The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (13 page)

The English royal income was prodigious by now for under the strain of the Danish wars and then of Danegeld the raising of taxes had become immensely efficient. Ethelred the Unready had created the rudiments of a civil service of clerks to raise money from the shires. These royal officials communicated with the shire reeves so frequently that a special form of letter from the king to the shire court called a writ had developed before anywhere else in Europe. It was identified by the king’s seal attached to it and had the force of law. By the eleventh century it was the shire reeve or sheriff who oversaw the shire court and was the king’s official representative (even if that meant conflict with the local earl), in charge of ensuring that the king received the taxation owed to him.

The colossal sums which these improved fiscal methods raised should have been spent on maintaining England’s shore defences; instead they were used by Edward to buy relics, or the bones of saints, in silver caskets shaped like miniature churches. He did not keep up the small permanent navy that had become an important guarantee of England’s security. The Confessor’s days were passed at Mass in the company of the Normans he had imported. They were avaricious, disciplined men who watched the king like hawks and were always looking for ways to get rid of the over-powerful Godwin and his sons.

Quite soon two bitterly opposed parties grew up at Edward’s court, the Normans versus the English magnates headed by Godwin. The Normans, with their almost oriental courtesy, disliked the free and frank ways of the English, who did not stand on ceremony. They also objected to the arrogance of the Godwin family, who seemed to place themselves on a level with the king. The Godwins frequently ridiculed Edward’s holy simplicity–and even did so in his hearing, as shocked observers noted. Godwin’s hold over the king enabled his sons to take huge areas of England into their fiefdoms. Thanks to Godwin’s pressure on the king, Sweyn, Godwin’s bad-penny son now had an earldom embracing shires from Mercia and Wessex, while his eldest child Harold had been made earl of Essex.

For their part the Godwins, especially Godwin himself and his most able son Harold, resented the arrival of more foreigners at court and detested their growing influence over the king. Normans took over many of the great offices of state, though few of them could speak English, and the Norman monk Robert of Jumièges was made Archbishop of Canterbury. Norman clerks were employed in the royal secretariat, so it came to be believed that only those who spoke Norman French had their petitions heard. In one part of the palace Queen Edith’s father and brothers and their supporters spoke English and wore the Anglo-Saxon long mantle. In another part the Normans laughed openly at the Saxon earls’ beards and moustaches. The Saxons were permanently in a fever to wipe the supercilious smiles off the Normans’ clean-shaven faces. Shaving was an affectation, said the angry Saxons, which made them all look like priests anyway.

It was a situation which could ignite at any minute, and it soon did–with the Godwins to fan the flames–when Edward’s brother-in-law Count Eustace of Boulogne paid England a visit in 1051. Like all Franks Count Eustace regarded Saxons as born slaves, despite their common Teutonic ancestry. On his way to London he spent the night at Dover. There, instead of paying for an inn, the count told his men to dress in full armour and demand accommodation from the townspeople at the point of a sword. The burghers refused point blank, and were promptly attacked by Count Eustace’s knights. Though they were mainly shopkeepers, they managed to kill nineteen of his professional soldiers.

The incident developed into a full-scale diplomatic row. An angry Edward turned on Earl Godwin within whose domain Dover lay and asked him to visit the port with summary justice–that is, to execute the men involved without holding an inquiry. But instead Godwin the over-mighty subject raised an army from the south coast against Edward, for his lands stretched from Cornwall to Kent, and started for London. It was only when two of the other great earls, Leofric of Mercia (whose wife Godiva became famous for her charitable work) and Siward of Northumbria began moving south with superior forces to support the king that Godwin saw that he should back off. He was forced to attend a meeting of the witan at London, and was exiled with his sons Harold and Tostig and his wife, while Sweyn was condemned as an outlaw. Meanwhile Edward turned on his wife Edith, Godwin’s daughter. He renounced her, stripped her of her jewels and had her locked up in a monastery.

At last out of Godwin’s shadow, Edward was now free to make his own decisions about the future of the English throne. He almost certainly came down in favour of his cousin William, the bastard son of the Duke of Normandy, in preference to his half-nephew Edward, the son of Edmund Ironside, whom he had never seen. The same year, 1051, most unusually William left his country to pay Edward what was probably a state visit to settle the succession in his favour. The Norman chroniclers of the period all agree on this, and William the Conqueror’s many later assertions that he planned to rule England according to the customs of the old English kings, ‘as in the days of King Edward’ himself, suggest that he saw himself as the legitimate heir. Nevertheless Duke William had no popular support in England, and those who met him in 1051 found him forbidding; he was described as a ‘stark man’. Despite the king’s own Norman leanings, the Normans were very unpopular in the shires, where they were increasingly being appointed as sheriffs. Since most of them could not speak English, they appeared to have little interest in procuring justice in the shire courts.

Taking advantage of this a year later, Godwin was back on a high tide of anti-Norman feeling. This time he had an enormous navy at his back and numerous enthusiastic seamen recruited from coastal towns. Having obtained the support of the City of London, he surrounded the king’s ships at Southwark and dictated terms to the weary king, whose only enthusiasm now was for the building of Westminster Abbey. To the mortification of the king, whose spirit never recovered, an open-air meeting of the witan voted to restore Godwin to his previous position. Many Normans were expelled from England and the queen came back from her convent to resume her rightful place at court. The Norman Archbishop of Canterbury Robert of Jumièges left the country and much of the archepiscopal land was redistributed to the Godwins. The Anglo-Saxon Bishop Stigand, a supporter of the Godwins, was appointed to Canterbury in his stead, without papal permission. The Godwins were now in complete control of the country. With the unusual appointment of Tostig Godwin as earl of Northumbria on the death of the famous Siward, the family’s rule stretched over the length and breadth of England.

The ambitious founder of this upstart house passed away soon after his return from exile, during a banquet. Legend has it that his death occurred just after King Edward had asked him, ‘Just tell me something, did you really put out the eyes of my brother Alfred and kill him?’ Godwin replied, ‘May God strike me dead if I did,’ whereupon he choked on a piece of meat.

Despite the death of the master plotter, Edward the Confessor’s childlessness meant that the succession continued to be a live issue for the Godwins and those who received their patronage. They were determined that the throne should not be settled on Duke William. At their insistence, now that the Norman party had fallen from power, King Edward at last sent for his half-nephew Edward to name him heir to the throne. Mysteriously this rival to William the Conqueror died shortly after arriving in England. Although Edward left a son, Edgar the Atheling, children were almost never crowned under the Anglo-Saxon monarchy and thus once again Duke William seemed the most likely heir.

Despite the king’s own leanings toward Normandy, Duke William’s claim was not clear cut. There was in fact no obvious natural successor to Edward the Confessor. Meanwhile the evident weakness at the heart of the English monarchy which Godwin’s rebellious behaviour had betrayed had aroused considerable interest in England from abroad. In Norway the ambitious young King Harold Hardrada now revived a claim to the throne as Cnut’s heir. Meanwhile the friendship between Tostig Godwin, the new earl of Northumbria, with Malcolm III of Scotland did not bode well for the future. It might lead to a Scottish-backed invasion of England.

The last years of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy saw a struggle against Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, the increasingly powerful king of Gwynedd and Powys. Gruffydd had united most of Wales under him. He had been encouraged by the disgruntled Aelfgar of Mercia, many of whose hereditary possessions had been given to Gyrth, the youngest Godwin, to invade England in alliance with a fleet from Norway. At this moment of national danger Harold Godwin began to attract attention for his daring Welsh campaign, which crushed Gruffydd and annexed his provinces to the English state in 1063.

Three years later, on the death of Edward the Confessor, to the witan Harold as head of the Godwins seemed the best possible English candidate for the throne. Apart from what remained of Mercia the Godwin family in effect ruled most of England. Though Harold was not of royal blood he was the natural choice to defend England from the threat of foreign invaders with claims to the crown, and as an Englishman he was far more welcome to the witan. By then the Godwins’ chief rival Aelfgar, the head of the still powerful house of Mercia, was dead, so Harold Godwin’s election went through unopposed. During the tenth century so many heirs to the throne had been minors at the time of the king’s death that the old English monarchy had become far more elective. There was precedence for this in the Holy Roman emperorship, but it followed a natural tendency in a country where from its most ancient beginnings Anglo-Saxon kings had tended to have their decisions approved by a council of lords. By the time of the Conquest the witan was well used to being consulted on major national issues. The assent of its members–thanes, bishops and sheriffs from every part of the country–to new laws, new taxes, military measures and foreign alliances was sufficiently important to be recorded as part of the ruling process.

Edward died on 5 January 1066 and was buried in the crypt of his new church, Westminster Abbey. The external situation was considered so dangerous that the very next day Harold was crowned king. Though quite contrary to precedent, since the Godwins were without a drop of royal blood in them, it indicated the family’s immense influence. But Harold’s was to be a very short reign. By Christmas of the same year William the Conqueror was being crowned in the same abbey.

For William of Normandy was convinced that he was the rightful heir to Edward the Confessor. Not only had the former king told him so, but according to the Norman version of events, which is all that survives, as Edward weakened over Christmas 1065 Harold sent a message to William on behalf of the English government declaring that the duke should be ready to receive the crown of England as soon as Edward breathed his last. When William, who was hunting in the forest of Rouvray outside Rouen, received word from England that Harold Godwin had been illicitly crowned in his stead, his rage knew no bounds.

The situation was further complicated by an unfortunate accident which had befallen Harold some years before. In exchange for being ransomed by William, Harold, who was prisoner of the local count after a shipwreck on the French coast, had been forced to swear to be William’s liege man, that is his servant. He had sworn an unbreakable oath of loyalty to William on a reliquary containing the remains of some of Normandy’s most holy saints and martyrs. In the period in question, when national law was rudimentary and legal charters were in their infancy, the orderliness of society was guaranteed by the sacred nature of the oath; oathbreaking was punishable by forty days’ imprisonment. William thus believed that he had been doubly insulted by Harold, who ought in any case to yield the throne to his liege lord.

Throughout 1066 William sent threats to the new king of England to remind him of his broken vow and to warn him that before the year had expired he would come and claim his inheritance. But Harold refused to take any notice, claiming that in return for vowing to be the duke of Normandy’s man he had been betrothed to William’s daughter, and that his oath was now void because she had since died. Unfortunately Harold seems to have had a reputation for being a slippery character like his father. One chronicler noted that he had a tendency not to respect the sacredness of his word. He was said to be ‘careless’ about abstaining from a breach of trust ‘if he might by any device whatever, elude the reasonings of men on this matter’.

Although Harold had gained the throne he never captured the imagination of the nation, and neither did the rest of the Godwins. His brother Tostig was unpopular enough to have been expelled from Northumbria after a popular uprising, and had to be replaced by Morcar, brother of Edwin of Mercia, who had succeeded his father Aelfgar. Mercia and Northumbria were thus controlled by two members of a rival and hostile family. The lack of countrywide support for Harold would be a fatal element in the next nine months, as would be the air of illegitimacy that continued to cling to the new king and his family. The Godwins’ impetuous replacement of the Norman Archbishop of Canterbury by the Anglo-Saxon Stigand without approval from Rome would enable William of Normandy to present his invasion as having a higher moral purpose: the duke announced that he planned to remove the illegal archbishop and replace him with the approved papal candidate. Archbishop Stigand had in any case caused offence by his independent behaviour, not least refusing to send the Church collection money called Peter’s Pence to Rome. The pope was happy to provide a papal banner for the expedition, beautifully decorated with pearls and jewels, to spur the duke’s men on.

William had also taken care to obtain the support of the other most important international figure in western Christendom, the Emperor Henry IV. Ever since 800 when the title Emperor of the West was created for Charlemagne by the papacy as a rival to the power of the Byzantines, the emperor had been the earthly magnate designated protector of the Church. With both emperor and pope onside, Duke William’s soldiers were united by a sense of the rightness of their task. Such a feeling was not present in an increasingly fragmented England. William’s soldiers also had a leader of great military renown who had seen off all comers from the kingdoms bordering Normandy, including France. This enabled him to be confident that the duchy would not be attacked in his absence, if he kept it short–particularly given that his greatest enemy, neighbouring Anjou, was wracked by civil war.