the abbess – Christina is not named – says she gave Edith a veil to protect her from William Rufus when he visited the abbey in 1093 and similarly describes her father’s angry reaction when he saw it. This story has been interpreted as an indication that in 1093 Malcolm was planning a marriage for his daughter, either to the Breton nobleman Alan Rufus, one of the most powerful men in the north of England, or to William Rufus himself.69 The political advantages of a union with Edith would have been as evident to William as they were to Henry, seven years later, and Malcolm may have intended to offer William a marriage with his daughter to confirm his recent alliance with the king. Since Malcolm died very soon after this visit to Edith, neither marriage took place. Christina’s role in this incident seems potentially revealing. She is presented as forcibly trying to make the girl a nun against her father’s wishes and criticized for being violent in her anger; Edith’s report of her father’s words also suggests an openly hostile relationship between Christina and Malcolm. It is hard to know how seriously to take this: since the purpose of the story is to show that Edith’s parents did not want her to be a nun, to prove she was free to marry Henry, it is not surprising that the blame is thrown on Christina. Both sources agree, however, that her aim was to protect her niece from sexual violence – in Hermann’s version, to guard her not just from a planned future marriage but from the lust of William Rufus, at a time when Edith was no more than twelve years old. Christina had been a similar age when she saw her sister married to Malcolm, perhaps against her will. She must have known better than anyone what it was to be a vulnerable young royal woman, attractive to powerful men

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Figure 16  Romsey Abbey. © Author’s own.

because of her lineage and her potential for child-bearing. Who could blame her if she sought to protect her niece from sharing Margaret’s fate, by whatever means were within her reach? (Figure 16) 

Conclusions If any figure from eleventh-century English history seemed fitted to become a hero of romance, it must be Edgar Ætheling. His is the story of a young prince, forcibly displaced from his paternal inheritance by foreign invasion, who goes adventuring in distant lands – the plot of so many narratives from Anglo-Norman romance. But unlike Hereward or Horn or other heroes of their kind, for Edgar there was no restoration of his inheritance, no happy return to the homeland; and since there was no restoration, there could be no romance. Edgar never found a sympathetic biographer to narrate how he adapted to Anglo-Norman society, and so he has gone down in history as if

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his whole life was defined by his early failure to organize successful resistance to Norman rule – a task which would have been very difficult for anyone, let alone a teenage boy whose disrupted family history had left him unusually friendless and ill-equipped to fight for his rights. In the last decades of the eleventh century, the English writers of the different versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle clearly retained a strong emotional investment in Edgar, continuing to speak of him admiringly and referring to him as ‘the ætheling’ long after it must have become clear that he would never be king. But for twelfth-century historians his was an uncomfortable side-story, a footnote in the larger narrative of the formation of Anglo-Norman England. Discomfort with his story is suggested both by the Anglo-Norman historians’ unwillingness to write about him in detail and by such sharp judgements on him as the comments of William of Malmesbury. By contrast, Margaret’s life provided a more acceptable and popular way of thinking about how some form of Anglo-Saxon culture might be transmitted to the post-conquest world. Henry’s marriage to her daughter was partly intended to neutralize any remaining threat from the descendants of the West Saxon royal line; through her, subsequent rulers of England could claim descent from the Anglo-Saxon kings when it was useful to do so, as could Margaret’s descendants among the kings of Scotland. In later centuries Margaret’s life story was appropriated to serve such purposes, but her own strong identification with the English side of her ancestry, and the apparent success of her union with Malcolm, suggests she might not have objected to its being used in this way. However, the later picture of her marriage and her daughter’s as straightforward means through which Anglo-Norman unity could be furthered, and pre-conquest ancestry preserved through the female line, obscures how her contemporaries may have viewed the circumstances in which such marriages were formed. Christina’s violent objection to her niece’s proposed marriage is relayed to us at third-hand, and Christina is such a shadowy figure that we can only speculate about what she meant by it. But perhaps she, like the chronicler who compared Margaret at Malcolm’s court to a sparrow caught in a snare, was conscious that such apparent cultural harmony came at a price: it might be achieved at the cost of a woman’s freedom and her hopes about the course of her own life.

3 A lost generation

The grandchildren of Gytha and Godwine

Apart from Margaret and her siblings, there was one family affected more than any other by the tumultuous events of 1066: the children and grandchildren of Godwine, late earl of Wessex, and his wife Gytha, survivors of a family almost wiped out in one day at the Battle of Hastings. The rise and fall of this famous but short-lived dynasty was meteoric, spanning barely fifty years.1 The family had risen to prominence as a result of the first conquest England experienced in the eleventh century: the marriage between the English Godwine and the Danish noblewoman Gytha was a union formed in the early years of Cnut’s reign and exemplified the new Anglo-Scandinavian elite which took shape under Cnut. Gytha was a near family connection of the Danish king, and marriage to her marked an important step in the young Godwine’s swift rise to power; it bound him closely to Cnut, who appointed him to the large and powerful earldom of Wessex. In the 1020s, with the children of Edmund Ironside and other members of the royal family forced into exile, Anglo-Danish rule seemed firmly established in England. It was in this first post-conquest society that Godwine and Gytha prospered and their oldest children were born. As it turned out, the dynasty formed by their marriage outlasted Cnut’s own dynasty in England and continued to play an influential role – often a conflicted and controversial one – in the reign of Edward the Confessor.

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Godwine and Gytha had probably nine children in total, six sons and three daughters, of whom seven were still living at the beginning of 1066. By this time Godwine himself was dead, but Gytha was still a formidable presence, holding estates which made her one of the wealthiest women in England.2 At the start of that year, her surviving children dominated the highest positions in English politics: her daughter was Edward’s queen and three of her sons held earldoms. The day after Edward’s death on 5 January 1066, her son Harold was crowned king of England (Figure 17). By the end of the year, all this was gone. The most powerful family in England had become a scattered and endangered group of widows, fatherless boys and young women, who now had to consider what future might exist for them in a country under Norman rule. The eldest sons, Svein, Harold and Tostig, had all left children – none probably yet out of their teens – who responded to this new and perilous change in their fortunes in different ways. Some attempted to rebel against the conquest; others stayed in England and tried to survive in the post-

Figure 17  The coronation of Harold Godwineson on the Bayeux Tapestry. © Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

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conquest world; several of them made lives for themselves outside England, in Denmark, Norway and much further afield. The disparate fates of these children provide a way of exploring the choices faced by – or imposed upon – aristocratic women and men in the wake of the conquest, as well as the changing relationship between England, Scandinavia and other parts of Europe in the decades after 1066.

Stories told and untold There are some striking contrasts and parallels between this family and the children of Agatha and Edward the Exile, points of connection where across successive generations their stories meet, intersect and diverge. The Danish Conquest which provided the basis for Godwine’s rise to power forced Margaret’s father into exile; while one family was benefitting from their closeness to Cnut, the other had to escape beyond the Danish king’s reach to stay alive. The children of Godwine were not of royal blood, yet one of them rose to be king, while the descendants of Edmund Ironside – for all that their kingly lineage is emphasized by the sources which describe their fates – only attained royal status through marriage. In both cases, the person at the head of the dynasty by the end of 1066 was a woman, a widow whose own family origins lay far away from England; she now had to decide whether her interests and her children’s were best served by remaining in the conquered country or returning to the land of her birth. Many of the English-born children of the next generation of the Godwine family found themselves, in adulthood, making careers away from the British Isles, while Margaret and her siblings, born in Hungary, made the opposite journey. And so on. The links and contrasts between these stories, the alternating rise and fall of these powerful families, may tell us little in themselves except that eleventh-century England experienced a great deal of political and dynastic change. But comparisons between the way these parallel lives were perceived by contemporaries, and how they were treated by later writers, can tell us some interesting things. Unlike St Margaret, none of the grandchildren of Godwine and Gytha attracted the attention of a biographer or hagiographer. With this group

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of people, we have no single narrative to tell of their experiences after the conquest – only a range of brief and scattered references in different sources, from which we can piece together what happened to the remnants of this once mighty family. These help us to track what there is to know about their lives – little enough, in some cases – but we will also consider why their activities continued to be written about, or did not. For writers in the decades after the conquest, what purpose was served by recording the fates of Godwine and Gytha’s grandchildren? And perhaps as importantly, why was so little recorded of them at all – in England, at least? We will look at evidence from Scandinavia and elsewhere, but the English sources for their activities are very sparse indeed. It is a telling absence. This is especially surprising in light of the fact that post-conquest historians did continue to be interested in some members of the family – in Harold, of course, but also in Godwine. The details of Harold’s life and his brief reign continued to be subjects of discussion for a long time after 1066, since discrediting Harold became an important strategy in Norman efforts to establish the legitimacy of their rule.3 Though Godwine died more than ten years before the conquest, his rise under Cnut and the influential position he held under Edward the Confessor also made his activities a subject of considerable interest to later medieval historians seeking to understand the events of the first half of the eleventh century. It was not only his well-attested political dealings which attracted attention, however; there is also evidence of a wider fascination with Godwine. By the twelfth century, tales of a very colourful nature had collected around the earl – most of them more memorable than plausible – suggesting some kind of continuing oral tradition of storytelling and gossip centring on Godwine and his family. For instance, there is William of Malmesbury’s preposterous tale that Godwine had a Danish wife (apparently not Gytha), a cruel woman who traded English girls as slaves to Denmark and was killed by lightning in punishment for her wickedness.4 There are romantic accounts of Godwine’s heroics in the early days of Cnut’s reign, fighting for the king in battle against the Swedes and convincing Cnut to treat the English well.5 Of his later life, there are stories about his supposed involvement in the murder of Edward the Confessor’s brother Alfred in 1036: how he atoned for it by giving Edward a golden ship equipped with soldiers bearing weapons of gold6 or how his guilt

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was dramatically confirmed, years later, by the manner of his death. While at a feast with the king, protesting his innocence, it was said that he swore ‘May this piece of bread choke me if I am guilty!’ – but he was, and it did.7 The most elaborate version of these Godwine legends is told by Walter Map, writing in the 1180s.8 He tells of Godwine’s lowly birth as the son of a cowherd, explaining how he won favour with Æthelred when the king found himself by chance in his family’s humble cottage; of Godwine’s growing power over the king and his increasing greed; of his ill-treatment of a nunnery at Berkeley, encouraging his nephew to seduce the abbess and nuns in order to claim their property. One particularly good story tells how Godwine tricked the archbishop of Canterbury into giving him Bosham in Sussex (a place closely associated with Godwine’s family): he asked the archbishop, ‘Do you give me Bosham?’, got the surprised reply, ‘I give you Bosham?’, and seized on the question as a promise to grant him the town. Godwine’s unscrupulous cleverness is the point of these stories, presenting him as a kind of trickster figure who wins power and wealth through his quick thinking and willingness to exploit others. Finally, Walter Map tells of Godwine as a rebel in the early days of Cnut’s reign (Hereward-like, but very unlike Godwine’s real behaviour in this period), presenting him as a champion of the oppressed English against Danish tyranny. Cnut pretends to listen to Godwine’s pleas for the English but plots to kill him by sending him to Denmark, making Godwine the bearer of sealed letters which secretly order his death. On the voyage Godwine opens the letters, finds his death warrant and tampers with the letters so they instead arrange for him to govern Denmark and marry Cnut’s sister. Here Map’s account of Godwine breaks off abruptly; he may have had more stories to tell, but they are lost. Map has a talent for such tales, and most of them probably have no other origin than his own imagination; however, some of the stories he tells about Godwine are paralleled in other English and Scandinavian sources, suggesting they had a wider currency.9 Both the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus and the thirteenth-century Knýtlinga saga record tales analogous to Map’s stories about Godwine, but instead of Godwine’s encounters with Æthelred and Edward, they are interested in his relationships with Cnut and Gytha’s brother Ulf.10 Knýtlinga saga explains how the connection between Godwine and Ulf began, telling how they first met after the Battle of Sherston in 1016: Ulf,

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separated from the rest of the Danish army and in danger in enemy country, finds young Godwine tending a flock of sheep and the boy (as sharp as in Walter Map’s stories) comes to his aid. As a reward, Ulf introduces him to Cnut and arranges for Godwine to marry his sister Gytha. The story seems to be a legend to explain the genesis of that important marriage, an origin-myth for the dynasty which will be born of it: Knýtlinga saga says of Godwine and Gytha that ‘many great men from England, Denmark, Sweden and east from Russia are descended from them’. This was true, as we will see, and it made the circumstances of the marriage worthy of note for medieval Scandinavian historians. The parallels between this story and that told by Walter Map suggest they have a common origin, and both have folk-tale elements which suggest they could originally have been oral tales. Gytha’s family, too, had a legend associated with them in Scandinavian literature, telling of their descent from a bear; as we have already seen, this tale was known in England, part of what the author of the Gesta Herwardi calls ‘the stories of the Danes’.11 These legends obviously have little historical value, but they are nonetheless significant. They show that Godwine continued to be a figure of interest to medieval historians long after his death, not only in England or in the context of Anglo-Norman discussions of Harold’s legitimacy; Godwine’s role in Scandinavian affairs and the means by which this Anglo-Danish dynasty came into being were also matters of interest to historians in Scandinavia. The colourful nature of the stories being told about Godwine by the twelfth century has led some historians to speculate about the context in which such tales might first have circulated. It has been suggested, for instance, that Godwine was the subject of a saga-like oral narrative about his deeds, now lost, from which some or all of these later stories originate.12 Alternatively, Emma Mason proposed that Godwine, like his patron Cnut, might have ensured a reputation for himself by engaging in the Scandinavian tradition of praise-poetry: ‘when he became rich he ensured that he also became famous’, she suggests, by patronizing a skald.13 This can only be speculation, and the stories later told about Godwine (except perhaps those about his victories over the Swedes) are not really the kind of topics celebrated in Cnut’s praise-poetry. However, the wider point holds true: Godwine and Gytha must have been, at the very least, aware of the poems composed at Cnut’s court and probably formed part of

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the audience for them.14 They were well acquainted with the forms of literary commemoration which helped to ensure Cnut a high reputation in later medieval historical tradition, in both England and Scandinavia. But if anyone composed a poem for them, it is lost; if a saga ever circulated about them, only a few episodes survive. What is most striking about the plethora of stories about Godwine and his sons is the sharp contrast with the next generation of the family, about whom very little is recorded in English sources – certainly no stories of the length and complexity of those told about Godwine. As we have seen, a number of post-conquest historians took a sympathetic interest in what happened to the unfortunate children left fatherless and displaced by Cnut’s conquest – Edmund Ironside’s infant children or the young sons of Æthelred who fled to Normandy – and tell pathetic stories about their ill-treatment.15 But there is nothing equivalent for the grandchildren of Godwine and Gytha, who were in exactly the same situation after the Norman Conquest. One reason for this might be that to treat them as displaced royal children would mean acknowledging that Harold had been king – the very point Anglo-Norman historians were so concerned to dispute. But perhaps these children, like Edgar Ætheling, also became something of an uncomfortable subject, better avoided. After 1066, the future of this family did not lie in England, and they were soon forgotten there.

Between English and Danish kings To understand the fates of the family after 1066, it is important to consider something of the turbulent history of their fifty-year rise and fall. The children of Gytha and Godwine were all probably born between c. 1018 and c. 1042 – members of a generation of post-conquest children who grew up in an England ruled by a succession of Danish kings. On their mother’s side, they were close relatives of Cnut and his sons. Gytha’s father, Thorgils, may have been related to the Danish royal line, but the more immediate connection was through the marriage between her brother Ulf and Cnut’s sister, Estrith.16 When Godwine and Gytha married, England’s future seemed firmly linked with that of Denmark, and the names they gave to their children reflect this: Svein, Harold, Tostig

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and Gunnhild are all Scandinavian names, while two daughters, Edith and Ælfgifu, and the youngest sons, Gyrth, Leofwine and Wulfnoth, bore English names. These names function not only as markers of cultural identity but also, and perhaps more importantly, as statements of political allegiance: Svein and Harold bore the same names as Cnut’s first two sons, the names of the Danish king’s father and grandfather. This seems a clear indication of their parents’ wish to be associated with Cnut’s dynasty, through Gytha’s family connections, and it suggests that Gytha exerted a similar influence over the naming of her children as Margaret of Scotland did over hers, with their distinctively English names. The split between English and Danish names among the children of Godwine and Gytha has been seen as reflecting an awareness of shifting political circumstances. On his marriage to a Danish noblewoman, Godwine promptly abandoned the naming traditions of his own family for those of his wife and king, but the names of the younger children, probably born after Cnut’s death in 1035, seem to be a return to the English customs of his own family. However, at least some of these should probably be seen as AngloDanish rather than English alone. The family must have been bilingual: Queen Edith is said to have spoken Danish as though it was her mother tongue,17 and Godwine and Gytha must have spoken Danish at Cnut’s court. Later Gytha’s sons seem to have communicated easily with their family connections in Scandinavia, suggesting a ready familiarity with the language. In this light the names Gyrth and Edith (Old English Eadgyth), which echo their mother’s name, seem more truly Anglo-Danish than English. It is possible that Edith was in fact first named after her mother and added the first element Ead- when she became queen; Edith/Eadgyth was a traditional royal name, and it was not uncommon for royal women to adopt another name on marriage. The same is even true of the youngest son Wulfnoth, who was named after Godwine’s father, but whose name contains an element cognate with that of Gytha’s brother, Ulf (both mean ‘wolf ’). These names proclaim an Anglo-Danish dynasty culturally at home in both England and Denmark, and – as the eleventh century went on – with increasing ambitions to rule in both countries. By the time Gytha’s last children were born, the power of Cnut’s dynasty was waning in England; Cnut was dead, and in 1042 Edward the Confessor managed to regain the English throne. His relationship with Godwine and his

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sons was fractious and often openly hostile. As earl of Wessex, Godwine held one of the most important earldoms in England, and Edward, so long absent from England in Normandy, was dependent on him in a way the king seems to have come to resent.18 In the early years of his reign Edward consented to marry Godwine’s daughter but struggled to establish his power over the earl and his family. This tension erupted into violence in 1051, when Godwine and his sons were forced into exile, but they soon pushed their way back into positions of influence. It was after this that Edward, anxious about his lack of an heir, sought out the children of Edmund Ironside in Hungary, perhaps in part as a way of trying to reduce his reliance on Godwine’s family. Of all the grandchildren of Godwine and Gytha, the most important is the one who was never born: if Edward and Edith had had a child, much might have been different for the Godwine family and for England. Godwine died in 1053, a few months after Svein, his eldest son. Svein’s career had been brief and inglorious: he had offended the king by abducting Eadgifu, abbess of Leominster, to gain control of her abbey’s estates, antagonized his Danish relatives by murdering his cousin, Beorn Estrithson, and (if a later source is to be believed) outraged his mother by claiming that Cnut, rather than Godwine, was his real father.19 Twice outlawed from England, Svein died in Constantinople while on his way home from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to atone for his sins.20 Though Godwine and Svein were gone, however, in the last years of Edward’s reign the remaining sons advanced to positions of power which gave them sway over huge regions of England: Harold, Tostig, Gyrth and Leofwine held earldoms in Wessex, Northumbria, East Anglia and the East Midlands. Harold, the eldest of the surviving brothers, was the dominant earl in the kingdom, winning success by his battles against the Welsh and gaining ascendancy over the ailing Edward. In 1065, his position was further strengthened after a rebellion in Northumbria forced Tostig into exile; Harold sided with the rebels against his brother, and a few months later Edward’s death left him able to take the throne. Tostig took his revenge by returning to England in the autumn of 1066, with the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada and an army to challenge his brother. Harold faced them in battle at Stamford Bridge on 25 September, and both Tostig and Harald Hardrada were killed. Harold was victorious, but he met his own death at Hastings a few weeks later.

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Though Harold and his brothers have gone down in history as ‘the Godwinesons’, their mother Gytha and her connections also exerted an important influence over their lives. Like her sons, Gytha had considerable landholdings in England by the end of Edward’s reign, especially in the southwest of the country. She also still had close ties to the Danish royal dynasty, which might have been part of the reason Edward distrusted her family. Her brother Ulf had died in 1026, but he and Estrith had three sons, Svein, Beorn and Osbeorn, and after the mid-1040s, with Cnut and his sons dead, Estrith and her sons were the chief representatives of the dynasty. In the 1040s Beorn and Osbeorn had held earldoms in England, but Osbeorn returned to Denmark on the accession of Edward and in 1049 Beorn was murdered by his cousin Svein Godwineson.21 By this time, Svein Estrithson had become king of Denmark. He and his surviving brother knew England well, and long retained an interest in the possibility of ruling, as their uncle had done, in Norway and England as well as in Denmark. Svein did not challenge his cousin Harold when he became king in 1066, but he, his sons and Osbeorn all became involved in the rebellions against the Normans in 1069–71 and 1075. They supported the English rebels but probably had their own designs on the throne. Gytha seems to have remained as interested in Scandinavian politics as her nephews were in English affairs. This is strikingly illustrated by her patronage of the cult of St Olaf, king of Norway. Olaf, who was killed in battle in 1030, had been Cnut’s rival for control of Norway, and after his death Cnut – while seizing command of his kingdom – began to promote Olaf ’s cult as a means of stabilizing his own power in Norway.22 Cnut’s Scandinavian followers imitated him, and in the mid-eleventh century a number of churches were dedicated to St Olaf in England through the patronage of members of the AngloDanish elite. Several of these churches are in areas closely linked to Gytha and Godwine, in Exeter, Southwark and Chichester, a few miles from Bosham (Figure 18). In Exeter, there is also evidence of liturgical veneration of Olaf from this period, and it is likely that this reflects the influence of Gytha and those around her.23 This interest in Olaf once again signals not only an ongoing cultural affiliation with Scandinavia but a specific political stance: attachment to the dynasty of Cnut – now, of course, the dynasty of Gytha’s nephew Svein – and its claims over Norway. While Godwine and his sons were struggling for

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Figure 18  A church dedicated to St Olaf in Chichester, probably reflecting the influence of the Godwine family. © Author’s own.

dominance with Edward, Gytha clearly kept one eye on Scandinavia and the interests and ambitions of her family there. By 1066, Gytha had grandchildren by her three eldest sons. Svein had left two sons, perhaps the product of his illicit relationship with the abbess of Leominster; Tostig seems also to have had at least two sons, possibly more;

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Harold had children by both his long-term consort, Edith ‘Swan-neck’, and the woman he married around the time he became king, Ealdgyth, sister of Edwin and Morcar. As we will see, the evidence for all these children is scanty and sometimes of dubious accuracy. There may have been more children who are not recorded or who did not survive to adulthood; the story of one unnamed child of Harold, who died in around 1066, belongs in our final chapter. Of those who are recorded, however, it is notable that Scandinavian names once again predominate in this generation of the family. Svein’s sons were called Hakon and Tostig; Tostig’s sons were Skuli and Ketill; Harold’s children were Gunnhild, Gytha, Godwine, Edmund, Magnus, Ulf and Harold. All these, except Godwine and Edmund, are Scandinavian names. Some were of course by now family names, but there are once again marked connections to Cnut’s dynasty (Gunnhild was an important name in that family)24 and to St Olaf. The choice of Magnus is particularly striking. This was the name of St Olaf ’s son, who in the 1040s had fought against Svein Estrithson for control of Denmark, and so this too had specific political associations: Magnus died in 1047, leaving Denmark to Svein, so for Svein’s relatives the use of his name may have represented a similar kind of politic adoption of a fallen rival as Cnut’s support for the cult of Olaf. The use of the name would have been very marked: it was new to Norway when it was given to Olaf ’s son, unusual enough for there to be a story explaining why it was chosen.25 It continued to be used in Olaf ’s dynasty in Norway; Harald Hardrada, Olaf ’s half-brother, named his two sons Magnus and Olaf, and they ruled together as kings of Norway after their father’s death in 1066. This means that Harold Godwineson and his opponent at Stamford Bridge may have had more than their own name in common, if their sons were named after the same Norwegian king. The children of Svein, Harold and Tostig were all probably born between c. 1047 and 1066, and their names suggest that Gytha’s influence continued to dominate in the family at this time. Godwine was remembered, however, in the name of Harold’s eldest son, who was probably in his mid-teens at the time his father became king. This Godwine was old enough to hold two small manors in Somerset, recorded in Domesday Book, but perhaps too young to fight at Hastings; there is no suggestion that he was with his father at the battle. His brother Edmund, alone among the grandchildren, bore a

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name with strong English royal associations. He might have been named for St Edmund, the leading saint of East Anglia, a region with which his parents had close links, but also perhaps for Edmund Ironside, who must have been much on everyone’s mind around the time Edmund Haroldsson was born in the mid-1050s, when King Edward was arranging to bring his brother’s children home to England. In Edmund, Magnus and Gunnhild, Harold – who perhaps already had ambitions to be king – had chosen distinctly royal names for his children. It seems clear that Gytha’s grandchildren, like her own children, were born into an Anglo-Scandinavian milieu, and some of them (especially Svein’s fatherless children) might well have been brought up by their grandmother. If the children were indeed raised in such an environment, it was better preparation than anyone could have imagined for the lives they were to live. Throughout this family’s story, Gytha’s Scandinavian connections played a significant role in their identity, and they were to be crucial in shaping its fortunes in the years after 1066 (Figure 19).

Figure 19  Prayers to St Olaf in a manuscript from eleventh-century Exeter (British Library, Harley MS. 2961, f. 124). © The British Library (public domain).

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Exeter and exile By the end of 1066, there were only three of Gytha and Godwine’s nine children still living: two daughters, Queen Edith and Gunnhild, and the youngest son Wulfnoth.26 Gytha lost four of her six sons within three weeks: Tostig at Stamford Bridge, then Harold, Gyrth and Leofwine at Hastings. Probably in her late sixties, a widow for more than ten years and grandmother to several fatherless children, Gytha might easily have chosen to remain in England, where she had extensive possessions and would probably have been allowed to live in peace. Instead, she took a much bolder course. Her first action after the defeat at Hastings seems to have been, if Norman sources are to be believed, to petition William to allow her to take Harold’s body (and presumably those of her other sons) for burial. Supposedly she offered the king the body’s weight in gold, though the sources disagree on his response: some say he refused her request, others that he granted her the body without accepting payment.27 The early sources’ suggestion that Gytha took an active role in dealing with the aftermath of the battle seems very plausible. Her courageous request and her munificent offer to William are reminders of the wealth she was able to draw on; she was a woman of resources, not only in a financial sense. She did not have many male relatives to turn to. Her last surviving son Wulfnoth was a hostage, whom she had probably not seen for fifteen years. After their exile in 1051–2, as part of their reconciliation with Edward, Godwine’s family had given the king two young hostages as security, Wulfnoth and Svein’s son, Hakon. Wulfnoth and Hakon were sent by Edward to Normandy, where they were entrusted to William’s keeping. Wulfnoth was perhaps fifteen years old, Hakon probably younger. When Harold embarked on his fateful expedition to Normandy in 1064 or 1065, during which he supposedly swore to support William’s claim to the throne, one source says his purpose was to reclaim his brother and nephew.28 He brought Hakon home with him, but the boy is never heard of again, and we do not know what happened to him. Wulfnoth did not return with Harold, but remained in captivity for the rest of his life, first in Normandy and later in England. In 1087, when William Rufus succeeded his father as king, he brought Wulfnoth with him to England, but still kept him in captivity, at different times in Winchester or Salisbury.29 The

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fact he was kept prisoner so long suggests that William and his son continued to see Wulfnoth as a potential threat, perhaps a rallying point for rebels who might have been attracted to the cause of Harold’s last surviving brother. He died around 1094, after spending his entire adult life in captivity. The prior of Winchester wrote an epitaph in his memory, praising his virtues and observing that though ‘exile, prison, darkness, inclosure, chains’ had been his fate from childhood, he had endured them with virtuous fortitude: ‘caught up in human bonds he bore them patiently, bound even more closely in service to God’.30 Meanwhile his sister Edith, the widowed queen, had retired to Wilton Abbey.31 In the immediate aftermath of the conquest she commissioned an account of her husband’s life, the Vita Ædwardi Regis, an anonymous text probably completed around 1067–8. Though nominally about King Edward and his saintly qualities, it also has much to say about Edith’s father and brothers – or at least, those of her brothers she chose to remember.32 The author commissioned by Edith, presumably taking his directions from the queen, is highly selective in his treatment of his patron’s family. Her eldest brother Svein, long dead, and even in his lifetime the black sheep of the family, is not mentioned at all. Godwine is praised at length and his story expansively told, but Gytha is mentioned only briefly and not even named – despite the fact that she, unlike Godwine, was still alive when the text was written. This may suggest that Edith had chosen to identify herself more strongly with her father than with her mother’s side of her family, perhaps a wise tactical choice both during her time as Edward’s queen and in the immediate post-conquest years. As Edward’s widow, she would merit respectful treatment from the new regime. Significantly, there is hardly any reference in the Vita Ædwardi Regis to the next generation of the family; apart from one very brief mention of Tostig’s children, it would be impossible to know from this text that Edith’s brothers had left surviving offspring. Though Edith’s text chooses to memorialize her father and brothers as well as her husband, it looks to the future only through the saintly legacy of Edward, not the living descendants of her family. Perhaps she did not think her family had a future at all. Gytha clearly disagreed. Though all her sons were now dead or in captivity, she seems to have been determined not to passively accept her family’s decline. After burying her sons, she returned to one of her residences in the

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south-west of England, at Exeter.33 William spent most of 1067 in Normandy, returning in December of that year, and in the spring of 1068 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records: In this year the king set a great tax on the wretched people, but nonetheless always allowed [his men] to raid everywhere they went. And then he travelled to Devon and besieged Exeter for 18 days, and much of his army was destroyed. But he promised them well and acted badly, and they gave up the city to him, because the thegns had betrayed them.34 There had been sporadic outbreaks of violence in the north and west of England in 1067, but this appears to have been the first attempt at organized resistance to the conquest.35 Gytha and her family seem to have been the movers in this effort. As David Bates suggests, the city’s refusal to submit to William ‘could indicate that Gytha and others were trying to co-ordinate a fightback in the West Country while awaiting the arrival of reinforcements from Ireland recruited by some of Harold’s sons. . . . [T]he revolt is at least indicative of organized discontent sufficient to create a regional power base from which those who wanted to remove William could operate’.36 The king’s decision to come himself to Exeter suggests he saw this as a serious threat, and the city had already shown defiance to William by mistreating some of his men during his absence in Normandy. He took harsh measures to subdue the rebels, forcing Exeter into submission by besieging the city and ravaging the surrounding countryside. This account of the siege of Exeter appears in the D version of the AngloSaxon Chronicle, which follows its narrative of the fall of the city with the flight of Edgar and his mother and sisters to Scotland, and then the extended account of Margaret’s marriage which we looked at in the last chapter (Figure 20). It is notable that immediately after describing Margaret’s fate and the lineage of her ‘faithful and noble kindred’, the next sentence of the entry turns straightaway to the subject of other women displaced by the conquest: ‘And here Gytha, Harold’s mother, travelled out to Flat Holm, and the wives of many good men with her, and stayed there for a time, and from there went across the sea to St Omer.’37 The next event the Chronicle records is the coronation of William’s wife Matilda as queen. It seems likely that the chronicler saw a painful contrast

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Figure 20  The siege of Exeter in one version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (British Library, Cotton MS. Tiberius B IV, f. 81). © The British Library (public domain).

between the newly crowned Norman queen of England and the plight of Agatha and Gytha and their children, and of the other unnamed ‘good men’s wives’ mentioned here: all women left at the head of families shattered by the conquest, faced with protecting themselves and their children in a rapidly changing situation of political turmoil. Agatha and Gytha, both born outside England, had made the country their home – Agatha for a decade, Gytha for more than forty years – but in 1068 both now left England, probably never to return. Flat Holm is a small island in the Bristol Channel, between Wales and England. Just half a mile wide, it is not much more than an outcrop of rock, used as a temporary base at different times by hermits and Vikings, and it can only have offered a brief refuge for Gytha and the women who accompanied her. It was a bold decision for these women to undertake such a journey, but Gytha had places to turn for support, including allies in Ireland, Flanders and Scandinavia who had previously aided her family. When she left England she was accompanied by a group of sympathizers; the name of one, a priest called Blæcmann, is recorded.38 Her daughter Gunnhild and one of Harold’s

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daughters, also named Gytha, were with her, but her other daughter Edith and another granddaughter, Gunnhild, remained in England, and Gytha probably never saw them again.

New lives abroad Towards the end of 1068, while William was dealing with threats of an uprising in Northumbria, some of Harold’s sons ‘came by surprise from Ireland’ with an army and sailed into the Bristol Channel.39 They had gone to Ireland to seek support from Diarmait, king of Leinster, who had aided Harold in 1051–2 when he and his family went into exile, and now provided support to his sons. Diarmait’s aid was perhaps purchased with some precious gifts, remnants of the family’s wealth: in 1068 he is recorded as owning an Anglo-Saxon royal battle-standard which Harold’s sons may have given him.40 The tactics Harold’s sons now used – raiding and seeking to attract supporters by a show of military power – were very like those by which their father and his brothers had managed to force their way back into England in 1052, but this time they did not succeed. They attacked Bristol but were fought off by the people of the town, then sailed down the coast of Somerset, perhaps hoping to find allies in places where Godwine had formerly held lands. The local levies met them in battle and many were killed on both sides, so the fleet returned to Ireland with their plunder. Harold’s sons made another attempt in the summer of 1069, this time landing in Devon with a fleet of sixty-four ships, but once again they were forcibly repelled. The sons of Harold who led this expedition are not named in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but John of Worcester says they were Godwine, Edmund and Magnus.41 Another twelfth-century source, Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, does not mention Magnus but says that Harold’s sons were accompanied by a Tostig Reinald, ‘son of Svein’.42 ‘Reinald’ may be an Anglo-Norman author’s attempt to render the Scandinavian name Hrani or Ranig. This Tostig is otherwise unrecorded, but he is usually assumed to be a son of Svein Godwineson. If young Godwine hoped to seize the throne his father had held, there is no evidence that anyone in England backed his claim. At the end of 1066 the

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English leaders unwilling to accept William had turned to Edgar Ætheling, not the sons of Harold, and they do not seem to have found much support on their forays to England. Making their base in Ireland and attacking Bristol, Devon and Cornwall suggests they had been in communication with Gytha while she was in Exeter or Flat Holm, but they had not managed to combine their forces with any success. In 1068 or 1069 Gytha and her companions travelled from Flat Holm to Flanders, where her grandsons, after these two failed expeditions, may now have joined her. Flanders too had been a place of refuge for the Godwine family in 1051–2, and at that time Tostig Godwineson had married Judith, sister of the count of Flanders. He and Judith had sought refuge there when he fled England in 1065, and Judith, possibly with their young children, had probably remained in Flanders during Tostig’s disastrous return to England in 1066.43 If Gytha now saw her daughter-in-law again for the first time since Tostig was killed fighting against his brother, it could not have been an easy family reunion. Despite these connections in Flanders, however, the natural destination for Gytha was her nephew’s court in Denmark, and this was where she and her family now went. The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus records that Svein received two sons of Harold and their sister at his court.44 It is possible that Svein’s decision to support the English rebels at York and Ely in 1069–71 was connected to their arrival in Denmark. However, there is no record of Harold’s sons taking part in these rebellions; no involvement from Harold’s children is mentioned by either English or Scandinavian sources, and at this point we lose sight of these sons altogether. Godwine and Edmund presumably remained in Denmark, and if Tostig Reinald was their cousin he may have been there too. It is possible that Magnus returned to England: there is a medieval monument in a church at Lewes in Sussex which commemorates a man named Magnus, ‘of Denmark’s royal race’, who became an anchorite there. The inscription is undated, but it has been suggested that this was Harold’s son.45 The elder Gytha too must have remained in Denmark, but the date of her death is not known. The fate of her daughter, Gunnhild, is recorded by a memorial inscription, discovered in the cathedral church at Bruges in 1786. This says that Gunnhild, after living for a while at St Omer, went to Bruges and on to Denmark but returned to Bruges, where she became a nun and died in

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1087.46 With her death, the last remaining child of Godwine and Gytha was Wulfnoth, still a prisoner in Normandy. In 1087, when William the Conqueror died, his prisoners fell into the power of his sons. William Rufus took Wulfnoth back to England, but another prisoner from the Godwine family is now mentioned for the first time: Ulf, another son of Harold.47 We do not know when or how he had come into William’s power, but he was more fortunate than his uncle. He passed into the hands of Robert Curthose, who released him, along with Duncan, a son of Malcolm of Scotland by his first wife. Robert knighted Ulf and Duncan before letting them go, but Ulf ’s subsequent fate is unknown. Perhaps he accompanied Duncan to Scotland and became involved, like Edgar Ætheling, in the struggles between Malcolm’s sons for the Scottish throne; perhaps he remained in Normandy. No one troubled to record his fate. Back in Scandinavia, however, some of the descendants of the Godwine family were thriving. As well as Saxo Grammaticus, other Scandinavian sources record their lives and the new connections they made in Denmark, Norway and further afield. These sources include Old Norse histories of the kings of Norway, all written in the first half of the thirteenth century: the anonymous Morkinskinna (c. 1220), Fagrskinna (c. 1220–30) and Heimskringla, by the Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson.48 Though they have nothing to add about the fate of Harold’s sons, they provide information about Harold’s daughter, Gytha, and the sons of his brother Tostig. Gytha made an important marriage. As a relative of King Svein and the daughter of a king, she was a useful diplomatic asset, and Svein arranged a marriage for her with Vladimir II, future Grand Prince of Kiev. The marriage took place around 1075, and the following year Gytha gave birth to a son in Novgorod. Her son was known as Mstislav or Harold, the use of her father’s name indicating that she and her husband chose to perpetuate the memory of Gytha’s ancestry. Gytha lived on in Russia for another thirty years, having more children and dying in 1107.49 It may be that her brothers, who seem to have quickly given up any idea of returning to England, decided to go with her to Russia and made new lives for themselves there. Through her eldest son Gytha had many descendants, some of whom married back into the royal families of Norway and Denmark over the course of the twelfth century. As a result, Fagrskinna and Heimskringla both record Gytha’s marriage and give detailed genealogies of her

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descendants, indicating that at this time in the thirteenth century descent from Gytha – and ultimately from Harold Godwineson – was still worthy of record.50 Via these and other descendants Gytha became the ancestor of many kings and queens across Europe, including English monarchs from Edward III onwards. She was the only one of the grandchildren of Godwine to retain royal status, and her legacy was the most enduring of any of her generation of the family. The fates of Tostig Godwineson’s children are also well recorded in Scandinavian sources. Tostig, unlike his brothers, involved himself directly in Norwegian politics, and as a result these Old Norse histories feature him prominently in their detailed narratives of Stamford Bridge and its aftermath. For most of this they are using Scandinavian sources, but it is likely that they also draw on some sources from England;51 as we will see in the next chapter, they had access to important forms of information not available to English historians, such as Old Norse poems celebrating English rebellion against the Normans. These histories reveal that Tostig had at least one and possibly two sons, Skuli and Ketill, who do not appear in English historical records. It is not clear who was the mother of these boys. They do not seem to have been the children of Tostig’s wife Judith and were perhaps the product of another, unrecorded relationship in England. The only children of Judith and Tostig attested in English sources were still ‘nursing infants’ in 1065.52 However, Skuli and Ketill seem to have been old enough in 1066 to play a part in the Norwegian invasion incited by their father, and so were presumably in their teens, of a similar age to Harold’s sons. It is also suggestive that their lives seem to have entirely diverged from Judith’s after Tostig’s death; Judith remarried and had a number of children by her second husband, and amid the evidence for her later life there is nothing to suggest she had surviving children by Tostig. The ‘nursing infants’ may not have lived to adulthood.53 The future of Skuli and Ketill, however, lay in Norway. The Old Norse histories suggest that Skuli, ‘son of Earl Tostig’, was with the Norwegian army which invaded England in 1066. He did not fight at Stamford Bridge but remained with the ships while the battle was going on, together with Harald Hardrada’s son Olaf. After both their fathers were killed in the battle, the young men were allowed to sail back to Norway. Olaf succeeded his father as king, reigning until 1093 (at first as joint-king with his brother Magnus), and Skuli

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stayed with him, becoming his intimate friend and counsellor. Fagrskinna says that Skuli was known as ‘konungsfóstri’, ‘king’s foster-kin’, suggesting a very close relationship with Olaf. The idea behind the name may be that the king’s dependence on Skuli’s advice made him look on Skuli as a kind of foster-father, though they must have been roughly the same age, or it may have been the other way around: Olaf seems to have in a sense adopted the orphaned English boy whose father had shared the same fate as his own. With Olaf ’s support, Skuli flourished in Norway. He is highly praised in Fagrskinna, which says ‘Skuli konungsfóstri was the wisest and most eloquent of men. He presented all the king’s business at assemblies and meetings, because King Olaf was not an articulate man, and he was not as shrewd as his father had been, and so in many situations he submitted to the decisions of Skuli konungsfóstri’.54 Olaf was generous to Skuli, giving him his choice of lands in Norway, and Skuli showed his practical wisdom in choosing land near the towns where the king was accustomed to stay, ‘so that whatever town the king was in Skuli had almost the best lands and ample rents for all the business and expenses in the towns’. Olaf also arranged for Skuli to marry his cousin. Fagrskinna lists the genealogy of their descendants over several generations and their connections to leading families in Norway; among their descendants was Ingi II, king of Norway from 1204 to 1217.55 The narrative in Morkinskinna adds some further details, including the suggestion that Skuli briefly returned to England to arrange for Harald Hardrada’s body to be brought to Norway for burial.56 It also mentions a man named Ketill krókr (‘hook’) who came to Norway with Olaf, and had a marriage and lands provided for him by the king; it is said that ‘many distinguished men are descended from Ketill’, though his descendants are not specified. It is not made explicit in Morkinskinna that Skuli and Ketill are related; in fact, Ketill is said to be from Hálogaland in northern Norway, which would seem to indicate they were not. Snorri Sturluson, however, making use of both these histories in his Heimskringla, took the two men to be brothers and says they belonged to ‘a noble family in England’.57 He does not, however, name their father and does not seem to have had any additional information about them. Modern historians have often followed Snorri’s assertion that they were brothers, though this may have been nothing more than his own deduction.

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While all three texts agree, then, that Skuli was the son of Tostig Godwineson, the evidence that Ketill was another son of his is less clear. By the last decade of the eleventh century another grandson of Godwine had also made his way to Norway. Olaf ’s son Magnus (known as ‘Barefoot’) succeeded him as king of Norway in 1093. In 1098, Magnus sailed on an expedition around the Orkneys, Hebrides and the Irish Sea, ending up in Anglesey, where he fought an Anglo-Norman army and killed the earl of Shrewsbury. According to William of Malmesbury, he was accompanied on this expedition by Harold, son of Harold Godwineson, whom Magnus had welcomed to Norway because of Harold Godwineson’s kindness to Harald Hardrada’s sons after Stamford Bridge.58 This expedition is also recorded in Norse sources, but Harold Haroldson’s role is not.59 It has been suggested that this Harold was a son of Ealdgyth, whom Harold Godwineson married around the time he became king. If so, he may have been born after his father’s death, when Ealdgyth was taken to Chester under the protection of her brothers Edwin and Morcar.60 There is nothing to tell how he made his way to Norway or if he had any contact with his brothers or cousins there. This very short reference to Harold, like the other brief mentions of the sons of Harold Godwineson in English sources, contrasts with the much fuller details the Norse histories record about Skuli and Gytha. Their information fits within a wider context of an interest among Scandinavian historians in the family of Godwine and Gytha and the long-term consequences of 1066. This was a momentous year for Norway as well as for England, and in writing about it Norwegian and Icelandic historians were of course primarily concerned with the Scandinavian side of the story: Harald Hardrada and his brother Olaf, whose posthumous saintly presence overshadows these narratives of Stamford Bridge, were both major figures in Norwegian history, and the story of how Harald, the great adventurer and warrior, met his death on an English battlefield was a dramatic and important one to tell. But it was impossible to understand the history of the eleventh-century kings of Norway without considering their interactions with Denmark and, to a lesser degree, England, since much of the narrative of the Norwegian kings in these years is the story of their struggle for dominance against Cnut and his heirs. As a result, these texts also show an interest in exploring the consequences of 1066

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for the relationship between England and Scandinavia. They were aware that the Norman Conquest meant that England had become increasingly detached from the Scandinavian world, ever more oriented towards the continent and less available as a field for the ambitions of Norwegian and Danish kings. Of course it was necessary to consider where the family of Godwine and Gytha, closely related by blood and marriage to multiple kings of Denmark and/or England, fitted into this changing Anglo-Scandinavian world. Since many of the family ended up in Norway or Denmark, Scandinavian historians had more information available about what had happened to them than English historians did, but they also seem to have been much more interested in recording their fates. Fagrskinna is even interested in doing just what we are doing in this chapter, trying to work out what happened to the next generation of the family: the author comments that after Harold and his brothers fell ‘there was no more of Earl Godwine’s family left alive, as far as we can tell’, except for Skuli and Gytha. By contrast, there is no evidence that any English historian gave any particular thought to this question. They may not have known how many prominent men and women in Scandinavia claimed descent from Harold and Tostig or how that descent was remembered and valued. If they knew, it might not have seemed important; as England became ever more part of the Norman rather than the Scandinavian world, the connections which had allowed Gytha’s family to thrive were losing their value in England.

The dead king’s daughter: Gunnhild Finally, we will turn to the only one of this generation of the family who remained in England, who had a very different fate from her sister Gytha. Harold’s other daughter, Gunnhild, stayed behind after her family’s departure for the continent. She lived at Wilton Abbey, long associated with the aristocratic women of Wessex, which seems to have provided a refuge for Englishwomen left vulnerable by the dispossession of their families at the conquest. Unlike many English heads of religious houses, Wilton’s abbess Godgifu was not replaced, and the abbey seems to have been left relatively undisturbed. One of

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the women who found sanctuary at Wilton was Queen Edith, who lived there until her death in 1075, and Gunnhild was presumably left in her aunt’s care. One incident from Gunnhild’s life at this time is recorded in William of Malmesbury’s account of the life of St Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester. William’s Vita Wulfstani is based on an Old English source, now lost, by a monk of Worcester named Coleman; this was written after the bishop’s death in 1095, and William’s Vita was composed between c. 1126 and c. 1142.61 Since Coleman’s text does not survive, it is not possible to know precisely how much of the Vita derives from his work and how much is William’s adaptation. Wulfstan was the only English-born bishop to long retain his position after the conquest, and the stories told by his hagiographers lay heavy emphasis on his English identity. As its editors note, the Vita ‘presents its hero as the confident and unapologetic representative of the pre-conquest Church and its values in the face of Norman superiority’, emphasizing Wulfstan’s holy simplicity by contrast to Norman worldliness and his respect for his Anglo-Saxon predecessors at Worcester.62 This view of Wulfstan accords with Eadmer’s description of him in the Historia Novorum as ‘the one sole survivor of the old fathers of the English people’, ‘unrivalled in his knowledge of the ancient customs of England’; Eadmer presents him as the representative of a whole pre-conquest world, whom Anselm chose to consult in order to learn about the customs of the English church.63 William of Malmesbury knew Eadmer’s view, and this emphasis on Wulfstan’s Englishness was probably already present in Coleman’s lost Life. Coleman’s decision to write his Life in English, at a time when Latin was increasingly the usual choice for hagiographical texts intended for a mixed audience of English and French speakers, suggests something about his own cultural affiliations and the audience for whom he was writing. Within this context, William tells a story about Wulfstan and Gunnhild which similarly emphasizes the saint’s importance as a bridge between the pre- and post-conquest worlds. It tells how on one occasion when Wulfstan was visiting Wilton he cured Gunnhild of a painful growth on her eyelids, because ‘he thought he owed a debt to her father’s memory, and he showed her the mercy appropriate to his virtues, moved as he was to the depth of his being by the woman’s wretched plight’.64 The close relationship between Wulfstan and Harold has been described earlier in the Vita: though William’s

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own attitude to Harold in this text is critical – he comments negatively on Harold’s ambitious desire for power and has the saint criticize him too – the affectionate personal relationship between Harold and Wulfstan comes across strongly and is allowed to endure.65 This affection is transferred to the next generation, and it is for Harold’s sake that Wulfstan is moved to cure Gunnhild. The result, however, is that this story tells us less about Gunnhild than it does about how Wulfstan’s hagiographers wished to present his relationship with the pre-conquest world. It shows Gunnhild being received by others primarily as her father’s daughter – an identity she cannot escape, for good or ill. The date of this incident is not clear, other than that it took place in the 1070s or 1080s. We next hear of Gunnhild in a very different context. At some time in or before 1093, she left Wilton to live with the Breton nobleman Alan Rufus, lord of Richmond in Yorkshire. She does not seem to have married him, but they may have had at least one child.66 Alan died in 1093 or 1094, but Gunnhild, instead of returning to Wilton, became the partner of his brother (also named Alan). The date and circumstances of her departure from Wilton are unclear, and the evidence has been interpreted in different ways.67 Alan was in possession of lands that had formerly belonged to Gunnhild’s wealthy mother, Harold’s consort Edith ‘Swan-neck’; it might have helped legitimize his position to ally himself with Gunnhild (though he did not confirm it by marrying her). It has been suggested that Gunnhild left Wilton in 1093, the same year that Malcolm of Scotland may have been considering a marriage for his daughter Edith with Alan or William Rufus; one possibility is that Alan, once the plan for him to marry Edith collapsed, turned instead to another survivor of a pre-conquest family. However, we cannot be sure that Gunnhild had not left Wilton earlier than this and lived with Alan for a while before his death. The real questions we cannot answer are whether she chose to go and how free her choice was.68 Gunnhild’s story has sometimes been presented in rather romantic terms, as if she ran away with Alan to escape the monotony of the cloister, and it is possible the change might have brought her advantages; rather than living quietly at Wilton for the rest of her life, she became the consort of one of the richest men in England. But it is also possible that Alan simply abducted her, seeking the benefits she could bring him as her mother’s daughter, and

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that she had no choice in the matter. The truth may lie somewhere between these two extremes. By 1093 Gunnhild had no known living family in England except her uncle Wulfnoth, a prisoner. She was probably in her thirties and had been at Wilton since childhood. Her choices were very much constrained by circumstance: even if she did choose to leave with Alan, it might have been because it was her only choice. The most detailed contemporary evidence for Gunnhild’s actions survives in two letters from Anselm, at that time newly arrived archbishop of Canterbury. As we saw in the case of Edith/Matilda, the status of women who had lived in a nunnery but then left to marry caused some anxiety to churchmen. Anselm, believing Gunnhild had willingly abandoned her life in the nunnery, wrote two letters urging her to return to Wilton. They are strongly worded letters, and at one point he reminds Gunnhild of the impermanence of earthly prosperity by recalling her family history: Consider: what is the glory of the world, what is it that you love? You were the daughter of the king and queen. Where are they? They are worms and dust. Their high rank, their pleasures, their riches did not protect them, nor go with them.69 Anselm’s letter is designed to shock and disgust, with the aim of persuading Gunnhild back to the nunnery. He encourages Gunnhild to imagine her deceased lover Alan as a putrefying corpse and to picture herself lying down beside him in the grave, embracing and kissing his rotting body. By contrast to this, the reference to her parents is relatively mild. Anselm gives the impression that Gunnhild chose to elope with Alan, partly because of lust and partly because she was disappointed she had not been made abbess of Wilton. Although Anselm had met Gunnhild, however, he may not be a reliable guide to her motivations. The position in which Gunnhild found herself – the choices, or lack of choice, which faced her when Alan sought her out for the sake of her ancestry – was hardly one the archbishop could comprehend. It is not clear how much Anselm might have known about Gunnhild’s parents, but his reference to them as ‘king and queen’ is interesting. After the conquest many denied Harold this royal status, and it is unlikely her

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mother ever had it. Anselm must have relied on what he had been told about Gunnhild’s ancestry, and there may be a link with the attitude to Gunnhild found in the hagiography of St Wulfstan; as we will see in our final chapter, some of those at Canterbury who were closest to Anselm were profoundly interested in pre-conquest English history, and the monks of Canterbury and Worcester shared information on these topics.70 Whatever the source of Anselm’s information, his letters and the scandal caused by Gunnhild’s departure from Wilton indicate that Gunnhild’s lineage retained considerable potency in the decades after the conquest. As one of the last survivors in England of the mighty Godwine family, her social and economic capital made her attractive to Alan; to the English monks around Wulfstan and Anselm, however, that ancestry invested her with a kind of poignant symbolism. She embodied the transient nature of earthly power, a greatness that had passed away. And amid these men’s attempts to use her and interpret her, this woman’s real feelings remain unknown.

Conclusions The children of Gytha and Godwine were central to the dynastic crises which profoundly changed England in the eleventh century. Some of the most important figures in British history, they have been a subject of abiding fascination to historians medieval and modern. The almost complete disappearance of their grandchildren from English history after the conquest is, therefore, a remarkable absence. Those who left England for Scandinavia might have passed out of the reach of information, but it was no different with those who remained; Gunnhild and her fate attracted next to no interest from post-conquest historians, even as Harold Godwineson and his brothers continued to be extensively written about. Apart from a handful of very brief references in twelfth-century sources, no one tried to find out or to speculate about what might have happened to these children. Even if information about them was hard to come by, we might expect someone to have been interested in trying to imagine what might have happened to them – if absent from the historical record, they might nonetheless

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have become the subject of legend or romance. By the thirteenth century, there were stories circulating in both England and Scandinavia about Harold Godwineson’s survival after Hastings, which engage with the experience of conquest and loss in the context of this imagined survival.71 In different ways, these stories describe Harold coming to terms with Norman-ruled England, choosing not to fight for his kingdom, renouncing the world to live as a hermit and finally being given a royal burial by William the Conqueror himself. These stories exploit the rich narrative potential of the situation: they are interested in the figure of a king who has lost his kingdom, strength, status, even his proper name, and yet in that loss acquires a kind of spiritual power over his conquerors. Similar stories could have been told of Harold’s children – but they were not. This seems like more than simple lack of information. No one appears to have been interested in telling the stories of these survivors. In Scandinavia, where the ancestry and the descendants of Gytha and Skuli gave them a place in royal and dynastic history, they were important enough to be remembered. For historians in Anglo-Norman England, however, the question of what had happened to these children was an awkward subject. To consider their fates worthy of investigation might have seemed tantamount to recognizing Harold Godwineson’s legitimacy as king, impossible to reconcile with the dominant Norman narrative that Harold was a grasping usurper who unjustly seized the throne. To discredit the memory of his family with scurrilous stories about the long-dead Godwine was one thing, but to address the status and legacy of Harold’s sons and daughters was a more complicated issue. It was perhaps easier and more comfortable to forget the grandchildren of Godwine and Gytha, rather than to acknowledge everything they and their family had lost.

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4 Warrior, traitor and martyr Waltheof

The young men who took part in the rebellions after 1066 made common cause with each other for a brief time, but after this their fates diverged, and they were remembered in very different ways. We have looked at the fame won by Hereward, the harsh judgements some historians passed on Edgar Ætheling’s travails and the swift disappearance of Harold’s sons from the historical record; in this chapter, we will explore the memorialization of one of their contemporaries, whose contested reputation was sharply divided between praise and blame. In general, the Norman Conquest did not make martyrs. The years after 1066 were notably different in this respect from the period surrounding the Danish Conquest, as well as from earlier conflicts between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings: several high-profile casualties of those wars were either at the time or retrospectively believed to be martyrs, though such claims were not always without controversy.1 There are numerous reasons for this: the much longer duration of the Danish Conquest, different strategies for the treatment of conquered enemies, divergent contemporary interpretations of the role played by religion in these conflicts – all these factors had a part to play. But the fact remains that the Battle of Assandun produced a martyr; the Battle of Hastings did not.2

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There is one exception, however. In 1076 Waltheof, the young earl of Northumbria, was executed for his involvement in a rebellion against the king, after a decade in which he had first resisted, then profited from, the new Norman regime. Waltheof ’s death was the only recorded political execution of William’s reign, and it was controversial at the time and afterwards, in part because the earl was said to have repented of his crime.3 At the place of his burial, Crowland Abbey, he was venerated as a saint and martyr, but his cult never achieved widespread popularity. Both in life and in later literature, Waltheof was closely linked to a number of other characters in our story. The connection between his family and that of Margaret and Malcolm extended over several generations: his father took a leading part in English efforts to help Malcolm gain the Scottish throne, Waltheof fought alongside Edgar Ætheling in 1069, and years after his death, his daughter would marry Margaret and Malcolm’s youngest son. The centre of Waltheof ’s cult was in the same Fenland region where stories about Hereward were most popular, which seems unlikely to be a coincidence – but, as we will see, interest in the two anti-Norman rebels took very different forms. In Scandinavian historical tradition, by contrast, Waltheof was linked with the sons of Godwine, and his story was used to shed light on their lives and on the changing relationship between Anglo-Norman England and Scandinavia after 1066. The story of the Norman Conquest’s only martyr was claimed for many purposes, and the meaning of his death long remained a subject of debate.

Earl and rebel Waltheof was born around 1050, the younger son of Siward, earl of Northumbria, and his wife Ælfflæd.4 Siward was of Danish origin, a contemporary of Gytha and Godwine, and like them he rose to prominence during the reign of Cnut, though there is no evidence to suggest when he came to England or whether he took part in Cnut’s conquest. Like Gytha, he married into an English family: Ælfflæd was a member of the house of Bamburgh, the former line of Northumbrian earls whom Siward had replaced, and Waltheof was named after one of his mother’s famous ancestors.5 Siward first appears

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in English sources in 1033 as earl of southern Northumbria, and a few years later was given control of the remainder of this huge and important earldom, which stretched from the Humber to the borders of Scotland.6 From around 1051 he also held a smaller southern earldom, centred on Huntingdon and Northampton in the south-east Midlands, and it would be in this region, not in Northumbria, that his son Waltheof would be longest remembered. In his day Siward seems to have had a reputation as a tough and formidable warrior, known to his contemporaries by the Danish nickname digri, ‘strong, big’; stories are recorded about his uncompromising attitude to death, claiming that in his last illness he decided to meet his end like a soldier, dressed in full armour, rather than dying in bed ‘like a cow’.7 In 1054 Siward, acting on behalf of Edward the Confessor, led an army to Scotland to help Malcolm claim the throne (by which means he, and the medieval legends about him, came to feature in Shakespeare’s Macbeth).8 His elder son Osbeorn, his only recorded child other than Waltheof, was killed in this campaign. Siward died the following year and was buried at York, in a church which he had founded and dedicated to St Olaf of Norway, and after his death the earldom of Northumbria was given to Tostig Godwineson. It is not clear where Waltheof spent the next ten years of his life, but by the time of the conquest, when he was probably in his mid-teens, he had been given authority over his father’s southern earldom in the area around Northampton and Huntingdon.9 After Tostig was forced out of Northumbria by the rebellion of 1065, the Northumbrians asked the king to give the earldom to Morcar, brother of the Mercian earl Edwin and future brother-in-law of Harold Godwineson. The fact that they chose the well-connected Morcar over the son of their former earl might suggest Waltheof was considered too young and inexperienced to hold such a demanding position; Northumbria, geographically vast and politically turbulent, needed a strong ruler. There is no evidence that Waltheof fought at Hastings. At the end of 1066, however, he must have been among the English noblemen who swore allegiance to William; along with Edgar Ætheling, Edwin and Morcar, he was one of the group of high-ranking Englishmen whom William took with him to Normandy in 1067, suggesting that William saw Waltheof, young as he was, as a potential asset or threat.10

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In 1069, Waltheof participated in the northern uprising against William and fought in the army which captured York from the Normans. The E version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle couples the names of Waltheof and Edgar together as the leaders of that army, telling how they met the Danish fleet in the Humber, ‘travelled to York and went up and won the castles’, killing and capturing hundreds of men.11 When the Norman army recaptured York, while Edgar went back to Scotland and their allies headed for Ely, Waltheof instead made peace with the king. He was pardoned, and his pardon took substantial form: a marriage was arranged for him with the king’s own niece, Judith, and in 1072 he was given his father’s former earldom of Northumbria.12 During their brief marriage he and Judith had two daughters, Maud (or Matilda) and Alice. Waltheof ’s long-standing connections in Northumbria, on his mother’s as well as his father’s side, probably made him potentially useful in William’s eyes.13 But this peaceful arrangement was short-lived. Three years later, Waltheof became involved in a rebellion led by Roger, earl of Hereford, and Ralph de Gael, earl of East Anglia.14 The extent of Waltheof ’s complicity was later disputed, but the earliest narrative account, in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, has no doubt that Waltheof was present at the wedding-feast, celebrating the marriage between Ralph and Roger’s sister, where the revolt was planned and the earls ‘decided they wanted to drive their royal lord out of his kingdom’.15 Their aims and motivations remain obscure, and Waltheof, though apparently aware of the plot, seems to have taken the least active role of the three. After obtaining Breton and Danish support, Roger and Ralph tried to raise armies in their respective earldoms, but their efforts were swiftly suppressed and the rebels punished. The Chronicle quotes some rhyming lines which sound like an extract from a poem about the failed revolt: ‘sume hi wurdon geblende, 7 sume wrecen of lande, 7 sume getawod to scande. Þus wurdon þæs kyninges swican genyðerade’ (‘some were blinded and some driven from the land, and some put to shame; thus were traitors to the king brought low’).16 Such harsh punishment was effective; this proved to be the last serious revolt against Norman rule in England. The D version of the Chronicle says that Waltheof travelled to Normandy to confess to William and ask forgiveness, and that William made light of the offence until he returned to England but then had Waltheof captured. The

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Figure 21  St Giles’s Hill, Winchester. © Author’s own.

other two earls lost their English lands; Roger was imprisoned, and Ralph left England for Brittany. Waltheof too was imprisoned, kept at Winchester for months while judgement was postponed, and in the end he alone received a sentence of death. He was beheaded on St Giles’s Hill in Winchester on 31 May 1076 (Figure 21). His body was at first thrown into a ditch, but then claimed by Crowland Abbey, of which he had been a patron, and taken there for burial. Waltheof ’s death was controversial, and his posthumous reputation was politically charged and contested. While the monks of Crowland began to promote him as one of the saints of their abbey, his memory was also preserved through his descendants, particularly his elder daughter Maud.17 In Maud and her children, Waltheof ’s family retained a connection with the area in the East Midlands where Waltheof had been earl, and with it an interest in the story of his life and death. Around 1090, Maud married the Norman nobleman Simon de Senlis, who was granted the earldoms of Northampton and Huntingdon, probably through right of his wife. Maud and Simon gave one of their children the name Waltheof, suggesting that by the time of his

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birth Maud had no need or desire to suppress the memory of her father. After Simon’s death, Maud made a second marriage to David of Scotland, son of Margaret and Malcolm, in 1113. He too received the earldom of Huntingdon on his marriage and acquired significant landholdings in the East Midlands in regions formerly associated with Waltheof ’s family.18 This connection with the East Midlands persisted after David became king of Scotland in 1124, and both his descendants and those of Simon de Senlis continued to claim an interest in what came to be known as ‘the honour of Huntingdon’ through their descent from Maud.19 In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as we will see, interest in tracing the history of the honour of Huntingdon meant that Waltheof continued to be invoked as an important ancestor, and even at Crowland, the centre of his saintly cult, this played a significant role in how he was remembered.

Waltheof the warrior Chronologically, the first literary memorialization of Waltheof ’s life seems to have been an Old Norse poem composed in his honour by a skald named Thorkell Skallason. Two stanzas of this Valþjófsflokkr (Poem about Waltheof) survive.20 Though they are only preserved in later Old Norse histories, if these verses are what they purport to be – the remains of a poem written by someone who had known Waltheof personally – they were probably composed in England in or shortly after 1076. Thorkell speaks of Waltheof as ‘my lord’, suggesting that he was a member of Waltheof ’s retinue, but we have no other records of Thorkell’s career apart from these stanzas. We do not know where he was from – presumably Iceland or Norway – or when or how he might have entered Waltheof ’s service. Thorkell’s verses show no trace of any idea that Waltheof was a saint or a martyr. Instead, he celebrates his lord as a brave warrior and military leader, a fierce enemy of the Normans, and laments Waltheof ’s unfair treatment at William’s hands. The first stanza which has survived praises Waltheof ’s victory over a group of Normans, telling how Waltheof caused a hundred of William’s soldiers to be burned to death and left as carrion:

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Hundrað lét í heitum hirðmenn jöfurs brenna sóknar Yggr – en seggjum sviðukveld vas þat! – eldi. Frétts at fyrðar knöttu flagðviggs und kló liggja. Ímleitum fekksk áta óls blakk við hræ Frakka. [A hundred of the king’s soldiers were made to burn in hot flames by the Yggr [Odin] of battle [the warrior, i.e. Waltheof]. That was a roasting evening for men! It’s known that warriors lay under the claw of the ogress’ steed [the wolf]. The grey horse of the troll-woman [the wolf] was given food from the corpses of the Normans.] In the Old Norse histories in which this verse survives, it is said to refer to events in 1066, immediately after the Battle of Hastings. The authors of these histories, probably basing their deductions on the verse rather than independent information, claim that Waltheof fought at Hastings, escaped from the battlefield and encountered a group of Norman soldiers, whom he burned to death in a wood. However, it is more likely that this verse describes something that happened in 1069, perhaps during the capture of York.21 Thorkell takes grim pleasure in the violent deaths of the Normans, relishing the gruesome image of the battle as a sviðukveld, ‘roasting evening’; the implication is that the soldiers have been reduced to meat cooking over a fire, their roasted flesh turned into food for the wolf. In its tone of jubilation, the verse recalls the picture sketched by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of Waltheof and Edgar Ætheling approaching York with their allies, ‘greatly rejoicing’ as they destroyed the castle and killed ‘many hundreds of Frenchmen’.22 Thorkell expresses it with more vigour, but there is a similar sense of exultation at the defeat and humiliation of the Norman army. There may have been further verses of Valþjófsflokkr describing Waltheof ’s later activities, but the only other surviving stanza laments his death: Víst hefr Valþjóf hraustan Viljalmr, sás rauð malma,

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hinn es haf skar sunnan hélt, í tryggð of véltan. Satts at síð mun létta – snarr en minn vas harri, deyrat mildingr mærri – manndráp á Englandi. [Certainly the valiant Waltheof has been betrayed under a truce by William, he who bloodied weapons, who cut the icy sea from the south. It’s true, slaughter in England will be a long time ceasing; yet my lord was brave, and a more splendid generous leader will never die.] This stanza, with its prediction that conflict in England will continue, seems to speak from a moment in the immediate aftermath of Waltheof ’s death, rather than looking back from a later point in time. It is emphatic in its assertion that William betrayed Waltheof, rather than the other way around, and in its presentation of William as a violent conqueror, who reddens weapons with blood and carves through the sea with his ships. Once again, Thorkell seems to echo the sympathies of the D version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: the suggestion that William misled Waltheof might allude to the implication of the chronicler that William, taking Waltheof ’s confession ‘lightly’, at first seemed willing to treat Waltheof with mercy before unexpectedly changing his mind.23 In the months of Waltheof ’s imprisonment, between the failure of the revolt and the much-delayed sentence of execution, there must have been plenty of time to discuss what the king had done or might do to the earl, and Thorkell’s view of events is plausibly that of Waltheof ’s own followers in 1075–6. If Thorkell had been with Waltheof until his death, he may have chosen at this point to return to Scandinavia – a well-travelled route in the years after the conquest, as we have seen – which may explain how his verses came to be preserved in Old Norse sources. Waltheof is also briefly mentioned in another Old Norse poem, Haraldsstikki, an anonymous poem in praise of Harald Hardrada. Only one stanza of this poem survives, quoted in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla. This does refer to the events of 1066, specifically to Harald’s first battle in England at Fulford,

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near York, on 20 September. On this occasion the Norwegian army won a victory against an English force led by Edwin and Morcar. Haraldsstikki refers to the Norwegians’ opponents on this occasion as ‘Valþjófs liðar’, ‘the forces of Waltheof ’, and says that so many of them were killed that the Norwegians could cross the marsh by walking on their corpses alone.24 There is no English evidence that Waltheof took part in the battle at Fulford, though it is possible that he did, especially in light of his family connection with York.25 Alternatively, the use of the phrase ‘Valþjófs liðar’ may be intended as a designation for the English army generally, rather than implying that Waltheof actually led the army on this occasion; if so, it may be an indication of Waltheof ’s later fame that his name could be used in this way. Since the date of Haraldsstikki is unknown, it is difficult to tell whether it preserves information on Waltheof ’s actions in 1066 which was unknown to English historians or whether the reference to him here arises from the subsequent elaboration of his role in the Norman Conquest by Norwegian and Icelandic historians, which we will look at later. The content of these brief verses does not tell us very much, but their mere existence is highly significant. If Waltheof employed Thorkell Skallason as a skald, that suggests something interesting about this Anglo-Danish earl’s sense of identity and cultural affiliations. Skaldic verse of this kind belongs to a very specific strand of masculine, military, elite Scandinavian culture. Understanding the complex language, metre and mythological allusions in skaldic verse was difficult, even for contemporary speakers of Old Norse; to appreciate these poems requires more than a passing familiarity with the language, as well as a sophisticated understanding of the literary and cultural tradition of patronage and commemoration of which they form part.26 Though that tradition was more usually associated with Norwegians and Icelanders than Danes, it had been introduced to England by Cnut earlier in the eleventh century. Cnut established himself as a patron of skaldic poetry, and several Old Norse poems survive in his honour which may have been composed and performed at his English court.27 It would not be surprising if Siward, who had been part of that court, continued to value that tradition in his own household even long after Cnut’s death; well into the reign of Edward the Confessor, Siward seems to have been perceived by his contemporaries as retaining a markedly Scandinavian identity.28

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It is more surprising to find Waltheof, born and brought up in England and apparently very young when his father died, still choosing to participate in this Scandinavian cultural tradition. Presumably he inherited it from his father and the men who surrounded him; it is very possible he inherited the services of Thorkell Skallason from Siward too. Even after Siward’s death, Waltheof may have been brought up in an environment which was distinctly AngloScandinavian, speaking Old Norse and in contact with the Scandinavian world. If so, what might this mean for his political affiliations and his actions after the Norman Conquest? What role, for instance, did Waltheof play in arranging or encouraging the collaboration between the English rebels and the forces sent by the Danish king to York in 1069? Though they fought alongside Edgar Ætheling at York, Waltheof and his followers may have all along been more inclined to support Svein Estrithson, Cnut’s nephew, in his designs on the English throne. And what (as his later hagiographers wondered) was Waltheof ’s aim in joining the Revolt of the Earls in 1075? The earls sent to Denmark for help in their rebellion, and Svein sent a fleet of 200 ships to their aid, though they did not do much good.29 Was this too an attempt to draw England back into the Scandinavian political sphere, where it had belonged in the time of Cnut and his sons? Later sources from England do not generally pay much attention to these aspects of Waltheof ’s behaviour, and in their focus on distinguishing between ‘English’ and ‘Norman’ interpretations of Waltheof ’s life they sometimes elide the Scandinavian side of his identity. But it was clearly important to him and to some of those who mourned him in 1076. 

An English martyr As an unusual and high-profile execution, Waltheof ’s death must have had an immediate impact. It is possible that when the monks of Crowland sought permission to claim his body for burial, they already recognized the possibility that he might come to be seen as a martyr (Figure 22). However, it was only in the 1090s, fifteen years or so after his death, that his saintly cult began to emerge. In 1091 Crowland suffered a serious fire in which the church was

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Figure 22  Crowland Abbey, the place of Waltheof ’s burial. © Author’s own.

damaged, and the following year, during the process of rebuilding, Waltheof ’s tomb was opened. His body was found to be intact, with the severed head rejoined to the trunk, and miracles began to be reported at the tomb – the first tokens of sainthood. Over the next few decades, Crowland began to promote Waltheof as a martyr. Although his tomb was opened in 1092, it was still not until more than twenty years later, in the decade between c. 1114 and c. 1124, that texts were produced at the instigation of the monks in support of his claim to sanctity. Unlike Thorkell’s lament, therefore, the first written accounts of Waltheof from

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Crowland date from at least forty years after the earl’s death and look back on his rebellions from a period when Norman rule was firmly established in England. What they have to say about ‘Norman’ and ‘English’ attitudes to Waltheof must be interpreted with this in mind. The abbot of Crowland who had brought Waltheof ’s body to the abbey, Wulfketel, was deposed around 1085, and it was later suggested that this was because he was ‘an Englishman hated by the Normans’.30 The two abbots who oversaw the growth of Waltheof ’s cult were, however, not likely to be anti-Norman partisans. Abbot Ingulf, who presided over Waltheof ’s first translation in 1092, was an Englishman by birth but had entered monastic life in Normandy at St Wandrille, while his successor, who encouraged the flowering of Waltheof ’s cult in the 1110s, was Geoffrey of Orléans, formerly prior of St Évroul. It was Geoffrey, who became abbot of Crowland in 1109, who saw the advantages of providing a full textual record of Waltheof ’s story. He commissioned Orderic Vitalis, whom he knew from St Évroul, to write an account of Waltheof ’s life and death, as well as of the abbey’s early history and its other saint, Guthlac.31 Orderic stayed at Crowland while engaged in this work, drawing on written sources for the monastery’s history as well as the oral recollections of the monks. The resulting texts were incorporated into Orderic’s Ecclesiastical History but copies also remained at Crowland, where they formed the basis of later accounts of the earl’s life. These texts provide an insight into how the monks were choosing to present their patron in the second decade of the twelfth century and in particular how they saw fit to interpret the story of his controversial death. They also allow us to date the revival of interest in Waltheof ’s cult with some precision: though implying that miracles had first been noted at Waltheof ’s tomb at the time of his translation, Orderic says that many more began to occur in 1111–12, three years into Geoffrey’s rule.32 Orderic, presumably following what the monks had told him, provides an account of Waltheof ’s life which attempts to exonerate him from the charge of treachery to William. He describes Waltheof as ‘a handsome man of splendid physique, exceptional for his generosity and courage: a devoted Christian who showed humble obedience to all priests and monks and truly loved the Church and the poor’.33 Though he says little about Waltheof ’s early life, he

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does mention his involvement in the 1069 rebellion and the battle at York, and presents William as eager to make an alliance with Waltheof by arranging his marriage to Judith. When it comes to the Revolt of the Earls, Orderic emphasizes that Waltheof was at first reluctant to become involved, because he had sworn oaths to William which he did not wish to betray. He gives Waltheof a speech in which the earl strongly denies any intention to commit treachery: I am known all over the country, and it would cause great scandal if – which Heaven forbid – I were publicly proclaimed a sacrilegious traitor. No good song is ever sung of a traitor. All peoples brand apostates and traitors as wolves, and consider them worthy of hanging and – if they can – condemn them to the gallows with every kind of ignominy and insult.34 His only crime is to agree not to reveal the plot to William, for which he repents deeply. During his captivity he confesses his sins and does penance, chanting the Psalter daily. The general belief is that he will be released, and when his execution is finally ordered, it has to take place early in the morning because the executioners are afraid they will be stopped if the people of the town see what they are doing. As he prepares to die, Waltheof devoutly prays the Paternoster, but the executioner strikes before he can finish the prayer, and his severed head speaks to complete the last line, ‘deliver us from evil’. This emphasis on Waltheof ’s piety and penitence is coupled with a heavy stress on the idea that he was an innocent victim of Norman hostility. Orderic says that he was ‘sentenced to die by cruel Norman judgement’, executed because of ‘the malice of the Normans who were envious of him and feared him for his great integrity’.35 William’s decision to put Waltheof to death provokes the anger not only of his subjects but also of God, who punishes the king by a series of troubles and disturbances in the kingdom. This repeated emphasis on Norman antipathy to Waltheof is brought into the present day with a story of a monk named Ouen, who fiercely denied Waltheof could be a saint, because he was a traitor. Though Abbot Geoffrey gently tried to correct him, Orderic says, the monk died a few days later, a punishment from God for doubting Waltheof ’s holiness. Orderic’s account of Waltheof consistently frames interpretation of the saint’s actions along ethnic lines, emphasizing that Normans and English view him differently – and, of course, that the Normans are wrong.

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This idea that Waltheof ’s cult was a subject of dispute between English and Norman audiences is also asserted by William of Malmesbury. William too visited Crowland around this time and heard what the monks had to say about their saint. In his Gesta Regum, William describes Waltheof ’s heroics at the battle in York, telling how he ‘laid low many of the Normans single-handed, beheading them one by one as they issued from the gate; he had great strength of arm, powerful chest muscles, his whole frame tough and tall’.36 It is perhaps not surprising, then, that when it comes to the question of this warrior’s sanctity, William presents the Normans as reluctant to accept him as a martyr. The Normans considered Waltheof a traitor, William says, but the English had their own version of the story: he had been forced to join the earls’ rebellion and repented of it before his death.37 In his Gesta Pontificum, William further records that when he visited Crowland the prior tried to convince him of Waltheof ’s sanctity, and he remarks, ‘God, it seems, signifies his assent to the English version, for He manifests many extraordinary miracles at the tomb’.38 The near-contemporary accounts of Orderic and William of Malmesbury must have drawn on the same available sources at the abbey, written and (perhaps more importantly) oral. Both record features of Waltheof ’s story which had clearly become consistent elements in the Crowland narrative of his death: the assertion that he was entrapped in the plot, that he confessed and received absolution for his crime and that both his penitential tears before his death and the incorrupt state of his body afterwards demonstrated his innocence in the eyes of God. These details all work to counter the charge against Waltheof which might be levelled by a critic such as the monk Ouen: that he was no saint, but a traitor. It is notable that both accounts suggest that Waltheof ’s sanctity was a matter of ongoing discussion and that they divide the debate sharply along ethnic lines – as William puts it, there are ‘English’ and ‘Norman’ versions of events. This idea has been challenged by a number of historians, who have noted the significant involvement of Norman monks in promoting Waltheof ’s cult.39 Ann Williams, for instance, has argued that Waltheof ’s ‘cult was not a focus of English feeling against the Normans, but a local observance in which both English and Norman shared’.40 Certainly this was true of Abbot Geoffrey, the leading figure in Orderic’s account of the revival of interest in Waltheof: as

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well as presiding over the surge of miracles at Waltheof ’s tomb, rebuking the doubter Ouen and commissioning Orderic to write about the saint, Geoffrey also had a personal vision confirming Waltheof ’s sanctity, in which the abbey’s other saints, Bartholomew and Guthlac, welcomed the newest patron into their ranks.41 Geoffrey was far from the only Norman abbot who, as the newly installed head of an English monastery, saw the advantages of promoting the cults of its Anglo-Saxon saints; in fact, this was extremely common in the late eleventh and early twelfth century.42 The question remains, however: if the Norman abbot of Crowland was so whole-hearted in his support of Waltheof, where did the idea come from that there were different ‘English’ and ‘Norman’ versions of his story? Since this view is shared by William and Orderic, but not by all twelfth-century historians who write about Waltheof, it seems likely that their framing of the debate in this way emanated from Crowland itself; visits to Crowland and conversations with its monks are the common features in both their accounts. Comparison with other references to Waltheof from around the same time indicates that it was entirely possible to defend Waltheof, and to believe in his sanctity, without invoking this idea of Norman-English hostility. For instance, John of Worcester also gives a sympathetic account of Waltheof ’s execution, saying he was ‘unworthily and cruelly beheaded’, emphasizing his innocence and appealing to the testimony of Lanfranc as witness that whatever sins he had committed had been absolved by penance.43 John even cites Lanfranc as saying that the archbishop himself ‘would be pleased to enjoy, at the end of life, Waltheof ’s happy repose’. However, there is no indication in John’s account that Waltheof was the victim of Norman hostility or that he was treated unjustly because he was English. Although it is suggested that Waltheof ’s cult has attracted criticism, no label is attached to those who oppose the veneration of his memory: John only says ‘men wanted to blot out his memory on earth, but in truth it is to be believed that he is worshipped with the saints in heaven’.44 A briefer, but equally unqualified, recognition of Waltheof ’s sanctity is given by Gaimar, writing in Lincolnshire in the 1130s. In contrast to his extended narrative about Hereward, Gaimar makes only a short mention of Waltheof ’s rebellion and punishment, and does not pass judgement on his guilt. He does, however, observe without any note of scepticism that many miracles have

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taken place at Waltheof ’s tomb at Crowland.45 Gaimar evidently did not expect his Norman patrons to object to the idea that Waltheof might be a saint. His Estoire gleefully celebrates Hereward’s victories over Norman soldiers, in the anticipation that his patrons will enjoy these stories as part of a shared history of the English; Waltheof seems to be absorbed into the same common cultural inheritance, without a hint of the friction on which Orderic and William of Malmesbury place so much emphasis. It may be, then, that the attention paid to English-Norman hostility in interpretations of Waltheof ’s story, observed by William and Orderic, reflects a very localized dispute, rather than a more general controversy. Was it an impression they had both received from the monks of Crowland? Instead of a continuation of old hostilities from half a century earlier, we might rather see this as a new issue, stirred up by the surge of interest in Waltheof after Geoffrey’s adoption of his cause. If Geoffrey’s attempts to revive the cult provoked renewed discussion about the circumstances of Waltheof ’s death, within the monastic community itself or in the local area, there may indeed have been some – like Ouen – who needed to be persuaded of his sanctity. To frame such doubts as prejudice must have served a useful purpose, helping to exonerate Waltheof from the charge of treachery attached to his ignominious death. Perhaps, too, the monks thought it would enhance Waltheof ’s popular appeal to emphasize that he was an English saint. In describing the first flood of miracles in 1111–12, Orderic suggests they were particularly welcome to an English audience: ‘the news of them gladdened the hearts of the English and the populace came flocking in great numbers to the tomb of their compatriot, knowing from many signs that he was already favoured of God.’46 Of course, this does not exclude those who might consider themselves English by adoption, rather than birth – such as Abbot Geoffrey or Gaimar’s patrons. This seems to be supported by the miracle-stories recorded in the early thirteenthcentury account of Waltheof ’s miracles, which almost all deal with pilgrims who come to Crowland from towns and villages in south Lincolnshire and the neighbouring counties.47 It has been suggested that the core of this collection, with cures at Waltheof ’s tomb occurring over a period of several consecutive months, represents the first record of the miracles of 1111–12, subsequently augmented with additional stories.48 The pilgrims in these miracle-stories

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bear a mixture of English and Norman names, but what they have in common is their local origin, within Crowland’s orbit, with only one pilgrim coming from further afield (from Normandy). All may have been attracted by the idea of Waltheof as their ‘compatriot’, as Orderic calls him, and it seems that the monks of Crowland saw an advantage in promoting him as an English saint who had suffered unjustly at the hands of the Normans. When we remember the popularity of tales about Hereward in this area in the same period, we might see Waltheof ’s story as appealing to a similar audience – like the Gesta Herwardi, not encouraging resistance to Norman rule but seeking to recover and celebrate a form of English culture which is perceived to be under threat. If nothing else, Norman-English rivalries could serve as an explanation for Waltheof ’s death, helping to prove his innocence and therefore his sanctity. Waltheof ’s cult never became widely popular, and there is little evidence of veneration for him as a saint outside of Crowland’s sphere of influence. However, there is one possible – uncertain but intriguing – exception. At some point between 1098 and 1102, Anselm intervened to suppress the cult of an unnamed saint who was being venerated by the nuns of Romsey Abbey.49 In his letter to the nuns, Anselm instructs them to cease from paying any honour to this man or accepting offerings at his shrine and tells them to send away a man, claiming to be the saint’s son, who was lingering in the area. It has been suggested that this saint was Waltheof, though it is not recorded elsewhere that Waltheof had a son.50 If the nuns were indeed venerating Waltheof ’s memory, we can only speculate why they should have taken a particular interest in him. It might potentially be explained by Romsey’s proximity to Winchester, the site of Waltheof ’s death; perhaps they had acquired some relics at the time of his execution. Alternatively, it is tempting to see a link with the fact that Christina, sister of Margaret and Edgar Ætheling, became a nun at Romsey in 1086. The uncertainty around Christina’s career is such that we do not know if she was still at Romsey at the time of this letter, but it is a suggestive coincidence. Would Christina have supported the veneration of her brother’s former ally as a saint? Judging from the story about her attempt to defend her niece Edith in 1093, Christina was a forceful woman, who regarded the Norman king and his men with considerable hostility and saw them as unwelcome intruders to her abbey. What she might have thought about Waltheof, however, we cannot know – nor,

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unfortunately, do we know whether Christina was still alive, around fifteen years later, when her nephew David married Waltheof ’s daughter Maud.

The ancestors of Maud It was not only the monks of Crowland who had an interest in rehabilitating Waltheof ’s reputation: his descendants had reason to do so too, and his daughter Maud seems to have played a particularly important role in trying to shape post-conquest interpretations of Waltheof. It does not seem like an accident that the two spurts of growth in Waltheof ’s cult coincided with two significant periods in Maud’s life: her first marriage to Simon de Senlis, which took place around 1090, just before the first opening of Waltheof ’s tomb, and her marriage to David of Scotland in 1113, at the same time as Waltheof ’s cult was experiencing a renewal of interest under Geoffrey at Crowland. At these times, Waltheof ’s story must have been a matter of considerable interest to his family – not so much for his own sake as for his connection to the important landholdings which Maud took with her into these marriages, inherited from her father. The decision of Maud and Simon to name their second son Waltheof seems like a deliberate and public reminder of Maud’s relationship to her father and the rights she had through her descent from him; despite the talk at Crowland about ‘English’ and ‘Norman’ views of Waltheof, this AngloNorman family were proud to claim Waltheof as an ancestor. The connection between Waltheof ’s family and the promoters of his cult seems not always to have been harmonious. In the early texts about Waltheof, his wife Judith is cast in an unflattering light: Orderic accuses her of denouncing her husband to her uncle the king, though also says she was instrumental in having his body brought to Crowland.51 A Crowland story suggests that the saint was thought not to have forgiven his wife for betraying him, noting that when Judith tried to make an offering of a silk cloth at Waltheof ’s tomb, it was thrown off as if by a strong wind.52 However, later materials produced at Crowland show a more sympathetic interest in Waltheof ’s family and in the pre-conquest line of inheritance which stretched from Siward and Waltheof down to their post-conquest descendants. This

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is demonstrated by a collection of texts preserved in a thirteenth-century manuscript, probably compiled at Crowland around the time of the second translation of Waltheof ’s relics in 1219.53 This manuscript contains a cycle of texts related to Waltheof ’s cult, together with works on Crowland’s other saints. The material on Waltheof derives largely from Orderic and William of Malmesbury, with the addition of the Miracula Sancti Waldevi and further summaries of Waltheof ’s life in verse and prose which are attributed to a monk named William.54 The most interesting texts, however, are two narratives about Waltheof ’s ancestors and his descendants: the Gesta antecessorum, largely an account of the life of Siward, and the De Comitissa, which follows the story of Judith, her daughters and the subsequent generations of Waltheof ’s line up the early thirteenth century.55 These texts are united not only by their focus on Waltheof ’s family line but also by their desire to trace the history of the lands and possessions held by Waltheof – what had become known as the honour of Huntingdon – from the pre-conquest period to the thirteenth century. The Gesta antecessorum is essentially a story telling how Siward came from Denmark and acquired an earldom in England. Its narrative contains numerous elements drawn from Anglo-Scandinavian legend, such as attributing to the family ultimate descent from a union between a woman and a bear, a version of the story told in the Gesta Herwardi.56 It tells how after various colourful adventures, including fighting a dragon, Siward kills an earl named Tostig and is given his earldom (of Huntingdon) by Edward the Confessor. As well as providing Waltheof with a noble and glorious – if largely invented – Scandinavian ancestry, this text establishes the link between Waltheof ’s family and the honour of Huntingdon and gives it firm roots in the time of Edward the Confessor. This theme is followed up in the De Comitissa, which continues the story after Waltheof ’s death. The central preoccupation of this text is the possession of the honour of Huntingdon, which by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries was the subject of rivalry between the descendants of Maud’s two marriages. This text favours the claim of the de Senlis family over that of the Scottish royal house, and each Simon de Senlis (there were three in succession) is singled out for praise. An Anglo-Norman version of this text also survives from Delapré Abbey, near Northampton, a priory founded by the

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second Simon de Senlis, so the connection to this line of Maud’s descendants seems clear.57 This text is significant because it offers an attempt to narrate the story of Waltheof ’s family in a way which bridges the gap between their pre- and post-conquest history. It opens immediately after Waltheof ’s execution and describes what happened to his family (and therefore to the earldom) in the aftermath of his death. It claims that Judith and her daughters were allowed to continue in possession of the earldom, until the king, wishing to enrich Simon de Senlis, tried to arrange a marriage between Simon and Judith. Judith refused, giving as her reason that Simon was lame. This enraged the king, who took from her all her lands and possessions and conferred them on Simon. Judith was forced to flee into the marshes around Ely (like a female Hereward), in hiding from the king and her would-be husband. But Simon had not ceased to see the advantages of marrying into this family, and he was advised by his men to consider what might happen if England, rather than remaining under the power of the Normans, reverted to English control. If this happened his position would be more secure if he were married to the woman who had a hereditary right to his earldom: ‘if the English grew strong again, he would at least keep the honour of Huntingdon, by right of his wife.’ So instead of Judith he married her daughter Maud, and the fates of their descendants are then recounted. This text was written at least a century after the events described and does not seem at all likely to reflect the real circumstances of Maud’s marriage to Simon. It is important, however, in the emphasis it places on Maud’s rights, positioning her as a link of continuity between the pre-conquest and postconquest holders of the earldom. Through her, Waltheof ’s Danish ancestors and Norman descendants are incorporated into a continuous genealogical line, with a just and ancient link to the honour of Huntingdon. The monks of Crowland might have found that emphasizing Waltheof ’s English identity enhanced his popularity in the first decades of the twelfth century, but these two genealogical texts suggest that the de Senlis earls were interested in every aspect of their family history – Danish, English and Norman. In the family’s story, Waltheof, far from being an emblem of anti-Norman rebellion, becomes – like his daughter – an embodiment of continuity across the conquest (Figure 23). 

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Figure 23  A medieval statue of Waltheof at Crowland Abbey. © Author’s own.

Waltheof in Iceland With the exception of De Comitissa, one notable feature of the Crowland texts about Waltheof is how little they have to say overtly about the Norman Conquest, even when they are presenting Waltheof as the victim of Norman hostility. They defend Waltheof from the accusation of treachery to William by arguing that he was loyal – not by disputing whether a Norman king had the right to claim his allegiance in the first place. Remarkably, despite the circumstances of his death, the saint himself is never shown as having any objections to Norman rule; his heroics in the battle against the Normans at York, copied into the Crowland hagiographical tradition from William of Malmesbury, seem mostly designed to show he was a brave and admirable

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warrior, regardless of the specific historical context for that battle. The legitimacy of Norman rule passes without question, and Waltheof, unlike Hereward, is not presented as a fighter for the rights of the conquered English. This was not the case elsewhere. It was not only in England that Waltheof was remembered: he features in a number of Old Norse historical sources dealing with events in England in 1066, and here his death is firmly set within the context of (an imagined version of) post-conquest conflict. As we have already seen, Scandinavian historians and saga-writers took a particular interest in the family of Godwine and Gytha, and in this historiographical tradition Waltheof is identified as another member of the family, brother of Harold, Tostig and the rest. Although this is of course erroneous, it allows for some fascinating imaginative explorations of his place in the story of the conquest and its aftermath. Waltheof is given a small but significant part to play in the drama of 1066, and his actions help to illuminate the characters of the kings with whom he interacts. The core of the Old Norse stories about Waltheof is based on the skaldic verses discussed earlier, which these histories quote as direct evidence for his life and death. But while Thorkell’s poem, composed probably very soon after Waltheof ’s execution, shows no trace of the idea that he was a martyr, the histories combine this celebration of Waltheof ’s military prowess with an awareness of the fact that some people in England had come to venerate him as a saint. Waltheof features in four sagas of the kings of Norway: the three thirteenthcentury prose histories we looked at in the last chapter, Morkinskinna, Fagrskinna, Heimskringla, and the shorter Hemings þáttr.58 In Morkinskinna he appears only briefly, fighting against Harald Hardrada at Fulford in 1066. He is identified as ‘Waltheof of Huntingdon’, and he and Morcar are described as earls of Northumbria and sons of Earl Godwine.59 Fagrskinna and Heimskringla agree in having Waltheof fight the Norwegians at Fulford, and Snorri quotes the verse from Haraldsstikki in support of this, with its picture of the slain soldiers of Waltheof ’s army lying so thickly together that the Norwegians could cross the marsh by treading on their corpses.60 As English sources have very little to say about this battle, the information provided by the Norse histories may have some value and preserve details otherwise lost.

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It is not this battle, however, which makes Waltheof noteworthy for the Norse historians. Fagrskinna and Heimskringla both claim that Waltheof also fought, alongside his supposed brother Harold Godwineson, at Hastings. They tell how after Harold’s death, Waltheof managed to escape from the battlefield and later defeated a band of Norman soldiers by burning them to death in a wood. Some of this is an extrapolation from Thorkell’s Valþjófsflokkr, which these histories both quote; they interpret the verses as referring to events immediately after the Battle of Hastings, rather than to Waltheof ’s later involvement in rebellion against William. However, both histories then go on to give additional accounts of Waltheof ’s death which cannot have been derived from the poetry and which also do not agree with the surviving English hagiographical sources. Fagrskinna describes how after Hastings, Waltheof went to submit to William and received from him the earldom of Northumbria. But almost at once, it claims, William betrayed him, sending a troop of twelve knights to ambush and kill the earl. Waltheof fought to defend himself but was outnumbered and soon captured. In his last moments, he prepared for death in a way that revealed he was not only a brave warrior but a saint: And when the earl knew which of them was going to kill him, he entirely forgave that knight, and also the king and all the others who had come after him. And as a token he gave his silk tunic to the knight who was going to kill him. Then he lay down on the ground in the shape of a cross, and stretched out both his arms away from his body, and then he was beheaded. Many people have got healing through his blood, and Waltheof is truly a saint.61 The author then quotes the first four lines of the second stanza of Valþjófsflokkr, which provide support for the idea that William betrayed Waltheof, rather than the other way around. The description of Waltheof ’s death here is very different from the English sources, in the timing, nature and cause of his execution. Both the Crowland and the Norwegian versions present Waltheof preparing for death in an exemplary manner, worthy of a saint, but they have no details in common; there is no trace here of the Crowland story about Waltheof ’s severed head completing

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the Paternoster or of the idea that he had done penance for his involvement in a plot against the king.62 It is possible that the author of Fagrskinna invented these details, elaborating on the hint of betrayal suggested by Valþjófsflokkr, but it is also possible that they came from another source, likely of English origin. Snorri’s account is shorter and closer to the English sources in making Waltheof ’s execution the result of a judicial process rather than an ambush: The earl set out with a few men, but when he came to a moor north of Castlebridge he was met by two of the king’s officers with a body of men. They took him and put him in chains, and later he was beheaded. The English call him a saint.63 The place named by Snorri as the site of Waltheof ’s arrest, Kastalabryggju, has not been identified but is a further indication that another, probably English, source may lie behind these Norse versions of Waltheof ’s death. These accounts make no mention of Waltheof ’s involvement in a revolt against William; the king’s reason for wanting to kill him is not given but is presumably explained by Waltheof ’s position as the last surviving brother of Harold Godwineson. It is after this that Fagrskinna comments ‘there was no more of Earl Godwine’s family left alive, as far as we can tell’, before going on to trace the fates of Harold and Tostig’s descendants in Scandinavia. In these histories, the theme of treachery and betrayal which is so uneasily explored in the Crowland sources is completely inverted: William’s behaviour, especially as presented in Fagrskinna, is a clear violation of the truce he has made with Waltheof, and Waltheof himself is innocent of any treachery. There is no plot against the king; it is William who betrays Waltheof, not the other way around. This idea is further expanded in Hemings þáttr, where Waltheof plays a key role in several scenes intended to illustrate the characters of Harald Hardrada, Tostig and William.64 This author too was aware that Waltheof was considered to be a saint, and this allows Waltheof to be used as a standard of virtue, against whom the trustworthiness of other characters can be measured. As in all the Norse sources, Waltheof is identified here as the youngest son of Godwine. After he fights against his brother Tostig and Harald Hardrada at Fulford, he is captured and Tostig urges Harald to kill him. Harald, however, perceives Waltheof ’s value: he says he will not kill Waltheof if he promises

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not to fight against him and to inform him if he hears of any treachery being planned against the king. Waltheof refuses to swear an oath, but he makes a promise, which he faithfully keeps soon afterwards by warning Harald that Harold Godwineson’s army are approaching York. The text draws a sharp contrast between Waltheof ’s honourable behaviour and Tostig’s untrustworthy counsel, with Harald telling Tostig that he trusts Waltheof ’s promise better than Tostig’s sworn oath. There is some logic to this text’s belief in a particular friction between Waltheof and Tostig, since in a sense they were rivals for the earldom of Northumbria, which Tostig received after the death of Waltheof ’s father.65 The saga has Waltheof say he does not think Tostig intends him to have much inheritance, and since they are here presented as brothers the contrast between their characters is particularly marked. It is also striking that the promise Harald exacts from Waltheof is another inversion of the English story of Waltheof ’s offence against William: instead of concealing a plot against the king – in the Crowland sources, the one sin he commits and deeply repents – here he keeps his promise to warn the king of danger. Harald tells him approvingly ‘you have kept your word well’, and Waltheof appears to be an exception to the general untrustworthiness of the English, whose characteristic lack of faith is demonstrated (according to Tostig) by the people of York when they desert Harald for Harold Godwineson. In the eyes of the Norse writer, Harald has shown his wisdom in reading Waltheof ’s character rightly and resisting Tostig’s advice to kill him. William, however, is not so perspicacious. After the deaths of Harald and Tostig at Stamford Bridge and William’s victory at Hastings, William too takes Waltheof prisoner. Like Harald, he offers Waltheof a truce in exchange for an oath of loyalty. Once again, Waltheof will promise but will not swear an oath. William initially accepts this and allows Waltheof his freedom, but he swiftly changes his mind: ‘it is unwise to allow a man to ride away free who will not swear us any oaths’, he says, and orders Waltheof ’s death. As in the other Norse sources, Waltheof is ambushed but, Christ-like, refuses to allow anyone to defend him. The conclusion of his story is that ‘he went to a church and was killed there, and there he is buried; and people consider him as a saint’. The treatment of Waltheof by Harald and William provides an opportunity to contrast the character of the two kings and their different responses in the

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same situation – a typical theme and narrative device in Old Norse histories of this kind. Waltheof ’s own honour, however, is beyond question, and there is no doubt that Harald, who trusts him, understands him better than William, who does not. The prominent role Hemings þáttr gives to the swearing of oaths is noteworthy, in light of the controversial nature of Waltheof ’s oaths in the English sources for his life: in the Crowland texts, the charge that Waltheof was an oath-breaker was clearly seen as the chief objection which could be raised against him, and they work hard to defend him from it, as in the speech Orderic gives Waltheof in which he denounces oath-breakers. The emphatic assertion of the trustworthiness of Waltheof ’s word in Hemings þáttr would please even the staunchest defenders of Waltheof ’s honour at Crowland. It is remarkable to see the Norse texts reflecting the same concerns, although they seem not to be directly based on the recorded Crowland tradition. These histories, especially Hemings þáttr, have been much elaborated and expanded, but their roots may nonetheless lie in English sources, written or oral, which gave another view of Waltheof ’s story. This version of events is much more critical of William and much more confident in its belief that Waltheof had done nothing wrong; here, unlike in the Crowland sources, he has no crime at all to repent for. Though confused about the chronology of Waltheof ’s death (placing it soon after 1066 rather than ten years later), these stories are also firmly situated in a context of post-conquest tension between the English and their Norman conquerors, and plausibly reflect an English or AngloScandinavian point of view on how William had acted in those years. It is not difficult to imagine circumstances in which such a story might have reached Norway and Iceland – perhaps from some of those who travelled to Scandinavia after the conquest, including, of course, some members of the family of Godwine and their sympathizers, and perhaps Thorkell Skallason and other former members of Waltheof ’s own retinue. Alternatively, there were plenty of contexts in the twelfth century in which information could travel between England and Scandinavia; there is, for instance, some evidence for direct communication between Crowland and Norway in this period, which could have brought news of Waltheof ’s growing cult to the north.66 These Old Norse histories, from the first half of the thirteenth century, are roughly contemporary with the collection of texts about Waltheof and his family

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produced at Crowland after the second translation of his body in 1219. At this date in Norway and Iceland, as well as in England, there was still considerable interest in understanding Waltheof ’s story and its connection to the events of the Norman Conquest.67

Conclusions In this chapter we have seen four different versions of Waltheof, interrelated and influencing each other, but distinct in their emphasis and their interpretations of this controversial earl. For Thorkell, Waltheof was a brave and muchlamented warrior; for the monks of Crowland, a penitent martyr; for Maud and her descendants, an important ancestor; for Scandinavian historians, a worthy standard of honour against whom Norwegian and Norman kings could be measured. All these interpretations represent some attempt to rehabilitate his reputation and to excuse the actions which led to his death. What is a surprising omission is any defence of those actions – any version of his story which argues that he was right and justified in rebelling against Norman rule. None of these versions really tries to explore why he fought against the Normans in 1069, let alone why he became involved with the Revolt of the Earls just a few years after William had honoured him so highly. His aims and motivations remain largely unexplained. Thorkell’s verses come closest in their implication that William was a violent conqueror ‘from the south’, but they are too brief and elliptical to give us much sense of what Waltheof himself might have thought. Waltheof was, therefore, a martyr of the Norman Conquest only in a qualified sense. The monks of Crowland, for all that they promoted Waltheof as an innocent victim of the Normans, did not use his story to question the legitimacy of the conquest or to make any larger attack on the presence of the Normans in England. The same is true of Maud and her descendants, for whom Waltheof was a valuable ancestor because of his pre-conquest links, not because of his actions as a rebel in 1069 or 1075. Like Queen Edith/Matilda – who was briefly Maud’s sister-in-law, between Maud’s marriage to Edith’s brother David in 1113 and Edith’s death in 1118 – Maud clearly saw the value

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of her pre-conquest ancestry and might have taken some role in making sure it was recorded. But neither she nor the monks of Crowland could benefit from presenting Waltheof as an actively anti-Norman saint. Nonetheless, there may have been other factors at work in the transformation of Waltheof from an executed rebel into a saint and martyr. It seems unlikely to be a coincidence that his cult developed in precisely the same region and at the same time as the popular legend of the anti-Norman rebel Hereward. The Old Norse sources indicate that there may have been other versions of Waltheof ’s story circulating in England, besides those promoted at Crowland. The idea that there were ‘English’ and ‘Norman’ versions of Waltheof ’s story is too simplistic, but the suggestion that there were multiple conflicting interpretations of his life is plausible, and the difficulty of identifying them as straightforwardly English or Norman is a useful reminder of the changing nature of these labels by the early twelfth century. Some of Norman descent were by now thinking of themselves as ‘English’ and for them Waltheof had become part of their own version of English history, which stretched across the conquest and found ways of absorbing pre-conquest England into an Anglo-Norman narrative of continuity, inheritance and growing cultural union. But some of the early supporters of Waltheof ’s cult might not have been so ready to accept this view of English history. For them, Waltheof ’s appeal as a saint might indeed have been that he was a martyr to Norman violence – a Hereward-like figure who had been cruelly and unjustly executed. It may be that Abbot Geoffrey and his monks, in promoting their version of Waltheof, were in fact attempting to take control of the narrative of his death – harnessing popular interest in their martyr, but recording and presenting his story in a way that could appeal to a mixed audience of English and Norman pilgrims and patrons. These differing views of Waltheof might reflect conflicting opinions in the local area or between the monks of Crowland and those who came to visit the tomb – but such dividing lines could also, of course, run through the middle of a monastic community itself. It is to divisions like these that we will turn in our final chapter.

5 Child of memory

Eadmer of Canterbury

On 6 December 1067, a devastating fire destroyed the cathedral church at Canterbury. It took place on the same day that William returned from Normandy to resume personal control of his conquered kingdom, bringing with him Waltheof, Edgar Ætheling and his other English hostages; the coincidence of dates is noted by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as if the fire and the king’s return were somehow linked in the mind of the chronicler.1 Coming at a time when – as an eyewitness later wrote – ‘evils fell thick throughout England’, the fire struck at the heart of one of the oldest and most important monasteries in the country, a place regarded by many as the mother church of English Christianity.2 According to the same eyewitness, countless treasures, books and works of art were lost to the flames, and for years afterwards parts of the church stood in ruins. The material loss must have been great, the symbolic loss greater still – for the Anglo-Saxon church, for the people of Canterbury and for the monks of the cathedral priory, who already had reason to feel themselves embattled in the winter of 1067. Within a few years, Canterbury saw another dramatic change. In 1070 Archbishop Stigand was deposed and imprisoned, and replaced by Lanfranc, an Italian-born monk who had spent his monastic career in Normandy. Lanfranc brought with him an influx of continental monks, whom he appointed as leaders within the monastery at Christ Church, the cathedral priory at Canterbury. He embarked on a programme of extensive rebuilding,

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but it was not until the late 1070s, a decade after the fire, that the new church was ready and the community could resume some kind of normality. The eyewitness who recorded for us his memories of this calamitous fire was at that time a boy of seven or eight years old, being brought up in the cathedral school. His name was Eadmer, and he grew up to be one of the foremost English historians of his generation. His two most influential works are the Historia Novorum in Anglia and Vita Anselmi, which record many of the key events of the post-conquest period.3 In later life Eadmer became a close companion of Anselm, Lanfranc’s successor, and he was a witness to Anselm’s conflicts with the king and other church leaders, as well as a devoted recorder of the archbishop’s saintly deeds and sayings. Eadmer benefitted from the support and patronage of Lanfranc and Anselm, as well as from the wider scholarly and cultural connections of the Anglo-Norman church. At the same time, as a continuous thread running throughout his long career, he retained a deep interest in the pre-conquest English church – the church into which he had been born. Alongside his writings on contemporary affairs, Eadmer was also a prolific writer of hagiography, and he composed numerous works dealing with the saints of Christ Church. These saints’ lives retell stories from across the five centuries of the history of the Anglo-Saxon church and represent a recurring, serious engagement with pre-conquest history, viewed from the perspective of the late eleventh and early twelfth century. For these works Eadmer drew on sources available to him at Christ Church, but also made use of his own experiences and memories in his writing about the Anglo-Saxon past, just as he did when writing about the Anglo-Norman present. Eadmer’s work is a valuable source for the lives of some of the people we have been looking at – it is Eadmer, for instance, who provides almost the only story we have about Christina, daughter of Edward the Exile, and he is the only source to mention Hakon, son of Svein Godwineson. But he was also a contemporary of theirs – the same age as Harold Godwineson’s younger children – and he was conscious that this set him apart from the next generation of Anglo-Norman historians, on whom his work had an important influence.4 Unlike the historians born of mixed marriages in the decades after the conquest, such as William of Malmesbury and Orderic Vitalis, for Eadmer the pre-conquest world was – just about – within his own memory, and from childhood, as he frequently reminds

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the reader, he had been a witness at first-hand to the changes the conquest had brought. The first ten years or so after the conquest, between the fire and the completion of the new church, were the years in which Eadmer was growing to adulthood, and what he saw and remembered in this period made a profound impression on him. His later writings about this time provide an extraordinarily clear insight into how he and his fellow monks in Canterbury experienced the conquest and its aftermath, and were also influential in shaping how this period was later interpreted. Unlike some of the other people whose stories we have looked at, we can directly access Eadmer’s own perspective through his writings. It is the perspective of an educated and well-informed scholar, who was interested in and knowledgeable about English history, had lived through the post-conquest years and enjoyed privileged access to some of the leading figures of the day. His opinions on the events of his own time and the recent past are the product of a lifetime of reflection on history and the ways it can be understood. Wellplaced as he was, however, Eadmer’s perspective naturally has its limitations. He was, first and foremost, all his life, and however far he travelled from home, an English monk of Canterbury, and this was fundamental to his outlook on the world. He began and ended his life at Christ Church, and the needs and priorities of the Canterbury community shaped his understanding of all he witnessed and his views on English history. In addition, his memories of the immediate post-conquest period have to be pieced together from references found across the corpus of his works, scattered throughout different narratives where the primary focus is something else – usually someone else. Eadmer wrote extensively about other people’s lives, most often in the form of hagiography, but he never wrote a single work of autobiography. He is usually to be glimpsed on the sidelines of someone else’s life story, edging into frame, as he offers the reader a brief moment of reflection or personal recollection. But the moments when he does appear are revealing, not only about his own life story but also about the lives of those around him. As well as his personal perspective, he gives us an unrivalled window into the world he knew best: the monks of Christ Church, a community in flux and under strain, faced with the need to literally and metaphorically rebuild their church from the ruins (Figure 24).

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Figure 24  Eadmer depicted in a twelfth-century manuscript (The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, MS. Ludwig XI 6). © The J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty’s Open Content Program (public domain).

Two children of Canterbury From remarks made across Eadmer’s works, it is possible to establish some facts about his early life.5 He was born around 1060 and brought up in the community at Christ Church, as a child oblate whose parents had dedicated him to monastic life. It is likely that he was from a Kentish family; he mentions

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a relative who lived near Canterbury, and his nephew later also became a monk of Christ Church. At one point in the Historia Novorum, Eadmer tells a story about a monk of Canterbury whose impoverished mother was the recipient of Lanfranc’s generosity, and it has been suggested he may be referring to himself and his own family.6 As a boy in the cathedral school, he witnessed the fire of 1067 and incidents which took place in the community in the years afterwards; he saw the arrival of Lanfranc in 1070, the beginnings of work to rebuild the cathedral and the translation of the relics of Canterbury’s saints into the new church. In these years Eadmer also trained as a scribe; from the mid-1080s onwards his hand can be traced in numerous manuscripts made at Christ Church in this period (Figure 25).7 At this time in his life, to judge from his later comments, Eadmer was keenly aware of what he saw as changes in practice and custom from the pre-conquest church, which were in the process of being implemented by Lanfranc. We will consider these changes in more detail later but may note here the importance

Figure 25  An example of Eadmer’s scribal work (British Library, Harley MS. 5915, f. 12). © The British Library (public domain).

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of the fact that in these years Eadmer was witnessing these changes, while still too young to have any significant role in their implementation. As a junior member of the community, he was alert to what was going on but did not have the seniority to influence it or, as yet, the opportunity to put his thoughts into writing. That opportunity came much later in his life, but when he began to write about the post-conquest period it was with hindsight, after the passage of decades, and he was describing a situation over which at the time he had no control. He was aware, however, that others were actively engaged in the debates about changing practices which were sparked by the new regime and were beginning in consequence to write about Canterbury’s history. An important influence on Eadmer at this stage of his life was a monk a few years his senior, Osbern, who had had a very similar upbringing to Eadmer himself.8 Osbern too was a boy in the cathedral school at the time of the conquest, though he was probably in his teens and had fuller memories than Eadmer of the pre-conquest monastic community. He too remembered the cathedral church before its destruction and had an interest in Canterbury’s Anglo-Saxon history. Unlike Eadmer, Osbern – a close contemporary of Waltheof and Edgar Ætheling – was reaching adulthood by the 1070s and was able to take an active part in the events which were reshaping the community of Christ Church. The young monk seems to have been something of a troublemaker amid the upheavals which affected Canterbury in the 1070s. Around 1076 Osbern apparently committed a serious breach of monastic discipline (the details are unknown) and as a disciplinary measure was sent to Bec to study under Anselm’s guidance. He won the sympathy of Anselm, who wrote to the Christ Church authorities in his defence, praising his clear thinking and retentive memory, and seeking advice for a recurring illness from which Osbern was suffering.9 In return Osbern seems to have influenced Anselm too: Anselm requested that Lanfranc should send him information from Canterbury on Dunstan, Osbern’s favourite saint.10 Osbern returned to Canterbury around 1080, and over the next decade or so he composed works on Canterbury’s two chief saints, both Anglo-Saxon archbishops who had died within the past century: Dunstan, statesman and scholar, who died in 988, and Ælfheah, at that time (before the death of Thomas

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Becket) Canterbury’s only martyr, who had been killed by a Viking army in 1012. In the 1080s Osbern, commissioned by Lanfranc, composed accounts of the martyrdom and translation of Ælfheah, as well as a hymn to the martyr which has not survived, and soon after this composed a Vita of St Dunstan and record of his miracles.11 These became the most popular hagiographical narratives about these saints, and Eadmer knew them well; by the time he came to embark on his own historical writings, he had clearly given thought to their strengths and weaknesses as works of history and hagiography. Osbern was also a talented musician, described by contemporaries as the most skilled musician of his day.12 None of his music is known to have survived, but one manuscript of his Vita Dunstani contains a Mass and Prosa in honour of the saint, with accompanying music which might be Osbern’s own composition.13 An image of Osbern in a manuscript produced at Canterbury, in the 1090s or slightly later, alludes to both his literary and his musical skill: he is shown as a scribe writing, being censed by a younger monk, while around him openmouthed beasts sing and play harps (Figure 26).14 By the 1090s Osbern had been appointed precentor of Christ Church, a role Eadmer was also later to fulfil. In a medieval monastery, the precentor oversaw the round of prayer and offices which were the monks’ occupation by day and night. The role of the precentor, as defined by Lanfranc’s Monastic Constitutions, was to lead and direct the music of the liturgy, to be in charge of the monastery’s books and to keep track of the anniversaries and commemorations the community were observing.15 In fact, the precentor was nothing less than the custodian of the collective memory of the community; his role was to know, better than anyone else, what and whom the monks ought to be remembering. It was natural that the writing of history, especially in the form of hagiography, came to be closely associated with this role, and several leading medieval historians, including Orderic Vitalis, Symeon of Durham and William of Malmesbury, served as precentors of their monastic communities.16 Even while acting in this role, however, Osbern retained an inclination for disobedience. In one of the last things Eadmer ever wrote, he tells a story which gives us a glimpse of his life as a young monk in the early 1090s, as well as an insight into his relationship with Osbern.17 Eadmer describes how at some point in the years between 1089 and 1093, after the death of

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Figure 26  Osbern depicted in a manuscript from Christ Church (British Library, Arundel MS. 16, f. 2). © The British Library (public domain).

Lanfranc and before the appointment of a successor, he was quietly copying a manuscript in the cloister when Osbern came up to him. Directing the copying of manuscripts was one of the precentor’s duties, so Eadmer was perhaps working under Osbern’s authority at this time. Osbern invited him to join in a search for the relics of St Audoen, which he remembered having once seen during a general inspection of the church’s relics but now wanted to look at for himself. Eadmer recounts Osbern’s persuasive speech to him and says they went off together – without the proper permission from their seniors – to investigate. They found the relics and excitedly made a thorough inspection of the casket where they were kept, exploring all its treasures and becoming

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careless with the bones in their zeal. The two historians were exultant, but that night they found their presumption had angered the saints whose bones they had disturbed, and they were punished with frightening apparitions. Late in life, Eadmer describes with a mixture of pride and repentance the curiosity which had led him, the junior member of the research party, into this reckless and disobedient scheme. Though he speaks respectfully of Osbern as ‘the most celebrated of precentors’,18 and he was clearly not unwilling either to join or to remember the adventure, he might have felt with hindsight that the elder monk had somewhat led him astray. The picture he paints of Osbern in this story fits well with the impression which emerges from Osbern’s own works: a forceful personality, clever but not cautious, with a colourful imagination and a certain disrespect for authority. A few years after this, Anselm as newly appointed archbishop of Canterbury wrote a reproving letter to his monks, in response to reports of disobedience to the prior. Osbern is included by name among the recipients of the letter, and as Jay Rubenstein observes, ‘Whether Anselm addressed Osbern as a respected member of the community who could restore order or as a possible source of the turmoil itself must remain uncertain’.19 Their similar upbringing and common interest in Canterbury’s history must have been a strong bond between Osbern and Eadmer. In terms of historical interests, what they shared was a deeply held faith in the status of Canterbury as the mother church of English Christianity, whose antiquity provided an unbroken line, they believed, not only as far back as the conversion of the kingdom of Kent in the seventh century but also further back, to the days of Romano-British Christianity. At one point in his Vita Dunstani, Osbern explains how Canterbury’s very name reflects this importance: he says the see’s Latin name Dorobernia (derived from the name of the Roman city, Durovernum Cantiacorum) means ‘the door of the granary’, because it is the very door to the kingdom of the English and all its riches. This etymology is mistaken – Osbern has interpreted the name as if it were an English compound, from duru (‘door’) and bern (‘barn’) – but it encapsulates the status which the monks of Christ Church claimed for their ancient monastery.20 This must have been the view of Canterbury’s history which they had imbibed from their education at the cathedral school, and in the view of both it

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was confirmed by many forms of evidence: written sources in the monastery’s archives from throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, the physical form of the cathedral church, the oral traditions of the older monks and most of all the history of the monastery’s saints. But the years after the conquest saw a challenge to all these certainties. The physical fabric of the church, imbued with so much history, was gutted by fire and had to be entirely rebuilt; at the same time, new monks from abroad were imported into the community, formed by different traditions of thought and custom, who had no such instinctive veneration for English Christianity or for Canterbury’s history. Osbern and Eadmer both wrote, in part, to explain and defend the dignity of Canterbury’s Anglo-Saxon past for the benefit of these newcomers, and to persuade them of Canterbury’s place as the oldest and most important centre of English Christianity, which had for centuries been the home of saints and scholars. So far, Osbern and Eadmer are in complete agreement. But there are also some differences in their perspectives, and there is frequently a hint of disapproval or rivalry, a slight competitive edge, in Eadmer’s approach to his senior’s works. Unlike Eadmer, who ranged widely through Canterbury’s history and beyond in his writing, Osbern’s surviving works deal with only two saints and with a much shorter historical period, stretching from Dunstan’s birth in the early tenth century up to the 1090s. Osbern had a particular love for Dunstan, whose musical talent may especially have appealed to him, and he saw Dunstan’s influence at work throughout his own life; as a boy he witnessed several miracles performed by Dunstan for pilgrims to Canterbury, and he believed he had personally experienced the saint’s protection more than once in his life.21 He writes of visiting Dunstan’s cell at Glastonbury and being overcome with emotion at seeing items which had belonged to the saint.22 Eadmer’s devotion to the saints of Canterbury, though an important factor in his life, was a degree less intensely personal than this; he rarely seems so passionately attached to any of the saints about whom he wrote (except Anselm). Eadmer refers to Osbern with respect several times in his own works, but his approach as a historian and hagiographer was very different. Unlike Eadmer, Osbern’s writing tends towards the exuberant, in both style and subject matter; he has a fondness for lively dialogue and vividly imagined details in the stories

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he tells. William of Malmesbury, a product of the next generation of AngloNorman historians, praises the vigour and elegance of Osbern’s style but is scathing of his errors of fact as a historian,23 and Eadmer too seems to combine admiration with some disapproval. After Osbern’s death, when Eadmer began to write hagiography himself, he took it upon himself to rewrite Osbern’s work on Dunstan. He follows Osbern’s narrative very closely, without making any substantial changes to the material; the work was barely ten years old and hardly needed major revisions. But Eadmer chose to rewrite it throughout, editing to fit his own preferences: he corrects a few minor inaccuracies, omits many of the little details which are characteristic of Osbern and tones down the style at its more flamboyant moments. Most of all, he cuts Osbern out of the story almost every time Osbern mentions himself (which is often). Many of these revisions seem almost petty, though they may also have been intended to address some discomfort in the community about the way Osbern had presented the senior monks.24 Perhaps what they suggest is Eadmer’s own developing sense of what such a work ought to be and his growing confidence in asserting control over the writing of Canterbury’s history. Dunstan was the community’s most important saint; if Eadmer (or those around him) did not think Osbern’s work on him good enough, it was Eadmer’s task to correct it. Part of Eadmer’s development as a historian, then, came in reaction to Osbern’s work, though Eadmer was also deeply influenced by Osbern’s view of the key moments in the history of Canterbury and England. Osbern seems to have died in the mid-1090s, and it was only after this time that Eadmer began to compose his own works of hagiography. There are various possible reasons for this, but one might be that it was only once he was out from under Osbern’s shadow that Eadmer began to perceive other possible ways of writing about Canterbury’s history.

St Anselm and his biographer In 1093, when Eadmer was probably in his early thirties, his life changed. After the four-year interregnum which gave Osbern and Eadmer their opportunity for exploring the church’s relics, Anselm was elected archbishop.

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Eadmer had already encountered Anselm some years before, probably in 1080, when Anselm, then abbot of Bec, visited England and spent time talking to the monks of Christ Church. Now Anselm chose Eadmer to be a member of his household and keeper of his chapel, and Eadmer became one of his closest companions. He accompanied Anselm twice into exile as a result of the archbishop’s disputes with William Rufus and Henry I, travelling with him through southern Europe and attending ecclesiastical councils at the archbishop’s side. It was in these years that Eadmer first began to compose his own works, and from the last decade of the eleventh century onwards he became a prolific writer. Like Osbern, he began by writing about Canterbury saints whose stories he would have first learned in childhood.25 His first significant work seems to have been a life of St Wilfrid (d. 709/10), whose relics Canterbury claimed to possess.26 More lives of saints with Canterbury connections followed: first a life of St Oda, tenth-century archbishop of Canterbury, then an account of the life and miracles of St Dunstan, rewriting Osbern’s version.27 In the first years of the twelfth century, Eadmer was working on the Historia Novorum and Vita Anselmi. These were conceived as twin works, illuminating the public and private sides of Anselm’s life, and their composition occupied Eadmer over a period of some years, before and after Anselm’s death in 1109. In the 1110s he produced another saint’s life, taking as his subject St Oswald of Worcester; though not a saint of Christ Church, Oswald was the nephew of Oda and a contemporary of Dunstan, so with his biography Eadmer returned to a period of English history he had already dealt with more than once. Eadmer made another journey to Rome in 1116, on a mission relating to the long-running dispute between the archbishops of Canterbury and York over the primacy of the English church, and in 1120–1 he spent a brief and unsuccessful period as the nominated bishop of St Andrews (in succession to Turgot). His appointment was contested, so he was never consecrated, and he returned to Canterbury in 1121. The year of his death is not known, but it was probably in or shortly after 1126; the anniversary was kept at Canterbury on 13 January.28 In these last years between his return to Christ Church and his death, Eadmer seems to have resumed his hagiographical interests. As precentor of the monastery, he may have overseen one of the great achievements of the

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Christ Church scriptorium in this period: a seven-volume Passionale, a set of lavishly decorated books containing narratives of many saints, including some of Osbern and Eadmer’s works.29 It was probably also in this period that Eadmer produced a single manuscript containing almost all his own writings.30 This manuscript, written in Eadmer’s neat hand, forms a carefully planned collection of his works, for his personal record and for posterity; only the Historia Novorum is omitted as the collection now stands, though it was originally part of the manuscript too.31 The very act of putting together such a manuscript suggests something about Eadmer’s self-awareness as a writer at this late stage in his life, a certain pride in authorship and a desire to preserve his works in the form in which he wished them to be read. The texts, included in the probable order in which they were written, bear testimony both to Eadmer’s development as a writer and to the unity of his interests across his long career. As well as the numerous saints associated with his own monastery, there are texts on saints of Canterbury’s other ancient abbey, St Augustine’s, and a handful of works on topics Eadmer seems to have especially associated with the devotions of the pre-conquest English church, such as guardian angels and the conception of the Virgin Mary.32 Seen together, the contents of this manuscript indicate how profoundly Eadmer’s understanding of history was shaped by his interest in the saints of the Anglo-Saxon church.33 It is in these final works that the aged Eadmer – now, by his own description, ‘white-haired’ – returns with most clarity to the scenes of his earliest memories. Here he tells the story about his expedition with Osbern in search of St Audoen’s relics, and he also gives a long description of the cathedral he knew as a child – the church which was destroyed by fire in 1067. The attention Eadmer pays to his childhood memories in these late works may have been encouraged by the example of Anselm, whose reflections on his own youth and on the formative nature of childhood experiences play a significant part in the narrative of his life as recorded by his biographer.34 Eadmer, as he wrote of Anselm’s earliest memories, may well have been led to think more deeply about his own. Reflecting on the powerful hold his memories have on him, Eadmer observes that it is what people learn in their youth that they remember most vividly: he quotes a phrase from Horace, ‘Quo semel est imbuta recens seruabit odorem testa diu’, ‘a vessel long retains the scent of that with which

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it was first filled’.35 There could hardly be a more appropriate summation of Eadmer’s identity as a historian.

Life among the ruins It was no accident that Eadmer returned, at the end of his life, to the subject of the church which was destroyed in the fire of 1067. He mentions this fire on numerous occasions in his writings, in his first work and his last, and several times in between. For him, the destruction of the old cathedral marked an epoch in Canterbury’s history, a sharp division between past and present. As a watershed moment, it holds a place in his imagination that we might expect the Norman Conquest itself to occupy, but for Eadmer the two events were intimately linked, both representing a time of rupture and of profound and painful loss. The close relationship between the fire and the conquest for Eadmer is illustrated in the Vita Wilfridi, where he describes the events of 1067–70: by the just and secret judgement of Almighty God nearly the entire city of Canterbury was then burnt by fire, and the church built in Christ’s name there was set alight in the same conflagration. In the third year after this blaze, Lanfranc, of both happy and glorious memory, the abbot of the monastery at Caen, was appointed to govern that church. After he had been honourably confirmed everywhere in the patriarchate of the foremost see of the English, he demolished whatever ancient parts of that church remained because he intended to rebuild everything anew.36 What is strikingly absent here is any reference to the conquest. There is no explanation of why Lanfranc was appointed or of the larger political and cultural changes taking place in England at the time, although we know from Eadmer’s other works that he was deeply interested in those questions. There is a silence here which seems to mirror his deliberate refusal to record the immediate aftermath of the Norman Conquest in the Historia Novorum: there, after describing the Norman victory at Hastings, he comments, ‘So William became king. What treatment he meted out to those leaders of the English

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who managed to survive the great slaughter, as it could do no good, I forbear to tell.’37 Such silence can be more eloquent than speech. Here his focus is on the physical fabric of the church; in the context of all that is not said, that building and its rebuilding take on great significance. ‘To rebuild everything anew’ (‘nova omnia constructurus’): this phrase succinctly explains why the fire made such a deep impression on Eadmer, and he repeated it word-for-word when he wrote about the same subject in his De Reliquiis Sancti Audoeni, more than thirty years later.38 It is an allusion to the Book of Revelation 21:5, to God’s declaration in the New Jerusalem: ‘Ecce nova omnia facio’, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’ The phrase aligns Lanfranc’s newbuilt church with the post-apocalyptic New Jerusalem, a new heaven and a new earth where ‘the former things have passed away’. It is a resonant and suggestive allusion in this context – complimentary to Lanfranc and the postconquest community, and yet disturbing in its implications. If all things have been made new, what place can there be for Canterbury’s Anglo-Saxon history in this new world? Was it to be entirely obliterated and forgotten? Answering these questions was central to Eadmer’s life’s work as a historian. He was not the only one upon whom the fire had a lasting impact. Osbern probably drew on his own memories of the fire when he came to write an account of the Viking siege of Canterbury in 1011, when the city was attacked and Archbishop Ælfheah captured. Imagining the scene, Osbern describes a terrifying fire raging through the town, the monks weeping as they watch the burning cathedral, lead dripping from the roof of the church as it melts in the heat of the flames. If you were watching, he says, you would feel ‘like Nero marvelling at the flames of Rome, or Aeneas weeping at the fire of Troy’.39 With characteristic hyperbole, Osbern elevates Canterbury to the status of the two great cities of classical antiquity – but he probably had seen just such a fire in 1067, and it is not difficult to believe that witnessing it would indeed be devastating, especially for the monks for whom this church was home and the very centre of their lives. It was not only personal loss, however, which made the destruction of the cathedral significant. The timing of the fire, in the midst of post-conquest turmoil and uncertainty, must have contributed to the sense that something profoundly disturbing had happened – and that it was no accident but a

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momentous and meaningful event. In the passage quoted earlier from the Vita Wilfridi, Eadmer alludes to an explanation for the fire which both he and Osbern discuss at greater length elsewhere. It is an explanation which ties the fire closely to the political context of the Norman Conquest and draws a direct connection between the two events. The story they tell takes us into the tense environment of the monastic community in the mid-1060s, putting forward the claim that the fire was not a random calamity but a punishment for the sins – and perhaps the political allegiances – of the monks. In their accounts of the miracles of St Dunstan, both Osbern and Eadmer describe how the fire was heralded by an unsettling incident which took place late in 1067 among the boys of the cathedral school.40 The point of the episode is to show St Dunstan’s spirit intervening to defend the schoolboys against the cruelty of their masters, but it also offers an insight into how Osbern and Eadmer, boys themselves at the time, remembered this particularly difficult moment in the community’s history. The episode is set in the days leading up to Christmas, when the masters of the school have threatened to punish the boys with a savage whipping.41 The night before, as one of the boys weeps from fear, Dunstan appears to him in a vision and comforts him. Dunstan vows he will save the boys from punishment and does so by casting a miraculous sleep on the masters as they lie in wait, whips in hand. But Dunstan also tells the boy to give a message to the senior monks: he is displeased because they have buried an unbaptized child, son of Earl Harold, near his tomb. Unless they move the body, he warns, the monastery will soon suffer a terrible disaster. The boy passes on Dunstan’s warning, but the senior monks disregard it. Still dissatisfied, the spirit of Dunstan continues to walk: the monks see him leaving the church, and the ghost tells them that he will not stay because he cannot bear the presence of unbaptized flesh and the wicked behaviour of certain people in the church. A few days later, his warning of disaster is fulfilled when fire tears through the city and cathedral. This story suggests that at least some of the monks believed the fire was a divine judgement on the community. The ‘Earl Harold’ whose son’s presence caused Dunstan’s spirit such distress must be Harold Godwineson, and this connects the fire, in some oblique but potent way, to the events of 1066.42 Harold’s long-term consort Edith owned property in Canterbury, and

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presumably it was she who was the mother of this child who died before he could be baptized.43 In the years before the conquest Harold and Edith might well have had the influence to have their child buried at the heart of the cathedral near Dunstan’s tomb, but by the end of 1067 Harold was, of course, a deeply controversial figure, and this story seems to reveal anxiety within the community about appearing to show allegiance to Harold. Was someone worried that allowing the burial of Harold’s son had made Christ Church appear too loyal to the dead king? This story suggests Dunstan’s name was being invoked in an internal conflict on the subject within the community, resulting in the serious allegation that the fire was God’s punishment for the sins of the monastery’s leaders. Some context for this lies in the complicated relationship Christ Church had with Godwine and his family before 1066, and the way in which that relationship was reinterpreted once the political situation shifted. In 1051 the monks had become embroiled in Godwine’s fractious relationship with Edward the Confessor: the conflict which led to the exile of the earl and his family began when Christ Church nominated one of their monks, a relative of Godwine, as archbishop of Canterbury and the king opposed their choice.44 After the Godwine family forced their way back into England and Edward and Godwine were reconciled, a different candidate, Stigand – a close ally of Godwine’s family – was chosen as archbishop. It was not a propitious appointment. Stigand held the sees of Canterbury and Winchester in plurality, which made his position irregular and controversial, and he was later accused of greed, simony and corruption; after the conquest, this was made the reason for deposing him. Criticism of Stigand was retrospectively employed as ammunition in the Norman attack on Harold’s legitimacy as king: Norman writers claimed that Stigand had crowned Harold and that the ceremony was therefore uncanonical.45 Stigand is pointedly depicted in the scene of Harold’s coronation in the Bayeux Tapestry, though it is in fact more likely that Ealdred, archbishop of York, performed the ceremony. Association with Stigand was meant to be damning to Harold, and vice versa. In 1051 there must have been a faction in the monastery at Canterbury sympathetic to Godwine’s family, and fifteen years or so later the senior monks were apparently close enough to Harold to allow his son to be buried

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near Dunstan’s tomb. But Christ Church soon found it prudent to distance itself from any previous relationship with Godwine and his family. By the late 1070s, the monastery was engaged in litigation to regain estates which it claimed Godwine had unlawfully taken, fabricating evidence in an attempt to justify its right to these properties. It is possible that these properties had in fact simply been sold or leased to Godwine, but by now it suited Christ Church, eager to regain its former possessions, to remember Godwine as a long-standing opponent of the monastery.46 Eadmer follows this view in his Historia Novorum, describing Godwine as a ‘bitter enemy of the Church of Canterbury’.47 That might not have been how everyone in the community of his childhood would have thought of Godwine, but it was how Eadmer chose to present the monastery’s relationship with the earl. Furthermore, Eadmer goes on to record (without quite assenting to) the Norman view of Harold Godwineson as a perjurer, who had broken his oaths to William and therefore merited the punishment of God.48 While the story of Harold’s child provides some insight into divisions within the monastery at the end of 1067, it also tells us something about how Eadmer thought about this period and how he understood the significance of that epochal fire. From Eadmer’s point of view, this story revealed a community in drastic need of moral reform. The senior monks’ connection with Harold has led them to compromise the sanctity of the church and threatened to deprive the monastery of the spiritual protection of its chief saint; the situation seems so bad that only a catastrophic event could clear the ground for improvement. Dunstan provides moral leadership where the seniors of the monastery have failed, not only in his concern for the sanctity of the church but also in his protection of the schoolboys. This story, like other episodes in the Miracula Dunstani, presents the saint as an archbishop and abbot in the mould of Lanfranc and Anselm: it is no coincidence that in showing Dunstan rescuing the boys from cruel corporal punishment, Osbern and Eadmer align him with Anselm’s own views on the subject, as recorded in the Vita Anselmi.49 Despite Eadmer’s attachment to the pre-conquest church, he saw the monastic community of the 1060s as far from perfect; its leaders, in particular, were deeply flawed. Change was both necessary and desirable, however painful the process might be. The senior monks who had failed to heed Dunstan’s warning

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Figure 27  Canterbury Cathedral. © Author’s own.

had brought a terrible punishment on their monastery, and after 1067, it was not only the church but the community itself which needed to be reconstructed from a ruinous state (Figure 27).

The devil within: The sickness of Æthelweard For several years after 1067, the monks continued to live amid the ruins of their church and monastery. Dunstan’s tomb, which had been at the heart of the old church, was the centre around which they gathered: Eadmer describes the monks going on with their round of prayers in a small temporary building erected over the tomb amid the remains of the church.50 After Lanfranc’s arrival in 1070, the process of rebuilding began, but the influx of new monks introduced further sources of strain. At this time, Eadmer later estimated, the community numbered around sixty monks; the majority were English, but the monks in senior positions were largely new appointees from Normandy.51

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It was a situation full of potential for conflict, and the new prior, Henry, appointed in 1074, seems to have soon made himself unpopular. A glimpse into the tense state of affairs at Christ Church at this time is provided by another miracle-story about St Dunstan, told by both Osbern and Eadmer.52 This took place around 1076, in the latter stages of Lanfranc’s rebuilding project, when the new church was almost complete. It was a distressing incident in which a young English monk named Æthelweard suffered attacks of violent insanity, to the horror of the rest of the community. The first outbreak occurred when Æthelweard, serving at a mass celebrated by Lanfranc, was suddenly oppressed by terrifying visions of demons. In his distress he seized hold of the archbishop and had to be dragged away by armed guards. Although he briefly recovered, the next night at Compline he again disrupted the service and assaulted Prior Henry. Later, in the dead of night, he burst out with terrible screams and began to attack the other monks with accusations of the secret sins they were concealing. The monks believed these had been revealed to him by the devil which had taken possession of him. Osbern says that Æthelweard singled out one young monk in particular, viciously telling him, as the monk wept for him in pity, ‘Your tears are in vain, your laments are in vain! The same place holds us; hell will keep us both.’53 This monk received particular kindness from Lanfranc, confessed his sin and was forgiven. It has been suggested that this young monk may have been Osbern himself; it might have been this secret sin, which is never specified, which caused Osbern to be sent to Bec in 1076.54 Lanfranc, who around the same time is said to have heard the confession of Waltheof and tried to obtain mercy for the rebellious earl, similarly offered forgiveness rather than punishment to his own unruly monks.55 Æthelweard’s repeated relapses and his violent physical and verbal attacks on individual monks, including the archbishop and prior, seem to have caused a prolonged period of chaos within the monastery. Lanfranc and Henry struggled in vain to find a cure – and this was at a time when the community was already under stress, displaced from its usual routine by the ongoing building works in the church. The refectory was being used as a temporary church for the monks to say their offices, and in preparation for the final demolition of the old cathedral, the relics of Dunstan and Ælfheah

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were removed from their former shrines and carried in procession into this makeshift resting place. Eadmer tells how Æthelweard, bound to a litter, was brought into the refectory: Then was unfortunate misery to be seen. The captive was lying facing upwards on the litter, bound tightly all around, and had no control of his body at all. The demon who possessed him could be seen scurrying around madly here and there within his belly so that you might have thought he was getting ready to escape from him now through his mouth, now through the nether regions of his body.56 In a particularly disturbing moment, the devil speaks through Æthelweard’s mouth in French, a language the English monk did not know: Some of those who were standing nearby and extending their hands to prevent the flight of the enemy remarked among themselves in the French tongue that he was running about like a little cat, but the possessed man, who was totally ignorant of that language, smiled and replied fluently using diminutive forms in the same tongue, ‘Not like a kitten, but like a puppy.’57 This is very telling. Æthelweard’s ignorance of French is noteworthy, in a situation where the senior monks are conversing in French as a matter of course – a reminder of the linguistic and cultural rift which now ran through the middle of the community. The suggestion of linguistic tension is only exacerbated by the fact that the devil does speak French, so fluently that it can make a cruel joke through Æthelweard’s helpless mouth. (The joke does not work in English translation, but the wordplay is on the similarity between the diminutive forms of the two animals: ‘Non ut cattulus, sed ut catellus.’)58 At last, an elderly English monk named Ælfwine secretly sought the intervention of St Dunstan to heal Æthelweard. While the rest of the community were absent, Ælfwine held Dunstan’s staff above the possessed man, appealing for the help of the saint to whom, Eadmer tells us, he had been devoted since childhood. Æthelweard was cured, and after his recovery he remained in the monastery for many years without further relapse. This story suggests a community fracturing under great strain. It is suggestive that the incident took place at a time when the physical environment of the

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monastery was still unsettled, at the moment when the last remains of the old church were being demolished to make way for the new. The monastery’s chief treasures, the relics of Dunstan and Ælfheah, were in a transitional state, kept temporarily in the refectory; the ordinary designations of monastic space had been disrupted, just as Æthelweard’s outbursts interrupted the monks’ round of services by breaking into mass and Compline. In addition, the incident suggests there were sharp divisions within the community between the English monks and their new leaders. Both the sufferer and the monk who cures him are English, and Ælfwine seems to have had a particular devotion to the Anglo-Saxon saints of Christ Church; he is elsewhere named by Eadmer as the witness to a vision of St Wilfrid which took place around the same time in the 1070s.59 Only Ælfwine can successfully invoke the power of St Dunstan for his fellow English monk, while the French-speaking monks converse with the devil who has possessed him. Lanfranc and Henry are the personal targets of Æthelweard’s violent assaults, and both seem incapable of bringing a satisfactory resolution to the crisis. Æthelweard’s attacks on his fellow monks and threats to reveal their hidden sins are a powerful challenge to community cohesion. Whatever the cause of his behaviour, it shone a harsh light on divisions within the community at a time when it was clearly already under stress. This event seems to have profoundly troubled those who witnessed it. As well as Osbern and Eadmer’s records of the story, there are also references to the same incident in a letter by Lanfranc and an account of the life of Gundulf, who was appointed Bishop of Rochester in 1077.60 This discomfort seems to have lingered within the community, to judge from the way the episode is treated in Canterbury manuscripts of Osbern’s work. It is one of a small number of passages to have been later altered or omitted in Osbern’s text;61 in a Christ Church manuscript from the late eleventh or early twelfth century, the folios containing this incident have been removed from the manuscript. Turner and Muir comment that ‘It seems likely . . . that the way in which senior figures in the Norman hierarchy were depicted in Osbern’s work was considered offensive in some quarters, and caused the relevant episodes to be excised from manuscripts in Christ Church, as well as influencing the way Eadmer rewrote the work’.62 There are some significant differences between

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Osbern’s and Eadmer’s versions of the story, suggesting that Eadmer had carefully edited Osbern’s text. Only Eadmer provides the punning speech of the demon, the comment on Æthelweard’s ignorance of French and the name of Ælfwine, but his account is shorter and he omits the episode of the young monk (Osbern?) singled out by Æthelweard. Significantly, Lanfranc is given a much less prominent role in Eadmer’s version, minimizing his personal involvement with Æthelweard’s case and thus reducing the impression which emerges from Osbern’s story that the archbishop had failed to deal with the incident. Osbern presents Lanfranc’s failure as a foil to Dunstan’s success, and other members of the community might well have found that uncomfortable.63 Furthermore, Eadmer, unlike Osbern, uses this story to comment explicitly on the changes brought to the community by Lanfranc and the new Norman hierarchy. He interprets this incident as a process of painful but necessary moral reform, permitted by God to chastise a community whose discipline had lapsed.64 Eadmer describes how Æthelweard’s suffering, though terrible to witness, was required for the reform of the monks. Before that time, he says, the monks had lived like secular aristocrats, indulging in elegant clothes, hunting and music, but This frightening incident, together with the mercy of Christ and the wisdom of archbishop Lanfranc, advanced them to the extent that they renounced all those things and turning to the true vocation of a monk they looked back upon those things as if they were excrement. And moreover, since we know what was going on at that time, we can say for certain that such a healthy and sudden change in matters would in no way have occurred had this cruel and savage torment, which terrified everyone, not been played out before our very eyes.65 This interpretation, which has no parallel in Osbern’s account of the same incident, was taken by some later medieval historians as evidence for the corrupt and worldly nature of the Anglo-Saxon church.66 As Nicholas Brooks observes, however, Eadmer’s direct experience of the adult monks’ way of life before 1070 must have been small, and Osbern, who was in a better position to know, makes no such judgement.67 Eadmer’s opinion is therefore best understood as his attempt to make sense, with hindsight, of an episode which

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had clearly distressed the whole community. He offers an optimistic reading of the story which makes this traumatic incident an opportunity for progress and reform. It is notable that for once Eadmer, even while emphasizing his presence as eyewitness, chooses to distance himself from the monks of his own community: in the passage quoted earlier the pre-conquest monks of Christ Church are they, not we. Eadmer appears to be conscious of himself as belonging to another generation from the older monks of his own community; he identifies not with the worldly monks of the pre-conquest monastery but with those who embraced Lanfranc’s reforms. But if the sins of the past must be left behind, its virtues can be carried over into the new reformed community. It is the veneration of Dunstan, as mediated by the English monk Ælfwine, which provides a thread of continuity with aspects of the past which are worthy of respect. There is a suggestive parallel between Eadmer’s interpretations of the story of Æthelweard’s madness and of the fire and rebuilding of the church, two processes of destruction and reconstruction which take place in parallel. Painful as the fire was to witness, it allowed a new and more perfect church to be constructed once the ruins of the old had been cleared away. What was best about the old cathedral – the relics of its most venerated saints – could be carried over into the new church, salvaging the best of the old world for the benefit of the new. In the same way, Eadmer seems to suggest, the traumatic incident of Æthelweard’s madness might have revealed the fractured state of the community, but it was ultimately a cathartic process of destruction. It cleared away what was not worthy of being preserved, so that a better community could be constructed upon the foundations of the old.

An English saint and an English historian In his reflections on these incidents, Eadmer is positive about the changes Lanfranc had brought to Christ Church and what he saw as Lanfranc’s welcome reform and revival of monastic life. However, he seems to have been more uneasy about other aspects of Lanfranc’s reforms, in particular his approach to the veneration of saints. The question of Lanfranc’s attitude to Anglo-Saxon saints,

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and that of other post-conquest religious leaders to the customs and saints of the institutions they ruled, has been much debated.68 Historians disagree on the extent to which incoming bishops and abbots after the Norman Conquest were willing to support the cults of Anglo-Saxon saints and whether some individual cults and feasts were actively suppressed – and if so, what the motive might have been in doing so. For earlier historians, Eadmer’s own comments on the matter were influential in shaping the impression that Lanfranc was sceptical about English practices, particularly his much-quoted observation in the Vita Anselmi that, by the late 1070s, ‘Lanfranc, as an Englishman, was still somewhat green, and some of the customs which he found in England had not yet found acceptance with him. So he changed many of them, often with good reason, but sometimes simply by the imposition of his own authority’.69 Though Eadmer speaks of customs generally here, the particular example he goes on to discuss relates to the veneration of an English saint, St Ælfheah (Figure 28). The evidence for changing liturgical observance of the saints at Christ Church in the decades after the conquest has been interpreted in different ways,70 but Jay Rubenstein has persuasively argued that although Lanfranc’s attitude was not actually hostile there was, nonetheless, an important new emphasis in his approach to the saints.71 In the liturgy and in the arrangement of the new cathedral, he suggests, Lanfranc’s wish was to shift the emphasis of devotion away from the saints towards Christ, focusing attention on universal rather than local observances. He argues that Lanfranc was influenced in this aim by his experiences as abbot of Bec and Caen, two eleventh-century foundations which had not yet built up the long history claimed by the monks of Christ Church: Someone used to . . . monasteries with no history and no great saints may have simply been caught off guard by the situation at Canterbury, where the monks saw themselves as continuators of five centuries of tradition. What may have appeared to Lanfranc a perfectly obvious and uncontroversial decision to focus wholly upon Christ may have looked to his monks to be a far more aggressive and objectionable action.72 Though Lanfranc’s actions were probably not motivated by hostility to the saints, still less a targeted disregard for English saints, the shift of emphasis

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Figure 28  St Ælfheah in the twelfth-century Passionale produced at Christ Church, a set of manuscripts probably made under Eadmer’s supervision (British Library, Cotton MS Nero C VII, f. 46v). © The British Library (public domain).

clearly troubled Eadmer. The saints – and particularly the saints of Canterbury, whose hagiography was his life’s work – were central not only to his own religious devotion but also to his understanding of Canterbury’s history. It may have been this question of the relationship between the lives of the saints and the writing of history which made the case of Ælfheah a particular point of concern. In the Vita Anselmi, Eadmer describes a conversation about Ælfheah between Lanfranc and Anselm, which took place in 1080 during the visit to Canterbury when Eadmer first met Anselm. Eadmer’s account of this conversation has become an often-discussed case study in understanding Lanfranc’s approach to Anglo-Saxon saints, but Eadmer’s own role in narrating it has been less regarded. One purpose of the story is obvious: to present Anselm as a wise and judicious defender of Canterbury’s traditions,

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more than a decade before he became its archbishop. It seems significant that Eadmer chooses to narrate this conversation in his Vita Anselmi, rather than the Historia Novorum; he discusses Lanfranc’s actions at Christ Church in both texts, and generally in a positive light, but here Lanfranc is set up as the foil to Anselm’s superior wisdom. The context naturally favours Anselm and prepares the reader to see Anselm’s perspective on Ælfheah as correct. After his comment about the approach of Lanfranc, the ‘somewhat green Englishman’, to English customs, Eadmer has the archbishop telling Anselm, ‘These Englishmen among whom we are living have set up for themselves certain saints whom they revere. But sometimes when I turn over in my mind their own accounts of who they were, I cannot help having doubts about the quality of their sanctity.’73 He cites Ælfheah as an example because he is not convinced the circumstances of his death demonstrate he was a martyr. The English story (what Lanfranc calls ‘the words of the English themselves’) shows that Ælfheah was killed for refusing to pay a ransom to his Viking captors but not for professing the name of Christ – and this is not enough to qualify him for martyrdom. After recounting the archbishop’s view, Eadmer again comments that Lanfranc speaks here ‘as a recent citizen of England’. Anselm’s response does not refute Lanfranc’s understanding of the reason for Ælfheah’s death but argues that it can nonetheless show Ælfheah was a martyr: if Ælfheah refused to pay an unjust ransom he died for a principle of justice and therefore for Christ. Eadmer says this argument convinced Lanfranc and persuaded him to commission a history of Ælfheah’s life and death from Osbern. Eadmer’s account of this conversation was written at least thirty years after the event, when both Lanfranc and Anselm were dead. It is far from being a transcript of their conversation (to which Eadmer himself, still at the time a very junior monk, may not have been privy); it is Eadmer’s reconstruction of the scene, framed in a way which reveals his own views on the issues at stake. It is within this context that we should understand the repeated emphasis on English identity and particularly Eadmer’s choice to present the disagreement between Lanfranc and supporters of Ælfheah in specifically ethnic terms. He sets up an opposition between Lanfranc’s views and what ‘these Englishmen say’, ‘the words of the English themselves’, and in his own narrative voice explicitly links Lanfranc’s doubts to the archbishop’s own developing, but still newly

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acquired, English identity. Lanfranc is ‘somewhat green as an Englishman’ and a ‘recent citizen of England’, and his views on Ælfheah are presented as the result of this nascent and undeveloped form of Englishness. Eadmer allows that Lanfranc has assumed a new English identity, but it seems to be in his eyes qualified and imperfect, despite the fact that by this time Lanfranc had been archbishop of Canterbury for ten years – hardly a new citizen of England. Between Lanfranc’s speech and Anselm’s, Eadmer also interjects another explanation, drawn from his own greater understanding – as he presents it – of English history. ‘If, however, we look on the matter historically, we see that this was not the only cause of [Ælfheah’s] death, but that there was another and more fundamental one’: that Ælfheah did not only refuse to pay a ransom but strove to convert his pagan captors to Christianity, at the time ‘when they were burning the city of Canterbury and the church of Christ which stands there, and when they were putting the innocent citizens to a horrible death’.74 It was for this defiance, Eadmer suggests, that the pagan Vikings killed him. Eadmer argues for the importance of understanding Ælfheah’s death within its historical context – that is, with a knowledge of where it fits into Anglo-Saxon history and the longer story of conflict between the Christian Anglo-Saxons and the pagan Danes. Eadmer had probably taken his impression of the siege of Canterbury chiefly from Osbern’s Vita Elphegi, which provides the details he summarizes of the city’s suffering and Ælfheah’s efforts to convert the Danes. However, he must also have known the near-contemporary narrative of the siege in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in which Ælfheah’s martyrdom is seen as a symbolic attack on England’s Christian identity: the chronicler laments the suffering of the archbishop ‘who was the head of the English and of Christianity’ and of the city ‘from where Christianity came to us’, that is the English.75 The power of this lament relies on a particular view of the place of Canterbury within the centuries-long narrative of Anglo-Saxon Christian history – a view with which Eadmer entirely sympathized. For him, too, the city and its church were the very symbols of English Christianity, and it was for that church and its people that Ælfheah chose to die. Eadmer’s argument about the historical context of Ælfheah’s death also relies on his knowledge of an older tradition of writing about Viking attacks, one already well established in English historiography before the conquest. In

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presenting the Viking siege as an assault on the Christian people of Canterbury by pagan persecutors, he frames these events in terms of religious conflict, as many previous historians of the Vikings had done. He might have been thinking, for instance, of the tenth-century texts composed about St Edmund of East Anglia, which emphasize that Edmund was martyred at the hands of pagan invaders who were in league with the devil.76 By the time he wrote the Vita Anselmi, Eadmer had already linked Ælfheah’s name with Edmund’s in his preface to the Vita Wilfridi as martyrs of the English church who had died at the hands of foreign enemies, suggesting both had died for their faith at a time when Christianity in England was under assault from pagan invaders. In his view, they were both unquestionably martyrs in a religious war.77 Neither Lanfranc nor Anselm could have had much awareness of this historiographical tradition, nor would arguments based upon it have had much meaning for them. The reply Eadmer presents Anselm making is a theoretical and abstract response, which makes no reference to religious persecution and requires no knowledge of pre-conquest history. Eadmer’s own view on the subject, however, was the product of a longer, more well-informed and more personal process of reflection on Ælfheah’s story. From the point of view of defending Ælfheah’s sanctity, his narratorial intervention – his argument from English history – is superfluous; Anselm’s argument will clearly prevail. However, Eadmer seems concerned to frame the debate as a question about English history and identity, as if eager to insert himself into a conversation in which at the time – whether or not it took place exactly as he describes – he can have had no part. Finding fault with Lanfranc’s understanding of events, he offers an alternative reading of the situation from a specific perspective: that of an English historian. Lanfranc’s doubts about Ælfheah are based, he suggests, less on theological concerns about martyrdom than on an incomplete Englishness and an imperfect knowledge of the historical circumstances, and on both these grounds Eadmer must have seen himself as better placed to comment. Though often interpreted as a comment on Lanfranc’s sense of English identity, this observation probably tells us more about Eadmer’s own. It is Eadmer, not Lanfranc, who makes this discussion about Ælfheah a debate about Englishness and highlights the role of identity in forming an individual’s

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perspective on the past. His emphasis on Lanfranc’s nascent Englishness – still new after ten years in England – seems a self-conscious contrast with Eadmer’s own sense of English identity; here, as elsewhere, Eadmer seems intensely aware of himself as someone formed by an English upbringing, steeped in the very history Anselm and Lanfranc were discussing, and thereby earning the authority to write about it. In recounting this moment in 1080, he is describing an important conversation about an English saint in which the English are, at best, silent observers. In recording the discussion for posterity, however, he gives the English perspective a prominent voice, making a case for the English to be interpreters – and writers – of their own history.

‘Recent times’ and the history of England As Eadmer began to embark on his own works of hagiography in the 1090s, he might have been aware that his English birth put him in an unusual position. For most of the eleventh century, both before and after the conquest, the majority of hagiographers working in England were not English: the most significant works of hagiography composed in England from the middle decades of the eleventh century onwards were by learned authors born and trained on the continent, often in Flanders, including Folcard and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin.78 Eadmer knew the work of numerous English hagiographers from the AngloSaxon period, but probably none (apart from Osbern) more recent than Ælfric and Byrhtferth, writing at the end of the tenth and beginning of the eleventh century. It may have been a sore point with Eadmer: in a letter written towards the end of his life, he comments sarcastically on the skill of learned foreigners who invent fraudulent stories about English saints and implies that better should be expected of Englishmen who write about their own church.79 Throughout his work Eadmer regularly identifies himself with the English point of view, using phrases such as ‘we English’ (‘nos Anglos’) and ‘our people’ when speaking of English history.80 His views on that history emerged largely from his interests as a reader and writer of hagiography. His saints’ lives draw on a range of hagiographical sources which focus on the particular historical moments within which their individual saints lived, and from his familiarity

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with this mosaic of sources Eadmer developed his own ideas on the larger patterns of English history, both across the Anglo-Saxon period and in his own time. As with his interpretation of Ælfheah’s story, this was a perspective which he had in a way inherited from his upbringing at Christ Church and knowledge of pre-conquest traditions of writing about English history, but it was modulated by the new influences to which he was exposed in his adult life and by his sense that England had, in recent times, undergone a period of great change. When it came to the Norman Conquest and its aftermath, his perspective was shaped by an understanding of tenth- and eleventh-century history as depicted in the hagiographical texts he knew best, especially those relating to the life of St Dunstan. At the opening of the Vita Anselmi, Eadmer expresses the opinion that his own days are a time of ‘many strange changes in England’, ‘developments which were quite unknown in former days’ – a period of novelty and of a break from the past.81 It is this which he also evokes in the title of his most famous work, Historia Novorum in Anglia, which suggests not only a history of ‘recent’ times but of ‘new things’ currently taking place in England which had never been seen before. These works were both written in the early twelfth century, and we might expect him to identify the Norman Conquest as the beginning of these novelties, the start of a new era in English history. But although Eadmer does give an account of the conquest at the opening of the Historia Novorum, he in fact places the crucial turning point – the moment of change from ‘former times’ to the present day – some way earlier back than this. Specifically, he begins the Historia Novorum in the last decades of the tenth century, with a summary of the reign of King Edgar. For Eadmer, this was a significant moment for several reasons. He – in common with other monastic writers of the eleventh century – saw the reign of Edgar as a time of harmonious cooperation between royal power and the church, when the king and holy bishops worked together to promote monastic reform and religion and peace flourished in the land. We have already seen how such views of Edgar’s reign could influence monastic writers’ interpretation of this period, in the memory of Hereward’s ancestor Oslac and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s treatment of the fates of Edgar’s royal descendants. Eadmer’s understanding of

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this period was shaped by his reading of Anglo-Saxon accounts of Dunstan, Oswald and Oda, monastic leaders of the tenth century about whom Eadmer himself also composed works of hagiography. For Eadmer, the lives of these monastic leaders – most of all Dunstan – provided a precedent for the revival of monastic life he believed Lanfranc and Anselm had inspired in his own times. The death of King Edgar in 975 marked the end of this period of peace and harmony, but the real turning point for Eadmer came during the reign of Edgar’s son, Æthelred. Dunstan died in 988, and soon after his death Viking raids on England, after a few decades of peace, resumed with ever-growing ferocity and intensity. These raids culminated with the siege of Canterbury and murder of Ælfheah in 1011–12, the forcing of Æthelred and his family into exile and the conquest of England by Cnut in 1016. All these troubles, it was believed in late eleventh-century Canterbury, had been foretold by Dunstan before his death. This was a belief promoted by Osbern, who in his Vita Dunstani attributes to the archbishop two prophetic speeches which cast Dunstan in the role of prophet and interpreter of the divine will which would shape England’s history in the years after his death. A link between Dunstan and prophecy seems to have been a very early feature of the cult, and the earliest lives of Dunstan contain numerous visionary experiences attributed to the saint.82 However, it was Osbern who first made use of Dunstan’s prophecies as a historical explanation, a way of understanding the century of war and invasion which separated the England of Osbern’s own time from Dunstan’s. According to Dunstan, as presented in Osbern’s Vita, these troubles were a punishment visited upon Æthelred because he had gained the kingdom by the murder of his half-brother: for this reason, he tells Æthelred, ‘the sword shall not depart from your house, raging against you all the days of your life, slaying your progeny until your kingdom is given to a foreign power whose customs and language the people you rule do not know.’83 The immediate context for these prophecies is the Viking raids and threats of invasion which beset Æthelred’s reign, but Osbern makes it clear that the troubles predicted by Dunstan are not confined to the past: after Dunstan’s second prophecy, predicting ‘such evils as there have not been since the time when the English people came to rule until this time’, Osbern adds, ‘and all this came to pass, as may be read in

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annals and seen in our own times’.84 Those troubles include foreign invasion, from both the Vikings and the Normans. When Osbern has Dunstan warn of the kingdom being given to a foreign power ‘whose customs and language [the English] do not know’, his comment is as appropriate for the Norman Conquest as for the Danes; we might remember the sinister role played by linguistic difference, and the incomprehensibility of French to English monks, in the story of Æthelweard and his French-speaking devil. This detail might have seemed even more applicable to Osbern’s own time than to the early eleventh century. Osbern did not invent these prophecies, but he certainly popularized them; they are repeated by many twelfth-century historians and became so influential as a way of interpreting Æthelred’s reign that the prophecy was even inscribed on the king’s tomb in St Paul’s.85 But Osbern clearly saw them as a comment not only on Æthelred and Viking invasion but on everything that had happened in England since 988, and that was how Eadmer interpreted them too. Eadmer gives Dunstan’s prophecies a prominent place early in the Historia Novorum, as he described the precipitous decline in English fortunes in Æthelred’s reign. He closely echoes Osbern when he comments: How true this prophecy of the man of God proved to be can be very easily seen, both in the chronicles by those who choose to read them and in our own afflictions by those who know how to understand them, not to mention the events which the course of this present work will reveal, in their proper places, as truth shall dictate.86 Dunstan’s prophecy serves as an interpretation for what follows in Eadmer’s narrative; this is the beginning of England’s troubles, but also the beginning of ‘recent events’ as Eadmer sees them. For Eadmer, too, those troubles include foreign invasion; Edgar is praised for his success in keeping out foreign enemies, and the inability of his successors to resist conquest is one of the ways in which his successors have failed to live up to him. But the troubles of which Eadmer was thinking by the time he wrote the Historia Novorum were also Anselm’s – his disputes with William Rufus and Henry I over the conflicting rights and powers of the king and church, and his exiles from England.87 In his Vita Dunstani – perhaps written while he was in exile with Anselm – Eadmer

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laments with great emotion the state of England in the first decade of the twelfth century: it is clear enough from the chronicles and from our own tribulations without my saying anything what misery has enveloped all of England since his death, and by enveloping it has ruined it. Wherefore I do not see why I should write anything about it since those events are so clearly evident without a single word being written that there is no one who could not see the real misery there. I do not know what the outcome of these things might be or when it will occur, but I have no doubt at all that everything which he has done, God has done in true judgement of us because we have sinned against him and not obeyed his commandments.88 Looking back over the 120 years or so which have passed since Dunstan’s death in 988, Eadmer sees a long period of ruin and decline. Uncertainty and misery have made even the act of writing impossible, and he comments hopelessly that ‘since I do not have the physical strength and have no one to advise me, I do not know what might be said or done’ – except to appeal for the intercession of Dunstan, who had predicted all this would happen.89 But he did keep writing about it, again and again. As in his comments on Ælfheah, Eadmer clearly believed there was an advantage in interpreting the debates of his own time within the context of pre-conquest English history, and he sought to convince others to believe so too. When Eadmer and Osbern recommend looking at annals and chronicles to prove the truth of Dunstan’s prophecies, they mean it quite literally: such comments are indeed found in Canterbury sources of this period, and they had probably learned this view of eleventh-century history from a reading of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as well as the hagiography of St Dunstan. The F manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a bilingual Latin/English version produced at Christ Church in the early twelfth century, notes of the reign of Æthelred that ‘in his time many evils came to England, and afterwards always increased up to now’.90 A set of annals in a Christ Church manuscript (British Library, Cotton MS. Caligula A XV) begins with Dunstan’s death in 988, as if for the compiler of this manuscript, too, it was the start of ‘recent times’ (Figure 29).91 Whether these sources draw on Osbern and Eadmer, or the other way around, is difficult to say; all are

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Figure 29  Canterbury annals for 1066–76, noting the death of Edward the Confessor, the destruction and rebuilding of Christ Church and the execution of Waltheof (British Library, Cotton MS. Caligula A XV, f. 135). © The British Library (public domain).

the product of thinking about Anglo-Saxon history at Canterbury in the years around 1100 and represent what Eadmer, at least, seems to have thought of as a specifically English perspective. Eadmer’s hopeless lament for England’s present misery seems heartfelt, but he did find ways of writing about it. In beginning his Historia Novorum with Dunstan and Edgar, he makes a case for the value of studying AngloSaxon history: it can provide useful models, warnings and explanations for the people of the present day. He offers Dunstan as an interpreter of recent English history, for anyone willing to listen and learn from the Anglo-Saxon saint, and he presents Dunstan as a worthy predecessor and model for later archbishops of Canterbury to follow. Like Anselm, Dunstan is presented as a monastic reformer who spoke out prophetically against sinful kings and endured exile as a result. Eadmer’s intention seems to have been to encourage his contemporaries to think across the conquest – to understand how recent events might have their roots in the pre-conquest period and how a knowledge of that history might have something to offer to contemporary anxieties. He wanted to bring the Anglo-Saxon past into dialogue with the Anglo-Norman present, to find threads of continuity from the past in his own strange new times.

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The house of memory Eadmer’s sense of himself as a bridge between the pre- and post-conquest worlds is most clear in one of his last works, De Reliquiis Sancti Audoeni. In this text, he returns to the subject of his earliest memories: the old church which was destroyed by fire in 1067. Though the text is nominally about the relics of St Audoen, Eadmer says almost nothing about that saint; instead, the purpose of this text seems to be to place on record a description of the longdestroyed cathedral, which by the time of writing, in the 1120s, existed only in the memory of Eadmer and his elderly contemporaries. Eadmer wanted to ensure it was not forgotten – and it was not only the building he wanted to preserve but all the history of Anglo-Saxon Canterbury which had been written in its stones. De Reliquiis opens with an account of how Audoen’s relics came to England in the tenth century. They were supposedly obtained by King Edgar, who cooperated with St Oda to give them to Canterbury, the church ‘from which Christianity was brought to the kingdom of the English’.92 Again we are shown Edgar as the pre-eminent example of an English king governing in harmony with the church and are reminded of Canterbury’s foundational place in the narrative of English Christianity. Although this story is clearly the product of Eadmer’s own understanding of pre-conquest history, however, he presents it here as a direct inheritance from oral tradition: ‘just as I received it in former times as a youth from the elders of the holy mother church of Canterbury, now white-haired, at the request of my friends, I bring it to the notice of others.’93 He positions himself as an intermediary between the past of the community and his present-day readers – a continuing chain of oral tradition – and his white hair is suggestive not only of age but of authority and wisdom. Having told how Audoen’s relics arrived at Canterbury, Eadmer explains that these relics were only some of the treasures possessed by Christ Church before the fire. He describes the arrangement of the old church, exploring its physical layout in astonishingly minute detail: as if walking the reader through the building, he guides us around the location of the shrines of the saints, the altars of the church, its crypt, choir, towers and doors.94 Every aspect of the church is linked with particular traditions, devotions or historical details of

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the pre-conquest cathedral – the archbishop who presented the relics kept in a particular altar, the place where mass was customarily said at certain hours of the day. The site of St Dunstan’s tomb receives particular attention, with a careful description of the crypt and the passage by which it could be accessed. He tells us that the boys of the cathedral school were taught in the north tower, dedicated to St Martin, where they learned about the monastic office – as Eadmer must have done himself, sixty years earlier. In his description, Eadmer emphasizes the great antiquity of the church and its connections to long-established customs of royal and ecclesiastical administration. He believed it to be the same church described by Bede, which had been built by the Romans and given to St Augustine by Æthelbert of Kent in the earliest days of Anglo-Saxon Christianity.95 It was not only an ancient and venerable church but also a place with significance in pre-conquest English legal custom, Eadmer suggests: he notes that legal disputes were settled at the south door of the church, ‘which was called Suthdure by the English in ancient days, as it is now, and the door is often mentioned by this name in the laws of the kings of old’.96 The use of the English word stands out, especially since Eadmer hardly ever uses the English language anywhere in his writings; though English must have been his first language, as far as we know he never composed in it. Giving the name in its English form adds an authenticating touch, as well as a reminder that the authority with which he speaks here is that of personal experience. As he describes the former building as he remembered it, he reconstructs the church in his memory and in the minds of his readers. At first glance, it seems remarkable – almost implausible – that he could recall in such detail a church which was destroyed when he was a child of seven. However, it is not as unlikely as it seems. Archaeological evidence has largely confirmed Eadmer’s descriptions of the layout of the pre-conquest cathedral.97 In 1067 the church was gutted but not completely destroyed; the monks were living in and around the ruins for almost ten years after the fire, and it was not until 1076 or so that the relics of Dunstan and Ælfheah were finally removed from their tombs. Eadmer explains that, paradoxically, the fire provided opportunities for closer examination of the shrines than might otherwise have been possible; since the altars had to be opened, previously hidden spaces were disclosed to public

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view.98 In these circumstances, there would have been plenty of time for the details of the church to be impressed upon his memory. More importantly, Eadmer’s ability to mentally reconstruct the old church seems to be the product of a deliberate act of remembering. Eadmer says he consciously fixed the details of what he saw at this time in his memory: ‘I can bear a faithful testimony to the truth of this without any doubt, because I observed all that was done with my own eyes, and diligently laboured to commit it to memory.’99 Elsewhere, in the Historia Novorum, he makes a similar comment about himself: ‘it has always from childhood been my way to observe carefully and to impress on my memory any new things which I happened to meet with.’100 These comments suggest it was a self-conscious act, of which he was proud, and in De Reliquiis in particular Eadmer was clearly reflecting on the nature of memory; it is here that he quotes Horace on the special tenacity of memories acquired in youth. Medieval monks deliberately and actively cultivated the art of memory, and training the memory to store and recollect information was a fundamental part of a monastic education. This kind of memory-training made extensive use of mental images: ‘essential to medieval memory technique was the ability to raise up pictures in one’s own mind, to use the power of imagination in meditation and invention’.101 This is precisely what Eadmer is doing in order to rebuild the image of the old church, and all its accompanying associations, in his own memory and in the minds of his readers. In this text, Eadmer’s use of his carefully hoarded memories is a selfconscious act of recollection with a specific purpose, directed to an audience within the community at Christ Church. Part of that purpose relates to the contemporary anxieties and needs of the community in the twelfth century. Eadmer believed, as he writes elsewhere, that in the fire Christ Church had lost not only many books and precious objects but also some important documentary evidence for its rights and privileges, carefully preserved over many generations but now reduced to ashes.102 (In fact, a large quantity of books and charters from pre-conquest Christ Church must have escaped the fire; Canterbury’s archives are among the richest surviving from Anglo-Saxon England.)103 At this time, in common with monasteries throughout England, the monks of Canterbury were engaged in bolstering their monastery’s claims

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to ancient rights, struggling to produce – and sometimes forging – evidence to prove rights for which no documentary proof had probably ever existed. Eadmer offers the fire partly as a useful explanation for the loss of the documentary evidence he believed Christ Church ought to possess. However, his repeated references to the fire suggest this mental reconstruction of the old church is much more than an excuse for forgeries. The loss of the old cathedral meant not only the destruction of documentary proof of rights and privileges but the disappearance of all kinds of tangible signs of the antiquity and dignity of the pre-conquest church, which could be read in the old building but not in the new: its supposed Roman origins, its links to the ancient kings of Kent, its careful arrangements of shrines and altars which were physical reminders of the church’s long history. By recording these details and explaining their significance, Eadmer provides his readers with a mental image in which the physical structure of the old cathedral becomes an encapsulation of the history and practices of the Anglo-Saxon church. This is how he explains the purpose of his text for his audience: These things we have shortly described, in order that the men of the present and future generations, when they find them mentioned in the writings of old, and perceive that the existing things do not coincide with their narratives, may know that all these old things have passed away, and that new ones have taken their place.104 He is working to bridge a gap between ‘the writings of old’ and his readers; the building he describes gives concrete form to all he wants them to know and remember about the Anglo-Saxon church. Canterbury was not the only place where tangible evidence for the Anglo-Saxon past had been destroyed by the time Eadmer was writing: though at Christ Church the building of a new cathedral was enforced by the damage of the fire, many Norman bishops and abbots in the decades after the conquest were engaged in replacing their AngloSaxon churches with larger and more impressive buildings. Even Wulfstan of Worcester, the only bishop of English birth to long outlast the conquest – Eadmer’s ‘sole survivor of the old fathers of the English people’ – tore down his old cathedral at Worcester and built anew, though he wept as he did it.105 Such obliteration of the visible evidence of the English past seems to have troubled

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Figure 30  A reconstruction of the Anglo-Saxon cathedral at Canterbury, based on Eadmer’s description. © Author’s own.

Eadmer as much as the disregard for pre-conquest history and traditions. In this text, he positions himself and his own memories as a connecting thread between past, present and future members of the community of Canterbury, to persuade the next generation of Canterbury monks that they are the inheritors of a long and venerable tradition (Figure 30).

Conclusions It is perhaps not surprising that after a lifetime of writing the stories of other people’s lives, Eadmer should end his career by thinking back across his own life. He was conscious of himself as someone who had lived through a time of great change, a member of a generation which spanned the old world and the new. As a child, he had witnessed at first-hand the trauma of that transitional period of change, in the loss of the old cathedral and the painful divisions within the community, as well as the fear that the pre-conquest history he

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valued so highly would be disregarded by the monastery’s new leaders. One reason he returns so often to these subjects must be that they had a formative influence on him: they were his earliest experiences, and they left lifelong scars. Although there were undoubtedly deeply felt personal reasons why Eadmer came back so often to his memories of the post-conquest years, however, that is not the whole story. His use of his memories has often been seen in purely emotional terms, as nostalgia for the lost world of his childhood: R. W. Southern, for instance, describes how in Eadmer ‘pride of race, the grievances of the conquered, and the love of Canterbury combined to produce a sense of indignation and nostalgia. . . . [H]e nursed his memories and cherished a secret sense of superiority while he watched the downfall of his nation’.106 But Eadmer’s thinking about the pre-conquest church is far from uncritical, his record of his memories much more than nostalgia. Eadmer’s frequent invocation of his status as an eyewitness to the post-conquest years is not simply the musings of an old man who felt sentimental about his childhood; whatever emotional charge these subjects may have held for him, there are other potent reasons for the prominent role he gives to personal memory in his works. He was in every sense a child of Anglo-Saxon England, but he did not want to see the conquest as an end-point or solely a time of loss: it was important to him to show that English history spanned the conquest, that it was a long story still unfolding and that his own times were not irrevocably severed from the Anglo-Saxon past. In recollecting a time of trauma and disunity, he finds positive ways of interpreting past conflict, trying to connect and to reconcile past and present for the benefit of his contemporaries and for future generations. As a historian, and a self-consciously English historian, he uses his own memories to position himself as that point of connection between past and present. It is those memories which give him the authority to describe and to speak for the Anglo-Saxon church, and also to fashion an image of that church as he wished it to be perceived – an image which often reflects the influence Anselm and Lanfranc had on him as much as it does anything from the AngloSaxon past. In the decades after the conquest, as many writers were engaged in a process of assessing, evaluating, rediscovering or recreating the history of Anglo-Saxon England, Eadmer carved out for himself an authoritative and

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influential role as a kind of spokesman for the pre-conquest English church. In this he was very successful; his works, especially the Historia Novorum, significantly shaped how the next generation of Anglo-Norman historians, and those who followed them, interpreted Anglo-Saxon history. Eadmer used his memories, and the authority they conferred on him, to win an argument over a contested past. The church of his childhood might have been destroyed by fire and conquest, but Eadmer was determined that it should not be lost – at least to memory.

Epilogue

New Englands

The first ten years after the conquest were violent and turbulent ones, and this post-conquest decade ended no more peacefully than it had begun. 1076, the year in which Æthelweard’s demonic possession brought chaos to the monks of Canterbury, was also the year of Waltheof ’s execution and of the birth, far away in Russia, of Gytha’s first child, the beginning of a new generation of Harold Godwineson’s family. Waltheof ’s death must have seemed like an ending, and it marked the conclusion of the last serious attempt at English resistance to the Normans. But opportunities abroad had opened up to the generation of young people whose lives had been changed by the conquest, and now a large group of English emigrants took advantage of them. In the mid-1070s a band of Englishmen, accepting that the last hope of resistance to the Normans was gone, decided to emigrate together, not to Scotland or Scandinavia but much further afield: to Byzantium. They travelled to Constantinople, where they offered their services fighting on behalf of the Byzantine emperor and were given a place in his Varangian Guard. Some of them remained there, but others longed for a home of their own and asked for and were granted lands in the Crimean Peninsula, on the north coast of the Black Sea. There they set up a colony which they called ‘New England’, founding settlements which they named after London and York. We know of this emigration not from English sources but chiefly from the thirteenthcentury Chronicon universale anonymi Laudunensis, a chronicle written by an English monk living in France, and the fourteenth-century Játvarðar saga, an Old Norse saga about the life of Edward the Confessor.1 The chronicle and the saga probably shared a common source, which may have been of English

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origin. The information they provide about this emigration may have been elaborated over time, but the basic outline of the story is confirmed by placename evidence in the ‘New England’, and the English colony seems to have lasted well into the thirteenth century.2 One of the leaders of the expedition was named Siward of Gloucester, who has been identified with a known former companion of Hereward. Without the French and Icelandic sources, we would have no idea of the scale or significance of this emigration. Most of those who chose to leave the country – either at this time or in 1068 with Gytha and Agatha and their children – were simply lost to English history, and medieval writers in England did not inquire too closely what had become of them. Though this is partly the result of an absence of information, it might also indicate something more profound. Discussing the changing nature of writing in English between the conquest and the early thirteenth century, Elaine Treharne has characterized English-language texts of this period – frequently sidelined both at the time and in later scholarship – as reflecting, in their silences, the expression of ‘a collective trauma so great that it could not be explicitly articulated for well over a century, a trauma so catastrophic that even mourning could not be fully voiced.’3 The silence in Latin and Anglo-Norman twelfth-century sources about the fates of the conquered generation – the absence of discussion of the children of Harold Godwineson or of the many Englishmen and women who felt unable to remain in England – may be a manifestation of that trauma too. Only those who stayed within the Anglo-Norman orbit, like Hereward, Margaret and Waltheof, have their stories told in English sources. The forms those stories took were shaped by the challenges and priorities of post-conquest society, and especially, in the case of Margaret and Waltheof, by the needs of their descendants – women who derived status, and value as marriage partners for Norman men, from their parents’ English origins. Precisely because those telling these stories needed them to be narratives of transition and continuity, the lives of these saints also contain significant silences. They choose not to acknowledge their subjects’ painful experiences of conquest and do their very best to downplay dispossession, exile and rebellion. Turgot’s Life of Margaret and the Crowland texts about Waltheof do everything they can to smooth over the rupture of the conquest, though it was so fundamental to the lives of

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both these saints: these are the stories of a woman forced into exile and a man executed for rebelling against William the Conqueror, yet they are turned into narratives of Anglo-Norman continuity and cultural harmony. When the same stories are told in different contexts, different elements emerge. Many of the themes which could have been part of Waltheof ’s story, but are not, do appear in the tales about Hereward: the violence of conquest, resentment of injustice and a fear that English culture, scorned and subjugated, is on the verge of being irrevocably lost. The first people who mourned Waltheof might have seen him, too, as a Hereward figure, a martyr to Norman injustice – his death a sign that ‘slaughter in England will be a long time ceasing’, as his poet Thorkell put it. For those who took control of how Waltheof ’s life was recorded in the twelfth century, however, it was necessary to write those uncomfortable emotions out of his story. The reactions to his life may also suggest that the fear shown by the author of the Gesta Herwardi of Norman contempt for English culture was not imaginary or exaggerated. Although by the first decade of the twelfth century Henry I, in marrying Edith/Matilda, had signalled that the Norman kings sought continuity with the Anglo-Saxon royal line, not all his Norman followers approved: when they were angry with him, William of Malmesbury records, they would mock the king and his English wife by sarcastically calling them ‘Godric and Godgifu’.4 The sneer is full of disdain for English culture and for Henry’s choice to align himself with it, and it was against just such disdain that the author of the Gesta Herwardi felt he was battling. Of all the stories we have looked at, the tales about Hereward seem to have been the most genuinely popular, their variations bearing witness to a lively, if mostly local, interest in his legend throughout the twelfth century and long afterwards. Hereward is the figure about whose real experiences in the years after the conquest we know least, since his life is almost lost within a mass of legendary accretions – but for that very reason, we can conclude that the story of this anti-Norman rebel spoke to Fenland audiences in some important ways. It continued to be a tale they wanted to tell. Many of the stories we have considered in this book have been those of the social elite: the royal and aristocratic families of Anglo-Saxon England were those most severely affected by the conquest, and it was their lives which contemporary and later writers

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took most trouble to record. But Hereward – though sometimes claimed by elite audiences – was not only a hero of the elite, and those who told and valued his story must have included a much wider cross-section of society. Their own lives may not have been as dramatically impacted by the conquest as those who had more to lose, but it seems suggestive of their anxieties and preoccupations that they found meaning in the figure of Hereward, defender of the Fens and fighter for the dignity of the conquered English. Though we do not know what happened to the historical Hereward, the suggestion in some versions of his legend that he found a way of supporting the Norman regime without compromising his integrity, and thus regained his father’s lands, reflects what seems to have been the real experience of some English landowners in the years after the conquest, at least among the lower levels of the aristocracy.5 It makes his story not only one of rebellion and resistance but also of mutual accommodation and acceptance – a way of bridging the divide between the pre- and post-conquest world. That kind of carefully managed transition is also reflected in the story of St Margaret, and there it has a strong gendered component: a royal or aristocratic woman, through her changing roles as daughter, wife and mother, can provide a powerful form of continuity between past, present and future. This aspect of Margaret’s story also seems, in part, to reflect the wider context of aristocratic female experience in the post-conquest years, not only in her own generation but in the next, among the contemporaries of Edith/Matilda and Maud.6 Yet still there are silences – tales which remain untold. If we see stories of dispossession explored anywhere in twelfth- and thirteenth-century literature, it is in Anglo-Norman romances of the kind from which the Gesta Herwardi borrows, which so often tell of young men and women forced out of their inheritance, pushed into unwanted marriages or compelled to seek adventures abroad. The popularity of such stories in the centuries after the conquest might partly reflect, in an oblique way, an awareness that such experiences had indeed been those of the conquered generation. But the absence of any such romance about Edgar Ætheling or the sons of Harold Godwineson reveals the limits to the imaginative possibilities such stories could explore. The happy resolution of such narratives depends on the triumphant return to the homeland, the son who regains his father’s throne – and though a restoration of the paternal

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inheritance could be imagined for a minor landowner like Hereward, it was beyond the bounds of imagination for Edgar or Harold’s sons.7 For them the family line must continue, if it could, through their sisters alone, but the agency of these women was also, of course, heavily circumscribed and controlled. The heroines of romance, like the princess Hereward saves at her wedding feast, might be threatened with forced marriage by powerful kings, but they are usually rescued just in time, set free to marry as they choose. Whether women like Margaret, Gunnhild or Gytha might ever have wished for such deliverance as they embarked on marriage, we will never know. Although the hagiographical texts about Margaret and Waltheof gloss over their experiences as survivors of conquest, for Eadmer, as for the anonymous writer of Margaret’s story in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, it is the intersection between hagiography and history which provides the most helpful means of thinking about loss. In their different ways, both these English writers are seeking to explore what God intended by allowing England to be conquered. They reflect on questions of fate and providence, trying to understand how the suffering of conquest might be a divine punishment for national sins – but if so, why that punishment was visited on the innocent, on women and children as well as on warriors and kings. Here history could provide some comfort. Both steeped in an understanding of English history which stretched back centuries before 1066, these writers found consolation in seeing the conquest as part of a much longer story. For them the Norman Conquest was not the beginning nor the end of English history, only the latest chapter in England’s story – and England was a country with a future as well as a past. Their deep sense of loss is tempered with hope: those who lived through the conquest have survived to pass their history, and their stories, to generations yet to come.

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Introduction 1 For early interpretations of 1066 as a pivotal date, see Monika Otter, ‘1066: The Moment of Transition in Two Narratives of the Norman Conquest’, Speculum 74 (1999): 565–86; Elisabeth van Houts, ‘The Memory of 1066 in Written and Oral Traditions’, Anglo-Norman Studies 19 (1997): 167–79. For a comprehensive overview of the Norman Conquest in English historical writing, see George Garnett, The Norman Conquest in English History, Volume 1: A Broken Chain? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 2 On childhood and adolescence in Anglo-Saxon England, see Sally Crawford, Childhood in Anglo-Saxon England (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), and Susan Irvine and Winfried Rudolf (eds.), Childhood and Adolescence in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018). 3 Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity 1066–c. 1220 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 20–31. 4 Patrick Wormald, ‘Bede, the Bretwaldas and the Origins of the Gens Anglorum’, in The Times of Bede: Studies in Early English Christian Society and Its Historian, ed. Patrick Wormald and Stephen Baxter (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 106–34; Sarah Foot, ‘The Making of Angelcynn: English Identity before the Norman Conquest’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6 (1996): 25–49; Stephen Harris, Race and Ethnicity in Anglo-Saxon Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), 45–82. 5 Katherine Cross, Heirs of the Vikings: History and Identity in Normandy and England, c. 950–c. 1015 (York: York Medieval Press, 2018); Eleanor Parker, Dragon Lords: The History and Legends of Viking England (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018). 6 On Cnut’s conquest and reign, see M. K. Lawson, Cnut: England’s Viking King, 1016– 1035 (Stroud: The History Press, 2011); Elaine Treharne, Living through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020–1220 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Timothy Bolton, The Empire of Cnut the Great: Conquest and the Consolidation of Power in Northern Europe in the Early Eleventh Century (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Timothy Bolton,

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Notes Cnut the Great (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); Laura Ashe and Emily Ward (eds.), Conquests in Eleventh-Century England: 1016, 1066 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2020).

7 Roberta Frank, ‘King Cnut in the Verse of His Skalds’, in The Reign of Cnut: King of England, Denmark and Norway, ed. Alexander R. Rumble (London: Leicester University Press, 1994), 106–24; Matthew Townend, ‘Contextualizing the Knútsdrápur: Skaldic Praise-Poetry at the Court of Cnut’, Anglo-Saxon England 30 (2001): 145–79; Parker, Dragon Lords, 29–44. 8 On Norman interpretation and legitimization of the conquest, see George Garnett, Conquered England: Kingship, Succession and Tenure (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 9 For different views on the nature and timing of this process, see John Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity, and Political Values (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2000); Thomas, The English and the Normans; George Garnett, ‘Franci et Angli: The Legal Distinctions between Peoples after the Conquest’, Anglo-Norman Studies 8 (1986): 109–37; Ian Short, ‘Tam Angli Quam Franci: SelfDefinition in Anglo-Norman England’, Anglo-Norman Studies 18 (1996), 153–75. 10 For a helpful summary of terminology, discussing one rare use of a composite term, see Elisabeth M. C. van Houts and Rosalind C. Love (eds.), The Warenne (Hyde) Chronicle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), lxiii–lxviii. 11 Geffrei Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis: History of the English, ed. Ian Short (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Ian Short, ‘Patrons and Polyglots: French Literature in Twelfth-Century England’, Anglo-Norman Studies 14 (1992): 229–49. On other Anglo-Norman interpretations of English history, see Laura Ashe, Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 12 Elaine Treharne, ‘Categorization, Periodization: The Silence of (the) English in the Twelfth Century’, New Medieval Literatures 8 (2006): 247–73; Treharne, Living through Conquest. 13 Thomas, The English and the Normans, 107; Hugh M. Thomas, ‘The Significance and Fate of the Native English Landholders of 1086’, The English Historical Review 118 (2003), 303–3. 14 Frank Barlow, The English Church 1066–1154 (London: Longman, 1979), 57–8. 15 On the English after 1066, see Ann Williams, The English and the Norman Conquest (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1995), and Thomas, The English and the Normans, 105–236. 16 Williams, The English and the Norman Conquest, 2. 17 Pauline Stafford, ‘Women and the Norman Conquest’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 4 (1994): 221–49; Pauline Stafford, ‘Women in Domesday Book’, Reading Medieval Studies 15 (1989): 75–94; Eleanor Searle, ‘Women and the

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Legitimisation of Succession at the Norman Conquest’, Anglo-Norman Studies 3 (1981): 159–70 and 226–9; Cecily Clark, ‘Women’s Names in Post-conquest England: Observations and Speculations’, in Words, Names and History: Selected Papers of Cecily Clark, ed. Peter Jackson (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995), 117–43; Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Intermarriage in Eleventh-Century England’, in Normandy and Its Neighbours, 900–1250: Essays for David Bates, ed. David Crouch and Kathleen Thompson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 237–70; Thomas, The English and the Normans, 138–60. 18 Elisabeth van Houts (ed.), The Normans in Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 129–30. 19 van Houts, ‘Intermarriage in Eleventh-Century England’. 20 For discussion of this scene, see Catherine E. Karkov, ‘Gendering the Battle? Male and Female in the Bayeux Tapestry’, in King Harold II and the Bayeux Tapestry, ed. Gale R. Owen-Crocker (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2005), 139–47. For analysis of the tapestry and the contexts of its production, see Richard Gameson (ed.), The Study of the Bayeux Tapestry (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1997); Elizabeth Carson Pastan, Stephen D. White and Kate Gilbert (eds.), The Bayeux Tapestry and Its Contexts: A Reassessment (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014); Dan Terkla, Michael J. Lewis, and Gale R. Owen-Crocker (eds.), The Bayeux Tapestry: New Approaches (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2017). 21 For examples, see Martin Brett and D. A. Woodman (eds.), The Long Twelfth-Century View of the Anglo-Saxon Past (London: Routledge, 2016); Jay Paul Gates and Brian O’Camb (eds.), Remembering the Medieval Present: Generative Uses of England’s PreConquest Past, 10th to 15th Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 2019). 22 Thomas A. Bredehoft, ‘History and Memory in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, in Readings in Medieval Texts: Interpreting Old and Middle English Literature, ed. David Johnson and Elaine Treharne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 109–21. 23 On the evolution of the different versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, see Pauline Stafford, After Alfred: Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and Chroniclers, 900–1150 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), and for a translation of the texts, Michael Swanton (trans.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (London: Phoenix Press, 2000). 24 Elisabeth M. C. van Houts (ed.), The Gesta Normannorum Ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992–5); William of Poitiers, The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers, ed. R. H. C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998). 25 For an overview of historical writing in England in this period, see Andrew Galloway, ‘Writing History in England’, in The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 255–83; Garnett, The Norman Conquest in English History, 13–80. 26 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), vol. 1, 424–5.

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27 For discussion of this point, see Garnett, The Norman Conquest in English History, 13–80. 28 Judith Weiss, ‘Insular Beginnings: Anglo-Norman Romance’, in A Companion to Romance: From Classical to Contemporary, ed. Corinne Saunders (Malden: Blackwell, 2004), 26–44; Ashe, Fiction and History; Short, ‘Patrons and Polyglots’. 29 For one example, see Glyn S. Burgess and Leslie C. Brook (eds.), The Anglo-Norman Lay of Haveloc (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015); Eleanor Parker, ‘Havelok and the Danes in England: History, Legend and Romance’, Review of English Studies 67 (2016): 428–47. 30 On twelfth-century writing in English, see Treharne, ‘Categorization, Periodization’; Mark Faulkner, ‘Archaism, Belatedness and Modernisation: “Old” English in the Twelfth Century’, Review of English Studies 63 (2012): 179–203.

Chapter 1 1 On the rebellions of 1068–9, see William E. Kapelle, The Norman Conquest of the North: The Region and Its Transformation, 1100–1135 (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 109–15. 2 For the text of the Gesta Herwardi, see T. D. Hardy and C. T. Martin (eds.), Lestoire des Engles solum la translacion Maistre Geffrei Gaimar (London: Cambridge University Press, 1888–9), vol. 1, 339–404; for a translation, Michael Swanton, Three Lives of the Last Englishmen (New York: Garland, 1984), 43–88, and T. Ohlgren (ed.), Medieval Outlaws: Ten Tales in Modern English (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998), 12–60. 3 On this region in the early medieval period, see Susan Oosthuizen, The Anglo-Saxon Fenland (Oxford: Windgather Press, 2017); H. C. Darby, The Medieval Fenland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940). 4 On these texts and their audiences, see Jennifer Paxton, ‘Textual Communities in the English Fenlands: A Lay Audience for Monastic Chronicles?’, Anglo-Norman Studies 26 (2004): 123–37; Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England (London: Routledge, 1996), vol. 1, 269–86. 5 Janet Fairweather (trans.), Liber Eliensis: A History of the Isle of Ely from the Seventh Century to the Twelfth (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), 3. ‘Ely stagnensium maxima insularum, quam omnino dignam titulo predicare incipimus, opibus et oppidis magnificam, silvis, vineis et aquis enim eque laudabilem, omni fructu, fetu ac germine uberrimam[;] dicimus autem Ely Anglice, id est a copia anguillarum, que in eisdem capiuntur paludibus, nomen sumpsit, sicut Beda Anglorum disertissimus docet’, E. O. Blake (ed.), Liber Eliensis (London: Royal Historical Society, 1962), 2.

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6 For Ramsey, see W. Dunn Macray (ed.), Chronicon Abbatiæ Rameseiensis (London: Longman, 1886), 7–11, and Susan B. Edgington (trans.), Ramsey Abbey’s Book of Benefactors (Huntingdon: Hakedes, 1998), Part 1, 5–8; for Peterborough, see W. T. Mellows (ed.), The Chronicle of Hugh Candidus (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), 2; for discussion, Oosthuizen, The Anglo-Saxon Fenland, 5–6. 7 Sarah Harlan-Haughey, The Ecology of the English Outlaw in Medieval Literature: From Fen to Greenwood (London: Routledge, 2016), 44–7. 8 ‘Numquid et vos ex collega illius sceleratissimi Herwardi estis, qui tantos dolo oppressit, et tam multos secum ad nefanda opera contraxit? Proditur nunc domino nostro comiti ubinam malignus ille sit, condignos vos cum eo mercede et honore habituros, si adquiescitis. Quae vero infesta vis inimici [n]os ulterius ad hoc sollicitet, in invisa ista palude ultra habitare et per luteam paludem atque inter aquarum gurgites et arundinum asperitates sequi inermem’, Hardy and Martin, Lestorie, 375. 9 Susan Irvine (ed.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, MS. E (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), 88. 10 J. Hayward, ‘Hereward the Outlaw’, Journal of Medieval History 14 (1988): 293–304; Cyril Hart, The Danelaw (London: The Hambledon Press, 1992), 625–48; David Roffe, ‘Hereward’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), https://doi​.org​/10​ .1093​/ref​:odnb​/13074 (accessed December 2020). 11 C. W. Foster and Thomas Longley (eds.), The Lincolnshire Domesday and the Lindsey Survey (Horncastle: Lincoln Record Society, 1924), 58; Williams, The English and the Norman Conquest, 50. 12 David Roffe, ‘Hereward “the Wake” and the Barony of Bourne: A Reassessment of a Fenland Legend’, Lincolnshire History & Archaeology 29 (1994): 7–10. 13 For the Peterborough Chronicle’s account of events between 1066 and 1071, see Irvine, ASC E, 86–90, and Swanton, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, 195–208. On the dating of this version of the chronicle, see Stafford, After Alfred, 297–320, and Cecily Clark (ed.), The Peterborough Chronicle 1070–1154 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). 14 Irvine, ASC E, 87. 15 ‘Syððon comen ealle dræuednysse 7 ealle ifele to þone mynstre. God hit gemyltse!’, Irvine, ASC E, 87. 16 ‘þet englisce folc of eall þa feonlandes comen to heom, wendon þet he sceoldon winnon eall þet land’, Irvine, ASC E, 88. 17 ‘Hi namen þære swa mycele gold 7 seolfre 7 swa manega gersumas on sceat 7 on scrud 7 on bokes swa nan man ne mæi oðer tællen, sægdon þet hi hit dyden for ðes mynstres holdscipe’, Irvine, ASC E, 89. 18 ‘Þa gewende Morkere eorl to Elig on scipe . . . 7 com se biscop Egelwine 7 Siward Bearn 7 fela hund manna mid heom into Elig. 7 þa þe se cyng Willelm þet

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geaxode, þa bead he ut scipfyrde 7 landfyrde 7 þet land abutan sæt 7 brygce gewrohte 7 inn for, 7 seo scipfyrde on þa sæhealfe. 7 þa utlagan þa ealle on hand eodan, þet wæs Egelwine biscop 7 Morkere eorl 7 ealle þa þe mid heom wæron buton Herewarde ane 7 ealle þa þe mid him woldon, 7 he hi ahtlice ut lædde’, Irvine, ASC E, 90. 19 A closely related entry also appears in MS. D of the Chronicle; on their common source at this point, see Irvine, ASC E, lxxxii–lxxxiii. 20 Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. Diana Greenway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 396. 21 Irvine, ASC E, 89. On this aspect of the story, see Lesley Abrams, ‘The Anglo-Saxons and the Christianization of Scandinavia’, Anglo-Saxon England 24 (1995): 213–49. 22 Blake, Liber Eliensis, xxxiv–xxxvi; a slightly later date is suggested by Paul Dalton, ‘The Outlaw Hereward “the Wake”: His Companions and Enemies’, in Outlaws in Medieval and Early Modern England: Crime, Government and Society, c. 1066–c. 1600, ed. John C. Appleby and Paul Dalton (London: Routledge, 2016), 7–36. The sole manuscript, known as the ‘Book of Robert of Swaffham’, is Peterborough Cathedral MS. 1, on deposit in Cambridge University Library; see Janet D. Martin (ed.), The Cartularies and Registers of Peterborough Abbey (Peterborough: Northamptonshire Record Society, 1978), 7–12. 23 Douglas Gray, Simple Forms: Essays on Medieval English Popular Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 55–7. 24 Joanna Huntington, ‘‘The Quality of His Virtus Proved Him a Perfect Man’: Hereward “the Wake” and the Representation of Lay Masculinity’, in Religious Men and Masculine Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. P. H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013), 77–93 (79). 25 ‘opera magnifici Anglorum gentis Heruuardi’, Hardy and Martin, Lestorie, 339. 26 ‘Ex Anglorum gente multi robustissimi memorantur viri, et Herwardus Exul præclarissimus inter præclaros et insignis miles cum insignioribus habetur’, Hardy and Martin, Lestorie, 341. 27 Hugh M. Thomas, ‘The Gesta Herwardi, the English, and Their Conquerors’, AngloNorman Studies 21 (1999): 213–32 (214). 28 Rolf H. Bremmer, Jr., ‘The Gesta Herwardi: Transforming an Anglo-Saxon into an Englishman’, in People and Texts: Relationships in Medieval Literature, ed. Thea Summerfield and Keith Busby (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), 19–42 (42). 29 ‘præcipuus illis in locis jocus erat et novus’, Hardy and Martin, Lestorie, 351. 30 Hardy and Martin, Lestorie, 366. 31 ‘fabula Danorum’, Hardy and Martin, Lestorie, 343.

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32 ‘tripliciter cum suis sociis more Girviorum’, Hardy and Martin, Lestorie, 352. 33 ‘pauca et dispersa folia, partim stillicidio putrefactis et abolitis et partim abscissione divisis’, Hardy and Martin, Lestorie, 339. 34 Hardy and Martin, Lestorie, 339. 35 ‘viros . . . statura proceri et magni et nimiæ fortitudinis’, Hardy and Martin, Lestorie, 340. 36 Bremmer, ‘The Gesta Herwardi’, 34. 37 Compare William of Malmesbury’s comments on Coleman’s English Life of St Wulfstan: William of Malmesbury, Saints’ Lives: Lives of SS. Wulfstan, Dunstan, Patrick, Benignus and Indract, ed. M. Winterbottom and R. M. Thomson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), xxxiv–xxxxvi. 38 ‘Hujus enim memorati presbyteri erat studium, omnes actus gigantum et bellatorum ex fabulis antiquorum, aut ex fideli relatione, ad edificationem audientium congregare, et ob memoriam Angliæ literis commendare’, Hardy and Martin, Lestorie, 339. 39 Gray, Simple Forms, 56. 40 Hardy and Martin, Lestorie, 341, 343. 41 ‘agnomen Exulis adeptus est, in decimo octavo ætatis anno a patre et patria expulsus’, Hardy and Martin, Lestorie, 342–3. 42 Rosalind Field, ‘The King over the Water: Exile-and-Return Revisited’, in Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, ed. Corinne Saunders (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005), 41–53; Diane Speed, ‘The Construction of the Nation in Medieval English Romance’, in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), 135–57. 43 Laura Ashe, ‘“Exile-and-Return” and English Law: The Anglo-Saxon Inheritance of Insular Romance’, Literature Compass 3 (2006): 300–17. 44 Williams, The English and the Norman Conquest, 61–2; Lucy Marten, ‘The Rebellion of 1075 and Its Impact in East Anglia’, in Medieval East Anglia, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2005), 168–82. 45 Williams, The English and the Norman Conquest, 61–2. 46 Hardy and Martin, Lestorie, 390. 47 Simon Keynes, ‘Edgar, rex admirabilis’, in Edgar, King of the English 959–975: New Interpretations, ed. Donald Scragg (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2008), 3–58 (31–2, 53–7); Dorothy Whitelock, ‘The Dealings of the Kings of England with Northumbria in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries’, in The Anglo-Saxons: Studies in Some Aspects of Their History and Culture, ed. Peter Clemoes (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1959), 70–88. 48 Blake, Liber Eliensis, 106.

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49 Whitelock, ‘Dealings of the Kings of England with Northumbria’. 50 Irvine, ASC E, 59. 51 Thomas A. Bredehoft, Textual Histories: Readings in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 104–8. 52 J. M. Bately (ed.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, MS. A (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1986), 77. 53 Anne L. Klinck, The Old English Elegies: A Critical Edition and Genre Study (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 225–30. 54 Jayne Carroll, ‘Engla Waldend, Rex Admirabilis: Poetic Representations of King Edgar’, Review of English Studies 58 (2007): 113–32; Catherine A. M. Clarke, Writing Power in Anglo-Saxon England: Texts, Hierarchies, Economies (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), 69–72. 55 Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Hereward and Flanders’, Anglo-Saxon England 22 (1999): 201–23. 56 Roffe, ‘Hereward “the Wake”’, 7. 57 Laura Ashe, ‘The Hero and His Realm in Medieval English Romance’, in Boundaries in Medieval Romance, ed. Neil Cartlidge (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008), 129–47. 58 Parker, Dragon Lords, 126–38. 59 Swanton, Three Lives, 82. 60 Mary Danielli, ‘Initiation Ceremonial from Old Norse Literature’, Folklore 56/2 (1945): 229–45. 61 Andy Orchard, ‘Hereward and Grettir: Brothers from Another Mother?’, in New Norse Studies: Essays on the Literature and Culture of Medieval Scandinavia, ed. Jeffrey Turco (New York: Cornell University Press, 2015), 7–59. 62 Parker, Dragon Lords, 61–138. 63 Judith Weiss, ‘Thomas and the Earl: Literary and Historical Contexts for the Romance of Horn’, in Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, ed. Rosalind Field (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), 1–13. 64 This aspect of the Gesta seems partly to reflect wider twelfth-century Anglo-Norman interest in the cultures of other parts of Britain and Ireland, on which see Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century, 3–109. 65 ‘qui non impar Godwino filio Guthlaci, qui in fabulis antiquorum valde prædicantur’, Hardy and Martin, Lestorie, 372. 66 Bertram Colgrave (ed.), Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 76–7; R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England

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(London: Methuen, 1952), 32; W. F. Bolton, ‘The Background and Meaning of Guthlac’, Journal of English and Philology 61 (1962): 595–603. 67 van Houts, ‘Hereward and Flanders’, 206–15. 68 ‘aut potius alienigenis hiis . . . subacti fierent, sicut gens Anglorum a Francigenis, nec subdita’, Hardy and Martin, Lestorie, 360. 69 ‘visitare paternam domum et patriam volens, externorum ditioni nunc subjectam et multorum exactionibus pene subversam, si forte ullo in loco aliqui amicorum vel propinquorum adhuc respirarent’, Hardy and Martin, Lestorie, 364. 70 Swanton, Three Lives, 63; Hugh Magennis, ‘The Cup as Symbol and Metaphor in Old English Literature’, Speculum 60/3 (1985): 517–36. 71 On the relationship between Hereward’s story and later outlaw legends, see J. C. Holt, Robin Hood (London: Thames and Hudson, 1982), 64–75; Maurice Keen, The Outlaws of Medieval Legend (London: Routledge, 2000), 10–38; Timothy S. Jones, Outlawry in Medieval Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 72 The relationship between the text of the Gesta Herwardi and the Liber Eliensis is discussed by Blake, Liber Eliensis, xxxiv–xxxvi. On the account of the siege of Ely, see also Blake, Liber Eliensis, liv–lvii, and Simon Keynes, ‘Ely Abbey 672–1109’, in A History of Ely Cathedral, ed. Peter Meadows and Nigel Ramsey (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2003), 3–58. 73 Fairweather, Liber Eliensis, 203. ‘Et nunc de Anglia quid dicam? Quid posteris referam? Ve tibi est Anglia, que olim sancta prole fuisti angelica, sed nunc pro peccatis valde gemis anxia. Naturalem regem tuum perdidisti et alienigene bello cum ingenti tuorum sanguine fuso succubuisti. Filii tui miserabiliter in te occisi sunt et consiliarii principesque tui victi seu necati vel exheredati sunt,’ Blake, Liber Eliensis, 171. 74 Fairweather, Liber Eliensis, 175. 75 Blake, Liber Eliensis, 173–95; Fairweather, Liber Eliensis, 204–31. 76 Swanton, Three Lives, 75; Fairweather, Liber Eliensis, 217. 77 Eleanor Parker, ‘“Merry Sang the Monks”: Cnut’s Poetry and the Liber Eliensis’, Scandinavica 57 (2018): 14–38. 78 Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, 296–309. 79 ‘un des meillurs del regïon, / Normans l’ourent deserité’, Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, 296–7. 80 Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, 302–3. 81 On Hereward’s companions, see Dalton, ‘The Outlaw Hereward’, 15–23. 82 For a possible identification, see van Houts, ‘Hereward and Flanders’, 221–2. 83 Weiss, ‘Thomas and the Earl’, 12.

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84 ‘si Hereward en fust guarni, / le plus hardi semblast cuard’, Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, 304–5. 85 ‘gentement s’est contenuz: / si se contint com un leün’, Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, 304–5. 86 Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, 308–9. 87 Jane Zatta, ‘Gaimar’s Rebels: Outlaw Heroes and the Creation of Authority in Twelfth-Century England’, Essays in Medieval Studies 16 (1999): 27–40. 88 Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, 435; Dalton, ‘The Outlaw Hereward’, 32–5. 89 van Houts and Love, The Warenne (Hyde) Chronicle, 24–7, and Appendix 2, 103–6. 90 Orchard, ‘Hereward and Grettir’, 50; van Houts and Love, The Warenne (Hyde) Chronicle, 26, n. 49. 91 van Houts and Love, The Warenne (Hyde) Chronicle, 27. 92 Mellows, Chronicle of Hugh Candidus, 77–82. 93 ‘melius illa Dani seruarent ad opus ecclesie quam Franci’, Mellows, Chronicle of Hugh Candidus, 79. 94 Extracts from the Gesta also survive in another Peterborough manuscript; see Nicholas Karn and Edmund King, ‘The Peterborough Chronicles’, Northamptonshire Past and Present 61 (2008): 17–29. 95 The section of the chronicle attributed to Pseudo-Ingulf was printed in William Fulman, Rerum Anglicarum Scriptorum Veterum (Oxford: E Theatro Sheldoniano, 1684), vol. 1, and translated in Henry T. Riley, Ingulph’s Chronicle of the Abbey of Croyland, with the continuations by Peter of Blois and Anonymous Writers (London: H. G. Bohn, 1854). 96 Riley, Ingulph’s Chronicle, 135–6. 97 Riley, Ingulph’s Chronicle, 136. 98 Francisque Michel (ed.), Chroniques anglo-normandes (Rouen: E. Frère, 1836–40), vol. 2, xii–xv; Roffe, ‘Hereward “the Wake”’; Edmund King, ‘The Origins of the Wake Family: The Early History of the Barony of Bourne in Lincolnshire’, Northamptonshire Past and Present 5 (1973–7): 166–76. 99 Riley, Ingulph’s Chronicle, 141–3, 258–9. 100 Riley, Ingulph’s Chronicle, 141–3. 101 M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, England 1066–1307 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 311. 102 Riley, Ingulph’s Chronicle, 142. 103 Orderic Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969–80), vol. 2, 224–58.

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104 Andrew Wawn, ‘Hereward, the Danelaw and the Victorians’, in Vikings and the Danelaw, ed. James Graham-Campbell, Michael Hall, Judith Jesch and David N. Parsons (Oxford: Oxbow, 2001), 357–68; Michael Young, ‘History as Myth: Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake’, Studies in the Novel 17 (1985): 174–88. 105 Young, ‘History as Myth’, 179.

Chapter 2 1 John of Worcester, The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. R. R. Darlington, P. McGurk and J. Bray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), vol. 2, 502–5; a similar account is given by William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, 318–19. 2 Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, trans. Francis Joseph Tschan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 91–2; for discussion, Catherine Keene, Saint Margaret, Queen of the Scots: A Life in Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 11–13. 3 Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, 242–53. Gaimar mistakenly calls Edward ‘Edgar’. 4 Keene, Saint Margaret, 9–37; Gabriel Ronay, The Lost King of England: The East European Adventures of Edward the Exile (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989); Nicholas Hooper, ‘Edgar the Ætheling: Anglo-Saxon Prince, Rebel and Crusader’, Anglo-Saxon England 14 (1985): 197–214. 5 For a summary of the theories about Agatha’s parentage, see Keene, Saint Margaret, 13–17. 6 G. P. Cubbin (ed.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, MS. D (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1996), 74; John of Worcester, Chronicle, vol. 2, 574–7; Hooper, ‘Edgar the Ætheling’, 201. 7 On Margaret’s education, see Keene, Saint Margaret, 33–4. 8 On the much-discussed question of Edward’s plans for the succession, see Stephen Baxter, ‘Edward the Confessor and the Succession Question’, in Edward the Confessor: The Man and the Legend, ed. Richard Mortimer (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2009), 77–118; Tom Licence, ‘Edward the Confessor and the Succession Question: A Fresh Look at the Sources’, Anglo-Norman Studies 39 (2016): 113–27; Tom Licence, Edward the Confessor: Last of the Royal Blood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020), 227–32. 9 On D and its relation to other versions of the Chronicle, see Stafford, After Alfred, 233–67. 10 Charles Plummer and John Earle (eds.), Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, with Supplementary Extracts from the Others (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892–9), vol. 2, lxxviii; Dorothy Whitelock (ed.), English Historical Documents c. 500–1042 (London: Routledge, 1996), vol. 1, 118–19; Cubbin, ASC D, lxxiv.

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11 Stafford, After Alfred, 255–7. 12 Pauline Stafford, ‘Archbishop Ealdred and the D Chronicle’, in Normandy and Its Neighbours, 900–1250: Essays for David Bates, ed. David Crouch and Kathleen Thompson (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 135–56. 13 William of Malmesbury, Saints’ Lives, 138–9; Thomas A. Bredehoft, Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 191–4. 14 A word is missing here in the manuscript; ‘face’ is a conjectured substitution. 15 ‘Her com Eadward æþeling to Englalande, se wæs Eadwerdes broðor sunu kynges, Eadmund cing, Irensid wæs geclypod for his snellscipe. Þisne æþeling Cnut cyng hæfde forsend on Ungerland to beswicane, ac he þær geþeh to godan men, swa him God uðe, 7 him wel gebyrede, swa þæt he begeat þæs caseres maga to wife, 7 bi þære fægerne bearnteam gestrynde, seo wæs Agathes gehaten. Ne wiston we for hwylcan intingan þæt gedon wærð, þæt he ne moste his mæges Eadweardes cynges [ . . . ] geseon. Wala, þæt wæs hreowlic sið 7 hearmlic eallre þissere þeode, þæt he swa raðe his lif geendade, þæs þe he to Englalande com, for ungesælhðe þissere earman þeode’, Cubbin, ASC D, 75. 16 Simon Keynes, ‘The Crowland Psalter and the Sons of King Edmund Ironside’, Bodleian Library Record XI:6 (1985): 359–70. 17 Cubbin, ASC D, 66 (entry for 1042), 80 (entry for 1066). 18 ‘Eadwine 7 Morkere him beheton þæt hi mid him feohtan woldon, ac swa hit æfre forðlicor beon sceolde, swa wearð hit fram dæge to dæge lætre 7 wyrre eallswa hit æt þam ende eall geferde’, Cubbin, ASC D, 80–1. On Edwin and Morcar’s actions in this period, see Stephen Baxter, The Earls of Mercia: Lordship and Power in Late AngloSaxon England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 55–7. 19 ‘þæt he wolde þisne þeodscype swa wel haldan swa ænig kyngc ætforan him betst dyde, gif hi him holde beon woldon’, Cubbin, ASC D, 81. 20 David Bates, William the Conqueror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 275–6. 21 ‘a syððan hit yflade swiðe. Wurðe god se ende þonne God wylle’, Cubbin, ASC D, 81. 22 ‘aa æfter þam hit yfelode swiðe’, Cubbin, ASC D, 47. 23 ‘eallswa heom God uðe for folces synnon’, Cubbin, ASC D, 80. 24 ‘Þæs sumeres Eadgar cild for ut mid his modor Agatha, 7 his twam sweostran, Margareta 7 Cristina, 7 Mærlaswegen, 7 fela godra manna mid heom, 7 comon to Scotlande on Malcholomes cyninges gryð, 7 he hi ealle underfeng. Ða begann se cyngc Malcholom gyrnan his sweostor him to wife, Margaretan, ac he 7 his men ealle lange wiðcwædon, 7 eac heo sylf wiðsoc, 7 cwæð þæt heo hine ne nanne habban wolde, gyf hire seo uplice arfæstnys geunnan wolde, þæt heo on mægðhade mihtigan Drihtne mid lichomlicre heortan on þisan life sceortan on clænre forhæfednysse cweman mihte. Se kyng befealh georne hire breðer oð þæt he cwæð ia wið, 7 eac

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he elles ne dorste, for þan þe hi on his anwald becumene wæron. Hit wearð þa swa geworden swa God foresceawode on ær, 7 elles hit beon ne mihte, eallswa he sylf on his godspelle sæið þæt furðon an spearwa on gryn ne mæg befeallan forutan his foresceawunge. Se forewitola Scyppend wiste on ær hwæt he of hyre gedon habban wolde, for þan þe heo sceolde on þan lande Godes lof geeacnian 7 þone kyng gerihtan of þam dweliandan pæðe 7 gebegean hine to beteran wege 7 his leode samod, 7 alegcean þa unþeawas þe seo þeod ær beeode, eallswa heo syððan dyde. Se kyng hi þa underfeng, þeah hit hire unþances wære, 7 him gelicade hire þeawas, 7 þancode Gode þe him swylce gemæccean mihtiglice forgeaf, 7 wislice hine beþohte, swa he full witter wæs, 7 awende hine sylfne to Gode, 7 ælce unsiuernysse oferhogode. Be þam se apostol Paulus, ealra þeoda lareow, cwæð, ‘Saluabitur uir infidelis per mulierem fidelem, sic et mulier infidelis per uirum fidelem et reliqua’, þæt is on uran geþeode, ‘Ful oft se ungeleaffulla wer bið gehalgad 7 gehæled þurh þæt rihtwise wif, 7 swa gelice þæt wif þurh geleaffulne wer’. Ðeos foresprecene cwen seoððan on þam lande manege nytwyrðe dæda gefremede Gode to lofe, 7 eac on þa kynewisan wel geþeh, eallswa hire gecynde wæs. Of geleaffullan 7 æðelan cynne heo wæs asprungon, hire fæder wæs Eadward æþeling, Eadmundes sunu kynges, Eadmund Æþelreding, Æþelred Eadgaring, Eadgar Eadreding, 7 swa forð on þæt cynecynn, 7 hire modorcynn gæð to Heinrice casere, þe hæfde anwald ofer Rome’, Cubbin, ASC D, 82–3. 25 On the style and unusual features of this entry, see Stafford, After Alfred, 248–9; Bredehoft, Textual Histories, 113–15; Bredehoft, Authors, Audiences, and Old English Verse, 189–91. 26 Licence, Edward the Confessor, 230; Keene, Saint Margaret, 39–51. 27 Mary Clayton and Hugh Magennis (eds.), The Old English Lives of St. Margaret (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 114–15. 28 These two allusions appear in Book 2 of the Historia Ecclesiastica, chapters 11 and 13; Bede, The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Judith McClure and Roger Collins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 89–96. 29 Mohamed Eric Rahman Lacey, Birds and Bird-lore in the Literature of Anglo-Saxon England (unpublished PhD thesis, University College London, 2013), 167–95. 30 Bredehoft, Textual Histories, 142, 143. 31 Plummer and Earle, Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, vol. 2, lxxviii. 32 ‘ridende 7 gangende, mid unmætan here, swiðe fægengende’, Cubbin, ASC D, 84. 33 ‘hine underfengon mid mycclan weorðscype’, Cubbin, ASC D, 86. 34 On these gifts, see Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Dress in Anglo-Saxon England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010), 244–5. 35 On gift-giving and the models of queenship available to Margaret, see Keene, Saint Margaret, 59–61, and on ‘Anglo-Saxon’ values in this entry, Alice Sheppard, Families

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of the King: Writing Identity in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 136–7. 36 Turgot’s Vita is edited in J. Hodgson Hinde (ed.), Symeonis Dunelmensis Opera et Collectanea (Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons, 1868), vol. 1, 234–54, and a translation can be found in W. M. Metcalfe, Ancient Lives of Scottish Saints (Paisley: Alexander Gardner, 1895), 297–321. 37 ‘ut, qui faciem matris parum noveratis, virtutum ejus notitiam plenius habeatis’, Hodgson Hinde, Symeonis Dunelmensis Opera, 234; Metcalfe, Ancient Lives, 297. 38 On this context for Turgot’s Vita, see Joanna Huntington, ‘St Margaret of Scotland: Conspicuous Consumption, Genealogical Inheritance, and Post-Conquest Authority’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 33/2 (2013): 149–64; Lois L. Huneycutt, ‘The Idea of the Perfect Princess: The Life of St Margaret in the Reign of Matilda II (1100–1118)’, Anglo-Norman Studies 12 (1990): 81–97; Lois L. Huneycutt, Matilda of Scotland: A Study in Medieval Queenship (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003); Elizabeth M. Tyler, England in Europe: English Royal Women and Literary Patronage, c. 1000–c. 1150 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 302–53. 39 Metcalfe, Ancient Lives, 307–10. 40 Rebecca Rushforth, St Margaret’s Gospel-book: The Favourite Book of an EleventhCentury Queen of Scots (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2007). 41 Keene, Saint Margaret, 31. 42 Metcalfe, Ancient Lives, 304–5. 43 Metcalfe, Ancient Lives, 300. 44 A later rewriting of the Vita, which provides a much fuller historical context for Margaret’s life and a genealogy of all her Anglo-Saxon ancestry back to Adam, via the early kings of Wessex, does mention these events; see Keene, Saint Margaret, 136–68. 45 ‘claritate meritorum claram perornat scriem progenitorum’, Hodgson Hinde, Symeonis Dunelmensis Opera, 238; Metcalfe, Ancient Lives, 300. 46 She is mentioned, though still only briefly, in the later rewriting of the Vita; Keene, Saint Margaret, 167. 47 Metcalfe, Ancient Lives, 301. ‘Cum ergo in primæva adhuc floreret ætate, vitam sobrietatis ducere, ac Deum super omnia cœpit diligere . . . Cum ergo in lege Domini die ac nocte meditaretur, et, tanquam altera Maria secus pedes Domini sedens, audire verbum illius delectaretur; suorum magis quam sua voluntate, immo Dei ordinatione, potentissimo regi Scottorum Malcolmo, regis Dunecani filio, in conjugium copulatur. Sed quamvis ea quæ sunt mundi compelleretur agere, mundi tamen rebus ex desiderio contempsit inhærere: plus enim delectabatur bono opere, quam divitiarum possessione’, Hodgson Hinde, Symeonis Dunelmensis Opera, 238.

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48 Metcalfe, Ancient Lives, 297. ‘vobis congratulator, quæ a Rege Angelorum constituta regina Anglorum, vitam matris reginæ, quæ semper ad regnum anhelabat Angelorum . . . audire’, Hodgson Hinde, Symeonis Dunelmensis Opera, 234. 49 For early versions of the story, see Robert W. Rix, The Barbarian North in Medieval Imagination: Ethnicity, Legend, and Literature (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), 121–30. 50 Turgot’s story was recorded by Symeon of Durham and is edited in Hodgson Hinde, Symeonis Dunelmensis Opera, vol. 1, 95–6. This history was written while Turgot was prior of Durham and apparently at his command; see Symeon of Durham, Libellus de Exordio atque Procursu istius hoc est Dunhelmensis Ecclesie, ed. David Rollason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), xlii–xliv. 51 On the Lincolnshire context for these events, see Peter Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Lincolnshire (Lincoln: History of Lincolnshire Committee, 1998), 203–13. 52 Metcalfe, Ancient Lives, 312. ‘Quis autem enumerando explicare poterit quot et quantos dato pretio libertati restituerit, quos de gente Anglorum abducens captivos violentia hostilis redegerat in servos? Nam et occultos exploratores quaquaversum per provincias Scottorum miserat, ut, videlicet, qui captivorum duriori premerentur servitute, et inhumanius tractarentur, ubique perquirerent, eique subtiliter, ubi, et a quibus affligerentur, renuntiarent: talibus ipsa ex intimis visceribus compatiens, celeriter subvenire, et redemptos ad libertatem festinavit renovare’, Hodgson Hinde, Symeonis Dunelmensis Opera, 247. 53 See, for instance, Catherine Keene, ‘The Dunfermline Vita of St. Margaret of Scotland: Hagiography as an Articulation of Hereditary Rights’, Arthuriana 19 (2009): 43–61. 54 For accounts of her death, with discussion of her piety and holiness, see William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, 554–5, and John of Worcester, Chronicle, vol. 2, 67. 55 ‘uir neque promptus manu neque probus ingenio’, William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, 416–17. 56 ‘uario lusu Fortunae rotatus pene decrepitum diem ignobilis ruri agit’, William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, 416–17. 57 On Edgar’s career, see Hooper, ‘Edgar the Ætheling’. 58 ‘Eadgar æþeling Ædwardes mæg cynges beah þa fram him, forþig he næfde na mycelne wurðscipe of him; ac se ælmihtiga God him gife wurðscipe on þam toweardan’, Irvine, ASC E, 94. 59 Hooper, ‘Edgar the Ætheling’, 206. 60 Irvine, ASC E, 101–4. 61 ‘þet land mid stranglicum feohte gewann’, Irvine, ASC E, 108.

Notes

218 62 Hooper, ‘Edgar the Ætheling’, 208–10.

63 ‘omnia pro natalis soli desiderio spreuit; quosdam enim profecto fallit amor patriae, ut nichil eis uideatur iocundum nisi consuetum hauserint caelum. Vnde Edgarus fatua cupidine illusus Angliam rediit; ubi, ut superius dixi, diuerso fortunae ludicro rotatus, nunc remotus et tacitus canos suos in agro consumit’, William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, 466–7. 64 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 5, 270–2. 65 ‘Cristina þæs æðelinges swuster beah into mynstre to Rumesege 7 underfeng halig rest’, Irvine, ASC E, 94. 66 On the records for Christina’s life, see David Knowles, C. N. L. Brooke and Vera C. M. London, The Heads of Religious Houses: England and Wales, I, 940–1216 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 219, 295, 297. 67 Ann Williams, ‘The Speaking Cross, the Persecuted Princess and the Murdered Earl: The Early History of Romsey Abbey’, Anglo-Saxon 1 (2007): 221–38. 68 Eadmer, Historia Novorum in Anglia, ed. Martin Rule (London: Longman, 1884), 122; Eadmer’s History of Recent Events in England, trans. Geoffrey Bosanquet (London: Cresset Press, 1964), 127–8. 69 Frank Barlow, William Rufus (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 310–13; Searle, ‘Women and the Legitimisation of Succession at the Norman Conquest’.

Chapter 3 1 For accounts of this family, see Frank Barlow, The Godwins: The Rise and Fall of a Noble Dynasty (London: Pearson Longman, 2003); Emma Mason, The House of Godwine: The History of a Dynasty (London: Hambledon, 2004). 2 Stafford, ‘Women in Domesday Book’. 3 Laura Ashe, ‘Harold Godwineson’, in Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance, ed. Neil Cartlidge (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), 59–80. 4 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, 362–3. 5 Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, 364–5; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, 322–5. 6 John of Worcester, Chronicle, vol. 2, 530–3; Simon Keynes and Rosalind Love, ‘Earl Godwine’s Ship’, Anglo-Saxon England 38 (2010): 185–223. 7 For different versions of the story, see William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, 354–5; Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, 378–9.

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8 Walter Map, De nugis curialium, ed. M. R. James, C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 410–37. 9 Walter de Gray Birch (ed.) Vita Haroldi, The Romance of the Life of Harold, King of England (London: E. Stock, 1885), 13–15. 10 Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, ed. Kartsen Friis-Jensen and Peter Fisher (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2015), vol. 1, 740–3; Bjarni Guðnason (ed.), Danakonunga sögur (Reykjavík: Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 1982), 109–11. 11 Parker, Dragon Lords, 126–32. 12 C. E. Wright, The Cultivation of Saga in Anglo-Saxon England (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1939), 213–36; Barlow, The Godwins, 31–3. 13 Mason, The House of Godwine, 31. 14 Townend, ‘Contextualizing the Knútsdrápur’; Parker, ‘Merry Sang the Monks’. 15 For examples of emotive stories about the royal children supposedly victimized by Cnut, see John of Worcester, Chronicle, vol. 2, 494–503; Walter Map, De nugis curialium, 422–3; Robert of Gloucester, The Metrical Chronicle, ed. William Aldis Wright (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1887), vol. 1, 466–9. 16 On Ulf ’s career, see Simon Keynes, ‘Cnut’s Earls’, in The Reign of Cnut: King of England, Denmark and Norway, ed. Alexander R. Rumble (London: Leicester University Press, 1994), 43–88 (62–4). 17 Frank Barlow (ed.), The Life of King Edward Who Rests at Westminster (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 22–3. 18 On Godwine’s relationship with Edward, see Barlow, The Godwins, 47–70; Licence, Edward the Confessor, 101–4. 19 Ann Williams, ‘Swein, Earl (d. 1052)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/ref​:odnb​/26831 (accessed May 2021). 20 Swanton, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, 182. 21 On Osbeorn and Beorn, see Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops, 124–5; Plummer and Earle, Two of the Saxon Chronicles Parallel, vol. 2, 229–31; Barlow, The Godwins, 47–55. 22 Matthew Townend, ‘Knútr and the Cult of St Óláfr: Poetry and Patronage in EleventhCentury Norway and England’, Viking and Medieval Scandinavia 1 (2005): 251–79. 23 Olaf ’s name appears in two manuscripts made for use at Exeter Cathedral in the second half of the eleventh century, a Psalter (British Library, Harley MS. 863) and Pontifical (British Library, Additional MS. 28188). 24 Parker, Dragon Lords, 170–1.

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25 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, trans. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes (London: Viking Society for Northern Research, 2011), vol. 2, 139–40. 26 Their other daughter, Ælfgifu, seems to have died around 1065, but very little is known about her; see Mason, The House of Godwine, 182. 27 William of Poitiers (Gesta Guillelmi, 140–1) says he refused; William of Malmesbury (Gesta Regum, vol. 1, 460–1) says her request was granted. 28 Eadmer, History of Recent Events, 6–8; for discussion, see Mason, The House of Godwine, 112–20. 29 Barlow, The Godwins, 164–5. 30 Barlow, William Rufus, 66. 31 On Edith, see Pauline Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh-Century England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). 32 Barlow, Life of King Edward, lix–lxxviii. 33 On Gytha’s connections to Exeter, see Robert Higham, ‘The Godwins, Towns and St Olaf Churches: Comital Investment in the Mid-11th Century’, in The Land of the English Kin: Studies in Wessex and Anglo-Saxon England in Honour of Professor Barbara Yorke, ed. Alexander Langlands and Ryan Lavelle (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 467–513. 34 ‘Her se kyng sette micel gyld on earm folc, 7 þeahhwæðre let æfre herigan eall þæt hi oferforon, 7 þa he ferde to Defenascire 7 besæt þa burh Exancester .xviii. dagas, 7 þær wearð micel his heres forfaren, ac he heom wel behet, 7 yfele gelæste, 7 hig him þa burh ageafon, for þan þa þegenas heom geswicon hæfdon’, Cubbin, ASC D, 81–2. 35 Other accounts of the siege are given by John of Worcester, Chronicle, vol. 3, 4–7, and Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 2, 210–14. For discussion, see Bates, William the Conqueror, 288–90; Williams, The English and the Norman Conquest, 17–21. 36 Bates, William the Conqueror, 288. 37 ‘her ferde Gyða ut, Haroldes modor, 7 manegra godra manna wif mid hyre, into Bradanreolice, 7 þær wunode sume hwile, 7 swa for þanon ofer sæ to Sancte Audomare’, Cubbin, ASC D, 83. On the women of this entry, see Pauline Stafford, ‘Chronicle D, 1067 and Women: Gendering Conquest in Eleventh-Century England’, in Anglo-Saxons: Studies Presented to Cyril Roy Hart, ed. Simon Keynes and Alfred P. Smyth (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), 208–23; Tyler, England in Europe, 260–2. 38 John Hudson (ed.), Historia Ecclesie Abbendonensis: The History of the Church of Abingdon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), vol. 1, 222–3. 39 Swanton, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, 203.

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40 Ben Hudson, ‘The Family of Harold Godwinsson and the Irish Sea Province’, Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland 109 (1979): 92–100. 41 John of Worcester, Chronicle, vol. 3, 6–7. 42 Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, 292–3. 43 On Judith’s life, see Mary Dockray-Miller, The Books and the Life of Judith of Flanders (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015). 44 Saxo Grammaticus, Gesta Danorum, vol. 2, 798–9; Timothy Bolton, ‘English Political Refugees at the Court of King Sveinn Ástríðarson, King of Denmark (1042–76)’, Medieval Scandinavia 15 (2005), 17–36. 45 Barlow, The Godwins, 169. 46 Barlow, The Godwins, 167–8. 47 Barlow, The Godwins, 165. 48 The Old Norse texts are edited by Finnur Jónsson (ed.), Fagrskinna: Nóregs kononga tal, Samfund til udgivelse af gammel nordisk litteratur (Copenhagen: S.L. Møllers bogtrykerri, 1902–3); Finnur Jónsson (ed.), Morkinskinna (Copenhagen: J. Jørgensen & co., 1932); Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson (Reykjavík: Íslenzka Fornritafélag, 1941–51). 49 Mason, The House of Godwine, 200–1. 50 Alison Finlay (trans.), Fagrskinna, a Catalogue of the Kings of Norway (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 236; Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Faulkes, vol. 3, 157. 51 For discussion of dating and sources, see Finlay, Fagrskinna, 2–17. 52 Barlow, Life of King Edward, 82–3. 53 Dockray-Miller, Judith of Flanders, 13–14. 54 Finlay, Fagrskinna, 237. 55 Finlay, Fagrskinna, 300. 56 Theodore M. Andersson and Kari Ellen Gade (trans.), Morkinskinna: The Earliest Icelandic Chronicle of the Norwegian Kings (1030–1157) (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2000), 276. 57 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Faulkes, 119–20. 58 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, 480–1. 59 Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Faulkes, 135–6. 60 Barlow, The Godwins, 170. 61 William of Malmesbury, Saints’ Lives, xiv–xv.

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62 William of Malmesbury, Saints’ Lives, xxxii–xxxiv. 63 Eadmer, History of Recent Events, 46. 64 ‘Nam et memoriae paternae nonnichil deferendum arbitratus dignam uirtutibus suis misericordiam exhibuit, totis pro miseria mulieris uisceribus turbatus’, William of Malmesbury, Saints’ Lives, 82–3. 65 William of Malmesbury, Saints’ Lives, 34–5, 56–7. 66 Richard Sharpe, ‘King Harold’s Daughter’, Haskins Society Journal 19 (2008): 1–27. 67 Tyler, England in Europe, 263–5; Searle, ‘Women and the Legitimisation of Succession’; Barlow, The Godwins, 162–3; Mason, The House of Godwine, 198–9; Barlow, William Rufus, 310–16. 68 Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ‘Leaving Wilton: Gunhild and the Phantoms of Agency’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 106 (2007): 203–23. 69 ‘Considera: quid est gloria mundi, quid est quod amas? Filia regis et reginae fuisti. Ubi sunt? Vermes et pulvis sunt. Altitudo illorum, voluptates illorum, divitiae illorum nec illos servaverunt nec cum illis abierunt’, F. S. Schmitt (ed.), Sancti Anselmi Opera Omnia (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1949) vol. 4, 47. 70 Mason, The House of Godwine, 140, 197. 71 Birch, Vita Haroldi; Gillian Fellows-Jensen, ‘The Myth of Harold II’s Survival in the Scandinavian Sources’, in King Harold II and the Bayeux Tapestry, ed. Owen-Crocker, 53–64.

Chapter 4 1 Among the numerous saints who were in their own time or later interpreted as martyrs to Viking violence, the most notable are probably Edmund of East Anglia and Ælfheah of Canterbury; Parker, Dragon Lords, 16–60. 2 Assandun’s martyr was Eadnoth, bishop of Dorchester, who was remembered as a saint at Ely; see Blake, Liber Eliensis, 140–2. 3 On the unusual nature of Waltheof ’s punishment, see John Hudson, ‘The Fate of Earl Waltheof and the Idea of Personal Law in England after 1066’, in Normandy and Its Neighbours, ed. Crouch and Thompson, 223–35. 4 On Waltheof ’s life, see Forrest Scott, ‘Earl Waltheof of Northumbria’, Archaeologia Aeliana 30 (1952): 149–215; C. P. Lewis, ‘Waltheof, Earl of Northumbria’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/ref​:odnb​/28646 (accessed 14 July 2020). 5 Kapelle, Norman Conquest of the North, 30–1; Christopher Morris, Marriage and Murder in Eleventh-Century Northumbria: A Study of ‘De Obsessione Dunelmi’ (York: Borthwick Institute, 1992).

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6 On Siward’s career, see Kapelle, Norman Conquest of the North, 27–49; Keynes, ‘Cnut’s Earls’, 65–6; Dorothy Whitelock, ‘Dealings of the Kings of England with Northumbria’, 83–5. 7 Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, 379–81. 8 Parker, Dragon Lords, 115–19. 9 On the context for this decision, see Bates, William the Conqueror, 209–10. 10 Swanton, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, 200. 11 ‘ferdon to Eoferwic 7 upp eodan 7 þa castelas gewunnan’, Irvine, ASC E, 88. 12 For discussion, see Bates, William the Conqueror, 350. 13 Williams, The English and the Norman Conquest, 58–9. 14 Marten, ‘The Rebellion of 1075’; Williams, The English and the Norman Conquest, 59–65. 15 ‘ræddon þær þæt hi woldon heora kynehlaford of his cynerice adrifan’, Cubbin, ASC D, 87; compare Irvine, ASC E, 90–1. 16 Cubbin, ASC D, 88. 17 On the development of Waltheof ’s cult, see Carl Watkins, ‘The Cult of Earl Waltheof at Crowland’, Hagiographica 3 (1996): 95–111; Williams, The English and the Norman Conquest, 63–5, 146–7; Emma Mason, ‘Invoking Earl Waltheof ’, in The English and Their Legacy, 900–1200: Essays in Honour of Ann Williams, ed. David Roffe (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012), 185–203. 18 G. W. S. Barrow, ‘David I’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), https://doi​ .org​/10​.1093​/ref​:odnb​/7208 (accessed 14 July 2020). 19 Mason, ‘Invoking Earl Waltheof ’, 201–2; Parker, Dragon Lords, 111–32; John Spence, ‘Genealogies of Noble Families in Anglo-Norman’, in Broken Lines: Genealogical Literature in Late-Medieval Britain and France, ed. Raluca L. Radulescu and Edward Donald Kennedy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 63–77. 20 For discussion of the verses, see Kari Ellen Gade (ed.), Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 2: From c. 1035 to c. 1300 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), vol. 2, 382–4. 21 Alistair Campbell, Skaldic Verse and Anglo-Saxon History (London: H. K. Lewis, 1971), 15–16, and Forrest Scott, ‘Valþjófr Jarl: An English Earl in Icelandic Sources’, Saga-Book of the Viking Society 14 (1953–7): 78–94. 22 Cubbin, ASC D, 84. 23 Cubbin, ASC D, 87. 24 Matthew Townend (ed.), Haraldsstikki, in Gade, Poetry from the Kings’ Sagas 2, vol. 2, 807–8. 25 Scott, ‘Earl Waltheof ’, 164–70.

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26 Judith Jesch, ‘Skaldic Verse in Scandinavian England’, in Vikings and the Danelaw, ed. James Graham-Campbell, Michael Hall, Judith Jesch and David N. Parsons (Oxford: Oxbow, 2001), 313–25. 27 Townend, ‘Contextualizing the Knútsdrápur’; Frank, ‘King Cnut in the Verse of His Skalds’; Parker, ‘Merry Sang the Monks’. 28 Parker, Dragon Lords, 106. 29 See Swanton, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, 211–12; Paul Gazzoli, Anglo-Danish Relations in the Later Eleventh Century (unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Cambridge, 2010). 30 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 2, 344–5; Knowles, Brooke and London, Heads of Religious Houses, 247. 31 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 2, xxv–xxix, 322–51. For the date of Orderic’s visit to the abbey, most likely between 1114 and 1123, see vol. 1, 25. 32 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 2, 349. 33 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 2, 321. 34 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 2, 315. 35 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 2, 344–5, 351. 36 ‘plures Normannorum solus obtruncauerat, unos et unos per portam egredientes decapitans; neruosus lacertis, thorosus pectore, robustus et procerus toto corpore’, William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, 468–9. 37 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, 468–9. 38 ‘Anglorum astipulationi diuinitas assentiri uidetur, miracula multa et ea permaxima ad tumbam illius ostendens’, William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, ed. Michael Winterbottom and R. M. Thomson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), vol. 1, 488–9. 39 Williams, The English and the Norman Conquest, 146–7; Joanna Huntington, ‘The Taming of the Laity: Writing Waltheof and Rebellion in the Twelfth Century’, AngloNorman Studies 32 (2009): 79–95; Watkins, ‘Cult of Earl Waltheof ’, 102–3. A different view is put forward by Emma Cownie, Religious Patronage in Anglo-Norman England 1066–1135 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), 119–21, who argues for a ‘distinctly non-Norman aura about Crowland and the cult of Waltheof ’ (120). 40 Williams, The English and the Norman Conquest, 146. 41 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 2, 349–50. 42 For examples and discussion, see S. J. Ridyard, ‘Condigna veneratio: Post-Conquest Attitudes to the Saints of the Anglo-Saxons’, Anglo-Norman Studies 9 (1986): 179–208; P. A. Hayward, ‘Translation-Narratives in Post-Conquest Hagiography and English

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Resistance to the Norman Conquest’, Anglo-Norman Studies 31 (1998): 67–94; Tom Licence, ‘The Cult of St Edmund’, in Bury St Edmunds and the Norman Conquest, ed. Licence (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2014), 104–30; Rebecca Browett, ‘The Fate of Anglo-Saxon Saints after the Norman Conquest of England: St Æthelwold of Winchester as a Case Study’, History 101 (2016): 183–200. 43 John of Worcester, Chronicle, vol. 3, 26–9. 44 John of Worcester, Chronicle, vol. 3, 29. 45 Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, 310–11. 46 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 2, 349. 47 Michel, Chroniques anglo-normandes, vol. 2, 131–42. 48 Watkins, ‘Cult of Earl Waltheof ’, 98. 49 For Anselm’s letters on the subject, see Schmitt, Sancti Anselmi Opera Omnia, vol. 4, 144–5. 50 Watkins, ‘Cult of Earl Waltheof ’, 99, and Mason, ‘Invoking Earl Waltheof ’, 185–6. 51 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, vol. 2, 321–2. 52 Michel, Chroniques Anglo-Normandes, vol. 2, 101. 53 Watkins, ‘Cult of Earl Waltheof ’, 97–8. 54 Possibly William of Ramsey; see A. G. Rigg, ‘William of Ramsey’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/ref​:odnb​/29472 (accessed July 2020). 55 Michel, Chroniques anglo-normandes, vol. 2, 104–11 and 123–31. 56 Parker, Dragon Lords, 102–32. 57 N. Denholm-Young, ‘An Early Thirteenth-Century Anglo-Norman MS’, The Bodleian Quarterly Record 6 (1931): 225–30, and John Spence, Reimagining History in Anglo-Norman Prose Chronicles (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), 147–52. 58 Waltheof is also mentioned in Játvarðar saga and Orkneyinga saga; for discussion, see Scott, ‘Valþjófr jarl’, and Scott, ‘Earl Waltheof ’, 164–70. 59 Finnur Jónsson, Morkinskinna, 267–8; Andersson and Gade, Morkinskinna, 265. 60 Finlay, Fagrskinna, 222–3; Snorri, Heimskringla, trans. Finlay and Faulkes, vol. 3, 110. 61 ‘En þa er iarlenn vissi hværr hann skylldi hoggva þa firir gaf hann þeim riddara vannlega oc sva konongenom. oc allum oðrum þæim er æftir hanum hafðu faret. oc til iartegna gaf hann riddara silkikyrtil sinn þeim er hoggva skylldi hann. Đui nest lagðe hann sik til iarðar i cross oc rette baðar hendr i fra ser. oc var hann þa hals hoggvin. oc af hans bloðe fengo marger menn bot. oc er Valþiofr sann

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hæilagr maðr’ (Finnur Jónsson, Fagrskinna, 299). For discussion, see Finlay, Fagrskinna, 25–7. 62 On parallels between this account and the death of St Magnus of Orkney, see Judith Jesch, ‘England and Orkneyinga saga’, in The Viking Age in Caithness, Orkney and the North Atlantic, ed. C. Batey, J. Jesch and C. Morris (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 222–39. 63 ‘Jarl fór með fá menn, en er hann kom á heiðina fyrir norðan Kastalabryggju, þá kómu móti honum ármenn tveir með sveit manna ok tóku hann ok settu í fjǫtur, ok síðan var hann hǫggvinn, ok kalla enskir menn hann helgan’, Snorri, Heimskringla, ed. Bjarni Aðalbjarnarson, vol. 3, 196. 64 Gillian Fellows Jensen (ed.), Hemings þáttr Áslákssonar (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1962), 46–56; Anthony Faulkes (trans.), Hemings þáttr (Dundee: Thorisdal, 2016), 34–43. 65 Scott, ‘Earl Waltheof ’, 169. 66 Stephen Marritt, ‘Crowland Abbey and the Provenance of Orderic Vitalis’s Scandinavian and Scottish Material’, Notes and Queries 53/3 (2006): 290–2. 67 Further evidence for Waltheof ’s popularity in this period is the use of his name, though no elements of his story, in the Roman de Waldef, an Anglo-Norman romance probably composed in East Anglia in the first decade of the thirteenth century; see Rosalind Field, ‘Waldef and the Matter of/with England’, in Medieval Insular Romance: Translation and Innovation, ed. Judith Weiss, Jennifer Fellows and Morgan Dickson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 25–39.

Chapter 5 1 Swanton, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, 200. 2 ‘multis malis quaque per Angliam crebrescentibus’, Eadmer, Vita Beati Bregowini Cantuariensis archiepiscopi et confessoris, edited in Bernhard W. Scholz, ‘Eadmer’s Life of Bregwine, Archbishop of Canterbury, 761–764’, Traditio 22 (1966): 127–48 (144). 3 Eadmer, Historia Novorum; Eadmer, Vita Sancti Anselmi (The Life of St Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury), ed. R. W. Southern (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). 4 On the relationship between Eadmer’s work and other twelfth-century historians, see Garnett, The Norman Conquest in English History, 13–77. 5 On Eadmer’s life, see R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought, 1059–c.1130 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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1963), 229–40; R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 6 Eadmer, History of Recent Events, 14–15. 7 Michael Gullick, ‘The Scribal Work of Eadmer of Canterbury to 1109’, Archaeologia Cantiana 118 (1998): 173–89; Teresa Webber, ‘Script and Manuscript Production at Christ Church, Canterbury, after the Norman Conquest’, in Canterbury and the Norman Conquest: Churches, Saints and Scholars, 1066–1109, ed. Richard Eales and Richard Sharpe (London: Hambledon, 1995), 145–58. 8 J. C. Rubenstein, ‘The Life and Writings of Osbern of Canterbury’, in Canterbury and the Norman Conquest, ed. Eales and Sharpe, 27–40, and Rubenstein, ‘Osbern’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), https://doi​.org​/10​.1093​/ref​:odnb​ /20865 (accessed December 2020). 9 Giles E. M. Gasper, ‘A Doctor in the House? The Context for Anselm of Canterbury’s Interest in Medicine with Reference to a Probable Case of Malaria’, Journal of Medieval History 30 (2004): 245–61. 10 Anselm, The Letters of St Anselm of Canterbury, trans. Walter Fröhlich (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1990–4), vol. 1, 139–42 and 187–90. 11 Osbern’s works await a full modern edition, but for his surviving works on St Ælfheah, see Osbern of Canterbury, Vita S. Elphegi, in Henry Wharton (ed.), Anglia Sacra (London: Richard Chiswell, 1691), vol. 2, 122–42, Osbern’s Life of Alfege, trans. Frances Shaw (London: St Paul’s, 1999), and ‘Translatio Sancti Ælfegi Cantuariensis archiepiscopi et martiris’, ed. Rosemary Morris and Alexander R. Rumble, in The Reign of Cnut: King of England, Denmark and Norway, ed. Alexander R. Rumble (London: Leicester University Press, 1994), 283–315. His works on Dunstan were printed in William Stubbs (ed.), Memorials of Saint Dunstan Archbishop of Canterbury (London: Longman, 1874), 69–161. 12 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, 240–1 and 592–3. 13 The manuscript is Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS. 328; for a digital facsimile, see https​:/​/pa​​rker.​​stanf​​ord​.e​​du​/pa​​rker/​​catal​​og​/c​g​​742qv​​0435 (accessed December 2020). A book described as ‘musica Osberni’, apparently a book on music for use in the monastic school, existed at Canterbury in the late twelfth century. It appears in a fragmentary book-list, now in Cambridge University Library MS. Ii. 3. 12; see M. R. James, The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903), 8. Osbern has been suggested as the possible author of an anonymous treatise on music; J. Smits van Waesberghe (ed.), De vocum consonantiis ac de re musica (Buren: Frits Knuf, 1979). 14 Mildred Budny and Timothy Graham, ‘Dunstan as Hagiographical Subject or Osbern as Author? The Scribal Portrait in an Early Copy of Osbern’s Vita Sancti Dunstani’, Gesta 32/2 (1993): 83–96.

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15 Lanfranc, The Monastic Constitutions of Lanfranc, ed. David Knowles and Christopher N. L. Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 118–23. This edition of Lanfranc’s constitutions is based on a manuscript of the 1090s written in Eadmer’s hand (ibid., xliv). 16 Katie Ann-Marie Bugyis, A. B. Kraebel and Margot E. Fassler (eds.), Medieval Cantors and Their Craft: Music, Liturgy and the Shaping of History, 800–1500 (Woodbridge: York University Press, 2017). 17 Eadmer, De Reliquiis Sancti Audoeni et Quorundam Aliorum Sanctorum Quae Cantuariae in Aecclesia Domini Salvatoris Habentur, in André Wilmart (ed.), ‘Edmeri Cantuariensis cantoris nova opuscula de sanctorum veneratione et obsecratione’, Revue des Sciences Religieuses 15 (1935): 354–79 (367–9). 18 ‘nominatissimus . . . cantorum’, Eadmer, De Reliquiis, 367. 19 Anselm, Letters, vol. 2, 100–1; Rubenstein, ‘Osbern’. 20 Osbern, Vita S. Dunstani, 107. 21 Osbern, Miracula S. Dunstani, 136–8, 156–9. 22 Osbern, Vita S. Dunstani, 84. 23 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, 240–1, for praise of his skill; William of Malmesbury, Saints’ Lives, xx–xxiv, on William’s criticism of Osbern’s inaccuracies. 24 Eadmer, Lives and Miracles of Saints Oda, Dunstan and Oswald, ed. Andrew J. Turner and Bernard J. Muir (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), lxix–lxxvii. 25 For the chronology of Eadmer’s works, see Eadmer, Lives and Miracles, xxii–xxiv. 26 Eadmer, Vita Sancti Wilfridi Auctore Edmero: The Life of Saint Wilfrid by Edmer, ed. Bernard J. Muir and Andrew J. Turner (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1998). 27 Eadmer, Lives and Miracles, xxiii. 28 The date of his death is noted in British Library, Cotton MS. Nero C. ix, f. 1v. 29 Richard Gameson, The Earliest Books of Canterbury Cathedral: Manuscripts and Fragments to c. 1200 (London: The Bibliographical Society, 2008), 226–47. 30 This is now Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS. 371; see https​:/​/pa​​rker.​​stanf​​ord​.e​​ du​/pa​​rker/​​catal​​og​/x​n​​117yn​​5845 (accessed December 2020). 31 Charles C. Rozier, ‘Between History and Hagiography: Eadmer of Canterbury’s Vision of the Historia novorum in Anglia’, Journal of Medieval History 45 (2019): 1–19. 32 Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer, 290–7. 33 For a reading of the Historia Novorum in light of this, see Rozier, ‘Between History and Hagiography’. 34 Eadmer, Vita Sancti Anselmi, 4–11, 37–9.

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35 Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer, 286–7. 36 ‘equo Dei omnipotentis occultoque iudicio ciuitas Cantuariorum fere tota igne cremata, atque ecclesia Christi inibi constituta eodem est incendio conflagrata. Cuius conflagrationis anno tertio iocunde simul et gloriose memorie Lanfrancus, Cadomensis cenobii abbas, ipsam ecclasiam regendam suscepit. Qui, postquam est in ipso patriarchatu prime metropolis Anglorum nobiliter usquequaque roboratus, quicquid ipsius ecclesie uetusti operis resederat, noua omnia constructurus euertit,’ Eadmer, Vita Sancti Wilfridi, 146–7. 37 ‘Rex itqaue factus Willelmus, quid in principes Anglorum qui tantæ cladi superesse poterant fecerit, dicere, cum nihil prosit, omitto’, Eadmer, Historia Novorum, 9; Eadmer, History of Recent Events, 9. 38 Eadmer, De Reliquiis, 366. 39 ‘aut Romanas flammas Neronem mirari, aut Trojana incendia Aeneam deflere’, Osbern, Vita S. Elphegi, 135. 40 Osbern, Miracula S. Dunstani, 140–2, and Eadmer, Lives and Miracles, 170–5. 41 The fire is dated to 6 December in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (MS. D and E); Osbern and Eadmer both locate these events later in the month but on different dates, placing the boy’s vision respectively five and two days before Christmas. 42 Osbern calls the man comes Harald, though Eadmer uses the name without any title (Osbern, Miracula S. Dunstani, 141). 43 Mason, The House of Godwine, 139. 44 Barlow, The Life of King Edward, 30–41; Mason, The House of Godwine, 58–68; Nicholas Brooks, The Early History of the Church of Canterbury: Christ Church from 597 to 1066 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1984), 300–4. 45 Garnett, Conquered England, 33–40. 46 Nicholas Brooks, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Cathedral Community, 597–1070’, in A History of Canterbury Cathedral, ed. Patrick Collinson, Nigel Ramsey and Margaret Sparks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1–37 (31). 47 Eadmer, History of Recent Events, 6. 48 Eadmer, History of Recent Events, 6–9; Barlow, The Godwins, 96–106. 49 Eadmer, Vita Sancti Anselmi, 37–9. 50 Eadmer, Lives and Miracles, 174–5. 51 Brooks, Early History, 260–1. 52 Osbern, Miracula S. Dunstani, 144–51, and Eadmer, Lives and Miracles, 182–9. On Osbern’s version of the story, see Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, ‘Writing Community: Osbern and the Negotiations of Identity in the Miracula S. Dunstani’, in Latinity

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and Identity in Anglo-Saxon Literature, ed. Rebecca Stephenson and Emily Thornbury (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 202–18. Similar conflicts among the monks in the neighbouring Canterbury monastery, St Augustine’s, also erupted into violence; see Richard Emms, ‘The Historical Traditions of St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury’, in Canterbury and the Norman Conquest, ed. Eales and Sharpe, 159–68. 53 ‘Vanæ sunt lacrymæ tuæ, vanus ploratus tuus. Idem nos locus habebit, ambos infernus tenebit’, Osbern, Miracula S. Dunstani, 146. 54 Rubenstein, ‘The Life and Writings of Osbern of Canterbury’, 29–31. 55 John of Worcester, Chronicle, vol. 3, 24–9. 56 ‘Erat itaque infelicem miseriam uidere. Iacebat captiuus in lecto supinus, undique constrictus, nec in se sui iuris quicquam habens. Cernebatur demon qui eum possidebat in uentre eius hac et illac discurrendo uagari, ut putares illum modo per os, modo per inferiores corporis partes fugam parare’, Eadmer, Lives and Miracles, 186–7. 57 ‘Quibusdam uero qui circumstabant manus ad discursum inimici protendentibus, et quod in modum paruuli catti discurreret Francigena lingua dicentibus, ille contra qui linguae ipsius omnimodis inscius erat subridens eadem lingua similiter uerbo diminutiuo consonanter respondebat, dicens: ‘Non ut cattulus, sed ut catellus.’ Eadmer, Lives and Miracles, 186–7. 58 In French, the joke was perhaps on diminutive forms of Old French chat and chien. 59 Eadmer, Vita Sancti Wilfridi, 179–81. 60 Eadmer, Lives and Miracles, 182, n. 28; Malling Abbey, The Life of Gundulf (West Malling: St Mary’s Abbey, 1984), 13–15. 61 Stubbs, Memorials of St Dunstan, xlii–xlviii. 62 Eadmer, Lives and Miracles, lxxvi. 63 O’Brien O’Keeffe, ‘Writing Community’, 216–18. 64 Eadmer, Lives and Miracles, 184–5. 65 ‘Hoc flagello, misericordia Christi cooperante et sagacitate boni patris Lanfranci archiepiscopi, ad id prouecti sunt, ut omnibus illis abrenunciarent, ac in ueram monachorum religionem transuentes cuncta quasi stercora reputarent. Et nos quidem qui qualiter ea tempestate res agebantur nouimus indubitanter fatemur, quia nequaquam processisset tam subita et salubris rerum mutatio, si prae oculis non fuisset ostensa crudelis illa et quae cunctos terruerat saeua examinatio’, Eadmer, Lives and Miracles, 188–9. 66 For instance, William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, 458–9. 67 Brooks, Early History, 261.

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68 For a variety of arguments, see Ridyard, ‘Condigna veneratio’; Hayward, ‘Translation-Narratives in Post-Conquest Hagiography’; Licence, ‘Cult of St Edmund’; Browett, ‘The Fate of Anglo-Saxon Saints’; Thomas, The English and the Normans, 283–97. 69 ‘Erat præterea Lanfrancus adhuc quasi rudis Anglus; necdumque sederant animo ejus quædam institutiones quas reppererat in Anglia. Quapropter cum plures de illis magna fretus ratione, tum quasdam mutavit sola auctoritatis suæ deliberatione’, Eadmer, Vita Sancti Anselmi, 50–1. 70 Richard Pfaff, ‘Lanfranc’s Supposed Purge of the Anglo-Saxon Calendar’, in Warriors and Churchmen in the High Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Karl Leyser, ed. T. Reuter (London: Hambledon Press, 1992), 95–108; T. A. Heslop, ‘The Canterbury Calendars and the Norman Conquest’, in Canterbury and the Norman Conquest, ed. Eales and Sharpe, 53–86. 71 Jay Rubenstein, ‘Liturgy against History: The Competing Visions of Lanfranc and Eadmer of Canterbury’, Speculum 74/2 (1999): 279–309. 72 Rubenstein, ‘Liturgy against History’, 295. 73 ‘Angli isti inter quos degimus, instituerunt sibi quosdam quos colerent sanctos. De quibus cum aliquando qui fuerint secundum quod ipsimet referunt mente revolvo de sanctitatis eorum merito animum a dubietate flectere nequeo’, Eadmer, Vita Sancti Anselmi, 51. 74 ‘At tamen causam necis beati Ælfegi historialiter intuentes, videmus non illam solam, sed aliam fuisse ista antiquiorem . . . sed etiam quia paganis persecutoribus suis civitatem Cantuariam et æcclesiam Christi in ea sitam concremantibus, civesque innocuos atroci morte necantibus’, Eadmer, Vita Sancti Anselmi, 52. 75 Swanton, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, 142. The F manuscript of the Chronicle, which was copied at Christ Church in Eadmer’s lifetime and represents a text he is likely to have known, reads: ‘Was þa ræpling se ær was Angelcynnes heafod 7 Cristendomes; ðar man mehte geseon ermþe þær ær was blisse, þanon us com ærost Cristendom’, Peter S. Baker (ed.), The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, MS. F (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 103. In this manuscript, the Latin translation of the entry introduces the context of pagan hostility to Christianity which Eadmer also emphasizes: ‘Et tunc fuit preda paganorum qui paulo ante fuit caput totius Bryttannie et Christianitatis’. 76 Cross, Heirs of the Vikings, 86–102; Parker, Dragon Lords, 19–25. 77 Eadmer, Vita Wilfridi, 9–11. 78 Elisabeth van Houts, ‘The Flemish Contribution to Biographical Writing in England in the Eleventh Century’, in Writing Medieval Biography, 750–1250: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow, ed. David Bates, Julia Crick and Sarah Hamilton (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2006), 111–27; Barlow, Life of King Edward, xliv–lix.

232

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79 Richard Sharpe, ‘Eadmer’s Letter to the Monks of Glastonbury Concerning St Dunstan’s Disputed Remains’, in The Archaeology and History of Glastonbury Abbey, ed. Lesley Abrams and James P. Carley (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1991), 206–15 (210). 80 See, for instance, Eadmer, Lives and Miracles, 114, and Eadmer, Vita Sancti Wilfridi, 10–11. 81 ‘multas et antecessorum nostrorum temporibus insolitas rerum mutationes nostris diebus in Anglia accidisse’, Eadmer, Vita Sancti Anselmi, 1. 82 C. Cubitt, ‘Archbishop Dunstan: A Prophet in Politics?’, in Myth, Rulership, Church and Charters: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Brooks, ed. Julia Barrow and Andrew Wareham (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 145–66. 83 ‘non deficiet gladius de domo tua saeviens in te omnibus diebus vitae tuae, interficiens de semine tuo, quousque regnum tuum transferatur in regnum alienum cujus ritum et linguam gens cui praesides non novit’, Osbern, Vita S. Dunstani, 115. 84 ‘mala qualia non fuerunt ex quo gens Anglorum regnare coepit usque ad tempus illud … Quae omnia ita contigisse in annalibus legere, et nostris temporibus est videre’, Osbern, Vita S. Dunstani, 117. 85 Simon Keynes, ‘The Burial of King Æthelred the Unready at St Paul’s’, in The English and Their Legacy 900–1200: Essays in Honour of Ann Williams, ed. David Roffe (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2012), 129–48. 86 ‘Quæ prophetia viri Dei quam vera extiterit, et in chronicis qui legere volunt, et in nostris tribulationibus qui advertere sciunt, videre facillime possunt, ne dicam in iis quæ istius operis series per loca, veritate dictante, demonstrabit’, Eadmer, Historia Novorum, 3. 87 See, for instance, his account of ‘the evils that swept like a flood over England in those days’, in Eadmer, History of Recent Events, 183–5. 88 ‘Miseriam . . . quae post decessum eius Angliam totam inuoluit, et inuoluendo pessumdedit, satis est in cronicis et in nostris tribulationibus, me tacente, uidere. Vnde cur quid inde scribam non uideo, quoniam sine omni littera res ipsa tam euidens est, ut ueras miserias non possit ibi cernere nemo. Finis illarum quis, uel quando sit euenturus ignoro, sed tantum procul dubio ignorare non queo quod omnia quae fecit nobis Deus in uero iudicio fecit, quia peccauimus ei et mandatis eius non oboediuimus’, Eadmer, Lives and Miracles, 158–9. 89 ‘Quapropter quid aliud dicatur aut agatur, uis enim humana et consilium omne sublatum est, non intelligo . . . ’, Eadmer, Lives and Miracles, 158–9. 90 ‘tempore suo multa mala uenerunt in Angliam et postea semper hucusque creuerunt’, Baker, ASC F, 85. 91 On annals produced at Canterbury in this period, see David N. Dumville, ‘Some Aspects of Annalistic Writing at Canterbury in the Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries’, Peritia 2 (1983): 23–57.

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92 ‘cui Christianitas in regno Anglorum . . . commissa est’, Eadmer, De Reliquiis, 363. 93 ‘prout a senioribus sanctae matris aecclesiae Cantuariensis adolescens olim accepi, iam cano capite, ab amicis rogatus, noticiae aliorum’, Eadmer, De Reliquiis, 364. 94 Many of the relevant passages from these and Eadmer’s other descriptions of the pre1067 church are translated in Robert Willis, The Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral (London: Tiger of the Stripe, 2006), 1–34, and in H. M. Taylor, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Cathedral Church at Canterbury’, Archaeological Journal 126 (1969): 101–30. 95 Eadmer, De Reliquiis, 365. 96 ‘quod antiquitus ab Anglis et nunc usque Suthdure dicitur [ . . . ] ostium in antiquorum legibus regum suo nomine sepe exprimitur’, Eadmer, De Reliquiis, 365. 97 Brooks, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Cathedral Community’, 33–7; Kevin Blockley, Margaret Sparks and Tim Tatton-Brown (eds.), Canterbury Cathedral Nave: Archaeology, History and Architecture (Canterbury: Canterbury Archaeological Trust, 1997), 106–11. 98 Eadmer, De Reliquiis, 366. 99 ‘Quae ita se habuisse sine ulla ambiguitate fateri ueraciter possum, quippe qui propriis oculis omnia, cum fierent, intuitus sum, et diligentiori studio tenaci memoriae commendaui’, Eadmer, De Reliquiis, 366. 100 ‘mihi ab infantia hic mos semper erat, nova quæ forte . . . occurrebant diligenti intentione considerare ac memoriæ commendare’, Eadmer, Historia Novorum, 107; Eadmer, History of Recent Events, 111. 101 Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski (eds.), The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 29. 102 Eadmer, Vita Beati Bregowini, 144; Willis, Architectural History, 9–10. 103 On books and charters from pre-conquest Christ Church, see Nicholas Brooks and S. E. Kelly (eds.), Charters of Christ Church, Canterbury (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), and Gameson, The Earliest Books of Canterbury Cathedral. 104 ‘Quem ea re hic ita paucis descripsimus, ut, cum praesentis aetatis homines et futurae antiquorum de hoc scripta audierint, nec iuxta relationem illorum quicquam inuenerint, sciant illa uetera transisse et omnia noua facta esse’, Eadmer, De Reliquiis, 366; Willis, Architectural History, 13. 105 ‘unus et solus de antiquis Anglorum patribus’, Eadmer, Historia Novorum, 46; Eadmer, History of Recent Events, 46; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum, 429–31. 106 Southern, Saint Anselm and His Biographer, 232.

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Epilogue 1 Christine Fell, ‘The Icelandic Saga of Edward the Confessor: Its Version of the AngloSaxon Emigration to Byzantium’, Anglo-Saxon England 3 (1974): 179–96; Fell, ‘English History and Norman Legend in the Icelandic Saga of Edward the Confessor’, AngloSaxon England 6 (1977): 223–36. 2 Caitlin Green, ‘The Medieval “New England”: A Forgotten Anglo-Saxon Colony on the North-Eastern Black Sea Coast’ (2015) https​:/​/ww​​w​.cai​​tling​​reen.​​org​/2​​015​/0​​5​/med​​ ieval​​-new-​​engla​​nd​-​bl​​ack​-s​​ea​.ht​​ml (accessed December 2020); Jonathan Shepard, ‘The English and Byzantium: A Study of Their Role in the Byzantine Army in the Later Eleventh Century’, Traditio 29 (1973): 53–92. 3 Treharne, Living through Conquest, 93. 4 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, vol. 1, 716–17. 5 Thomas, The English and the Normans, 105–236. 6 Searle, ‘Women and the Legitimisation of Succession’; van Houts, ‘Intermarriage in Eleventh-Century England’. 7 On the centrality of patrilineal inheritance to the narrative patterns of romance, see Field, ‘The King over the Water’, and Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 325–60.

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Index Aedina, mother of Hereward  21, 32–6, 42 Ælfgifu, daughter of Godwine and Gytha  103–4 Ælfheah, St, archbishop of Canterbury  160–1, 179–86 interpretations by Lanfranc, Anselm and Eadmer  179–89 Osbern’s writings on  160–1, 169, 181–2 relics translated into new cathedral  174–5, 176, 191 Æthelred II, king of England  63, 70, 80, 103 reign interpreted by post-conquest historians  84, 101, 186–8 Agatha, wife of Edward the Exile  60–6, 69–70 family background  61, 66, 70 life after the conquest  69–70, 92, 99, 112–13, 198 mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle  65–6, 69–70, 112–13 omitted from Margaret’s Vita  82, 84–6 Alan Rufus  93–5, 122–4 Alfred the Great, king of Wessex  3–4, 9 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle  8–10, 14, 28, see also Peterborough Chronicle account of events in 1066–76  19, 21–5, 69–79, 112–14, 130–4, 155 connections with the West Saxon dynasty  9–10, 64–80

and the family of Edward the Exile  64–86, 90–3, 96, 112–13, 185, 201 influence on Osbern and Eadmer  182, 185–6, 188–9 poem on the death of King Edgar  33–5, 75 Anselm, St, archbishop of Canterbury  93–4, 121, 180–4, 187–9 adjudicates the marriage of Edith/ Matilda and Henry I  93–4, 123 counsels Gunnhild to return to Wilton Abbey  123–4 objects to veneration of a saint at Romsey  143–4 parallels with St Dunstan drawn by Eadmer and Osbern  172, 186–9 relationship with Eadmer  123–4, 156, 164–8, 180–4, 195 relationship with Osbern  160, 163 views on St Ælfheah discussed with Lanfranc  178–84 Battle of Hastings  1, 6–8, 15, 129 the battle and its aftermath in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle  8, 21–2, 67–9 Eadmer’s comment on  168–9 and Harold Godwineson’s family  97, 105, 108, 110 legends of Harold Godwineson’s survival  125

Index memorialization of those who fought  57, 127 in Old Norse historical writing  125, 133, 149–52 Battle of Stamford Bridge  24, 105, 108, 110, 119 in Old Norse historical writing  117–20, 151 Bayeux Tapestry  7–8, 33–4, 171 Bede  3–4, 18, 72–4, 87, 191 Beorn, brother of Svein Estrithson  105, 106 Beowulf  30, 43 Bosham, Sussex  101, 106 Bourne, Lincolnshire  20–1, 26, 28–31, 37, 42–3, 47–8 later medieval lords claim descent from Hereward  21, 53–4 Brand, abbot of Peterborough  22, 54–5 Canterbury  155–96 Viking siege (1011)  169, 182–3, 186 Christ Church, Canterbury (Canterbury Cathedral)  123–4, 155–97 beliefs about its Roman and AngloSaxon history  155, 163–4, 178–84, 190–4 conflict among the monks after the conquest  155–7, 160, 163, 169–78, 197 damaged by fire (1067)  155–7, 159, 168–73, 190–4 Eadmer’s description of the preconquest cathedral  190–4 manuscripts from Christ Church  159, 161–2, 166–7, 176–7, 188–9 reforms introduced by Lanfranc  159–60, 172–84 relationship with the family of Harold Godwineson  101, 123–4, 170–3 Christina, sister of Margaret and Edgar Ætheling  59–60, 72, 89–96, 156 early life (before 1066)  61–3

249

leaves England for Scotland (1068)  69–70, 112–13 life at Romsey and Wilton Abbey  92–6 omitted from Margaret’s Vita  82, 92 potential link to veneration of Waltheof  143–4 relationship with her niece Edith/ Matilda  93–6, 143 Cnut, king of Denmark, England and Norway  3–4, 62, 119, 186 and the children of Edmund Ironside  60–1, 65–6, 84, 99, 103 and the family of Gytha and Godwine  3–4, 97, 99–109 and the family of Waltheof  128, 135–6 comet, interpreted as an omen (975 and 1066)  33–4, 68 Constantinople  105, 197 Cornwall  26, 27, 36–7, 39, 115 Crowland Abbey  17–20, 53–5, 136–54 commemoration of Edward the Exile and his brother  67 and the Hereward legend  17–20, 40–1, 49, 53–5, 143, 154, 199–201 and the veneration of Waltheof  128, 131–2, 136–47, 149–54, 199–200 David I, king of Scotland  128, 132, 144, 153 Denmark  25, 60–1, 97–109, 115–17, 119–20 Danish conquest and rule in England  3–5, 75, 83–4, 97–104, 182, 186–7 Danish involvement in rebellions after the Norman Conquest  15, 19–25, 37–8, 52, 76–7, 106, 115, 130, 136

250

Index

Danish settlement and culture in England  3–4, 28, 88, 97–109, 127–9, 135–6, 145–6 refuge for people from England after the Norman Conquest  98–9, 115–17 Domesday Book  5, 20–1, 53, 93, 108 Dunstan, St, archbishop of Canterbury  160–1, 164–5, 170–8, 185–9, 191 Eadmer and Osbern’s writings on  160–1, 163–6, 170–8, 185–9, 191 prophecies used to interpret AngloSaxon history  84, 185–9 seen as contrast or parallel with Lanfranc and Anselm  172, 177, 186–9 story of Harold Godwineson’s unbaptized child  170–3 story of miraculous cure of Æthelweard  174–8 Durham  65, 80–1, 88–9, 161, see also Turgot Eadgifu, abbess of Leominster  105, 107 Eadmer of Canterbury  12, 121–4, 155–96, 201 childhood and education  155–65, 168–78, 190–6 cited as source  93–4, 110, 121, 156 comments and views on English identity  121, 156–7, 178–85, 194–6 individual works De Reliquiis Sancti Audoeni  161–3, 167–9, 190–4 Historia Novorum in Anglia  156, 166–9, 172, 181, 185–9, 196 Vita Anselmi  156, 166, 167, 172, 179–85 Vita et Miracula Dunstani  165, 166, 170–8, 187–9 Vita Wilfridi  166, 168, 170, 176, 183

interpretation of the Norman Conquest  155, 168–9, 172, 184–9, 193–6, 201 other writings  155–6, 166–7, 184–5 relationship with Anselm  156, 165–8, 172, 180–4, 187–9, 195 relationship with Osbern and his writings  160–7, 176–7, 184, 187–9 views on Lanfranc and his reforms  159–60, 168–9, 172–84, 186 Ealdgyth, wife of Edmund Ironside  60 Ealdgyth, wife of Harold Godwineson  108, 119 Ealdred, bishop of Worcester and archbishop of York  62–3, 65, 67–8, 171 arranges the return of Edward the Exile  62–3, 65 support for Edgar Ætheling  65, 67–8, 77 Edgar, king of England  33–5, 80, 93 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle  33–5, 68, 70, 75 reign interpreted by post-conquest historians  33–5, 68, 84, 185–90 Edgar, king of Scotland  80, 81, 91 Edgar Ætheling  59–79, 89–96, 129–30, 143, 160, 200–1 birth and childhood (before 1066)  61–4 involved in initial resistance to William (1066)  22, 67–8, 114–15 journey to Normandy with William (1067)  68, 129, 155 leaves England for Scotland (1068)  69–74, 112–13 rebellion and battle in York (1069)  15, 22, 76–7, 128, 130, 133, 136 subsequent career  77–9, 89–93, 116 views of medieval historians  69–79, 89–93, 95–6, 103, 133, 200–1

Index Edith, consort of Harold Godwineson  108, 122, 170–1 Edith, wife of Edward the Confessor  62, 80, 98, 104, 105 life after the conquest  111, 114, 120–1 Edith/Matilda, wife of Henry I  59–60, 80–9, 122, 123, 143, 153–4 marriage to Henry  59–60, 75, 80–9, 93–6, 199–200 patron of Turgot’s Vita of her mother  59–60, 80–9, 153–4, 198–200 Edmund, son of Edmund Ironside  60–3, 67, 103 Edmund, son of Harold Godwineson  108–9, 114–16, 200–1 Edmund, St, king of East Anglia  109, 183 Edmund Ironside, king of England  60–2, 80, 105, 109 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle  65–6, 70 in Turgot’s Vita of Margaret  83–4 Edward, son of Margaret and Malcolm  80, 81 Edward the Confessor, king of England  32–4, 80, 129, 145, 197 relationship with Edward the Exile and his children  62–8, 71–2, 74, 83–5, 105, 109 relationship with the family of Godwine  62, 97–8, 100–1, 104–7, 110–11, 171 subject of the Vita Ædwardi Regis  111 in Turgot’s Vita of Margaret  83–5 Edward the Exile (Edward Ætheling)  59–69, 80, 90, 99, 103, 156 omitted from Margaret’s Vita  82–3 Edwin, earl of Mercia  15, 68, 108, 119, 129, 135

251

Ely  15–26, 35, 146, see also Liber Eliensis base for anti-Norman rebels  15–16, 19–26, 44–7, 77, 115, 130 English language and the impact of the conquest  1, 4–5, 7, 54, see also Old English literature among the monks of Christ Church, Canterbury  175–7, 186–7, 191 writing in English after the conquest  14, 17, 28–36, 121, 198 Exeter  15, 106, 109–15 Fagrskinna  116–20, 148–50 Fenland region of England, culture and identity  17–20, 36–50, 55–7, 142–3, 153–4, 199–200 Hereward sings in the style of the Fenland  28 Flanders  77, 90, 184 location of Hereward’s adventures  26, 27, 36, 42, 57 refuge for the family of Harold Godwineson  113–15 Gaimar, Geffrei, Estoire des Engleis  5, 60–1, 114 narrative about Hereward  25–6, 46–51, 141–2 reference to Waltheof  141–2 Gesta Herwardi  13, 15–57, 61, 102, 143, 145, 198–201 author, date and stages of composition  26–31 manuscript  26, 52 relationship to the Liber Eliensis  19, 26, 44–6 Godgifu, wife of Leofric, earl of Mercia  21, 53–4 Godwine, earl of Wessex  97–105, 114, 128, 171–2 family and children  62, 63, 97–125, 152 in medieval historical writing  99–103, 111, 125, 128, 148, 150, 171–2

252 Godwine, son of Harold Godwineson  108, 200–1 rebellion and life after the conquest  112–16 Gunnhild, daughter of Godwine and Gytha  103–4, 110, 113–16 Gunnhild, daughter of Harold Godwineson  108–9, 113–14, 120–5, 201 Guthlac of Crowland, St  18, 40–1, 138, 141 Gyrth, son of Godwine and Gytha  103–5, 110 Gytha, daughter of Harold Godwineson  108, 113–17, 119, 120, 125 marriage and descendants  116–17, 197, 201 Gytha, wife of Godwine  97–125, 128, 148 family and children  62, 63, 97–125, 152 life after the conquest  110–15, 198 hagiography  11–14, 17–18, 40–1, 155–201, see also Eadmer of Canterbury; Osbern of Canterbury Margaret’s life in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle  69–76, 82, 84, 86, 201 Old English Life of St Margaret of Antioch  72 Turgot’s Vita of Margaret  12, 59–60, 80–9, 198–201 Vita Ædwardi Regis  111 Vita Wulfstani  120–4 Waltheof as saint  127–8, 136–54 Hakon, son of Svein Godwineson  108, 110, 156 Harald Hardrada, king of Norway  105, 108, 117–19, 134–5, 148–52 Harold, son of Harold Godwineson  119, 200–1

Index Harold Godwineson, king of England  42, 98, 114 battles at Hastings and Stamford Bridge  21, 24, 105, 110, 148–51 children  15, 98–9, 108–9, 112–17, 119–25, 127, 170–2, 197–201 family connections  7–8, 37–8, 97–125, 129 in medieval historical writing  24, 45, 103, 119–25, 148–51, 170–2 Norman attitude to  100, 102–3, 110–11, 123–5, 170–2 Heimskringla  116–20, 134–5, 148–50 Hemings þáttr  148–53 Henry I, king of England  80–9, 92, 199 Anselm’s conflicts with  166, 187 marriage with Edith/Matilda  59–60, 75, 80–9, 93–6, 199 Hereward  6, 13, 15–57, 198–201, see also Gesta Herwardi ancestors and descendants  20–1, 32–6, 53–4, 185 companions  28–9, 40–1, 47–8, 198 comparisons with other narratives of exile and rebellion  31–6, 50, 59, 61, 95, 101, 198–201 links between his story and Waltheof ’s cult  127–8, 141–3, 146, 148, 154 post-medieval interpretations  6, 55–7 stories of his death  43–4, 49–50 wives  26, 42, 48–9, 53 Horn, romance hero  39–41, 95 Hugh Candidus  51–2 Hungary  60–3, 65–6, 82, 90, 99, 105 Huntingdon, earldom  129, 131–2, 144–6, 148 Ireland  112–15 location of Hereward’s adventures  26–8, 36–7, 39–40, 42, 57

Index John of Worcester  60, 114, 141 Judith of Flanders, wife of Tostig Godwineson  115, 117 Judith of Lens, wife of Waltheof  130, 139, 144–6 Ketill, possible son of Tostig Godwineson  108, 117–19 Kiev  60, 61, 116 Knýtlinga saga  101–2 Lanfranc, archbishop of Canterbury  155–6, 159–62, 173–84, 186 attitude to English saints  161, 178–84 Eadmer’s views on  159–60, 168–9, 177–84, 186 influence on Eadmer  156, 159, 172, 195 relationship with Osbern  161, 174 and Waltheof ’s imprisonment  141, 174 Leofric, abbot of Peterborough  21–2, 52 Leofric, chaplain of Hereward and possible author of the Gesta Herwardi  28–31 Leofric, earl of Mercia  21, 53–4 Leofric of Bourne, father of Hereward  21, 31–6, 42, 53–4 Leofwine, son of Godwine and Gytha  103–5, 110 Liber Eliensis  18–19, 24–6, 28, 33, 44–7 attitude to the Norman Conquest  44–6, 50 relationship to the Gesta Herwardi  19, 26, 44–6 Lincolnshire  17–21, 38–9, 141–3 birthplace of Turgot  88 connections with Hereward  20–1, 32, 36, 46–50, 199–200 and Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis  25–6, 46–50, 141–2 local veneration of Waltheof  141–3

253

Magnus, son of Harold Godwineson  108–9, 112–15, 200–1 Magnus I (the Good), king of Norway  108 Magnus II, king of Norway  108, 117–18 Magnus III (Barefoot), king of Norway  119 Malcolm III, king of Scotland  59–96, 116, 128, 132 marriage to Margaret  59, 69–76, 80–6 provides help to English rebels  15, 76–9 relationship with kings of England  15, 71, 76–9, 91, 93–4, 122, 128–9 Margaret, St, wife of Malcolm III  12, 59–96, 198–201 account of her life in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle  69–79, 112–13 early life (before 1066)  60–3, 82–9 education, books and reading  12, 63, 72, 80–2 family and children  59–96, 99, 104, 128, 132, 142–3 marriage to Malcolm and subsequent life  69–89, 93 Turgot’s Vita  12, 59–60, 80–9, 198–201 Matilda, wife of Henry I, see Edith/Matilda Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror  80, 112–13 Maud, daughter of Waltheof and Judith  130–2, 144–6, 153–4, 198–200 Morcar, earl of Northumbria  108, 119, 129 defeated by Harald Hardrada at Fulford (1066)  134–5, 148 promises to support Edgar Ætheling (1066)  68 rebellion against Norman rule (1068–71)  15, 24, 76–7 Morkinskinna  116–20, 148

254

Index

‘New England’, English colony on the Black Sea  197–8 Norman strategies for legitimization of the conquest  4–5, 7, 10–11, 80–8, 100–3, 124–5, 171–2 Northampton, earldom  129, 131–2, 145–6 Northumbria  15, 33, 37, 68, 73–4, 128–30, see also York and the kings of Scotland  77, 80, 88–9 rebellion against Tostig Godwineson  105, 129 rebellions against Norman rule  76–7, 114, 130 Waltheof as earl  128–30, 148–9, 151 Norway  37, 106–8, 116–20, 129, 132 attempted Norwegian invasion (1066)  105, 108, 117–20, 134–5, 148–53 refuge for people from England after the conquest  88, 98–9, 116–20, 152–3

comments on contemporary events  186–9 hagiographical writings  160–5, 167, 169–77, 181, 182, 186–9 relationship with Eadmer  160–7, 176–7, 184, 187–9 relationship with Lanfranc and Anselm  160, 161, 163, 172, 174 William of Malmesbury’s comments on  161, 165 Oslac, possible ancestor of Hereward  32–6, 41, 185

Olaf II, St, king of Norway  106–9, 119 veneration in England  106–9, 129 Olaf III, king of Norway  108, 117–19 and Skuli, son of Tostig Godwineson  117–19 and Turgot  88 Old English literature  14, 25–37, 42–3, 72, 184, 198, see also AngloSaxon Chronicle; Beowulf; English language and the impact of the conquest Orderic Vitalis  10, 55, 156–7, 161 comments on Edgar Ætheling  91–2 writings on Waltheof  55, 138–45, 152 Osbeorn, brother of Svein Estrithson  38, 76–7, 106 Osbern of Canterbury  160–77, 186–9 childhood and life at Christ Church  160–5, 169, 170, 174–7

Ralph de Gael, earl of East Anglia  32–3, 50, 130–1 Ramsey Abbey  17–18 rebellions against Norman rule in England  5–7, 15–57, 67–8, 76–9, 111–15, 127–54, 197–8 Richard of Ely, possible author of the Gesta Herwardi  26, 28–9 Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy  91–2, 116 Robin Hood  43 romance in post-conquest England  12–13, 60–1, 95–6, 124–5, 199–201 influence on narratives about Hereward  16, 25–50 Roman de Horn  39–40 Romsey Abbey  92–5, 143–4 Russia  60, 102, 116, 197

Peterborough Abbey  17–26, 51–2, 54 chronicles and histories  9–10, 17–25, 28, 33–5, 51–2 involvement in post-conquest conflict  21–5, 38, 51–2, 67 manuscript of the Gesta Herwardi  26, 52 Peterborough Chronicle  9–10, 14, 19, 21–5, 28, 33–4, 51–2

Index Saxo Grammaticus  101, 115–16 Scandinavian settlement and culture in England  3–4, 88 and the family of Gytha and Godwine  97–109 and the family of Waltheof  128–9, 132–6, 145–6 and narratives about Hereward  23, 28, 36–41 Scotland  59–60, 65, 69–96, 112–13, 116, 129, 132 Simon de Senlis I, earl of Northampton and Huntingdon  131–2, 144–6 Siward, earl of Northumbria  15, 128–30, 135–6, 144–6 reputation and legendary adventures  129, 135, 145–6 Skuli, son of Tostig Godwineson  108, 117–20, 125 Snorri Sturluson  116–20, 134–5, 148–50 Somerset  108, 114 Stamford, Lincolnshire  20–2 Stigand, archbishop of Canterbury  155, 171 Svein Estrithson, king of Denmark  106–8, 115–16, see also Denmark family  37–8, 106–9, 115–16 involvement in English rebellions after the conquest  22, 25, 37–8, 76–7, 106, 115, 136 Svein Forkbeard, king of Denmark and England  3, 104 Svein Godwineson  103–4, 105, 106, 111 children  98–9, 107–10, 114, 115, 156 Sweden  60, 100, 102 Thorgils Sprakalegg  37–8, 103 Thorkell Skallason, skald  132–8, 148–9, 152, 153, 199 Tostig Godwineson, earl of Northumbria  98, 103–5, 110, 117–20, 129 marriage and children  98–9, 107–8, 111, 115–19 in Old Norse historical writing  117–19, 148–51

255

Tostig Reinald, possible son of Svein Godwineson  114, 115 Turfrida, wife of Hereward  26, 42, 48–9, 53 Turgot, author of Vita of Margaret  59–60, 80–9, 166, 198–201 early life  88–9 Turold, abbot of Peterborough  22–4 Ulf, son of Harold Godwineson  108, 116, 200–1 Ulf Thorgilsson, brother of Gytha  101–4, 106 Vita Ædwardi Regis  111 Vita Wulfstani  121–4 Walter Map  101–2 Waltheof, St, earl of Northumbria  50, 55, 127–54, 160, 197–201 early life (before 1066)  128–9, 135–6 journey to Normandy with William (1067)  68, 129, 155 rebellion and battle in York (1069)  15, 22, 76–7, 128, 130, 132–3, 136, 139–40 Revolt of the Earls, imprisonment and execution (1075–6)  128, 130–6, 139–41, 174, 189, 197 saintly cult  128, 131–2, 136–45, 148–54 William I (the Conqueror), king of England  10, 32, 77–8, 80, 172 and English rebellions after the conquest  15, 22–5, 45, 67–8, 77–8, 112–15, 155, 168–9 and the family of Harold Godwineson  110–16, 125 in narratives about Hereward  24–5, 41–4, 47, 49, 50, 54

256

Index

treatment of Edgar Ætheling  67–8, 77–8, 90 treatment of Waltheof  68, 128–34, 138–9, 147–53 William II (Rufus), king of England  80, 94–5, 122 Anselm’s conflicts with  166, 187 and Edgar Ætheling  91–2 and Wulfnoth Godwineson  110–11, 116 William of Jumièges  10 William of Malmesbury  10–11, 100, 119, 156–7, 161, 199 comments on Edgar Ætheling  90–2, 96 comments on Osbern of Canterbury  161, 165 Vita Wulfstani  121–4 writings on Waltheof  140–2, 145, 147–8 William of Poitiers  10 Wilton Abbey  63, 80, 93, 111, 120–4 treatment after the conquest  120–1 Winchester  110–11, 131, 143, 171

women and the conquest  6–8, 69–89, 93–6, 110–14, 120–4, 198–201 women commemorating and recording their pre-conquest ancestry  7, 80–9, 144–6, 153–4, 198–200 Worcester  65, 121, 124, 166, 193 bishops of Worcester  5, 62–3, 65, 121–2, 166, 193 interest in preserving English traditions after the conquest  65, 121, 124 Wulfnoth, son of Godwine and Gytha  103–4, 110–11, 116, 123 Wulfstan, St, bishop of Worcester  5, 65, 121–2, 124, 193 York  65, 129, 134–5, 151 archbishops of York  65, 77, 166, 171 conflict between English and Norman forces (1069)  15, 76–7, 130, 133, 138–40, 147–8 settlement named after York in ‘New England’  197

 257

258

 259

260