The Norman Conquest (19 page)

Sadly this taciturn attitude infects all three versions of the Chronicle during the next five years: an ominous silence descends as England becomes a one-party state under the Godwines. Between them the four brothers controlled every part of England except Mercia, where the embattled Ælfgar apparently continued to hold out. Recent scholarship has overturned the older notion, based on figures in the Domesday Book, that their combined income exceeded that of the king; revised calculations suggest that, in terms of the size of his estates, Edward probably retained the edge. But in pre-Conquest England, land and lordship were not automatically linked: a landowner could have tenants without necessarily being their lord, and a man could be ‘commended’ to a lord without necessarily holding any property from him. Edward owned lots of land but his lordship was seemingly lacking. The Godwines, by contrast, had an affinity that was vast, powerful and irresistibly expanding. Harold alone had a following measured in thousands, with scores of thegns commended to serve him in almost every shire.
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The Godwines also had powerful allies in the Church. When Archbishop Cynesige of York, appointed by Edward in 1051, went to take his place among the saints in 1060, the altogether more worldly and pro-Godwine Ealdred of Worcester was promoted to take his place, while Worcester itself went to Harold’s friend and confidant, Wulfstan. The archbishopric of Canterbury, meanwhile,
continued in the grip of Stigand, despite the pall that his appointment had cast over the whole English Church. ‘There was no archbishop in the land’, commented the C Chronicle pointedly in the year after Stigand’s elevation, and throughout the 1050s newly elected English bishops had avoided his taint by going overseas to be consecrated. The archbishop saw a chance to remedy matters in 1058 when an anti-reform party swept to power in Rome and installed the biddable Pope Benedict X, who obligingly sent Stigand a pallium of his very own. But the following year the reformers retook the papacy, denouncing Benedict as an antipope and leaving Stigand looking even more discredited than before. And yet, despite the shame he brought on England, the archbishop’s worldly success meant he was unassailable. His annual income of £3,000 made him as rich as a great earl, and he was lord of over 1,000 thegns.
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Against this background it is hard to imagine that Edward the Confessor had any real power at all. The appointment in the winter of 1060–1 of two Lotharingian priests to the bishoprics of Hereford and Wells may indicate that the king retained some initiative in this area, but otherwise the impression is that, from the late 1050s, the Godwine brothers were governing the kingdom in his stead. Such is the unabashed admission of the
Life of King Edward
, the purpose of which was largely to justify this state of affairs and the family’s unprecedented accretion of power. Harold and Tostig in particular are depicted as the twin pillars of the realm, thanks to whose fortitude and diligence the Confessor is able to retreat into an existence free from all cares:

And so with the kingdom made safe on all sides by these nobles, the most kindly King Edward passed his life in security and peace, and spent much of his time in the glades and woods in the pleasures of hunting. After divine service, which he gladly and devoutly attended every day, he took much pleasure in hawks and birds of that kind which were brought before him, and was really delighted by the baying and scrambling of the hounds. In these and such like activities he sometimes spent the day, and it was in these alone that he seemed naturally inclined to snatch some worldly pleasure.
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In the early 1060s the power of the Godwines continued to increase. Earl Ælgar appears to have died in 1062 – a year for which,
suspiciously, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has no entries at all – and there is no sign in the immediate term that either of his sons succeeded him as earl of Mercia.
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With their only English adversary finally gone for good, the Godwines decided that it was time to deal decisively with his former ally, Gruffudd ap Llywelyn: soon after Christmas 1062 Harold launched a surprise attack on the Welsh king’s court at Rhuddlan. On that occasion Gruffudd managed to escape by ship, leaving Harold to vent his frustration by destroying the king’s residence and the remainder of his fleet. But the following spring the earl unleashed a larger and more concerted assault, striking at the coast of south Wales with a fleet of his own while his brother Tostig led in a land army and overran the Welsh interior. So successful was their combined offensive that in early August Gruffudd was killed by his own men. His head was sent to Harold, who in turn sent it on to Edward the Confessor.
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But despite this belated nod to royal authority, there was no doubt to whom the victory in Wales really belonged. The E Chronicle tells us that it was Harold who appointed a new client king to rule in Gruffudd’s place, while the historian Gerald of Wales, writing more than a century later, remarked that one could still see the stones raised all over the country to commemorate the various battles of 1063, inscribed
HIC FUIT VICTOR HAROLDUS.
Whereas the Confessor is all but absent from the historical record during the last decade of his reign, the eldest son of Godwine stands out as both conqueror and kingmaker.
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When we next encounter Harold, however, he is riding towards his manor of Bosham on the Sussex coast. He has a meal with his friends, takes a ship out into the English Channel, and somehow ends up as the guest of the duke of Normandy.

*
  Either Ashdon or Ashingdon in Essex. Most historians now seem to favour the former.

7

Hostages to Fortune

I
f the years down to 1063 had been ones of glorious achievement for Harold Godwineson, the same was equally true for William of Normandy.

The duke’s victory at Varaville in 1057 had not ended his war with Henry I of France and Geoffrey Martel of Anjou: the following year he pressed home his advantage against the French king, recovering the castle of Tillières that had been lost during his minority and seizing Henry’s own castle of Thimert; his struggle against Anjou, meanwhile, ground on inexorably with no advertised losses or gains. But 1060 proved to be a providential year – for William, that is. On 4 August Henry downed some medicine, disregarded his doctor’s orders not to drink any water, and died before the day was out.
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Around the same time Geoffrey Martel also fell ill, ‘seized by an incurable sickness that grew worse daily’, according to an Angevin chronicler. He died on 14 November, in great pain, surrounded by his men.
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The near-simultaneous death of his two principal antagonists must have come as a great relief to William, for it meant that the longstanding threat of invasion was lifted. Henry I had been married three times, but only his last queen had given him any children, and in August 1060 his eldest son, Philip, was only eight years old. Power in France passed to a regency council, headed by the widowed queen and Henry’s brother-in-law, Baldwin of Flanders – who also happened, of course, to be William’s father-in-law.
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Matters in Anjou fell out even more favourably for the Norman duke, since Geoffrey Martel, despite no fewer than four marriages, had managed to produce
no children at all. The succession went to his sister’s son, Geoffrey the Bearded, whose rule was contested from the first by his younger brother, Fulk. Their struggle, which lasted for several years, effectively ended Anjou’s ability to compete with Normandy.

This was particularly evident in regard to the intermediate county of Maine. After his takeover of 1051, Geoffrey Martel had ruled Maine in the name of its rightful heir, Count Herbert II. According to William of Poitiers, at some point thereafter Herbert had escaped to Normandy in search of protection, in return for which he had provisionally made William his heir. Historians have been understandably sceptical of this story, which obviously contains strong echoes of the Norman claim to England. There is no reason why duplication by itself should automatically arouse suspicion: one could well argue that the similarity shows simply that this was the kind of arrangement that William favoured. Yet Poitiers’ very insistence that he is telling the absolute truth, coupled with his vagueness on points of detail, do on this occasion raise serious doubts. Certainly, the Norman claim did not go uncontested in Maine itself. When Herbert died on 9 March 1062, having failed to beget any children of his own, the pro-Angevin party in Le Mans offered the succession to his uncle, Walter, and made ready to resist.
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But resistance was useless. Shortly afterwards William launched a relentless campaign of harrying on the countryside around Le Mans, ‘To sow fear in its homes by frequent and lengthy visits,’ as William of Poitiers unashamedly explains, ‘to devastate its vineyards, fields and villages; to capture its outlying castles, to place garrisons wherever necessary, and thus everywhere and incessantly to inflict damage.’ Walter and his supporters appealed for aid to their existing overlord, but despite making threatening noises the new count of Anjou failed to appear. And so, at length, the defenders decided to submit to William, and the gates of Le Mans were thrown open to admit him. Both Walter and his wife died soon after the city’s fall, fuelling the rumour, first reported in the twelfth century, that they had been poisoned on the duke’s orders. It remained only to capture the castle of Mayenne, a virtually impregnable stronghold to the south of Domfront whose lord had long been opposed to William’s ambitions. The garrison there eventually surrendered after the Norman army succeeded in hurling fire at the castle and setting it alight.
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Thus, by 1063, William was in a triumphant position. Like Harold
Godwineson, he had witnessed the fortuitous deaths of his enemies and mounted a successful conquest of a neighbouring province. Nothing reflects this triumph today so well as the town of Caen, which was developed on the duke’s orders during this same period. Caen had hitherto been a settlement of virtually no significance – indeed, it only enters the written record around the time of William’s birth. But from the late 1050s the town was transformed out of all recognition, becoming the second greatest urban centre in Normandy after the capital at Rouen. The duke probably settled on Caen because of its proximity to the site of his providential victory at Val-ès-Dunes, which made it an ideal place to emphasize the God-given nature of his authority. But the location also boasted certain natural advantages, not least the rocky outcrop on which the duke established a castle. Sadly, although the outline of this extensive fortress-palace can be traced today, none of its original stone fabric has survived. The same is not true, however, in the case of the two abbeys that were founded by William and Matilda, probably in return for the pope’s decision to lift the ban on their marriage. Her foundation was a house of nuns, begun around 1059 and dedicated to the Holy Trinity; his was a community of monks, started around 1063 and dedicated to St Stephen (St Etienne). Both, of course, were built in the Romanesque style, but William’s church, despite being only slightly later, was far more sophisticated, its innovative design becoming a model for much that was to follow. Happily it was only little altered in later centuries and escaped the worst destruction of the Second World War, so its splendour can still be appreciated. After a great deal of insistent arm-twisting (‘by a kind of pious violence’, as William of Poitiers puts it) the duke persuaded his chief spiritual adviser, Lanfranc, to become its first abbot.
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Not long after the founding of St Stephen’s, William received the exciting news that Harold Godwineson had landed on the north French coast.

Harold’s Continental adventure is one of the most celebrated episodes in the story of the Norman Conquest, largely because it is the subject of the opening section of the Bayeux Tapestry. It is also one of the most controversial, for in spite of its extensive treatment in the Tapestry and also in chronicles written in Normandy, it goes entirely undiscussed in contemporary English sources such as the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the
Life of King Edward
. As a result, the episode is difficult to date. Most historians are inclined to place it in the early summer of 1064, though it is just possible that it occurred at the same point in 1065. Fortunately, whichever of the two dates it was makes no difference to the story’s significance.
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There is no doubt that it is a true story, for all versions, both contemporary Norman and later English, agree in broad outline about what happened. The Bayeux Tapestry provides the most detailed prologue, beginning, as we’ve seen, with Edward the Confessor. The king, white-haired, bearded and elderly, is shown in animated conversation with two men, one of whom we take to be Harold. The earl – now explicitly identified in a caption – then rides to his manor of Bosham in Sussex, accompanied by his mounted retainers and a pack of hounds, and carrying a hawk on his wrist. Once at Bosham they say a prudent prayer in the church (which still stands), and have a meal in the manor house, before setting out to sea. The Tapestry shows them hitching up their tunics as they wade out into the waves to climb aboard their ships.

While crossing the Channel, however, Harold and his men sail into a storm and only narrowly avoid being shipwrecked – a fact implied by the Tapestry and stated explicitly in all the chronicle accounts. Providentially they escape a watery grave, but end up putting to shore in Ponthieu, one of several small counties sandwiched between Normandy and Flanders. This is clearly not their intended destination: the Tapestry shows Harold being seized as soon as he disembarks by Ponthieu’s ruler, Count Guy, and taken to be imprisoned at the castle of Beaurain. According to William of Poitiers, such brigandage was common practice in Ponthieu, and the count was planning to detain Harold and his companions until he obtained a large ransom.
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